Too many sourdough bakers fuss too much and make it sound like this thing is rocket science. I gave my daughter some of my starter and she got so perplexed searching online for how to care for it. So I thought I’d share how it takes me literally under one minute

Do you love Asian flavours as much as I do? Then maybe you miss them as much as I do, too. Even though Israel is technically IN Asia, it’s tough to get authentic-tasting Asian food here.  Takeout places are hit and miss, mostly on the “miss” side of things… as in, I totally MISS delicious hot and sour soup.  Yes, it looks disgusting (if you make it right).  But the mix of flavours, of sweet, spicy, pungent, salty… well, it’s divine. (And on the plus side, the hottest thing in Tel Aviv is kosher dim sum, and it actually tastes okay, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much.) Still, while the cool weather lasts a little longer here, I thought I’d share one of my all-time favourite soup recipes – to make, to share, to just lean over and inhale.  It’s very, very fragrant.  You can adjust the hotness and sourness to suit your family’s taste. RECIPE DISCLAIMER:   As with most of my favourite easy soups, this recipe is an approximation, not an actua...

When you love baking as much as I do, you become an evangelist. After we moved to Israel, and our whole lives were topsy-turvy, the only time I felt like things were at all “normal” were when I was making bread.  Those breads were rudimentary at first – hey, we didn’t even have an oven.  But they kept me grounded.  I was so ecstatic when all our possessions arrived, including my gorgeous cast iron loaf pans, plastic dough bucket , and other beloved bakeware, accumulated over the years.  It was time to get my hands floury and really start baking again. I love how centered and grounded baking makes me feel, but can’t help wondering why other people seem to think it’s hard, or complicated, or just not something they have space for in their lives.  We all have time and space to make bread.  Sure, it takes a while, but very little of that is active prep time.  A bread that takes 36 hours from start to finish may have less than ten minutes of actual st...

It’s no secret that I’ve been searching years for the perfect pareve cinnamon bun.  When I saw this recipe , for a Giant Cinnamon Roll Cake, mentioned on a facebook group last week, it looked sort of perfect – simple, low-key and kind of pretty, to boot. I didn’t use the dough recommended in the recipe – I just made my regular challah dough a bit sweeter than usual. ROLL IT OUT.  Roll it out into a “rectangle” (okay, not exact, but you can tug at the corners gently to make it prettier). SPREAD YUMMINESS.  The cinnamon spread was easy, and I was impressed that it didn’t have a ton of margarine in it.  I used butter-flavoured.  Use fresh cinnamon, if at all possible! TIME TO STRIP. Now, you’re supposed to cut the dough into nice, neat strips.  Theoretically, the recipe asks you to use a ruler and make sure they’re equal so your “cake” doesn’t look all lumpy and bumpy.  My philosophy is that it all tastes the same anyway (probably not t...

Sara has been doing some amazing things with (nearly) gluten-free sourdough.  That’s right, SOURDOUGH.  She uses rice flour, I believe, fermented and added to a mixture of various gluten-free flours, to try to rival the flavour and popularity of her gluten-full breads. Check it out over here ! And while you’re at it, here’s some more great press!!! I had an amazing NEW concept this week following a super-fun bread workshop on Thursday:  a 2-generation, 3-baker bread workshop, with me, my mother, and Sara.  Each of us could present one bread from start to finish: something like challah, no-knead and sourdough… or whatever.  Anything, really! I mentioned it to my mother, who is pretty gung ho.  Haven’t told Sara yet… or anybody at our shul, which would be a fabulous (and kosher!) place to do it.  NOT my mother’s kitchen… or mine, I suppose. Anyway, please take a minute to LIKE my sister’s very worthwhile up-and-coming bakery operation over h...

This is from last week… Tuesday?  I wanted to have a plain meal, with tinned comfort-food tomato soup and awesome bread.  And I had a dream, not a literal dream, but an in-my-head-so-close-I-can-almost-taste-it dream of a savoury RYE bread full of ONIONS.  No poppy seeds, not a pletzl.  FULL of onions, like almost to bursting.  And not just an ordinary loaf – a ROUND loaf. Luckily, I had everything I needed just sitting around.  I modified this Sourdough Rye Bread recipe , using some sourdough but the full amount of yeast for the yeast version, and cutting the rising time by about ten hours.  While the dough was rising, I caramelized two regular supermarket yellow onions, using my no-fail, idiot-proof caramelization technique:  cast-iron skillet, little bit of oil, salt the onions, let them sweat until translucent, then just keep dumping water in and simmering on medium-low until the water was gone.  Repeat a few times, boiling water of...

Yay!  You may remember this photo from my Rosh Hashanah sourdough Pan de Calabazas this past year. Well, I sold my editor at the Canadian Jewish News on an article about “kosher sourdough baking” – in which I reveal the stunning truth that “kosher sourdough baking” is pretty much the same as any other sourdough baking. Read it here.

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out! Hate to brag – but delicious challah! Only my second time succeeding with Maggie Glezer’s “My Sourdough Challah”… but BOY did it turn out well!  Hate to brag, but this was delicious challah – and beautiful.   I still have no idea why my sourdough challahs were losing their braids last year.  But now, they are totally fine. I even got to pass along some starter to a friend – along with the lower middle challah (a 1-lb’er; I had to keep the two big ones and the “baby” for our own Shabbos)!

Is it October and the fruit flies are still #$^! everywhere??? Luckily, I have a tent! Here, it’s sheltering two sourdough breads I made yesterday – one for our family, one for a friend who had a baby.  (I sent the bread with a lasagna… one cannot live on bread alone!) I used Peter Reinhart’s basic Pain au Levain from p. 61 of Artisan Breads Every Day .  Indeed, it turned out so well, crusty outside, tender and moist with HUGE openings inside, that we could DEFINITELY eat bread like this every day. I had almost forgotten.  I don’t own this book, despite drooling over it countless times from the library, so I used my becoming-standard trick of perusing the book using Amazon ’s “Look Inside” feature.  I took a quick screenshot of the recipe so I wouldn’t have to print it out. And, of course, I used my amazing Sourdough Spreadsheet again.  It was helpful, because the recipe called for 458g of 60% starter, and I only had 352g, so it told me ex...

Nothing goes together at Sukkos time like fresh-picked PUMPKIN and challah dough! We didn’t actually pick the pumpkins ourselves, but did pick them UP (and pick them OUT) at the place we went for apple picking .  So it’s sort of the same thing… I have vowed never to peel another raw squash again, because it’s so blissfully EASY to just cut them in half, pop them in an oiled pan face-down, and roast them at 300° until it’s soft enough to poke.  You can actually roast them at almost any temperature.  400° works just as well but quicker… but just look what this Australian baking blog says about LOWER temperatures: We roast the pumpkin in our wood-fired oven at a low heat (50C to 100C) for 24 - 36 hours. At the low temperatures the pumpkin malts, which firms and helps keep the pumpkin from falling apart in the dough. Yummy!  (one of the kids said they thought the pumpkin would MUMMIFY in the heat, which it sort of sounds like it does… “malting” being another...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Sourdough challah:  the Jewish holy grail? Yes, folks… I did it!  After weeks and weeks of “supplementing” the challah with a teaspoon of yeast, I spent a few days this week buffing up the starter and managed to create three delicious sourdough challahs – fully risen, perfectly cooked and beautifully-textured! The problem is… you knew there was a catch, right?  They’re not very sweet.  And there’s a limit to how sweet they can become without either tasting weird or the sugar inhibiting the action of the yeast. So I think next week, I’ll return to my basic tried-and-true Reliable Challah recipe – and then, perhaps, issue myself a new challenge.  Who knows what it will be?

I cheated – as I’ve been doing with the challah, I added a teaspoon of commercial yeast.  It is just too darn cold in the house. This would have been Maggie Glezer’s Sourdough Semolina bread otherwise… It could have been moister, and the crumb is far tighter than the one shown in the pictures.  Not as intensely  yellowish, either, though it was slightly more yellow in real life before my camera destroyed the colour. But I baked this in the dutch oven and was quite pleased that at least the darn thing was edible all the way through, for a change.  Considering I mixed the final dough at 1 pm and we sat down to eat this at 6 pm, it was quite fast for sourdough. Next time – no yeast and a longer rise, like maybe even overnight, probably wouldn’t hurt.  And then, probably, a slightly shorter bake, although maybe NOT.  All in all, I’m happy to have produced edible kind-of-sourdough bread.

As my sister the baker has pointed out often, she sometimes (probably not often) envies the flexiblity I have in deciding what to bake.  Too often, however, that “flexibility” translates to inconsistent, mediocre bread simply because, like anything, you need to rehearse a bread many, many times before you can make it reliably well. And the other day, she pointed out that the upside of her inflexible routine – baking the same breads over and over every single night – is that she has absolutely no experience refreshing and rejuvenating an old starter from the back of the fridge, which is where mine lives most of the time. If she wants a starter, she’s got one – heck, she’s got several.  Rye?  Probably a bucket of it somewhere in the back.  Spelt?  Whole wheat?  Maybe.  Definitely, there are active cultures just waiting around in buckets for someone to reach in and grab out a scoop.   Whereas if I want to bake sourdough, it can’t be a s...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  A whole week of bread adventures! Not all entirely successful….   Sourdough rye bread that I finally got around to baking in my little dutch oven.  Beautiful loaf!  Just not all that flavourful. The “bread” that isn’t bread :  Seitan for hot & sour soup that turned out so gloriously well last time… but this time globbed into chewy rubberish nightmare.  Flavourful, but the texture was horrid!    Ew! But finally, finally, to cap things off, a sourdough challah that was amazingly buoyant; this rose better, and with less commercial yeast, than any sourdough challah that I have made so far.  I had 324g of starter, more than I’ve used before, and it performed super-well, though I did add 1/2 tsp of yeast.  The rise times were comparable to non-sourdough loaves, despite the wintry-cool house.  On the downside, it tasted like there was no sugar in the loaf, and I’...