My family has recently embarked on a "less-is more" natural style of living. We're trying to do more things ourselves instead of relying on commercial offerings. We're also trying to get rid of the plastic in our house, which is easier said than done! But baking things I usually buy ready-made at the store, I can do.

One of the things I have switched over to making at home is flour tortillas. We love tacos and quesadillas, and flour tortillas seemed easy enough to make. I remembered seeing women make them in San Antonio when I was there several years ago. All they did was roll out a ball of dough and plop it onto a cast iron skillet for a few seconds on each side. Simple!

I found my keeper recipe at epicurious, which is one of my fave food sites. I haven't tried the wheat version yet, but the white flour tortillas are amazing.

I follow the recipe pretty much exactly, but I use my stand mixer to mix and knead the dough. And I divide the dough into 16 portions, then roll them out paper thin. This makes tortillas like the ones I'm used to buying at the store, about 8" in diameter and nice and flexible and thin. I would divide them into even smaller portions for tacos, though, because 8" is more like a burrito size. Then I just cook them one by one on a preheated cast iron skillet, no oil or anything necessary (my skillet is super-seasoned, thanks to our summer favorite, fried okra). I place the cooked tortillas in a big lidded Pyrex dish while they wait for the rest to get finished.

Next item on the commercial product hit-list: corn tortillas! Good thing we have a big Hispanic influence where we live...masa harina is on every grocery store shelf.

So, I haven't posted here in Quite A While, but I made some hamburger buns the other day and thought I would share my results. I have always wanted to make my own burger buns, but the last time I tried over a year ago, they were heavy and too bready for burgers. We couldn't even finish our burgers, the night I served them on those buns! So I sort of let that idea pass away. But then a few weeks ago, I found a recipe posted on King Arthur's baking blog. I was intrigued by the method of forming the buns cinnamon-roll style, and I loved the idea of the onion swirl! So I gave them a try.

Well, first of all, they turned out beautiful. How pretty are those? The egg wash and poppy seeds really dressed them up. And the onion flavor from the dried onion swirl was really nice. Subtle, but still tasty. I added a little too much flour to this batch, though, and so they were a little more dense and heavy than I wanted. I really want homemade taste, but supermarket fluff, in my hamburger buns. So I tried them again the next weekend, added less flour (PJ says the dough should be tacky like tape, not sticky like glue, and that description helped me a lot). They were much lighter with less flour. So, I think the key to these is to avoid adding too much flour. I might try adding some milk instead of water sometime, too. It makes super light and fluffy dinner rolls, so it might also work well in hamburger buns.

(No, we didn't have french fries with our burgers that night. Instead, we had fried okra, straight from the farmer's market! Yum.)

It's been a while since I've had the luxury of daily check-ins with TFL. Lots going on this summer, and actually I really don't have the time even now! But I made some sourdough sandwich bread today for the first time (so far I have only made rustic loaves with my starter), and I wanted to get the recipe written down and share it with anyone else who might like it.

I tried another batch of bread with my new white starter. This time, the basic sourdough from BBA. I just replaced the barm in the book's formula with my own starter, since it seems to be about the same consistency. I made the firm starter yesterday and let it rise on the counter for 4 hours, at which point it had doubled. So into the fridge it went. This morning I took it out, cut it into pieces, and let it sit for an hour, then I used the KA mixer to mix the dough. I used KAF Bread flour and gray sea salt.

So I have baked a lot of bread this weekend, if you count Friday.  Friday saw the BBA pugliese.

I used some of my starter that would have been discarded last night during refreshment to make some english muffins.  I found this recipe about 3 years ago on the KAF Baking Circle.  It was submitted by a user going by the name chard.  It makes great english muffins!

Last night we had some mashed potatoes.  I had just read the BBA pugliese formula recently, and thought that I would make it with some of the leftovers.  Well, as it happens, I found the Potato Rosemary bread on my way to the pugliese, and it also contains mashed potatoes!  Then I saw that the general formula for the biga makes enough for both the pugliese and the potato rosemary breads.  And then I discovered that my leftover potatoes weighed EXACTLY as much as the amounts called for in the two recipes.  A sign from the universe, perhaps?  So I made the biga last night and s

I want to post here how I started my sourdough starter, and what happened throughout the process, so I can come back and review if necessary later.

All amounts are weight measurements measured on my Salter scale. All water is Brita-filtered water at room temperature.  Starter is rotated between two Mason jars with each feeding so jar is always kept fairly clean and sludge-free.  Ring cap is placed loosely on jar after feeding.

Day 1:  Combined 4 oz KAF bread flour and 4 oz Brita-filtered water.  Put in Mason jar and loosely covered with ring cap.

Just thought I would start a blog, so I can stop highjacking bluezebra's with all of my sourdough questions.  Hopefully I will soon be posting some photos of my own sourdough loaves!