What is Taste of the Past?

Taste of the Past is where I share my love of traditional cookery. Recipes from the days before TV dinners and microwaves right down the ages to the earliest cook books that I can get my hands on. I hope you enjoy my experiments as much as I do. Please share your own ideas, efforts and feedback in the comments.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

Sour Dough

Life recently has been hectic to say the least and time to experiment with interesting recipes has been severely limited.  Apart from a brief encounter with Eliza Acton (of which more in the future, she is definitely a cook to return to) I have been investigating sour dough in as many forms as I can. 

I have been making sour dough loaves for years, ever since I went on a specialist bread making course and came away with my own pot of gently bubbling rye paste and detailed instructions of how to care for it.  I have used this recipe time and again and it makes a very reliable loaf of bread.  It fulfils my main cooking criteria of being virtually faff free and it tastes great. 

With my own sour dough course looming I have been cooking as many of the other recipes and methods as I can and my freezer is slowly filling up with loaves for interested cookery students to sample.   It is also filling up with lots of pots of gently bubbling flour and water paste for other people to take home a cherish.