Sourdough bread, Denver slow

That does it! ))) WHAP (((

I'm disgusted. We bakers are a temperamental lot, and I'm totally owning it.

This is the bread from the sourdough starter that was problematic from the very beginning. Babied along, it stayed slow. Slow and weak. It was born as a dud, showed its dudliness early, and stayed a dud throughout. I threw it all out. No point in wasting any more time with it. It tastes good enough, sure, but that's only due to fermentation, and it's nothing to write home about. The crumb is all wrong, it didn't rise properly, its crust dominates the loaf rendering it useless as bread, it tends to crumble, and as stated many times it is impossibly slow. I hate it. I'm not having it. I ate a few bits and tossed the loaves and the starter. Pfft.

There were two loaves. I ate about 1/8 of one. It was awful. The sauce, I'm all about sauces now, was butter and olive oil with Italian herbs. I photographed all that but then in confusion of transcribing lessons and uploading them, I erased the card on the camera before uploading the photos. So I went back and took the one shown above. It's all part of my disgust.

Even though I refuse to think about this any further, a portion of my brain automatically analyzes what went wrong and devises a plan to correct it all on its own. That corner of my brain made conclusions and devised a plan even though my overarching outer thought-shell hasn't given it permission. I'm aware of this dark cogitation: The next bread-making session will be non-experimental revivification of an earlier reliable starter. The loaves will be entirely refined white AP flour. Water and salt. That's it. Back to basics. That lower-consciousness analyzer determined all this messing around with whole wheat extra load-carrying is unsatisfying. Like training a dog and going back to earlier successes in order to override the difficulty of new tricks and reaffirm with things known and end on happy notes.

Well. So my brain thinks of me as a dog does it? Why, I outta ...