While I have been keeping my sourdough starter pretty busy baking with Sourdough Surprises every month, it occurred to me that I haven’t actually used it to make a lot of bread, especially considering that I bake bread at least twice a week to keep us in sandwiches and toast. Lately I have been making some variation of Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread (that famous one that was in the New York Times), using yeast and just throwing a little bit of sourdough discard in with the dough for some added flavour, but not actually using the sourdough starter for its leavening power. I really really love Lahey’s no-knead bread (even more than the 5 Minutes a Day bread) so I decided to try to convert it to sourdough. This in itself proved to be a learning process, because it meant converting the recipe from volume measures to weight, and it involved percentages and math, which is not really my strong suit. But I must have done something right because, lo and behold, it worked! The bread came out beautifully crusty, with a soft, chewy, light interior crumb and a nice full flavour thanks to the starter.
…
The weekend before last, there was a 