Today's Projects: Starting a Starter & Homemade Cheezits

Becoming a bread snob is not something I anticipated, given that I grew up on whatever was on sale and spongy enough for kid sandwiches... But, alas, bread snobbery has overtaken me and I can't even entertain the idea of a loaf that comes in a brown plastic bag with a twist tie. My first ventures into homemade bread took place in a great span of purposeful unemployment in the two months before our move to Portland. I made my own starter from scratch, using an LA Times recipe, and devoted many mornings to break making. Settling on the NY Times No Knead recipe as my ultimate favorite (who's going to argue with less work?!), I made endless loaves of bread that spring. When we moved, I couldn't bring my starter, and I promptly stopped baking bread.

Last winter I pulled out the LA Times article on starting a starter and was surprised, and saddened, when it didn't work. Maybe I'd forgotten to use spring water? Unsure of what went wrong, I quickly moved on to other projects and Mark started making bread with regular old yeast which was delicious enough to distract me from getting a starter going.

Since January is a good time to resolve to do everything on your list, I added "start making sourdough bread" to my list of resolutions. On New Year's day I got out the recipe and the flour, remembered to use spring water, and my starter is now at stage 4-- almost a "mother starter".



Starting a starter is a bit like having another pet-- because you have to pass close attention to it's livelihood, and feed and water it accordingly to schedule. But once you get it going it rewards you with fluffy, perfectly consistent loaves of homemade sourdough. Once you have an active starter you can store it in the fridge and feed it every few weeks, it's just getting to that point that takes a little patience and dedication.

Once the starter was fed and aerated I moved on to a more indulgent project-- homemade parmesean crackers, as featured on one of my favorite cooking blogs Smitten Kitchen. Cheezits are most definitely my very favorite junk food, and they have to be the "full fat" version-- none of this reduced fat or sodium business when I'm eating Cheezits! I was sure I would like these, but unsure if they'd be worth the trouble. The verdict is in, and they are worth the 30-40 minutes I spent from start to finish, and that includes washing the bowl.

I made a few modifications to the recipe- the main one being use of just a spoon since I don't have a food processor. I also used cold butter and a pastry blender to blend the flour and butter-- this resulted in the flaky pastry crust I was hoping for. The recipe made around 40 small crackers, and I promptly devoured about half of them. YUM.