The Mild Wife likes to bake, and she's branched out into various different types of bread and pastries. I've seen her make bread, pizza, and panettonne, among others. Incidentally, if you don't know what panettonne is, it's not exactly the simplest recipe. You have to take some care in order to get it right, but the Mild Wife has knocked out some fairly good ones. Now, I mention this so that you get an idea of how much the Mild Wife appreciates the activity.
We haven't been able to do it as much lately (flour has been a little harder to come by), but it is something that comes up around our home. In fact, it's a common enough activity that for a while, we had a sour dough starter that we'd use to bake loaves of bread. The basic idea is that you let the starter grow, and once it's grown large enough, you take a chunk of it to make into dough. The starter continues to grow, and you repeat the process a bunch of times.
Now, technically, the starter is a bacterial culture. That's why you have to feed it and only break off parts of it. It's like a domesticated bacteria that is good for making bread. So, like any living thing, you have to make sure it's given the right conditions to grow and stay healthy. If you don't feed it enough, it'll go bad. If you let it get too cold, it can stop growing altogether. It's not unlike a plant, in that you have to care for the thing.
When the Mild Wife first started doing this, she would check on the starter more frequently. She didn't want to mess it up, and she was very curious about the whole process. I remember that she would check on it several times a day, trying to make sure that everything was going according to plan. I poked fun a little bit, joking that this project had become her very own bread baby (very much like my "plant babies"). We had a good laugh about it all, and then continued to bake some delicious bread.
All of this, however, is simply the backstory. Like I said, we haven't actually baked too many things lately. We have, however, decided that it's not worth it to keep buying kombucha from online retailers. Kombucha is basically a fermented, probiotic drink; think of something like a liquid version of yogurt made with tea as the base ingredient. We used to buy it in bulk from Costco, but since we're trying to stay inside the house as much as possible, we've switched to different providers (Costco doesn't seem to have it in stock on their online platform). The results have been, unfortunately, somewhat disappointing. The ones we've purchased have tasted more like sugar water than the stuff we liked, and they were more expensive per ounce than we used to pay.
So, we decided to get a kit and brew our own. If the stores wouldn't provide what we wanted, maybe we could do it ourselves. It was actually a bit cheaper than I expected, and I figured that it should pay for itself in a few brews. After a relatively short wait, a kombucha brewing kit showed up on our front door, and we decided to dive in. As it turns out, the process is very similar to baking bread; you use a culture (a SCOBY) and let it do its thing in liquid form rather than in solid form. The end result is a fermented beverage.
It's worth mentioning at this point that while "we" have decided to experiment with this and brew "our" kombucha, it is not an equal distribution of "we" that is intrigued by this process. I am the one that is more curious about how this is going to work, and I'm the one who will check on the brew periodically. I suspect that this is somewhat old hat to the Mild Wife, since she has all of the aforementioned experience with baking bread. In any case, I am now quite invested in how this brew turns out. The shoe is on the other foot now.
This all came to a head the other day when I decided to check on the brew the minute I woke up. I had already brushed and groomed myself, and the very first thought that came to mind was to check on the kombucha. The Mild Wife burst out laughing, and returned some of the ribbing that I had thrown her way when she was anxiously checking the sourdough starter. I clearly had it coming, so all I could do was laugh and go about my business of checking on the brew.
These bacterial cultures sure do make things interesting around here.
We haven't been able to do it as much lately (flour has been a little harder to come by), but it is something that comes up around our home. In fact, it's a common enough activity that for a while, we had a sour dough starter that we'd use to bake loaves of bread. The basic idea is that you let the starter grow, and once it's grown large enough, you take a chunk of it to make into dough. The starter continues to grow, and you repeat the process a bunch of times.
Now, technically, the starter is a bacterial culture. That's why you have to feed it and only break off parts of it. It's like a domesticated bacteria that is good for making bread. So, like any living thing, you have to make sure it's given the right conditions to grow and stay healthy. If you don't feed it enough, it'll go bad. If you let it get too cold, it can stop growing altogether. It's not unlike a plant, in that you have to care for the thing.
When the Mild Wife first started doing this, she would check on the starter more frequently. She didn't want to mess it up, and she was very curious about the whole process. I remember that she would check on it several times a day, trying to make sure that everything was going according to plan. I poked fun a little bit, joking that this project had become her very own bread baby (very much like my "plant babies"). We had a good laugh about it all, and then continued to bake some delicious bread.
All of this, however, is simply the backstory. Like I said, we haven't actually baked too many things lately. We have, however, decided that it's not worth it to keep buying kombucha from online retailers. Kombucha is basically a fermented, probiotic drink; think of something like a liquid version of yogurt made with tea as the base ingredient. We used to buy it in bulk from Costco, but since we're trying to stay inside the house as much as possible, we've switched to different providers (Costco doesn't seem to have it in stock on their online platform). The results have been, unfortunately, somewhat disappointing. The ones we've purchased have tasted more like sugar water than the stuff we liked, and they were more expensive per ounce than we used to pay.
So, we decided to get a kit and brew our own. If the stores wouldn't provide what we wanted, maybe we could do it ourselves. It was actually a bit cheaper than I expected, and I figured that it should pay for itself in a few brews. After a relatively short wait, a kombucha brewing kit showed up on our front door, and we decided to dive in. As it turns out, the process is very similar to baking bread; you use a culture (a SCOBY) and let it do its thing in liquid form rather than in solid form. The end result is a fermented beverage.
It's worth mentioning at this point that while "we" have decided to experiment with this and brew "our" kombucha, it is not an equal distribution of "we" that is intrigued by this process. I am the one that is more curious about how this is going to work, and I'm the one who will check on the brew periodically. I suspect that this is somewhat old hat to the Mild Wife, since she has all of the aforementioned experience with baking bread. In any case, I am now quite invested in how this brew turns out. The shoe is on the other foot now.
This all came to a head the other day when I decided to check on the brew the minute I woke up. I had already brushed and groomed myself, and the very first thought that came to mind was to check on the kombucha. The Mild Wife burst out laughing, and returned some of the ribbing that I had thrown her way when she was anxiously checking the sourdough starter. I clearly had it coming, so all I could do was laugh and go about my business of checking on the brew.
These bacterial cultures sure do make things interesting around here.
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