Hi, my name is Keith Gierman. I now live in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Some of my fondest memories growing up in New Jersey include waiting for the Bond Breadman to show up at the house for his twice weekly delivery of bread. Yes, I am that old, and both bread and milk in glass bottles were delivered to the house by route men. While Bond bread wasn’t artisanal bread, it was a notch up from supermarket bread.
In this blog I will be discussing my love of making homemade breads and my recent journey into sourdough breads. I will not be teaching you how to make bread. Instead I will be sharing what works for me, in my kitchen, from the ingredients I use. Mainly this blog will be focused on sourdough bread. What I know about making sourdough bread I learned from binge watching YouTube videos by Teresa L. Greenway of Northwest Sourdough (www.northwestsourdough.com) and subsequently taking several of her courses on Udemy. Teresa is a terrific teacher if you want to learn how to make sourdough breads and I highly recommend her videos and courses.
My making of sourdough breads really only started in November 2018. My journey into making bread actually started when I was in my 20’s. I was in my first apartment after graduation. My cooking equipment consisted of one sauce pan and a cast iron fry pan which I still have and use 50+ years later. I decided I wanted to bake my own bread so I went out bought a bread pan, some flour and a packet of yeast. As I remember, I made a mess of the kitchen and made a hockey puck of a loaf of inedible bread. I had a couple more attempts with similar results and gave up.
Jump forward another 10 or 15 years and the desire for homemade bread struck again. So I bought a bread machine. That made good but not great bread. The loaves were oddly shaped and had that cavity in the bottom where the paddle that mixed and kneaded the dough was stuck. What also started at the same time was buying books about bread making. Eventually the bread machine fell into disuse. But the books remained.
My favorite book was and still is Bread Alone by Daniel Leader. That book provided much inspiration and a lot of really good breads were baked from the recipes in it. My favorite recipe in the book is his Pain au Levain. I baked that bread a lot. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it is the beginning of a sourdough bread. It starts with 1/16 teaspoon of yeast, water and flour that gets additions of flour and water over several days while it ferments.
My wife and I have hosted a family get together on Christmas Eve for as long as we have been married. For most of them I have baked bread. The get together is fairly simple with appetizers, soup, bread and Christmas cookies for dessert. Most years I would fret and worry that my bread would not come out but it always did. I cut things too close some years with the bread coming out of the oven as people arrived.
Jumping ahead to the present, why did I get into sourdough? I think because it is elemental. There are only three ingredients, flour, water and salt and everything needed to make great bread is contained within them.
Technically there are two other “ingredients” needed, time and patience. The first I have, the second not so much. And the second is the reason I believe that until recently I never made a great loaf of bread.
I have rambled on in this post but have left out steps in my journey that may ultimately be covered in future posts. I will try to not be so long winded in future posts but no guarantees. I may include rants in future posts about things that drive me nuts.
My next post will address misconceptions I had about sourdough and I have learned.