As soon as the temperatures drop and the sun starts setting earlier, it’s time for me to crack out my favorite seasonal pastime: baking. There’s nothing better than enjoying some fresh baked goodies on a crisp fall or winter evening.

I’ve baked all kinds of things from the time I was a 4-H’er (with mostly successful results). Now, with the return of the new season of “The Great British Baking Show,” the baking inspiration is flowing at our house. Ciabatta, cakes, cookies, pie, pastries, croissants and all types of rolls and loaves have been created in our kitchen.

The one thing I’ve never tried before? Sourdough bread. While some variation of sourdough bread has been around even since the beginning of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent and ancient Egypt, depending on the source you believe, it’s also been a recent trend on TikTok. That’s where I first decided that I needed to give it a shot.

Game time

Enter where I decided to give it a try. After seeing a plethora of home bakers show off their artisan loaves, I made a game plan to get started. Sourdough is a type of bread that is started with fermented flour and water, which is called “sourdough starter.” This starter contains wild yeast and good bacteria that, when incorporated into recipes, gives the loaf its height, crumb texture and distinct sour but sweet flavor.

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This is good news for me, because I can’t count the number of times I’ve run out of active dry yeast when trying to make bread. I read recipes and blogs and watched about 100 TikTok videos before I finally made a starter of my own. Some people have sourdough starter that they’ve used for decades, and I even found starter for sale online. I didn’t want to wait (this will be a theme throughout), so I mixed 25 grams of bread flour and 25 grams of water together in a random jar I found.

Through my research, I found out you have to “feed the starter,” which essentially means adding more flour and water each day you plan to bake with it. It’s like a pet in a jar next to my coffee maker, I suppose.

While some who are sourdough experts might get a chuckle at my lack of experience and recounting my attempt, even as a regular baker, it seems like the sourdough world has its own language and tricks of the trade. Did I need a bread oven? That fancy whisk-looking thing? A proving basket? I didn’t want to wait for those items to get shipped to my house, and it turned out I didn’t need them after all.

GET STARTED: The sourdough starter, which is the base for all sourdough loaves, is a fermented mix of flour and water. Many online have named their starters with funny, pun names, and I call mine “Fernan-dough.”

About a week after I created my starter, I finally attempted to bake my first loaf. I fed my starter the night before and, in the morning, I poured 100 grams of the bubbly, sticky substance into a bowl. Adding in water, flour and salt created the dough, which I left to sit and rise in my warm kitchen.

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I’m not the most patient person, and it turns out baking sourdough requires a fair amount of it when the dough has to rise in between stretches. I chose the most basic recipe I could find — enough for a small loaf to go with our homemade knoephla. You could say we’re never worried about our carb intake or trying to be gluten free. After starting about 7:30 in the morning, it was barely ready in time for our 7 p.m. supper.

About halfway through the day, it didn’t look like the dough had risen much at all. Too far into the process to really care about how well it was working without starting over, I stretched and rested the dough like the recipe guided. I turned it out of the bowl to shape it into something that looked like a bread loaf and plopped it into the bread tin for its final rise.

This is where patience might’ve helped me out. I went to feed horses and do evening chores, which I figured would keep me from rushing the final rise and baking too soon. Did it look like it rose correctly? Not even a little bit. But after dealing with this one loaf for the entire day, I shrugged my shoulders, scored a line across the top and tossed it in the oven.

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I was getting bread no matter what — and even if it didn’t quite turn out, some bread with soup was better than no bread. To my surprise, the bread rose exponentially in the oven, finally looking like the loaves I had been seeing on social media for weeks. Was it an artisan loaf with the fancy scoring and decoration? Nope. Was the crumb still too tight as my homemade starter wasn’t active enough when I made the dough? Definitely. Did my great idea of baking it in parchment paper lead to said paper getting stuck to the loaf, which we had to peel off on each slice? Absolutely.

But now that I started, and have a loaf under my belt, I’m determined to keep trying until I get that picture-perfect loaf — and maybe I’ll find a little more patience along the way.