Bake Us This Day Our Daily Bread

At the risk of being labeled a food heathen, I didn't think the Julia Child bread really had much flavor--and I swear I'm not just sore that it took almost the whole day.  Well, maybe a little....

Julia does, however, explain a lot about making bread so I decided to take my new knowledge and apply it to my favorite bread recipe--Sourdough Honey Oatmeal.

I have been working on this recipe for about 10 years, and I had arrived at a really great flavor but I was still having trouble with the texture.  Time to bring in....JULIA.

As normal, I mixed a cup of starter

from the dreadful-looking sponge that lives in my fridge.  Sourdough is just a live yeast culture, and by mixing a cup of the starter with warm water & flour and setting it in a warm place to ferment overnight

otherwise known as a food dehydrator in our house, a new sponge is created and ready for use the next day.  To replenish the starter, you put one or two cups of the new sponge into the old one & it can last indefinitely.  Of course, it only works if you NEVER put anything but flour and water into it. 

In the recipe, there's a preliminary rise when the dough is still pretty thin, and until now I had been putting the oatmeal in during this stage, but I think gluten strands should be forming here, so I decided to add 2 cups of whole wheat bread flour.  Bread flour has a higher protein content, which makes is a high gluten flour....which helps it form gluten strands.  (Thank you, Julia).  The original recipe called for oatmeal and white flour, but I had been experimenting to see how much whole wheat flour I could substitute, so I think I was probably causing gluten problems.  It's hard to say exactly because sourdough is often used with rye flour to compensate for its lack of gluten (according to my research--not me), so the long fermentation does help build gluten strands.  Anyway....

I formed the dough into loaves ala Julia, and even flung some water into the oven when I first added the loaves.  Not that I expected it to do much for bread in bread pans....I just like the flinging water part.

Roughly an hour later......

they came out looking great, smelling fabulous, and.......

had a nice, chewy texture AND all the great flavor of the original.  WHOO HOO!!!!  A cooking experiment that worked the first time.  Someone call Ripley!!!!