Over the last 15 or so years, Dave's sourdough journey has not only produced amazing breads, for which he's now milling his own locally grown, organic wheat, but to far-flung baking adventures including a luscious Sourdough Chocolate Cake—a stunner from King Arthur—and cookies, pancakes and waffles.

Lately, he's been playing around with different focaccia recipes, and pulled out one (again from King Arthur) where he substituted his sourdough for the yeast it called for. With a couple of modifications to the original recipe, we think he's come up with a real winner!

Sourdough Focaccia

Adapted from King Arthur's Big and Bubbly Focaccia

290 grams fed and active starter that is half flour and half water (see Note)
215 grams high-gluten flour (I used Chimacum hard red bread flour)
9 grams fine sea salt
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
139 grams water at about 80º
18 grams extra-virgin olive oil

To oil the baking pan, you’ll also need a bit more olive oil, and for sprinkling on top you’ll  need about 2 Tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil and a half-teaspoon to a teaspoon of coarse or flaky sea salt.

Mix the starter, water and 18 grams of oil in a large bowl to break up and disperse the starter. Whisk the flour, salt and sugar in a separate bowl, then add to the liquids and mix until completely combined. Cover and set aside.

After 15 minutes. uncover and do a set of bowl folds: With a wet hand, reach under an edge of the dough and grab some, stretch it up and pat it onto the center of the dough. Give the bowl a little turn and repeat the stretch. Repeat for a total of eight to 12 times. (There’s a good demonstration of bowl folds at King Arthur.) Cover and set aside.

After 15 minutes, wet your hand and repeat the bowl folds.

After 15 minutes, repeat.

After 15 minutes, repeat for fourth set of bowl folds..

Cover and let rise until doubled in size (probably two to four hours, depending on the temperature of the room and the activity of the starter).

When dough has doubled, prepare a 10-inch cast-iron pan or a 9-inch-by-9-inch baking pan: Lightly oil the bottom and sides of the pan. Line the bottom and sides of the oiled pan with parchment, leaving enough parchment to extend enough above two opposite sides so that you’ll have handles to remove the loaf from the pan partway through the baking. Generously oil the dough side of the parchment.

Gently place the risen dough into the pan, then with the help of a bowl scraper and using your hands as paddles, turn the dough over to oil both sides. Gently stretch the dough toward the edges of the pan. Cover and let rise until it is pillowy and has risen almost to the top of the pan.

Toward the end of the rise, preheat the oven to 475º with a rack a third of the way from the top and a third of the way from the bottom.

When the dough has risen, dip your fingers in oil and gently stick your fingers in the dough so they touch the bottom, then pull them out. Do this all over the dough until it is covered in dimples. Drizzle a tablespoon of oil over the dough. Sprinkle with a half teaspoon to a teaspoon of the coarse or flaky salt.

Bake in the lower rack for 15 to 18 minutes, until the high spots have browned and the lower spots are very lightly browned. If the bread isn’t browned enough, move the pan to the upper rack and broil for a minute, watching closely to avoid burning.

Remove from the oven and turn the oven off. Lift the loaf from the pan using the parchment handles. Place the loaf directly on the lower rack and leave in the oven for five minutes until the sides are lightly browned and the loaf is crisp.

Remove from the oven and place on a rack to cool.

Note: This recipe is basically the King Arthur recipe but eliminating the yeast and using sourdough starter instead. Thus the 290 grams of starter is the total I had on hand after feeding; since it’s 100 percent hydration, I deducted 145 grams from the 360 grams of flour in the KA recipe and 145 grams of water from the 284 in the recipe. Changing from yeast to sourdough also adds to the rising time for the dough.

There's a new member of the family I've been meaning to introduce, and now seems like the perfect time. And no, we didn't add another Cardigan to our two-dog herd, much to Kitty and Silas's relief.

A few months ago Dave mentioned that a gas and wood-burning pizza oven he'd been eyeing was on sale. Not cheap, but on sale. Now you have to know that he's been talking about wood ovens and reading books on them for years—at least a decade or more—from building a cob oven to constructing a brick oven to buying one of the newer portable pizza ovens made by companies like Ooni and Roccbox.

Several friends we know have invested in them, with varying degrees of satisfaction. Most are okay for pizzas, but what Dave wanted was an oven he could use for baking, in particular one that would be big enough to fit the cast iron lidded cooking pots he uses for baking his sourdough bread.

The idea was to make it feasible to bake bread in the summer, since running the oven at 500 degrees for several hours had a tendency to heat up the house to Mojave Desert levels. Plus I wanted to be able to use the oven's residual heat for roasting squash or braising meats once the bread was baked.

Oh, and it had to be one that wouldn't break our fairly limited budget. Good luck, right?

It turned out that Ooni had just come out with its Ooni Karu 16" Multi-Fuel oven that ticked all those boxes. And while it would cost several hundred dollars, the price was less that what we had estimated for the fire bricks to build our own. So I convinced him to put in an order, and it arrived a couple of weeks later.

Since then he's been baking bread, of course, but also making galettes, cinnamon rolls, biscuits and, yes, pizza, too. I've been roasting squash, making platters of roasted vegetables from our CSA, and roasting meat for stock—the Ooni's ceramic floor fits a full-sized sheet pan. It holds the heat quite well and it's easy to stoke the fire if the temperature starts dropping.

All in all, we're looking forward to more adventures with our new family member, like the nectarine galette below that Dave made last week. I've included the instructions for baking it in the oven, but using the wood-fired option in the Ooni is almost as simple.

Nectarine Galette

For the pastry:
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1 stick plus 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/3 c. ice water

For the filling:
1 1/2 lbs. nectarines (Dave used 5 medium-sized nectarines)
2 Tbsp. flour
1/4 c. sugar
Pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 400°.

In a food processor, combine the flour with the sugar, salt and butter and process for about 5 seconds. Sprinkle the ice water over the flour mixture and process until the pastry just begins to come together, about 10 seconds; you should still be able to see small pieces of butter in it. Transfer the pastry to a work surface, gather it together and pat into a disk. Wrap the pastry in plastic or wax paper and refrigerate until chilled, about one hour. (You can also roll out the pastry and use it right away or make it ahead and refrigerate overnight.)

Cut nectarines in half and remove pits. Cut each half into thirds. Set aside.

On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the pastry to a 12-13"" square and transfer to a large parchment-lined baking sheet.

In a medium-sized bowl mix together flour, sugar and salt. Add nectarines and toss to coat. Arrange coated nectarine slices skin side down and close together onto the rolled-out crust, leaving about 1 1/2" border around the edges. Carefully fold and pinch the edges up around the nectarines.

Bake the galette for about 35-45 minutes, until the pastry is nicely browned and crisp and the nectarines are tender. Transfer to a rack and let the galette cool. Serve warm or at room temperature, with ice cream if you like.

It's the bane of a sourdough aficionado's life: What to do with all the discard? You see, when you get ready to make something with your starter, first it must be fed, which basically means refreshing or “activating” the starter by adding more flour and water for the bacteria to feed on.

When it's all bubbly and ready to go to work, you'll need to save out a bit for your next project down the road, then take out however much you need for the job at hand. That leaves about half of that ready-to-rock starter sitting there staring at you.

Which is why it's so heartbreaking to toss it in the compost. If you're like Dave, it gets added to a vat of old starter that's been sitting in the back of the fridge for weeks getting a black-ish liquid building up on top of it. Not pretty. But there are only so many friends you can gift with starter, and only so many pancakes, waffles, bagels, etc., etc., that one (small) family can reasonably consume.

Thus the (tragic) discard issue.

Fortunately Dave is always on the prowl for recipes using sourdough discard, and is a dedicated fan of the encyclopedic videos and recipes of employee-owned King Arthur Flour—he and their star instructors like Martin (Philip), Gesine (Bullock-Prado) and Jeffrey (Hamelman) are on a first-name basis at this point. Which is where he ran across a recipe for a lusciously decadent chocolate cake that calls for no less than a cup of discarded starter.

He's used both discarded and fresh starter, and whatever organic all-purpose flour we have in the pantry—the recipe also calls for a teaspoon of espresso powder, which we don't have, and it turns out perfectly anyway. It can be baked in a bundt pan (top photo) or a rectangular baking pan, which only needs to be buttered and dusted with flour to come out like a charm.

Sourdough Chocolate Cake

Adapted from King Arthur Baking.

1 c. (227g) sourdough starter, ripe (fed) or discard
1 c. (227g) milk
2 c. (240g) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 c. (298g) granulated sugar
1 c. (198g) vegetable oil
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. fine sea salt
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 c. (64g) cocoa powder
2 large eggs

Combine the starter, milk and flour in a large mixing bowl. Cover and let rest at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours. It won't necessarily bubble, but it may have expanded a bit.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly butter a bundt pan and dust with flour (you can also use a 9" by 13" baking pan).

In a stand mixer at a low-medium setting (or separate bowl if you're doing it by hand), beat together the sugar, oil, vanilla, salt, baking soda and cocoa. The mixture will be grainy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

On the lowest setting of the mixer, gently mix in the starter-flour-milk mixture until smooth. (The recipe says it will be gloppy at first, but the batter will smooth out.)

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30 to 45 minutes, until a cake tester inserted into the thickest part of the bundt pan comes out clean.

Remove the cake from the oven and set it on a rack to cool. If using a bundt pan, let it cool for 20 minutes before inverting it onto a platter and removing the pan. Allow it to cool completely. (The recipe on the website also has instructions for an icing that can be drizzled over the cake.)

It started innocently enough. Dave got interested in baking bread several years ago and, from a post I wrote at the time, it went like this:

"Dave made a few stabs at baking his own bread using recipes he garnered from various websites and books, even going so far as to start his own sourdough from the yeast left at the bottom of a bottle of Doggie Claws from Hair of the Dog. Results of these experiments were mixed, from lumpen to acceptable, but none had the crisp crust and bubbled interior of the artisan-style loaves he was dreaming of."

Then he got Chad Robertson's book, Tartine Bread, as a gift from perceptive friends, and he was off to the races. Initially he was using standard AP (all-purpose) white flour, then began incrementally adding whole wheat to his loaves to add texture and flavor. I encouraged him to try organic flours, since they're beneficial not only for our family's health, but also better for the soil, the water, the air and the planet than flour from pesticide-dependent conventional grains.

Shortly after that he began reading about locally grown grains being pioneered by farmers and institutions like Washington State University's Breadlab that sought to marry flavor and sustainability, as well as revitalizing local grain economies that have been (literally) losing ground to global conglomerates for decades.

Around that time I ran into Adrian Hale, Portland editor, writer and bread evangelist, and told her about my husband's fascination with sourdough. She immediately put us down to receive her Thousand Bites of Bread e-mail newsletter that lists the local grains, flours and legumes that she distributes from her home, sourced from farms and mills around the Northwest. And that's when 25-pound bags of flour began showing up on our kitchen counter with names like Rouge de Bordeaux, Edison, Hard Red, Bono Rye, Einkorn and Sonora.

But it didn't stop there.

Now those 25-pound bags of flour have turned into 25-pound bags of grains with the addition of a Komo Mio grain mill. We'd originally discussed getting a milling attachment for our KitchenAid mixer, but were concerned that, over time, it would stress the motor too much. The KoMo Mio is the product of a collaboration between legendary German mill designer Wolfgang Mock and Austrian Peter Koidl—the name is derived from "Ko" for Koidl and "Mo" for Mock—and it's compact enough to sit on the counter and is designed to last a lifetime. It was also not much more expensive than the mixer attachment, so it made that decision easier.

So far it's been used to grind some of the flour for Dave's incredible bread, of course, but also his amazing biscuits and scones, and the flavor of the fresh-ground grain is noticeably more vibrant and it has a much more distinct grain aroma.

For those of you new to baking, you'll find a list of Dave's favorite resources below.

Essential Baking Books:

• Tartine Bread, Chad Robertson
• Tartine Book No. 3, Chad Robertson
• Sourdough, Sarah Owens

Video Series:

• King Arthur Artisan Bread
• Dessert Person: Claire Saffitz