Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 4

Now that a couple of hours have passed, we can carry on with the sourdough. It's warmed up enough to liven up and get bubbly again. This is at 7:15 a.m.

Lively and ready to go.

Before I add anything else at this point, I pull out some of the dough to serve as starter for next time. So using my wooden spoon, I scoop out about a cup and a half of dough and put it back in the jar to go in the refrigerator.

This jar is pretty crusty, but that's a good thing.

The advantage of using the same jar over and over is that if you forget to take starter out while you're making bread--which I have done more than once--you can just put more water and flour right in the jar to get starter going again easily. The residual dough that inevitably is stuck to the sides and bottom of the jar will act as starter for your starter.

Okay, now I add more flour. As I said before, I only use white flour to make bread now, but when I used some whole wheat flour, this is when I would add it. I used just two cups of wheat flour, and I would add it first and add a little more than a cup of water to mix it in. I found the whole wheat flour the hardest to incorporate, so I would mix it first by itself with a bit of extra water, then, when it was all mixed in, add in the white flour.

At this point, I'm adding a total of about six more cups of flour. So when I was using whole wheat, that would have been two cups of whole wheat and four cups of white flour. 

Now, with only white flour, I add only about five cups of flour to start with, because I always add a bit too much water, so it's usually a little too wet. Then I mix in another cup or so of flour to get it a bit drier. 

This time I put in five cups of flour, about two and a half cups of water, and then another cup and a half of flour. You really want the dough at this stage to be as dry as possible without having dry streaks of flour in it. This requires some heavy-duty mixing and is, I find, the most taxing part of the whole process. Which isn't saying much.

If you have a stand mixer with a dough hook, I think this is where you would use it. I don't have one, and I can vouch for the fact that it is entirely possible, if a bit tiring, to mix all this dough by hand with a very study wooden spoon. This will be easier, though, if you're not making such a quantity of bread at once.

So then it looks like this:

Same as the last two times, except the pot is getting steadily more full every time.

I'm sure you've noticed that making sourdough can pretty much be summed up as "mix in flour and water, and wait." Now we're going to wait some more, but then! Then we're going to add in the excitement of kneading! And salt! WHEE!

To be continued . . .