Thursday, April 9, 2020
A Plea for Sourdough Sanity
When the MiL was here last month, she watched me make sourdough bread and remarked, "It's amazing how you don't take any particular care shaping your bread, and yet it's so good."
The story of my life. I don't take particular care, and yet it turns out pretty good.
As everyone has no doubt seen, this current situation in which yeast is apparently as rare and valuable as caviar has resulted in an incredible number of people trying sourdough for the first time. Or trying it again. And what I keep seeing over and over are frustrated comments about how to do this.
When do I feed it? How much? How often?
What do I do with the discard?
How do I shape it? What do I bake it on?
There are sourdough hydration calculators online! I am not kidding!
This is insanity. I wish people would calm down and not make it so complicated.
When I was having trouble getting my starter, uh, started again after our trip to New York, I tried troubleshooting with sites dedicated to sourdough and I quickly lost patience. If I were trying to start baking with sourdough using those sites, I would give up immediately.
I want to tell you all a secret: I don't do any of that stuff. I don't even know how.
I don't feed my starter. I keep it in the refrigerator, scrape it all out to start a new batch of bread every ten days or so, and then, before the third addition of flour, add some dough back to the jar in the refrigerator to serve as starter for the next time.
I don't worry about baking with discards. Because I don't feed my starter.
I bake it in regular bread loaf pans greased with butter.
And what this produces is four loaves of sandwich bread a week for my family. Which is all anyone wants, really, at this time.
You do not need artisanal sourdough loaves if you are trying to make PB&J for four kids. You just need bread. And not bread with an almost-black crust that resists a bread knife, or all those big holes that sourdough people get all excited about. That looks pretty, but doesn't make a good sandwich for kids.
Maybe all those tips and tricks (and calculators, good Lord) result in slightly higher rise or airiness or whatever, but do you need that? I don't.
Sourdough will give you very good bread, with very little effort. I'm not a natural baker. I don't even LIKE baking much. But even I can bake with sourdough.
And I don't use a hydration calculator.
Thank you for this reminder that everything doesn't have to be perfectly done in this one "right" way in order to work.
ReplyDeleteI do happen to be starting a sourdough starter right now. I'm pretty sure my eyes rolled out of my head and bounced across the floor when I read the recommendations to measure out 5 milliliters of the starter and discard the rest and then stir in 15 mL of flour and 10 mL of water (or something like that; I was rolling my eyes so I couldn't read it that closely) to the reserved starter in a fresh bowl and ... really? I wasn't present but am fairly certain that when the pioneers were starting their sourdough starters (which they definitely did do, because -- shopping for a package of yeast out here on the prairie in 1858, or in a gold rush camp? Ha, good luck!), they were not carefully measuring out 5 mL of anything. The twee starter recipe was generic guidance. I didn't measure mL of anything. And this is working juuuuuust fine.
I will add here that I got started with the sourdough because of A., who randomly stirred some water and flour together and set it on top of the fridge. Now, an 1860s house that has had bread baked in it for years probably has a handsome supply of yeast. (A's naturally fermented cider also demonstrated the ubiquity of wild yeast).
ReplyDeleteMy first efforts were pitiful, but soon I got the hang of the sourdough bread. If you want a sensible guide, which is more or less what Kristin and I follow, look up Darina Allen's sourdough bread. She's an Irish cookbook writer whom I like a lot. That said, one of her American editions does have a misprint of the amount of flour, so use common sense. Also, if you are just getting started, make those biscuits that Kristin referenced a few weeks ago. They are great, and they are easy.
The super-detailed guides are really meant for commercial production, which must be the same every time. That's not even desirable for home use. A little variation is fine.
i confess to having read a lot of articles before starting my first starter.
ReplyDeletebut then i arrived at the conclusion that it can't be that hard to capture some wild yeast and bake bread with it.
i'm casual about my regular baking and now of it is that hard.
i confess though, that i feed mine daily, in little bits, because SCIENCE. it's my first one, and i don't really know how it works, or how long it takes to rise, so i'm fussing over it and watching it almost as proudly as if i had discovered yeast.
I have trouble with any homemade bread lasting a week without molding. How do you store yours for a week or more. I guess I could freeze it.
ReplyDeleteG.P.: Yup, I freeze all but one. Although we don't have bread go moldy here like it did in NY, because the humidity is so much less here.
ReplyDeleteAlso, sourdough bread does not mold as quickly as regular bread. It is, I suppose, more acidic. Also, flask, you may find that some starters are more finicky than others. My uber-baker cousin once had one that was fussy--and she ditched that for a more reliable one. She has made all her own bread for at least 50 years.
ReplyDeleteNever knew there so much fuss about making bread...I bake bread like you do & never had much of a problem, or maybe just didn't worry about it, as others are. Yeast is in short supply here, though.
ReplyDeleteLinda