Sourdough Sandwiches

Last Friday we disposed of the sourdough starter that had been cultivating in our refrigerator for the past two months or so.  Over that time I baked three batches of bread which, though not bad, were not really good enough to justify the effort required to properly maintain a sourdough starter.

Keeping a starter sounds easy: scoop some out, discard, feed with flour and water.  Repeat.  The thing is, flour costs money, so I put the starter in the fridge (rather than out at room temperature) in order to have to feed it less.  After a while, it smelled so bad that I started Googling questions like "is it safe to eat sourdough starter if it smells like nail polish remover?".  That acetone phase passed, but the point is that it's easy to let your starter fall into a state of neglect, which only means you'll have to feed it with more and more flour.

Lastly, Peter Reinhardt's instructions were too overwhelming for my schedule.  It's not really his fault - his book is intended for people who want to bake on a professional level, not those who want simple home recipes.  As such, it often instructs its readers through a series of waiting steps that can take days to complete, and requires them to do various things at four hour intervals.  With sourdough, these steps ensure proper development of the wild yeasts and bacteria within, and I took short cuts.  Maybe that's why my bread, while tasting good, ended up extremely dense.  All three times it came out dense, even when I added regular yeast to the dough on my third try.

Still, dense bread is ok for sandwiches when thinly sliced.  And for toasted sandwiches, it's actually great.  We made a bunch of sandwiches with our sourdough.  These (pictured at the top of the post) aren't the best - the best were the grilled cheese sandwiches; they didn't stand a chance of lasting long enough to be photographed.  But these were pretty good in their own right - one containing tuna salad and a combination of red and green lettuce called חסה משי, and one containing the same lettuce with feta and tomatoes.