Lately I have been trying out baking my own bread. I have had some success using the no knead method and the stretch and fold kneading process.
Today I mixed 62g of King Arthur 100% whole wheat flour with 62g of filtered water slightly warmed to 32c in a clean 2 liter glass jar with a loosely fit lid and set it on my counter.
Tomorrow morning, and every morning for the next 10 days I will discard all but 25g and add 50g of flour and 50g of filtered warm water.**
After that I should be ready to bake my first loaf of sourdough bread.
** I should have used just 50g of each this morning but I was a little heavy handed with the water. The key is equal amounts of flour and water.
great experiment. Suggest that for the price of a self addressed stamped envelope, you can get some awesome sourdough starter to compare from
> Friends of Carl. Carl was advanced in years, and he had sourdough supposedly from the 1800’s that came with his grandmother over the Oregon trail. Regardless, it is some REALLY awesome sourdough starter. Also, I think, one of the coolest things I’ve ever discovered on the interwebs: Free Sourdough Yeast starter to anyone kept alive (no pun intended) by people that keep Carl and ancestor memories alive by giving out free yeast.
There are some board folks that got their starter from Carl himself before he passed. I got my first Carl’s starter maybe 15 years ago in Shanghai. Got a fresh Carl’s starter in the age of covid, and this stuff rawks! About 100x better than the starter I caught in the wild here in the Seattle area.
Anyhoo, for a SASE, you can get heirloom sourdough that’s totally awesome to compare with your home “caught in the wild” sourdough. Note: it may take awhile as demand for Carl’s has spiked in the covid era.
@China_Guy Thanks! I saved the link. Today is day 2. My starter is alive and active. I discarded all but 25g and then fed it 50g flour and 50g warm water. So far, so good.
Not quite bread-making but sourdough related. If you ever venture to “Rules” (London’s oldest restaurant) and chose the “fish and chips” you’ll be eating my late father’s sourdough batter recipe.
The owners of Rules source much of their game from the north-east of England. My dad owned a celebrated fish and chip shop in the area and after sampling the goods one day the owners of Rules asked my dad for the method and a sample. He obliged and as a family we were gifted 5 free slap-up meals. A good deal. He died some years ago but nice that his batter lives on!
I’ve been making sourdough bread for my family for two and a half years. Haven’t bought store bread at all that entire time. It’s both cheaper and much higher quality to make my own.
If any Doper in the St. Louis area wants some starter, let me know and I’ll get you some. Making it yourself isn’t too hard, but it’s a learning curve. It’s worth doing once at least, to understand the basics. But starting with someone else’s starter is also a fine way to begin.
My starter is maybe 18 months old - I started it myself with some grapes, and 50/50 white flour/rye flour. I just keep it in the fridge, and when I want to make sourdough, I just grab some, feed it (1:2:2 ratio), and 12 hours later (or six if I use the yogurt maker to speed up the process) it has doubled in size and is ready to use. Any active starter I don’t use goes back into the main pot (after I do a discard to stop it getting too big).
I really like the taste of the sourdough I’m making - I’m still a bit hit and miss on the oven spring, but I’m getting better. I’m waiting for an oval cast-iron casserole that should be the right size for my bannetons.
I have also tried making a multigrain sourdough - we make a yeast-based multigrain in the breadmaker every week, and I turned that recipe into a sourdough dough (with some yeast) for hamburger buns, which worked really well. I do need to try a multigrain sourdough loaf, though.
I’ve never done sourdough, but have been baking some pretty humble bread since I was 16. My mom gave me a lovely bread bowl, bread board, and bread knife, along with the Tassajara Bread Book, for Christmas that year. I’d never expressed an interest in baking, that I can recall, but boy did she have my number: it was exactly what teenaged me needed.
Most of my bread is a simple honey whole wheat, often with soaked steel-cut oats added for moistness and chew. There’s half a loaf left on my counter at home, from Sunday’s two-loaf baking. It’s nothing fancy, but fresh bread with butter and honey is one of the great delights of being alive.
I haven’t made sourdough since going back to work in the office a few months ago. I do feed it and have a back up dried SASE in the pantry.
Will fire it up tonight and prolly do an overnight rise in the fridge tomorrow night in order to bake on sunday.
I brew beer and have a whole bunch of beer yeasts. Genome sequencing has several bread and beer yeasts as being really close genetically. When I get motivated, I’ll fork my Oregon and do a mixed ORegon/beer yeast starter just to compare.
My first run at starter failed to to operator error. I lost track of the quantities while feeding a couple of days in a row. I started over and worked out a better way to control the feeding. My started is active and more than doubling in size every day. I haven’t started baking with it yet.
I have to admit that sourdough starter is a mystery to me, probably because I haven’t read enough to understand how to use it. I bought starter from King Arthur, along with their starter pot, and dutifully fed it, but when it came to baking, I guess I just don’t understand how that works. Seems like you spend a lot of time adding ingredients and then throwing it away and adding more, which doesn’t seem cost effective. And then to make a loaf of bread. . .I’m just not understanding something there. A good, thorough link to the process would be nice.
@Chefguy Baker Bettie’s YouTube videos have been what I am following in my sourdough pursuit. In this video she is explaining in very simple steps how to use sourdough starter to make a loaf of bread.
My starter made from just flour and water from the instructions in Baker Bettie’s videos is proceeding nicely. The one I started with on 09.26 did not pan out due to my user error in measuring a feed. I started over on 09.30 My starter is coming along nicely.
Once your starter is established, you can store it in the refrigerator and reduce your feedings to once every 7 - 10 days. I am on the road this week, so I will feed mine for the next couple of days and refrigerate it Tuesday.
A while ago in lockdown when flour was tough to get and I was going through tons of it to feed my starter I ordered a 10kg sack of white flour. I recently opened it and tried to get a starter going with it. Two weeks in and it was doing some stuff but nothing great, but I had just got hold of 500g of organic wholewheat rye flour! So I started again with that stuff and it was glorious. It smelled like puke for two days, I had a quiet day, and then it took off - producing regular activity and doubling in size twice a day after each feed (I swapped to feeds every 12 hours after about four or five days).
The smell was perfect: sweet at first but with a beautiful sourness swelling after a second or two. However using this expensive flour was not sustainable and I had this gigantic sack to go through, purchased specifically for this purpose. So after a couple of weeks I did a single 50/50 feed and then fully switched to the sack.
And now nothing.
The mixture has no activity. I may as well have added bleach. This is the fourth day since I switched but I’m really frustrated to see the greatest starter I’ve ever made turn to an inactive mixture of flour paste. I get a bit of froth - and to be fair the flavour has remained. But apart from that very little except some tiny tiny bubbles and not even a hooch.
Any expert bakers here who know the reason for this? Is this flour basically useless for use as a starter fuel? Or does switching flour tend to have such an effect?
Really hoping my massive sack (of flour) is good for more than just cookies and cakes.
I have three separate starters working #1 from 100% whole wheat, #2 from stone ground organic rye and #3 I developed by combining the two. I am in maintenance feeding now as I do not plan to bake anything at the moment. Each starter begins with 15 grams of active starter from the jar and gets 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of warm filtered water a day. #1 gets 25 grams of 100% whole wheat flour and 25 grams of unbleached all purpose flour. #2 gets 25 grams of stone ground rye flour and 25 grams of unbleached all purpose flour. #3 gets 25 grams of whole wheat flour and 25 grams of stone ground rye flour. They more than double each night. I have one sample of each in the fridge now that I plan to feed once a week to make sure they will continue to thrive, and then I will stop the daily feedings.
I made some brioche buns the other day. The first time they came out like bread pancakes (dough was too wet). The second time they came out like a photo on the cover of Bon Appetit. I used this recipe, which calls for making a tangzhong first.
