Bread Diary - Whitney's Sourdough

My mom makes amazing sourdough bread. I think she's famous for it in our little town. I, on the other hand, can't quite figure it out. She's passed the starter on to me for the second time now. The first time was about 4 years ago. It's quite a tricky process - you have to keep the starter alive (forever) by feeding it at least once a week, then with the fed starter you can make a dough, and from the dough you make rolls or loaves, let them rise, and finally bake for bread-y goodness. I hear it just takes practice but I think you can see why I didn't keep it up from 4 years ago!

I'm not the most patient person when it comes to figuring things out but I'm still sticking with this starter for the next little bit. Patrick and I are hoping at some point to get good at this bread stuff. My goal is to get a whole wheat bread loaf recipe for sandwiches that we like a lot and stop buying loaves of bread from the grocery store. So with this goal we are creating a "bread diary" on the blog! I'm not sure how many entries it will have but we'll be chronicling our trials and tribulations of bread making here for the next little bit.

We're kicking off the inaugural bread diary post with this little love-hate rant about my mom's Sourdough Bread that I'm still trying to figure out.

Here's the starter:

We have to keep the starter in the refrigerator. Then we take it out and feed it at least once a week. Once we're ready to make bread we must make sure to feed it and before we return it to the refrigerator we take some of the starter out to put into the dough. We make the dough, let it rise for 12 hours, make the rolls/loaves and let them rise for 12 hours, and then bake them. As you can see it's a time consuming process.

If I'm lucky I get something that actually resembles a loaf! There are a lot of deflated rolls and loaves. Right now my biggest problem is getting it to rise properly (or at least I think that's what the problem is).

Here's my most successful loaf:

Next week Patrick will be sharing a post in the bread diary!

Any bread thoughts and/tips to share with us?!