From top left, clockwise: 1) Kneading 2) Measuring out flour 3) I let the dough rise in shallow bottomed casserole dishes to make the stretch-and-fold easy. 4) Boule pre-shaping.

I guess my shaping skills still need a lot of work, because when I peeked into my oven to check on the progress of the loaves I was greeted with this:

Notice the uncanny resemblance to a pair of round buttcheeks.

In another blow to my bread-baking-ego, I didn’t slash the batard properly and the bread ended up exploding off to the side.

In the end, the breads baked up fine and tasted great. If you turn the fendu around, you kind of get a heart shape:

I apologize for the slight blurriness.

I just got back from a roadtrip up the coast with some old college friends. We ended up making stops in Carmel Valley, SF and Berkeley. I can’t wait to post some photos of the delicious food I ate while on vacation, but I must wade through the ~3GB of photos I took first!

As some of you may know, I’ve made several attempts at starting my own wild yeast starter over the past few months. After finishing up school in April, I finally had the time to dedicate to cultivating a starter. Thankfully, this time I was actually able to nurse my starter until the point where it was viable, due to several factors:

• Started with 100% rye flour; rye flour acts as a springboard for “apturing” wild yeast.
• Measured my feedings using a digital scale rather than spooning out tablespoons of flour and water. Now I realize that when baking bread, one needs to be both precise yet flexible; measuring out the right amounts of flour, water, salt, etc. is paramount to a good result, but one also needs to develop that “know how” to account for changes like humidity and temperature that could cause you to deviate from a recipe.
• Made sure I fed the starter enough; currently I’m feeding my 100% rye/100% white starters at a 1:1.5:1.5 ratio every 12 hours. Yeah, it can be tiring to make sure the thing is fed every 12 hours, but I figure that it’s akin to keeping a dog or a cat; you wouldn’t forget to feed your pet, would you?
• Started my starter during the tail end of spring; the warmer weather allowed for a faster startup.

However, the inevitable effect of all this feeding is the “throwaway” that each feeding generates; I’m estimating that I’m accumulating/throwing away about 1 cup of starter every couple of days; this doesn’t seem like that much but with rising flour/food prices nowadays, even those few tablespoons in the garbage seems like a huge waste. Now, whenever I feed, I store the throwaway in a small pyrex glass container and pop it back in the fridge until the next feeding.

So far, I’ve made a couple of things with the excess; sourdough english muffins, sourdough pancakes and today’s recipe, sourdough pita bread. What’s so exciting to me about baking with wild yeast is the miraculous transformation of a pasty lump of flour and water into bread just by adding a bit of additional flour, some salt, water (and maybe sugar/fat if you’re feeling fancy). And it rises and everything, without the addition of any yeast.

This time, I improvised a pita bread recipe by converting the pita bread recipe in the Williams-Sonoma Collection: Bread book to one that was leavened with my starter. Because I didn’t feel like heating up my oven, I decided to bake these on the stove in my mini 6″ cast-iron skillet.