A Sourdough Starter Recipe That Works

At first I didn't even know what sourdough was, except that slices of sourdough were usually thick and white and--somehow--San Francisco was involved. I didn't even realize that it was named sourdough because it was, well, sour.

I had eaten sourdough, I guess. You know in restaurants when you order from the breakfast menu, and the server wants to know what kind of bread your toast should be made from, and you ask what the choices are and s/he says, white, whole wheat, and sourdough, and you say you'd like sourdough, and the bread comes, and it's just a thicker than normal slice of white bread? That's the type of sourdough I had tried. That's not sourdough really--its flavor is no different than normal white bread.

The Other Adult said she wanted me to make sourdough. So I started researching it, and found out that sourdough is this whole process, and people get really into it.

It turns out that I am really vulnerable to adopting new hobbies. Case in point: I recently started researching bonsai trees, and even though I had no previous interest in bonsai trees and I found them to be really dull, as I started to do the research, I started to realize that bonsai trees are like, really cool.

I got this picture of the Dwarf Schleffera Bonsai Tree from Bonsai Beginnings blog:

And um, isn't that little guy amazing? Like, don't you just look at that and think of the swamp where Yoda lives? And what if you could make that in your house? Do you know how hard it is to get this thing to grow those aerial roots?? You have to put it in a humid environment and mist it every day and prune back the little roots to get the bigger ones to get bigger, and you have to fertilize it and I mean, it's just this really long process and it takes years. And people do this for fun.

Actually, if I had time, I think I would do that for fun.

Now, I'm a little too aware of my own limitations to pick up a bonsai hobby. I'm kind of busy. Between beer, bread, the Kid, cooking, writing and needing like at least 6 hours of sleep a night, I'm just booked for the rest of my life. Plus I've started this vegetable garden in the back yard and that's completely consuming me. So it's unlikely that I'll be doing anything with a bonsai tree--but I'll admit, a big part of me wants to find a Dwarf Schefflera Bonsai and go to town.

Back to my story, the Other Adult said that I should try sourdough. And I started researching sourdough, and like the bonsai tree, even though I really had no interest in sourdough bread as a food, the more I read about sourdough, the more I wanted to be able to make it for myself.

I found out that you can buy sourdough yeasts from a store, but that seemed a little too easy, and sounded a little too much like buying the boxed potatoes, which I am basically against doing even though I think that some of the boxed potatoes (like betty crocker's julien dehydrated potatoes) are just really delicious (because I have a really unsophisticated palate). And anyway, I thought, people make these starters in their own house, so I can too.

It turns out that finding a starter recipe that works can be really hard. For one thing, breadies measure things in percentages and weights, and so a lot of the recipes I found were measured in pounds and ounces and percentages and I can't devote that kind of time to bread. Not now anyway.

And then, the first couple recipes I tried didn't even seem to work. And it would take me weeks or months to figure out that the starter was really weak or wasn't doing anything. It was a big waste of time and flour.

The recipe that finally worked for me came straight out of the River Cottage Bread Handbook, a book I highly recommend. This book has sturdy pages, sensible recipes, attractive illustrations, and it gives all its measurements in cups, pounds and ounces, so everyone can use it and be happy.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Starter

This is what you need:

1 cup stone-ground whole wheat four

1 cup warm water (I would say about 95-100 degrees Fahrenheit)

a plastic or ceramic container

Directions:

1. Mix the cup of flour with the cup of warm water in the container of your choice. Whisk vigorously and cover with plastic wrap or a loose fitting top.
2. Leave the batter somewhere warm.
3. Check the batter every 12 hours or so. Eventually, you'll start to see bubbles forming near the top of the batter. This is what the bubbles will look like:
   
   
   When you see the bubbles, it's ready to be fed.
   
   
4. Feed the starter by adding one cup of the same flour, one cup of warm water. Whisk vigorously and replace the lid.
5. Wait 24 hours, then discard half the batter. I usually discard it into a plastic shopping bag, which I then throw away.
6. Feed the starter with 1 cup of the same flour and 1 cup cold water. Whisk vigorously and replace the lid.
7. Feed daily at the same time every day, repeating steps 5 and 6.

That's it. That's how I made my starter. For the first couple of weeks while your starter is becoming established, feed it every day. After your starter is healthy and established, you can move it to your fridge and feed it only once a week, until such time as you need it. Take your starter out of the fridge a day or two before you plan to use it. Feed it immediately after removing it from the fridge, then feed it every 24 hours after that. Feed it around 5-7 hours before you plan to use it in a recipe.

I recommend that you become familiar with the behavior of your starter. A few hours after you feed it, it will start to rise and expand in the container. Mine is usually doubled in size about 5 hours after feeding, and that's when I use it for cooking. Once it peaks, it goes back down. Sometimes a layer of liquid forms at the top of the starter. This is called hooch. Stir it back in or dump it out, it's up to you.

No-Knead Sourdough

This recipe was inspired by my version of Jim Lahey's No-Knead bread recipe, and it is virtually the same in all ways except I substituted the regular yeast for my sourdough starter.

I found this loaf to be moist and shiny inside, with big air pockets and a soft crumb. I can only hope that my future loaves are so successful.

No Knead Sourdough Recipe

Preparation time: about 15 minutes of actual work, 24 hours to make a loaf

Ingredients:
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons sea salt
1/3 cup active sourdough starter (approximate)
1 1/3 cup cool water

Directions:

1. Feed sourdough starter approximately 5 hours before mixing the dough. Wait until starter is risen and puffy.
2. Mix together 3 cups flour, sea salt, starter and cool water. Work ingredients with your hands to form a wet and somewhat sticky dough. Add the remaining flour only if the dough is too wet and sticky to work with; add just enough so that the dough will form a sticky but not unworkable ball. Once the dough has been mixed, place it back in the bowl and cover with a hand towel. I usually do this around 8PM at night. Let the dough sit someplace warmish.
3. Let the dough rise for around 15-21 hours, depending on the temperature of your kitchen. I usually let it sit until 5PM the following night. The dough will be risen and there will be bubbles at the surface. Scrape the sides of the dough off the bowl and tuck the sides of the dough underneath so it forms a deflated, semi-loose ball.
4. Let the dough sit in a warm place with a hand towel over the bowl. After an hour and a half, turn on the oven to 475 degrees and place the ceramic dish with lid inside.
5. When the dough has been sitting for two hours, scrape the sides of the dough off the bowl and tuck the sides of the dough underneath so it forms a deflated, semi-loose ball. Lightly flour the surface of the dough.
6. Put the dough in the ceramic pot, then bake at 475 for 30 minutes.
7. Turn down the oven to 400 degrees and remove the lid. Bake for an additional 10 minutes.
8. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a wire rack.

It should be noted that the loaf I made in the picture was baked at 475 for the entire 40 minute time period because I forgot to turn down the temperature in the oven. The result is a very attractive, chestnut colored crust. In the past I found darker crusts to be difficult to cut, more difficult for my purposes (I use this for my sandwich bread), but I'm having no difficulty with this particular loaf. It is slightly too well done around the edges but in the future I'm not going to turn down the oven quite so much.

If your starter lives in the fridge (mine does), you'll want to take the starter from the fridge a few days before making your loaf. The starter should be room temperature and on a regular daily feeding schedule.

Reflections, sourdough update

So, I know I've explained this before, but sourdough bread is bread made from wild yeasts. The yeasts are cultivated in a mixture of flour and water called a starter. A starter is like a pet. I feed my starter every night before I go to bed. ...or at least, I'm supposed to. These days, the starter sleeps in the fridge. In the cold temperatures the starter basically goes dormant. I keep it in the fridge because I'm just so busy lately that I don't have time to make bread, and if I don't have time to make the bread then feeding the starter flour every night is just a good way to waste flour.

A few months ago I made a loaf of sourdough bread, and that was the first time since we moved into the house that I had done so. My sourdough starter is a couple years old now, a young age for a starter. Starters can live forever, as I understand it, as long as they are fed.

My starter really has taken a beating since we moved into the new house, and even before the move, my starter had suffered long periods of time in the fridge without food.

You can imagine that basically all fun activities stopped for the summer while we were moving. The Other Adult was gone with the Kid for the weeks leading up to the move, and in the first few weeks after the move. During that time, I packed a lot, disassembled furniture, watched back to back episodes of the Office and Star Trek (yup, I'm one of those), made phone calls to the Realtor and signed papers and ate Luna bars and slept 4 hours a night and stressed about termites and roof problems and renting a moving truck and driving a moving truck, and everything fun I ever did or ever wanted to do was pushed aside. Beer brewing, sourdough, painting, reading. I didn't do any of it over the summer. Ah, well actually, I did read. I re-read the Pillars of the Earth over the summer. Re-reading is not even like real reading though, it's like...pretend reading. Cause you're not increasing the list of books you've read or learning anything new. You're just massaging your brain, like dreaming.

And during that time, the moving time, my starter lived in the fridge. I have serious affection for my starter because it was there with me through this. Chugging along. Like me. I brought it to the new house in a cooler with refrigerated condiments and the depleted contents of our freezer (and that was basically all the food I had left, after spending all my money on gas and trips to the new house and movers and packing tape). My refrigerated pet. My starter. It was one of the first things in our fridge in our new house.

So then we got busy pulling out carpet and tearing out the bathroom floors and painting and replacing light fixtures and fixing the brick wall in the back yard and meeting with contractors and unpacking. And every weekend was some new DIY project and my hands were always filthy and there wasn't time and the starter sat in the fridge, where it sits today. If my starter is lucky, I remember to feed it weekly, which is really how often you're supposed to feed it if it's in the fridge.

A few months ago, as I mentioned, I tried to make my first loaves of sourdough in our new house. Not surprisingly, the starter is not as vigorous as it once was, and I didn't get as much rise out of the loaves as I wanted. What's more frustrating is that the oven, that 1940's O'Keefe and Merritt stove that came with the house, does something very different than our old characterless oven in the apartment we moved out of. The bread I made in our new oven was slightly overdone on bottom and the crust was rock hard. My old methods either don't work in our new oven, or somehow during my forced vacation from bread baking, I lost my touch.

So this weekend I hope to make another batch of sourdough. First I need to prep the starter. I'll take it out of the fridge tonight (wednesday night) and feed it a good healthy dinner. Stir vigorously to aerate the mixture. Then I'll feed it again tomorrow (Thursday), and then feed it early the next day (Friday) so that the following night (Friday night), I can make my sponge. Then I bake on Saturday.

Sourdough Explained

Some types of bread are made without yeast. Some breads are made with commercial yeasts that have been packaged in packets or jars and sold in grocery stores. And some breads--sourdoughs--are made with wild yeasts that have been cultivated in fermented flour.




The picture above is my sourdough starter. The starter is fermented flour that supports a live culture of bacteria and yeasts. Every night, I feed my starter. I remove about half of the old starter and throw it away, then I add a cup of whole wheat flour and a cup of water. I mix it vigorously, then I let it sit. And the next night, I do the same. And so on. Over night, the starter doubles in size. It collapses before I wake up in the morning.

My starter smells like rotten apples, vinegar, and alcohol. The smell of it reminds me of the apple tree in the backyard of the house where my family lived when I was in middle school. My parents paid me a dollar a week to pick up the fallen apples from the lawn because the fruit attracted wasps and bees. The apples were always warm from sitting in the sun, and full of worms and holes. The shame of it was that the apples had poor texture and flavor. They weren't good to eat, but they had a strong smell.

The night before I make a loaf of bread, I feed the starter early. When the starter appears the most active (bubbly, expanded in size), I mix a ladle full of starter with flour and water. It proofs overnight. This product is called the "sponge".


The pictures above and below are of the sponge.



The sponge doubles in size over night. The following morning, the sponge is added to the rest of the flour, water and salt, to make the dough. This dough is kneaded, then flattened, then rolled into a tight round, then allowed to rise, then flattened, then rolled into a tight round, then allowed to rise, and so on. This happens some three or four times. It takes hours.





You can see in the pictures above that the dough doubles in size between the first picture and the second. This happened over the period of an hour.

In the final stage, the dough is divided into two parts, then allowed to rise again. When the dough has tripled in size, it is dusted with flour, the top is cut with a knife (this is to relieve some of the surface tension and allow the dough to expand in the oven), sprayed with a fine mist of water, the oven is preheated to 500 degrees, and boiling water is dumped in the tray in the boiler tray in the bottom of the oven. The loaves are inserted and after ten minutes, the temperature of the oven is decreased to 350-400, and the loaves bake for approximately 45 minutes.




The pictures above documented my first successful attempt at making a loaf of sourdough. Before tonight, I'd tried to make sourdough at least four times. My failed loaves were always too dense. This bread was made from a whole wheat starter I began on New Year's.

Starters, when cared for properly, can basically live forever. Years, decades. It's a colony of live bacteria. Most beginning sourdough recipes recommend that you think of a starter as like a pet, to be monitored and cared for.





I've had so many failed loaves of sourdough before today that the Other Adult in the family told me, even after this loaf was baked and I cut it open and fed her a slice, that she did not believe I had made sourdough.

Sourdough has become a myth in our household. Like the lost city of Atlantis, the Holy Grail.