Backwards bread

Winter is one of the nicest times to bake bread at home. It's also... one of the hardest seasons for making sourdough. A bit like me, the cold makes my sourdough starter sluggish, and that can drag out the already hours-long process of making bread with no guarantee it'll work out. 

So I was very excited to try a recipe for backwards bread, the bread-child of cute Instagram baker Mary Grace and cookbook author and doula Jessica Prescott. It's a recipe where you mix up your sourdough ingredients and essentially go to sleep, skipping 95% of the special folding techniques that goes into making regular sourdough.

I wasn't sure it'd actually work for me (it was a chilly zero degrees in Canberra last night, compared to the 19 degrees of Mary's test loaf in Adelaide) but it really did. And this lazy loaf might be one of my best yet.

A note for fellow sourdough bakers: My starter takes about 18 hours to rise (!), so I followed Mary's tip and put it in the fridge at it's peak (usually at 3pm if I feed it after dinner the night before) and mixed up my dough using the same starter straight from the fridge. And because it's so cold in Canberra, I put my dough in the oven overnight. It wasn't on, but protected the dough from the weather a bit.

When it works, baking bread is very satisfying. And it turns out it's even more so when you've put almost zero effort into it.