Sane Sourdough: The Starter

I was kind of hoping no one would ask me how to make a starter for sourdough, because I didn't actually make ours. A. made it many years ago now. I think about eight years ago, but I can't really remember.

He started it because he had read that some people who have trouble digesting wheat-flour bread (which in our house at the time included both A. and the MiL) are okay with sourdough.

Now, because it was A. in the kitchen, he was not about to get involved in anything finicky or detailed. The MiL looked up a lot of information about sourdough and found all that stuff about feeding and discarding and all, and A. responded something along the lines of,"That's stupid. I guarantee you no one crossing the prairie in 1870 was throwing out flour."

So he used the method that we found in Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking, an immensely practical book the MiL gave me for Christmas at my request many years ago.

Here is that method:

Day 1: Choose a large airtight jar that will hold at least 2 quarts--a glass jar is fine. Put 1/4 cup of tepid (not hot) pure spring water (my note: I think filtered tap water is okay, too, you just don't want municipal water with chlorine in it) and 1/4 cup of flour into the jar. Stir well, close the jar, and leave at room temperature for 24 hours.

Day 2-5: Add 1/4 cup water and 1/4 cup flour every day, stir well, close, and leave at room temperature.

It should be ready to go by Day 6.

An important change A. made, though, was that he did not cover the jar so it was airtight. He just covered it with a cloth secured with a rubber band, under the assumption that you need to give the wild yeasts in the air access to your starter.

He put it on top of the refrigerator, which is a nice warm spot.

To be fair, the kitchen at Blackrock--a damp, 1860s farmhouse--almost certainly has a larger-than-average colony of wild yeasts hanging around. I have never tried doing this in New Mexico, but I think it would be much harder to start a starter here in this arid, cleaner climate.

Anyway. That's what he did, should you wish to try it yourself. And if you do, please let me know if it works. (Or doesn't.)

Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 8

Dough goes in, and after fifty minutes, out comes . . .

BREAD!

I dump the bread out onto a cooling rack, then I let it cool for a few hours and then wrap it up. Cereal bags and twist ties are the best way to wrap it, but if I don't have enough of those, I just put it in two plastic grocery store bags without holes in them.

Although this bread, like all bread, is much better fresh, I still freeze three of the four loaves.

So, a handy summary for you if you don't feel like spending an hour reading the many, many words I just wrote about sourdough:

Step one: Mix together a cup of starter, four cups of flour, and two cups of water. Cover and leave.

Step two: 8-10 hours later, mix together another four cups of flour and two cups of water. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Or, in winter, just leave it on the counter overnight if your kitchen is cool.

Step three: Take out of refrigerator first thing in the morning and let it warm up for a few hours. Or, in winter, get going right away.

Step four: Remove about a cup of starter and put it back in its jar in the refrigerator. Mix in six cups of flour  (some whole grain flour here if you want) and 2.5 cups of water. Cover and leave to rise.

Step five: Four hours later, scrape the dough out onto a floured counter and sprinkle over it 4.5 teaspoons salt. Knead it in for about thirty seconds. Put the dough back in the bowl, cover, and leave to rise.

Step six: Two hours later, grease four loaf pans, scrape the dough out onto a floured counter and flip a few times so it's not sticky, then cut into four pieces and put the pieces in the pans. Cover the pans with a damp tea towel and leave to rise.

Step seven: 2-3 hours later, heat oven to 425 degrees, then slash the top of each loaf twice with a serrated knife and put the pans in the oven.

Step eight: About fifty minutes later, take the bread out, flip it out of the pan onto a cooling rack, and allow it to cool all the way before wrapping it up.

Done! (FINALLY)

Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 7

Let's get this oven party started.

During the last stage, the dough rose in the bread pans for about three hours. Our kitchen was only about 65 degrees today, so that was maybe a little slower than normal. But once it starts pushing up the towel covering it, it's ready to bake.

The oven needs to pre-heat to 425 degrees. Then I slash the top of each loaf twice with a serrated steak knife. I do this quickly so that I'm not pressing down on the dough and deflating it at all. The slashing gives the bread more space to rise in the oven.

Slashed loaves with the slashing knife.

They stay in the oven for about 50 minutes.

To be continued . . .

Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 6

Now that it's two hours later and the dough looks like this:

Puffy and bubbly.

It's time to rid ourselves of that pot and make some loaves.

First I get the loaf pans ready.

My kitchen equipment can be most charitably described as "utilitarian."

I grease the pans with old butter wrappers I save. There's always some butter stuck to them, and it's usually enough to grease a loaf pan. If it's not, I just get some of the soft butter from the counter and smear it on with the wrapper. Keeps my hands from getting greasy.

You can also use non-stick spray.

Then I scrape the dough out of the pot and onto the floured counter. I immediately put the pot in the sink and fill it with water, because that pot is a bitch to clean even if it soaks. Then I flip the dough over two or three times, just so it's not sticky.

Next I pat it a bit flat, to make it easier to cut.

Like so.

I cut the dough into four pieces with my bread knife. 

I have two one-pound loaf pans, and two pound-and-a-half loaf pans (one of which was the MiL's), which means I don't divide my dough equally, but rather, into two bigger pieces and two smaller pieces. This is challenging, and frankly, I suck at it. If I had a scale, I could weigh the pieces. I don't have a scale, though, and honestly probably wouldn't do that even if I did.

It doesn't really matter if I screw it up, though. This time when I tried to cut two smaller pieces and two bigger pieces (plus one even smaller piece for garlic bread tonight), I ended up with one big pan with too much in it and one small pan with not enough, so I just pulled a chunk from the too-full pan and squished it in with the dough in the not-full-enough pan.

This is what the MiL meant when she said I don't take any particular care shaping them. Understatement of the year.

Here's what the pans looked like after I re-arranged the dough.

They're . . . pans of dough.

I cover them with a damp tea towel:

Shrouded pans.

I bet you can guess what I do now, right? Yes. I wait.

To be continued . . .

Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 5

It is now 10:50 a.m. Now that the dough has been sitting for about four hours, it looks like this:

Mo' bubbles, mo' bettah.

It's going to get all kinds of exciting up in here now, because now we take the dough out of the pot.

Wild.

Okay, so I clear a spot on my counter (possibly the hardest part of this whole process, given my paucity of counter space) and wipe it down, then make sure it's dry and scatter a heavy layer of flour in an area of about a foot. I just use my hand to scrape the dough out of the pot out right onto the counter. Fingers are excellent tools for scraping.

Directly onto the surface of the dough, I sprinkle about five teaspoons of salt. Usually it's more like 4.5 teaspoons, but I'm making a bit of extra dough this time for garlic bread.

Anyway, I usually use plain old table salt, although this time I was out of that and just used canning and pickling salt.

Kind of hard to see white salt on white dough, but it's there.

I fold each side of the dough up and over to keep the salt from coming off, then start folding and flipping the dough. Otherwise known as kneading. Just for you, I counted how many times I folded: fifteen times exactly. I stopped once about halfway through and lifted the dough to re-distribute the flour under it so it wouldn't stick.

Sourdough requires very little kneading compared to breads made with commercial yeasts. This is one reason I like it. None of this "knead for five minutes." Five minutes is far longer than I want to knead.

Anyway again.

After kneading, I drop the dough right back into the pot:

As you can see, I don't bother washing the pot out first.

Incidentally, if you have a lot of loose flour still on the counter--I had about a quarter cup this time--sweep it back into your measuring cup to save for the next step.

And now! We wait. Again. Sourdough baking could accurately be called The Waiting Game.

To be continued . . . 

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 . . . 

Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 3

Winter update: Disregard this step if it was on your counter overnight.

Say good morning to your sourdough! And get it out of the refrigerator.

Rise and shine! No, but seriously. Start rising, sourdough.

The sourdough will have risen a bit in the refrigerator--mostly right when it's put in, before it gets too cold--but you still need to leave it out for a few hours to recover itself. It will be too stiff and cold to do anything with right out of the refrigerator.

I just take it out as soon as I get up. Or rather, as soon as I get up, get dressed, and get water heating for coffee. Priorities.

This morning, that was at 4:53 a.m. And now, we wait some more.

To be continued . . .

Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 2

Okay! Time to crack on with our sourdough!

Now that it's been sitting for 8, 9, 10 hours, I do the next addition of flour. This time I did it at 6:50 p.m., although I can do it anytime between 6:45 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. That is, when I remember after dinner and before I go to bed.

Often I'll be on my way to bed and remember I haven't dealt with the sourdough, at which point I swear gently to myself and shuffle back into the kitchen to tend to the sourdough. Because sourdough has no mercy.

Anyway.

Here it is, pre-addition:

Sing it with me: "Tiny bubbles . . ."

Then I do the same thing I did the first time. That is, four cups flour and two cups water, mix mix mix until all mixed up.

Then it looks like this:

Looks familiar.

I should mention that I make all-white-flour bread, although I will tell you later at what point I added whole-grain flours when I used to do that.

And then, because I go to bed early, I put the sourdough to bed, too. In the refrigerator.

Good night, sweet sourdough.

It'll just sit there in the refrigerator until I get up in the morning. And with that, we will leave you for the night.

Winter update: I don't put it in the refrigerator overnight in the winter, because our kitchen is around 58 degrees overnight. So I just leave it out on the counter. If your kitchen is very cool at night, you don't have to put it in the refrigerator overnight.

To be continued . . .

Real-time, Sane Sourdough: Part 1

After that post in which I frankly kind of ranted about the ridiculous information online about finicky sourdough baking, A. was all, "Well, why don't you show people how you do it?"

Why don't I?

I don't usually do tutorials or give advice here because, to be honest, I don't take advice well myself. I kind of figure no one wants to be told what to do, just because I don't. But maybe you do! Maybe you have a sourdough starter hanging out in your kitchen and you're staring at these insane sourdough websites thinking, "Why doesn't someone post something actually useful that won't make me tear my hair out?"

If that's you, this is for you. What I'm going to do is take pictures and post as I go through my process, which takes two days. Almost all of that is just waiting around for dough to rise, though, so don't be intimidated.

So if you're so inclined, you could just keep madly refreshing this page and do exactly what I do as I do it. Or not. Whatever.

You ready? Let's go.

First thing in the morning, I take my jar of starter out of the refrigerator:

Sourdough starter on the left, yogurt starter on the right. The most important jars in my kitchen.

When I say "first thing," I mean "whenever I get to it in the morning." I did it this morning around 7 a.m., but I've done it as late as 10 a.m. with no issues.

This is what the starter looks like in the jar:

A bit dry and stiff right now, and not actually bubbly. Doesn't matter. It'll still work.

I make four loaves of bread at a time, so I start with four cups of flour in my big stock pot, which is what I use to mix my dough in. I like the pot because it's capacious, relatively easy to clean, and has its own tight-fitting lid.

Okay, so four cups of flour in my pot, then scrape out whatever is in my starter jar. This time it was about a cup because I used some to make the sourdough pita bread yesterday.

Starter and flour in pot. Plus the very sturdy wooden spoon I mix it with. It must be sturdy. I have broken spoons before mixing sourdough.

Then I add about two cups of water. A ratio of 2 cups flour with 1 cup water is about right. A little more is okay, though, so if it's a little wet, doesn't matter. I also don't worry too much about the temperature. My water is usually pretty cold. Again, doesn't matter. (Are you seeing a theme in my sourdough attitude?)

Mix mix mix until there are no streaks of dry flour anymore.

And there it is.

Now put a top on your container or cover it with a wet towel and forget about it until evening.

To be continued later . . .