Month: August 2018

Quick sourdough…

I spent most of the day yesterday making a good sourdough loaf.  Gave it plenty of time for the gluten to develop nicely, multiple foldings in the final stages – a lot of work, but it is worth it.

Jar of sourdough starter and the baking mold after filling with excess starter…

But this morning, since the sourdough starter is going a bit mad, I decided to use some.  (Admittedly, I could put the starter in the fridge, but I sort of like watching it grow so rapidly.)

I have a silicone “seashell” sort of shaped baking mold – not sure what it was intended for.  Possibly choux pastry?  Or maybe as a chocolate mold.

But I mixed a bit of the live starter with a bit of salt, and put it straight into the molds.  I only let it sit for about 15 minutes, while the oven got hot.

Several have been turned over so you can see the sharply delineated shapes of of the seashell!

And they are dilightful!  The bottom of each have the pale shapes like a seashell.  The tops are more normal bread crust texture.  And they have each got a hollow spot in the middle!  Slit it open, slide in butter or cheese – and all ready to eat!

Overall effort?  Hardly any, so I’ll remember this one for the future…

Camping and kites…

We took our caravan up to the Bowentown Motor Camp for two nights last weekend.  Averil spent time fishing, I got to fly some kites.

Finally, a good chance to see the blue parafoil at its best.  Friday’s winds were a bit erratic, but I got both the purple and the blue parafoils flying well.  Never easy to take good photos of kites in the air, as once you get them up high enough, they are just specks on the photo, anyway.  And given it was just a cellphone camera, the kites were generally out of focus (if you click on the image to the right, you will get a better version of it…)

Both kites had substantial amounts of tail, to counteract the gusty wind.  First time I’ve flown the blue parafoil with both the long tail but also the drogue at the end of that.  It looked pretty good!

When I went down to the beach on Saturday ( a 3 minute walk from the caravan) I forgot to take the bag with the tails – so flew the blue parafoil without any tail.  Light but steady wind meant it flew very well, though very sluggish when I raised the camera with it.

The blue parafoil was amazingly responsive – I could let it drop down to not far above the path to the beach.  Then, just pulling in a few metres of line, I could get it to climb rapidly up to nearly overhead.  I think the shallow aerofoil shape has given it this responsiveness – much more than any of the other parafoils I’ve made.

Beetroot flavoured dried starter…

I posted about this once before, I think.  The concept is that each time you ‘feed’ the sourdough starter, you first throw away some of it, so there will be room in the container.  

In this case, it was a specially made starter, made from cooked beetroot (from our garden), flour and water.  I let it work for several days before smearing it out on the surface of a silicone pad.

Liberal sprinkling of salt and pepper – and then just put it into the top of the hot water cylinder to dry.  That only takes a few days, since it is so thinly spread out.

When dry, it is flakey – and can be blended up to make a powder/flakes that taste great sprinkled on just about anything.  Last night, we had it as a topping on poached eggs – which were themselves sitting on fresh slices of sourdough bread!

It’s alive…

Well, several days ago my sourdough starter decided to enter a phase of extreme activity!

I had been feeding it a bit of flour and water each day, and it had a nice bit of bubbling and pleasant smell.  Then, over a few hours, it massively took off, bubbled up and slightly overflowed the container!  That’s what I want to see!  I’ve now refrigerated the starter, after knocking it back in volume by taking away more than half of it.

And the half I took away?  I smeared it across a sheet of silicone, added salt, pepper and some spicy smoked paprika, even though I know there are people who don’t care for the smoked flavour…

I put it up in the cabinet above the hot water cylinder, and in only a day or so, it had dried completely.  I was able to put it into a grinder device and reduce it to powder/flakes.  A very nice flavouring agent from what otherwise would have been thrown out…