Sourdough starter and backing bread

Some how it is difficult to prevent mold in my sourdough starter. For about 2 years I made a sourdough starter for the first time and after a while it had some mold starting at the side of the jar. I trough it out and made a new one. For several weeks I backed bread now and then. I was not very happy with the recipe and find it very difficult to handle the dough. After a while I did not use the sourdough starter very regular and again it started to mold at the side, even do I hat put it in the refrigerator in between use. For a while we bought our bread from a baker that drives around the villages twice a week. But then I wanted to bake bread again myself. That way I know for sure what is in my bread. First I just made bread with yeast, but after a while I made a new sourdough starter again. I found a different sourdough bread recipe and wanted to try it out. Since my Dutch oven is small I made my loaves half of what the recipe hat and my loaf was a bit dark. A smaller amount of dough obviously is finished baking sooner. The loaves I made where a bit flat and I tried if the complete amount of dough would fit in my Dutch oven. It was a tight fit, but it worked.

What I do not like is to use new parchment paper every time I bake bread and the dough is so runny that I don’t have to think about scoring the bread. The other thing is that I do the rise in a cook pot and the parchment paper has some folds on the side, because the sides of the cook pot goes strait up. These folds are stuck in the bread after baking and I had to cut of a few sides of the bread to get rid of the parchment paper. After that I was done baking bread this way. Now I make my dough with less water and after the bulk ferment I just put it in a greased bread pan, cover it and put it in the refrigerator over night. In the morning I bake it. This way I do not really have an oven spring, but the bread has raised enough and is fluffy enough for our taste, so that is fine. A bit of an oven spring there usually is though, but never where I did the scoring. Always right along the long side of the bread right where the dough meets the bread pan.

After a while only baking sourdough bread, the kids requested to bake some bread with yeast again, because they love to play with the dough and form there own bread. Obviously they can not help with the so very sticky and hard to form sourdough dough. There fore we will just switch between breads as we feel like it and I also want to try out other sourdough recipes.