I will continue to write a more personal blog here, which will include my ongoing love of baking sourdough bread.

beetroot sourdough

After the battle with the sticky tea towel my bread had a rustic shape to it but smelled divine.

The texture seemed fine and the colour less garish than the purple sticky dough I had left to rise for a couple of hours.

Nice.

bad blogger but...

What happened to the summer? My last post was in May, I'm afraid I am a bad blogger. On the plus side, my enthusiasm for baking has not waned. I have made a lovely sourdough bread most weekends. Even thought about taking my starter away on holiday to Berwick-upon-Tweed last month, much to the despair of my wife!

I have not been that adventurous though, with my favourite loaves being baked with 50-50 granary flour to either white or wholemeal. Until today that is, when I decided to have a go at a gloriously messy beetroot sourdough that I saw in Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's book How to make bread. Its a beautifully produced book and the purple dough leapt out from the page at me.

It's in the oven as I type. It was a much wetter dough than I am used to and I made a right mess in getting it into the oven from my improvised prooving basket (an under-floured sticky tea towel and colander). Flat and misshapen it may be but  the aroma wafting up from the kitchen is just fine... and there's the buzzer... got to go...