Sourdough Bread

Sourdough is a nice test of patience. I am not a patient person and it was a miracle that I was able to make it through the whole process without ripping my hair out, but overall it still came out pretty well. For those of you who don't know what sourdough is or why its called that, heres the gist. Most bread that you make uses commercial yeast; little bacteria they've conveniently packaged for you- just dissolve and watch the magic begin! But back before we had major corporations to provide us with our bacteria, we had to get it naturally. Yes, this means that sourdough is literally a result of the bacteria that you grow right at home! This is where being an untidy person really pays off.

The first law of sourdough is that you must start with a starter. This is the way we catch the wild yeast and get them going. Now, I got some fantastic advise from The Fresh Loaf (always a great place to visit). A woman there made a starter using what she calls "raisin water". Now before I continue I should explain that the natural yeasts in the air are attracted to fruit and fructose (the sugar in fruits). Many starters will call for use of a slice of some fruit to help attract the yeast. This woman had a much better idea. If you ever look very closely at raisins you will see that the creases have kind of whitish stuff in them. That is wild yeast. How do we harvest it? Dissolve it in water. Take warm water (105ish) and pour it over a handful of raisins. Let it sit 20 minutes and you've got raisin water, more accurately yeast water. This is a great way to jumpstart your starter.

From here Im going to site her instructions because they were amazingly much better than the ones I got from my Profession Baking textbook.

1 cup rye flour
3/4 cup raisin water

From here you want to stir and let sit. When it gets about twice the size (should take about a day but its hard to tell because it depends very much on heat and the amount of yeast) you want to refresh the starter. Your new starter should consist of:

1 cup bread flour
1/2 cup water
1 cup previous day's starter

These are pretty good standards, but if you see that it is getting too thick, you can add more water, or visa versa. You want to refresh it every time it rises to twice the size and keep this going for about 2 weeks. If you don't want to throw out the rest of the previous day's starter you can just make it in bulk and create a LOT of sourdough.

Heres another warning. It will smell. Not so strongly that people will be put off, but thats actually how you can tell your sour dough is coming out. It should be sour. Don't worry, not all of that smell will be imparted in your bread. Adding flour to anything dilutes flavor. Proteins in flour bind to flavor particles and make them useless. If you make a very wet starter as I did, you will have to add a lot of flour and so you will greatly dilute the sour flavor. If you want a more sour sourdough, you will want to have a stiff starter, meaning more flour and less water in your starter. That way you wont have a lot of additional flour to add after you have let it ferment.

Anyway, the thing about sourdough is that it is literally an art. There is no strict way to do it because for everybody it will differ. The yeast in one area is not the same as the yeast from another, nor will people get the same amounts when they make the dough. This is what makes sourdough so interesting, but it also makes it complicated for a beginner. After the 2 weeks or so have passed and youre beginning to feel like youve got a nice starter, take half the starter, add enough flour to make a dough that isnt sticky, and kneed it 10 minutes. Take the rest of the starter and put it aside for more dough later. The nice thing about sourdough is that you can just keep refreshing it and it will keep making dough for you. Here are pictures of the dough i finally made and the starter that I retained. My mistake when i first made sourdough was that I didn't kneed long enough. A good test to see if you have kneaded long enough is to try to stretch the surface of the dough. It shouldn't break on you, and if it does it won't hold in gases when it is baking either. You will end up with poorly leavened bread.

Here is another tip. After you have let the dough rise to double its bulk, after you have shaped it and let it proof, you want to think about baking temperature. This is the same thinking you would use for any type of bread. If you are going to make a baguette or a roll you that is not very thick, you want high temperature so that it can brown on top as fast as it bakes in the middle. My recommendation is to start with 500 and then bring it down to 450 when you see that the oven spring is finished (inside temp 140). If, however, like myself you are making a loaf or something much thicker like that, only use a temperature of 500 if you have a lid for your pan, otherwise keep it about 420 or so for the entire time, and bring it down if the top is getting nicely brown but the middle isnt near 200 yet.

The last thing I must say because I am a strong advocate is that you MUST use steam throughout the entire oven spring period. This is just common sense. If you do not use steam a hard skin will form on the outside of the bread. That skin will turn to a crust, but there will still be gas creating pressure on the inside of the bread. It will cause the crust to crack so that it can find somewhere to go. This results in terrible looking dense bread. You never want to let skin form on your baked good and if it does, you want to score it very well just before putting it in the oven so that there is plenty of room for steam and CO2 to escape.

~Jules