Thursday, November 20, 2008

Pet Officially Deceased

Okay. I've given up. My attempts at creating and maintaining sourdough starter are over. I killed my last batch. Since I don't consider myself a cruel person I'll just quit tortuing those poor little microbes and go back to using ordinary commercial yeast when I want to bake bread, pizza or sweet rolls. Besides the dogs and horses refused to eat that last batch of bread I attempted.

And speaking of sweet rolls, while I was trying to find a book I consider an important refrence I ran across various old books about cooking, gardening, goat keeping, and compost building, as well as other things. These are not only books I've collected over the years, but ones various relatives collected, including one created by my grandmother. It has recipes, crochet patterns and housekeeping tips in it. Some of them are clipped from magazines and newspapers and some are written out. She gave it to me in 1967 when I was first married and complaining about not knowing how to bake bread.

Back to the rolls. I found my grandma's old recipe and decided to try it. The first batch turned out okay, but needed something. The thing is she didn't use the measuring tools I have today. Her Cup was an old teacup. Her spoons were the ones she used for coffee, soup and serving. There is also the pinch of this and dash of that that are determinded by experience.

it turned out I needed more sugar in the dough, but not as much as I put in the second time. I tested the dough by making a small pancake and tasting it. Since the dough was too sweet and you can't remove the extra sugar I decided I would make her cinnamon rolls.

The cinnamon rolls turned out okay, but when she said to add a hint of caynne to the cinnamon and sugar mixture she meant a HINT. Still they turned out edible and that is good enough for me.

1 comment:

Becky Burkheart said...

One of my favorite memories of childhood was baking bread with my grandma. She always served sandwhiches on homebaked buns instead of storebought slices and her sweet rolls were heavenly.