First time making sourdough bread

One of the things I've wanted to do for a very long time is sourdough bread. Yesterday I made my first two loaves of sourdough bread made from spelt flour.

I've been dreaming about sourdough bread and pancakes and muffins, but I've never been successful with making the starter. This time I got water from the lake at our cabin and I gave it another try using only water and spelt flour. This time it worked!
I found a recipe based on weight and I find that easy, I can weight the amount of starter I need to keep and use what's left. The biggest difference was however that the recipe I found actually explained something about the process. On the second day I wasn't supposed to feed it, I was supposed to stir it to let the yeast forming on top get into the starter. That tells me something. So I stirred, I fed it again and kept on stirring it every now and then. On the morning of day 6 I had a starter that was ready to use.

Link to the starter I used.
I used organic sifted spelt flour and I did let the day 5 get 12 more hours so that I could use it on the morning of day 6.
Sourdough starter

I saved 224 grams of starter and once I fed it again I couldn't believe how it took off! This is my starter today so I'll be doing some more bread tomorrow!

I searched online and ended up reading recipe after recipe for sourdough bread and I was stunned that for the most part they're really complicated. It doesn't make sense to me that it has to be so complicated to make bread. Some recipes suggested that I would stretch and fold the dough twice every hour, some that I would do a dough before making the real dough or that I would use dry yeast in addition to get a more reliable rise. I've learned that to make bread you let the dough rise in the bowl and then again on the baking sheet before getting it into the oven. If I use a natural yeast that needs a lot of time to perform, why disrupt it? If I need to make it into a 24 hour project to get a loaf of bread then I'm not going to do it and to me the point of using sourdough was to replace the storebought yeast.

So I just stopped reading and found a recipe that I thought had the right amounts of liquid to get me started and then I just made a dough. I used milk, butter and both swedish baking syrup and honey. I did it all by hand with so much love and covered the bowl to let it rise. After four hours I realized it wasn't going to rise. So I went online again. I read somewhere that the dough want the same temperatures that your kitchen gets on a hot summer day when you think it's getting to hot. So I used my oven, with only the light on it got up to 27 C, and after a few hours the magic finally started to happen! By this time we could only let it rise for a few more hours before we needed to use the oven for dinner. I made two loaves and left them to rise on a baking sheet while we had dinner. The loaves didn't look like much, they almost looked sad, but I got them in the oven after two hours and there was some more magic happening. They did rise, but not as much as I would have expected them to do. The taste is great, but they turned out really dense.

There's nothing perfect about the two loaves I made, but I learned from the mistakes I made. I know that next time I'll do much better and that I'll be more successful using the starter and making my own sourdough bread.
Lessons learned, I'll be using loaf pans for the next batch and I'll let it rise in the oven with the lights on.

Until next time, be well!
//S