Sour Dough Bread baking

Cafe Society
1

Anyone out there make sourdough? I grew up in a reasonable proximity to San Francisco, and fresh sour dough bread simply rawks. I’m in China and have a bread machine so have taken a few stabs at it. Not too bad but not quite nirvana.

anyone have experience making the starter from scratch? Any secret tips? Should I make a special effort to fly through SF on one of by biz trips to pick up sourdough starter at the airport? Will it make a difference?

I used the following recipe derived from betty crocker and Tony van Roon.

Bread Machine Crusty Sourdough Bread
2/3 cup (158 cc) Sourdough Starter
1/3 cup (79 cc) water
2 cups bread flour
1 tbls + 1 teas sugar
1 teas salt
2/3 teas yeast

Starter
1 cup flour
1 teas yeast
1 cup lukewarm water
½ teas sugar

Starter replenish
Care of Sourdough Starter: Use Sourdough Starter once a week or stir in 1 teaspoon sugar. After using starter, replenish it by stirring in 3/4 cup Gold Medal® all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup water and 1 teaspoon sugar until smooth. Cover loosely; let stand in warm place at least 1 day until bubbly. Cover tightly; refrigerate until ready to use.

2

I got starter from these guys 4 years ago and it’s still alive in my fridge. It comes in a dry packet.

One thing about sourdoughs, they need time to ferment and get good and stinky. The typical bread machine cycle is too short (at least mine is). Try using the machine to knead the dough, then let it rise in the kitchen in a greased bowl covered in saran wrap for about 4 hours at least.

3

The starter will make a big difference.

I don’t think you can go wrong by picking some up from a batch you know is good in SF OR letting yours develop if logistics are an issue.

My starters always improved over time but invariably I’d neglect them and have to start over before they were really rockin.

4

Knead the dough in your bread machine if you must but I much prefer bread baked in an oven on top of a ceramic pizza stone. And good resting is a must for sourdough. If you like, you can make a sponge out of 100gm of flour, all the water and all of the starter. Put that in your fridge overnight and then mix with all the rest of your ingredients.

5

Shalmese, do you put the bread in a bread pan and then on top of a pizza stone?

I like the convenience of using a bread machine. What I tried the other day was I did the normal white bread cycle and stopped it after the mixing and rising part. pulled the little mixing paddle out and then let the dough rise all night in the bread machine. In the morning, it had really risen quite nicely.

Because my machine does not have a bake only cycle, I then did a complete bread machine cycle (without the mixing paddle). and it turned out decently but with room for improvement.

Is there something wierd with sourdough and honey? an earlier attempt I tried using honey instead of sugar and the yeast didn’t poof and ended up with a brick.

Anyone have thoughts on substituting beer for water? Seems to make better bread to me.

thanks for the replies.

Annie, that is a really cool link. I’m sending an envelope out now :slight_smile:

6

Personally, I don’t believe in using regular yeast to help along the sourdough starter. Sourdough should be able to accumulate yeasties and grow on its own by itself. There are many different ways to do it, and the simplest is just flour and water and patience. Other recipes I’ve seen use organic raisins or grapes (which are home to lots of wild yeast), and these work quite well. I’d recommend trying one of these out. Google for “sourdough” “starter” “grape” or “raisin” and you’ll find several different recipes.

As for how good your sourdough will be, it really all depends on what yeasts are present in the air. Some parts of the world aren’t condusive to good sourdough (I’ve heard L.A. is particularly bad unless you’re starting from an established culture). Others (like San Francisco) are goldmines for desirable yeasts.

As for sourdough and honey, I can’t see any reason why this would not work. Honey provides the food source for the yeast to metabolize and multiply. Honey is extremely fermentable (mead, anyone?) Perhaps yeasts take more time breaking it down than straight sucrose, but I can’t see any reason why honey wouldn’t work in a sourdough recipe. Just be patient. Don’t do anything with your starter or dough until you’re sure the yeast has started doing its work. Sometimes, it just takes a little more time than others–when you’re dealing with wild yeasts, you have no definite timeframe.

7

Sourdough and yeast is generally a bad idea because the yeast ends up doing the bulk of the rising. What you end up with is a vaguely sourdough flavoured yeast bread.

I generally don’t bake in bread tins, I prefer free form loaves for the extra crust.

8

My Grandmother showed me how to make a starter.

She put half a potato in a jar of water and set it in a cupboard for about a week then she took half of the water and made dough then let it sit in a warm place to see if it would rise. Sometimes she told me that she would put the jar in different places until she had a “Hermie” that would work.

Once she caught a good “Hermie”, she would keep it in a cool dark place, feed it and divide it regularly

9

I just got my batch in the mail. Thanks for the suggestion and I think this is one of the coolest internet things I’ve been introduced too. I’ve got a business trip but hopefully I can get a batch going by Christmas. Thanks

10

I’ve been baking SD bread for over 10 years (I used Carl’s starter when he was still alive). These days I get my starters from Sourdough International, I just made a yummy batch with a New Zealand starter.I like the Breads for the LaBrea Bakery book by Nancy Silverton and use her basic country loaf recipe as my standard bread recipe. This includes an overnight “retard” of the loaves in covered baskets in the fridge.

I splurged and got a FibraMent baking stone to bake my loaves on…I place an older pizza stone on a rack above the loaves, so I end up with a quasi “stone enclosure” in the oven.

Great collection of FAQs here

11

This is pretty much the method that we used to start our starter at the Butler household.

Over time, we’ve also used, in place of the water, beer, champagne, and wine. As time has gone on, our starter has gotten much more “sour” and it’s made a HUGE change to the quality of our bread!

We also periodically use some whole wheat flour to replenish our sponge, just for texture and variety.

At any one time, we’ve about 2 quarts of starter available, and often leave it out on the counter all day to collect more “wild beasties!” We never add any bakers yeast to the sponge now that it is going on it’s own.

12

Two comments:

  1. I’ve always “caught” my own wild yeast and had good results…might be worth trying it both ways.

  2. It’s normal for the starter to…er…seperate…into a sort of clear, yellowish liquid on top (it’ll smell sour–big surprise! :wink: ) and flour/sponge type thing on the bottom…just stir’em together every day or three or, if it gets TOO sour, pour off a bit of the clear yellowish liquid and replace with water. BUT if it turns any other color or the clear yellowish liquid on top becomes opaque or if there’s mold/other stuff growing on it, throw the whole thing out (don’t try to salvage the non-mouldy parts), run your starter-holder through the dishwasher and start again.

I’ve heard that once you get a really good starter going, you can freeze a chunk of it (like a 1/2 cup), wrap it well and allegedly it’ll keep in the freezer for a year, so you can start again easily. I’ve never tried this, so take your chances.

13

Mrs. R asked me to send the following:

What you can add from me is agreement with the person who wrote about leaving it on the counter. We keep our starter in the refrigerator in a tightly sealed container. Think about the Gold Rush Sourdoughs - they kept their starter alive wrapped inside a bag of flour. Starter should not need yeast or sugar and heaven forbid you should add milk. Mine comes out of the fridge, gets a good stir and is allowed to warm up. I then feed it with equal parts water and flour. Allow it to sit in an open container for a day. Add more flour and water and allow to sit again. I do this with small quantities of the mixture until the starter stops separating and the mixture starts to smell. Take out what you need for your recipe and store the rest back in the fridge. My starter’s name is Elmer Jr. and he can trace his ancestry to the Alaska gold rush.
I can say from personal experience that Elmer is wickedly sour.

14

Mrs. R asked me to send the following:

What you can add from me is agreement with the person who wrote about leaving it on the counter. We keep our starter in the refrigerator in a tightly sealed container. Think about the Gold Rush Sourdoughs - they kept their starter alive wrapped inside a bag of flour. Starter should not need yeast or sugar and heaven forbid you should add milk. Mine comes out of the fridge, gets a good stir and is allowed to warm up. I then feed it with equal parts water and flour. Allow it to sit in an open container for a day. Add more flour and water and allow to sit again. I do this with small quantities of the mixture until the starter stops separating and the mixture starts to smell. Take out what you need for your recipe and store the rest back in the fridge. My starter’s name is Elmer Jr. and he can trace his ancestry to the Alaska gold rush.
I can say from personal experience that Elmer is wickedly sour.

15

I once tried the organic grape/flour/water wild yeast starter thing, but at the end of the prescribed time it looked and smelled so nauseating that I threw it out. It was probably just fine, but I guess I’m not made of stern enough stuff to deal with a living, bubbling, stinky brew of wild yeast. Oh, well - I live in the bay area and can get killer sourdough bread at any time!

16

The clear liquid at the top of a separated starter is called “hooch”…it’s alcohol (and a few other things).

While some people may have good luck in capturing their own culture…most sourdough bakers use tried and true cultures that they have purchased/gotten from a proven source.

17

Sourdough starter is a symbiotic mix of “wild” yeast and bacteria. The yeast itself is present in flour, so to get a good starter all you need to do is mix flour and water to a consistency of thin cream, cover it, and let it sit for a few days. It might take more or less time depending on the temperature.

Using unbleached, organic flour and water (such as bottled water) which is low in chlorine makes success more likely.

In a few days you’ll start to see some activity, a few bubbles, a bit of froth. Add a bit more flour and water and keep feeding it with more flour and water until you have a really active starter (lots of bubbles, lots of froth, doubling in size).

Your starter will go through a stage where it smells of acetone (or old vegetables), but unless you’ve also got lots of mould happening, ignore this and keep feeding it.

You can make your bread more or less sour by using older or younger starters, my preference is for less sour bread, so I use a wetter starter which is at the beginning of its very active life.

My major mistake when I started making sourdough was not having a sufficiently active starter. The thing that most people who have trouble with bread making are doing wrong is not allowing enough time. Most recipes are only guides, and your bread may take much more or less time to rise than the recipes say … so learn to pay attention to your breaddough and not to the clock. :slight_smile:

There’s a terrific online course in making sourdough on eGullet.

I follow pretty much the method in this course, but I don’t knead my bread, I use a fairly wet dough and the stretch and fold method mentioned.

I’ve been experimenting with making commerically yeasted breads with this sourdough method, using stretch and fold, a wet dough and minimal yeast, and getting really good bread with a lovely, fresh taste of wheat.

18

Most of this has already been said, but what the hell, I bake for a living so I’ll throw in my $.02.

Don’t add sugar to a sourdough. Unless you want it to be tasteless.
You can order starter by mail, but what happens when it dies? save your money, and invest a little time in culivating your own, local wild yeast.
Sourdough starter can be frozen indefinitely.

19

Oh good, a professional to answer a question. :slight_smile: I’ve been told that you can’t free sourdough starter, but that you can freeze sourdough bread -dough-. I would have thought that all the dough was, was a big lot of starter with developed gluten, so if one can be frozen it doesn’t seem logical that the other can’t.

I have been too lazy to experiement, but looks like I should! Thanks for this bit of information.

20

nothing like a good bump after a few months. :slight_smile:

the wild yeast living in my kitchen in shanghai seem pretty mediocre. hoping that this starter makes a big difference.

btw, check out the starter link. it’s a bunch of carl’s friends that will mail starter if you send in a stamped, self adressed envelope. carl seemed like quite a character and used his grandmother’s sourdough culture.