Making Beeswax Bread Bags

We go through a lot of sourdough bread. Tricia makes 2 big loaves every other week in addition to bagels, po boy buns and hamburger buns.  The loaves are kept beneath a cake dome, but the bread doesn't stay soft for long and starts getting stale and even begins to mold before we can finish it.  Tricia began looking for a solution and found one - Beeswax Bread bags!  She ordered some organic cotton fabric from Azure Standard and cut the fabric as she needed.

She began to sew the pieces of fabric into the shape of a bag.

These bags will have a drawstring on top for sealing up the bread and keeping the loaves airtight and fresh.

The next thing needed is beeswax.  Fortunately, each time we extract honey, we save all of the cappings and render the beeswax.  We end up with big disks of beeswax.  We make lip balm (chapstick or carmex) by adding essential oils (eucalyptus and peppermint) to the beeswax and castor oil.

But back to our beeswax bread bag project - the beeswax is melted in a crock pot.

The melted beeswax is poured over the cotton bread bags.

You must work fast as the beeswax cools and hardens quickly.

You want to make sure the entire bag is coated on both sides, so a bread-making tool is used to spread the beeswax on the entire surface area.

Once the bag is coated with beeswax, it goes into the oven at 250 degrees F for 10 minutes.  The oven is used as the heat evens out the wax and gets the edges coated.

We allow the bag to hang and dry for a bit.

And now for the test.  A big fresh loaf of sour dough bread goes into the bag for safekeeping.

The drawstring is pulled tight and the bread is now sealed up - better than Saranwrap.

Now we'll test things out and see if this keeps the bread fresher for longer.  Will it stop the bread from getting hard and going stale and molding?  We will soon know.

Delicious Sourdough Bread

“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.” James Beard, the cook book author

We've been making sourdough bread for a long time.  It is the main bread that we eat and we average about a loaf a week.  Tricia had been watching videos showing the technique and recipe for making "Artisan Sourdough Bread."  We enjoy the tried and true, but it's always nice to try something new.  I peeked in on her as she added her sourdough starter and began folding the dough.  You fold the dough, let it sit for 30 minutes.  Then you must stretch and fold every 30 minutes for two hours.  Let it rise for 4-6 hours.  Stretch and fold again and make your loaf and let it rise for 2-3 more hours.  It was cool in the house, so she covered it and let it rise.

This bread doesn't go in a loaf pan like we normally do.  It is baked in a round.  Tricia flipped the dough over onto some parchment paper and used a razor blade to score the dough.

Meanwhile she's had a cast iron dutch oven in an oven heated to 500 degrees for 30 minutes.  Yep, that's hot!  Then she pulled the pot out of the oven.

We dropped the dough into the hot cast iron pot with the parchment paper on the bottom.  I was kind of afraid that the paper was going to catch on fire, but it didn't.

Into the oven it went.  You bake it with lid on for 20 minutes at 450 degrees.  Then you take the lid off for 15 minutes or until it is a good color.

This is the color we were looking for!

At this point you cure the bread.  Turn the oven off, crack the door open and leave for 20 minutes.

At this point we took it out of the pot and set it on the counter.

You are supposed to wait to cut into it.  We tried, we really did.  I confess that we ended up cutting into it.  You can see the steam rising from the warm bread.  Just a beautiful loaf of bread.

A little butter on top and we were ready to sample it.

I give this a five star rating!  Our normal sourdough bread is good, but this is at a whole other level.  The taste, the texture was superb.  Crusty on the outside and perfect on the inside.  I'm embarrassed to tell you that we sat there in the kitchen and cut slice after slice of bread.  Before we knew it, almost half the loaf was gone!

This was a hit.  I told Tricia that this needs to be in the rotation.  We learned that it freezes well.  I just noticed that Tricia is getting another batch of starter out to begin making the next loaf.  Can't wait!!