After getting help with rising my sourdough on a forum, they suggested I should make bread bowls with it, and put chowder in it. Who am I to argue?

To reduce stress, and get a great sourdough taste and crumb, I’m making the dough over a few days. I refreshed on Friday night, then make 750g of dough (the normal loaf is 1kg) and split into two large buns and proof overnight in the fridge.

On Sunday I’ll cook in the La Cloche. I’ll score the tops in a circle, hopefully giving us an easy lid to remove to make the bread bowls. Also as we want crusty buns, we’ll keep the temperature at maximum after the top comes off.

I put the buns on a peel lined with parchment to help transfer to La Cloche. I then scored the tops using the lame, which I dipped in oil rather than my usual water, and it was much easier. I’ll stick to that in the future.

However when I got La Cloche out of the oven it was clear the buns wouldn’t fit with the gap between then, so I ended up lifting them into La Cloche (which wasn’t hard given their smaller size), but they ended up touching.

After 30 minutes with the top on, and 15 minutes with it off (still at full temperature) the buns were nice and crusty looking, but they had fused together.

They broke apart easy enough, but we’re going to have to be careful hollowing them out for the soup. Maybe in the future I’ll have to do bread bowl without La Cloche :(

 

Cutting out the middle wasn’t that hard actually: serrated pairing knife for the win :)

I’d like to have done clam chowder, but getting clams in England isn’t as easy as it is to get in New England. So we’ve had to settle for fish: specifically [???].

In the past I’ve made a low-cal fish chowder, but this time we’re going for the authentic version: double cream and all! Actually it’s only 1/4 cup each, so to be honest the extra faff of blending veg probably isn’t worth it to save that. Especially if we’re doing bread bowls…

The recipe I’m following is from America’s Test Kitchen, but Felicity Cloake’s is very similar.

So mise en place…

Fry bacon, onions, garlic, add fish stock, potatoes, thyme & bay leaf.

Add cream, put into bowls, with extra bowls to backup chowder.

And it was delicious! Bread was nice an crusty, chowder was nice and creamy. And to be honest, you could half the cream in it and still have a lovely creamy chowder… so yeah: the low cal version probably isn’t worth the effort!