Sourdough Bread

Joseph and I tried our hand at making sourdough bread for New Year's.  We were really craving Disney's Tonga Toast from the Kona Cafe in the Polynesian Hotel.  If you haven't tried it, you are really missing out.  Their breakfast is quite normal but delicious.  Their coffee is 100% Hawaiian Kona and it is a nice atmosphere.


If we are able next time we are in America, it would be lovely to go there just for breakfast.

Anyway, we decided to try and make sourdough bread.  No biggie, right?  Just follow the directions. Yeah.....no.

Making sourdough requires making a starter first.  You have to love this starter and it has to have a reason to love you as well, apparently.  This takes anywhere from 18 hours to a week or more depending on temperature and other variables that we don't know all about yet.  We got this started and thought we did a good job.  It looked right, smelled right and all that good stuff.

We were making the actual bread and guess what.  No rise.  None.  Just a flat lump of dough.  After 12 hours of rising, nothing.  We cooked it anyway just to see.  Super pretty but flat.  Flat, flat, flat.  Not to mention hard as a rock.  You could protect yourself from an intruder with these loaves.

We cut it open and tasted it.  Lovely taste.  Alas, not awesome or thick enough to even consider making Tonga Toast.  Meh....it's okay.

We looked up problems with making sourdough bread and this is where we learned how hard it can be to do.  One person made 6 loaves until she got one that resembled something usable.  Too bad I'm not that patient lately.  Nor do we have the fridge space or that much counter space I'm willing to donate for this.

Katie sent us a really nice recipe that cheats a bit. No traditional starter.  Nice.  We will definitely give this next one a try: Easy Sourdough Bread.