SMiLes by Meg

Salted Chocolate Caramel Knot

I know I still haven’t shared my go-to sourdough bread recipe yet, but I make it so often it almost feels like cheating to put it on the blog. Instead, this week I’ll share a different recipe from the same cookbook (Artisan Sourdough Made Simple). It uses sourdough starter, but also the wonderful ingredients of Nutella and dulce de leche. If you don’t have sourdough starter in your fridge yet, and you live in DC, let me know – I’m happy to provide some of mine. It’s great to have, very hard to kill (unlike my house plants), and I

Brioche

I feel like I’ve been holding out on you. The past couple of months, I’ve been making a LOT of sourdough bread, using a recipe I haven’t posted here. It’s perfect and easy and we don’t buy bread anymore (except when I’m too busy to bake bread and we find our bread box empty mid week). But this will not be the week I share that recipe. Instead, I’m sharing a different sourdough recipe from the same book – one for sourdough brioche. This bread doesn’t taste sour or anything. Sourdough starter just serves as the leavening agent. It tastes

Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread

Erik is here! After two years of long distance from Boston, Massachusetts to Anchorage, Alaska, we’re finally in the same place, for the long run – Washington, D.C.! And because Erik’s back, it’s only fitting that this week’s recipe is one he claims we’ve made before, though it never appears on the blog, so I don’t know how that can be true – whole wheat sourdough bread. This recipe is a modified version from the Tassajara Bread Book. We used starter from Alaska (shout out to Cathy Coon!) and realized that we probably no longer need to each have our

Sourdough Bagels

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, you know that I have a sourdough starter that I like to bake with fairly often. Anytime I have a bread-type thing I want to make, I look to see if there’s a sourdough version. This is partly because every time I open my fridge it stares at me, wanting to be fed or used, and I feel bad letting it sit in there too long without doing something useful. (Even yeast cultures deserve to have a purpose in their lives.) But it is also because I despise using dry yeast for

Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

I have a confession to make: my sourdough starter experiment failed. For three days, it looked perfect – everything was bubbling away just like it should. And then I had to fiddle. The book I bought here, Alaska Sourdough, didn’t really give much guidance when it came to sourdough starter upkeep. I like having directions to follow, and don’t do well with “just let it be for 2 weeks.” I’m the kind of person that has to constantly push around anything I’m cooking on a stovetop. So I felt the need to at least give it a stir once a

Sourdough Pancakes

I always feel a little bit like pancakes don’t quite belong on this blog. As a baker, I’m drawn to breakfast food, and they do have cake in their name, but they seem like less of an adventure than other things I make. But I wanted to make another loaf of sourdough bread this weekend, and was already feeding my starter, so decided to give these a try. As consolation for them not being super exciting, I’ll supplement them with a good story.

Sourdough Bread

This was quite the weekend. Yesterday, I baked sourdough bread from scratch for the first time (more on that later). More exciting, I finished knitting my first sock! One more and I’ll have a set! AND my family made an impromptu visit in to have dinner with me (but really for Father’s Day – love you Daddy-o!). This morning I ran a Spartan race. And all afternoon I got to hang out with my best friend from college (hi, Cate!).