I’m baking my first ever loaf of sourdough bread today! Right now it’s on it’s second rise and so far so good. My husband and I both love the taste of sourdough bread but I’ve never attempted to bake it myself. What better time than now though, huh?
Actually, this loaf has been in the making for two weeks… My first try at a starter from scratch went well until feeding #3 and then something happened that it didn’t recover from. I’m not sure what I did wrong. I started it on a Sunday evening and so I kept up with feeding it in the evening. On Wed morning it was looking good and bubbly and active but by Wed evening it was flat and not a bubble in site. I gave it one more day with no changes before I scrapped it. So I waited until the next Sunday to try again. (I always feel better starting new things on Sundays when life is usually a little calmer.)
Things were growing good and we were getting close to doubling in size when I noticed Friday that my starter seemed a little smaller in the evening that it did that morning. I have it in a wide-mouth quart jar so it’s easy to notice such things. I fed it as usual and marked the side of the jar with a dry erase marker for a better monitoring system. And then I got a chance to listen to Jill Winger’s new podcast episode “ALL Your Sourdough Questions: Answered!” on her Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast!!! (You should definitely check her out- I love her- go to www.theprairiehomestead.com and you’ll find links to her blog, podcast, Facebook, YouTube, etc). It was perfect timing ya’ll! I gave my starter (maybe I should give him a name for purposes of this blog LOL) an extra feeding and he perked right up and doubled in like three hours! 
As I mentioned, this is my first time baking sourdough. With today being Easter and it being just the three of us at home for dinner I had decided to make it a little more special with the perfect ham that I picked up earlier this week (one thing that we didn’t have in the freezer was ham). What better way to make dinner even better than with a delicious loaf of sourdough! So yesterday I decided I was going to bake it today. Lucky for me I decided to actually look up a recipe ahead of time BECAUSE IT TAKES DARN NEAR 15 HOURS TO MAKE SOURDOUGH BREAD!!! By the time you mix it, let it rest, ball it up, let it rise overnight, etc etc etc I would’ve been severely disappointed had I waited until this morning to get started. Note to self: Be better at researching recipes ahead of time.
We are about 45 minutes into our second rise. It was pretty sticky still so I’m a little worried about that. Fingers are gonna stay crossed until I slice it. We’ll see how things finish out, but our timeline should leave us with plenty of time to cool before dinner.
after first rise 
ready for 2nd rise 
ready to bake!
UPDATE!! AMAZING!!!
perfect! 
Easter dinner…mmmm