Sourdough Boules for Soup Bowls

Made some bread bowls today to hold a delicious salmon chowder.

There is no exact recipe for what I did today because it was a thrown together kind of thing from stuff I had on hand.

And the sad truth is, I have never weighed my ingredients, I don't even own a scale (not even in the bathroom), and I very seldom measure, and when I do it's not very accurate. But next time I do this I will try to be more careful and document what I am doing!

In short, I made my basic sourdough white bread, I let it rise until doubled with two folds in my special warm spot - the barely pre-heated oven. Then I punched it down and divided into six pieces by just eye balling it. Shaped each piece into a ball, dipped the bottom of the ball into a plate of cornmeal. Then I placed them on a piece of parchment paper and set them in the fridge to ferment for a couple hours.

I preheated my oven to 425F, with my cooking stone in the oven. I use a Pampered Chef cooking stone, set on the middle rack with an old Wilton castle shaped cake pan on the bottom rack for my steam generator. I let the oven preheat for about an hour to make sure the stone is up to temp.

Working with two boules at a time, they got a light egg wash, then using my best sewing scissors, I snipped a star shape on top of the boule. Five snips, then quick into the oven on the stone, still on the parchment paper, filled the cake pan with two cups of boiling water poured out of my long neck watering pot as quick as I could and shut the oven door.

Baked them for 15 minutes with the oven light on. I sat on the floor in front of my oven staring through the glass so that I could watch them rise. After 15 minutes, I opened he oven pulled out the stone, gave each boule an additional quick egg wash, pulled out the parchment paper, swapped them places on the stone, shoved them back in and let them bake for an additional 10 minutes.

Took them out, internal temperature was 200F, so I moved them to the cooling rack and continued in the same fashion with the rest of the boules.

After they cooled I cut off the tops at the base of the star lid, and hollowed out the boule with my fingers until I had a suitable bowl. I saved all the crumb, it will be used to make bread crumbs. At dinner time (actually, when we got hungry), we filled the bowls with a delicious salmon chowder and it was really, really good!