Loaves

Nice! I dabbled at sourdough over the pandemic and quickly moved on to other hobbies, respect for refining your form.

Beauties!

Loved experimenting with sourdough but the effort/reward ratio wasn't there for a household of two people that eat more rice than bread. If the house was full enough to justify baking a couple times a week I would probably still be in the game.

I did NOT get the bug during the pandemic, @wjcstp (probably because as a tradesman I simply went to work everyday during that period and didn't do much working from home). My wife asked me sometime during 2024 that for Christmas of that year she wished for me to learn how to bake bread so I learned in the latter half of that year.

And I completely feel that rationale, @ardgedee. We do eat a lot of bread in our family so the value is there for us but to be perfectly honest I can purchase an equally quality loaf from our local coop for around $7 whereas the above two loaves require my attention on and off for around five hours. The financial ROI isn't there but it brings me a lot of priceless joy.

@samh Yeah. I appreciate that. It's not so much about ROI as it is the fact I'm bad at gardening and I'm bad at keeping sourdough starter alive. If I baked regularly I'd be at the starter frequently enough, but if I'm baking at most once every other month the starter demands more mental space than I can spare, I've accidentally killed off a couple-few starters that way.

I bake Japanese-style milk bread now and then, it's more or less the hand I'm keeping in the bread game.

My experience with sourdough was more of how to use the discard than actually making bread. Eventually, the feeding got to be too much, plus mold grew easily in my non air conditioned house in the summer.