I was going to make another attempt at sourdough this weekend, and my wife suggested “why don’t I make a dabo first?”
She didn’t use a measuring cup (or the scale) but estimates she used 1 or 2 cups more flour than I did, and more whole wheat than white. (It was the same whole wheat flour that I used, and couldn’t remember how old it was.) She used about half a cup of the starter I’d made – actually, not even starter, but the discard we didn’t want to throw away. Didn’t feed it; didn’t wait for its temperature to come up from being in the fridge. Threw in a little cardamom oops, coriander and something similar to (but not the same as) black pepper, whose name I forget.
We put it in when the oven reached 350F so, if nothing else, I wasn’t putting the (cold)* Dutch oven straight into an even hotter oven. Cranked it up to 450F and let it bake about 40 minutes with the lid on, and maybe another 10 with it off (I think I forgot to dial back the heat after that).
Here’s the result:
(Tape dispenser for scale)
…and here’s mine again for comparison:
Well, so much for doing it “right”! 
(If it’s still not clear from the photos, the dabo’s at least twice as high as the sourdough)
*The dough probably didn’t rise for 9 or 10 hours, and she put it right into the cold Dutch oven to finish proofing (and that wasn’t very long). She was afraid it would deflate if she dropped it into a pre-heated Dutch oven. I told her that, from what I’d read, if the dough is all right that shouldn’t matter and it will rise up again, anyway.
That might be why we had some trouble getting it out of the pot. (Or – maybe not?) It stuck to the sides and bottom a bit, whereas my loaf more or less came right out. But I got this one out without most of it coming apart (it is sort of cleaving between the top and the bottom).
She said that normally one would line the pot with banana leaves first, but we didn’t have any handy (they’re available frozen). They’d serve the same purpose as parchment paper, but we’d have to cut the latter up into little strips to better conform to the shape of the pot. Anyway, we didn’t use banana leaves nor parchment.
It’s not a sourdough (in the San Franciscan sense), in looks or in texture, by any stretch and it’s not supposed to be:
But it does have a sour flavor from the starter.
Again (like mine), it was pretty brown on the bottom. I forgot to try putting a cookie sheet underneath the pot.
