Denver sourdough

* Bisque thrown bowl and pizza stone for improvised cloche.

* Natural cultured airborne yeast from Denver, mixed into wet dough using no-knead method.




Sourdough culture collected one hot windy summer day in Denver. I think. Flour, water, eggs, lecithin, sea salt mixed to an exceedingly wet sticky dough. The flour for bread was enhanced with about a cup and 1/2 of wheat grain that was run through a coffee grinder to varying degrees of powder and broken bits. I added home-made tahini, which is sesame seeds ground to peanut butter consistency. The sesame seeds I used had their husks because I didn't know what I was doing. What this means, the wheat grain and the sesame seeds both with their husks, is that a good deal of fiber and whole-graininess is incorporated into the loaves, resulting in enhanced interest, nutrition and fibrosity. Incorporating tahini into bread is another experiment that appears to have worked.

Sometimes I display Brillo™ ants in my experimentation. I meant to say brilliance. I ordered a cloche through Amazon but it's on backorder, has been for three weeks. This confounds me greatly and tends to distress. Nearly bought another on eBay but it's not as long. I decided to just be patient, but I'm eager to try the wet no-knead method with a cloche instead of cast-iron pots as I've been doing. As to the no-knead bread method, I knead it anyway because I think it's fun. Kneading a wet dough amounts to stirring it until it becomes stringy. To devise an ersatz clay cloche I used a bisque bowl I bought a long time ago for yet another experiment. I was not pleased with the results of those trials, but I still had the bowl, so I imagined I could use a pizza stone for a lid and devise an approximate cloche. It worked well, hazardously well considering both must be brought to 500℉. One wrong move and burn, Baby, burn.

You should see the bread slide out of this bowl when it's done, as if the bread is eager to get out of there.

A local artist threw that bowl on a potter's wheel. I own a couple of them. The artist moved and that makes me a little bit sad. Nobody, and I mean nobody, matches his mad throwing skillz.