February 2, 2007 - 1:28pm
Refreshing Sourdough starter- Can you take a short cut?
In Maggie Glezer's book, Artisan Baking Across America, she instructs that you should refresh the sourdough starter 3 times before baking with it. If the starter has pretty much quadrupled as she suggests after only 2 feedings, can it be used to start a bread dough, or must you wait and do one more feeding? I have this situation right now, and would prefer to start a bread dough for tomorrow rather than wait for another feeding. Would this not be a good idea? Or is her suggestion somewhat random?
Share
Actually, I should clarify what I want to do. I am plannng to make Thom Leonard's country French bread, and I would like to start the levain after 2 refreshments instead of 3. Will I compromise the rising or flavor if I do this?
Caryn - you probably already have your dough proofing by now anyhow, but as the others said, as long as it's very active, you should be fine. I've been making a lot of the Glezer recipes for weeks now but with 100% hydration starter rather than stiff starter, and I usually only refresh it once after taking it out of the frig for the week before building it into the levain in the recipe. That said, I have taken the advice of Jim (jm_chng) on other threads and refreshed my starter at 1:4:4 rather than 1:1:1 and have found that it really likes that extra food and doubles very quickly, and gives a great rise when baked (thanks Jim).
So my bread baking experience took a not so great turn. The good news is that my starter showed great strength, and the bread rose extremely fast even though I had refreshed it only twice before baking. I was absolutely amazed how well the bread rose, and all the usual steps went really well. The bad news is after the bread dough was in its final rising stage as a shaped loaf after having risen for about 2 hours, my plans needed to change. We were suddenly invited to go out for dinner. and I did not want my bread to be the reason to decline!! So I moved my bread to the refrigerator for about an hour, then left it out to do its final rise while I was out. (I set my oven on an automatic timer, so that it would be preheated when I got back.) Well, we got back an hour later than I had calculated, and the dough was quite over-risen. So I just proceeded to bake it, since I did not know what else to do. It spread a fair amount, and the result is a somewhat flattened 14" disk, and the middle of the crust is a bit dark. I think the over-rising prevented it from baking properly.
I think that I did learn from this, though. If the starter quadruples, it should be fine for bread baking, but one should be careful about how long a bread is left to rise.
Since the bread is still in the cooling stage, I don't know yet how it will taste. I can report on that tomorrow!!
My experience has actually encouraged me to try this recipe again, because the dough did seem to rise and behave really well. I think had I not had to interrupt the process, it might have been one of my best results to date.
I might have left it in the refrigerator over night, but I read that that could cause the dough to become too sour, and it might have over-risen that way as well.
Caryn - that sounds like a classic case of over-proofed dough. The same thing happened to me the other day with one of my boules, I also had miscalculated my timing for getting it in the oven, and I had to go pick someone up from the airport about 3 hours away, so by the time I got home, the dough was far over-risen. As soon as the boule hit that hot oven, it went splat (the gluten just breaks down after all that time). It made a nice flat bread though! The family loved it because it was very crusty, it still tasted great and had some nice holes, but it was a good lesson to learn and one I'd prefer not to repeat :-)
Sounds like you've got the technique down pretty well and I'm sure your next loaf will be great. In terms of overnight refrigeration, that should not necessarily make your dough more sour - if it ferments for a long time at a very cool temp, I believe that encourages the bacteria that produce the milder lactic acid rather than the more sour acetic acid that gets produced at warmer faster ferments...at least that's what I think I've gleaned form reading all of Jim's graphs on fermenting time on the other threads, and from reading Dan Wing's chapters on fermenting in the "Bread Builders" book. My breads do not taste very sour and I always do overnight ferments in the frig - you can definitely taste the natural leavening but it does not taste sour, it tastes like other things hard to explain. --Good Luck!
Mountaindog- You are so right. My loaf suffered from overproofing. Actually, it had a rather nice texture- the crust was very crusty and the inside was soft and chewy, but the taste was bland, and the crust was really too dark. Next time if my baking gets interrupted, I will just put it in the refrigertor overnight. I have a feeling that I would have gotten much better results.
I forget whether you have made the Thom Leonard country bread. If so, when you made the levain, how much of your wet starter did you use in place of the firm starter called for in her recipe?
Also when you ferment the starter and levain and proof the dough, do you keep them in a warm place, or do you keep thm cool? I have been putting them all in my turned off oven with the light on which keeps the temperature at about 70 or so, but perhaps I would get better flavor if I let everything rise more slowly. What do you think?
Caryn - yes, I make the Thom Leonard boule all the time, in fact I have both Columbias and Thom Leonard Boules proofing near my woodstove as I write this. You can see my exact techniques for making my version of the Leonard boule over here at this blog entry (it's the same link as the one if you click the photo of the slice of bread on the top left front page of this site). To substitute wet starter for stiff, I used 45g wet starter, 120g water, 140g flour to make the levain. I alternate between using a rye starter and a white starter depending on my mood and who is more active when I'm ready to use it, if I use the white, I add 30g rye to the total flour in the final dough.
I ferment the levain at about 70F overnight (@ 8-12 hrs) before mixing the final dough. Then I usually ferment the final dough for an hour (folding after 30 and 60 min.) at 70-75F, then I refrigerate overnight or for @ 8-12 hrs, then warm up again in a 70-80F location until nearly doubled, then divide, shape,and proof at about 75-80F for 3-4 hrs. Other times, I have also done the first ferment at 70-75F for about 5-6 hrs without refrigerating and it has still come out very flavorful, but maybe with slightly smaller holes.
Mountaindog- I apologize for not realizing that it was from some of your discussions to begin with that inspired me to make some of the Glezer's breads in the first place. I had read some of your previous entries, and I thank you for all your detail. I will save your responses for when I do my next "experiment"!
I have had the Glezer book for at least a year or so, and did not have the courage to try her sourdough recipes until I finally had some luck developing a good starter. I really have been inspired by many of the contributors on this site. I did not realize that there were so many bread making enthusiasts. I have been making bread in some form or another probably for at least 30 years. (I guess I am revealing my age!!!) The sourdough process has been the most interesting- it seems practically impossible that you can get bread to rise without using purchased yeast, but obviously that is how the whole process of bread making began.
No problem Caryn...it's hard to follow every thread here and know who's who! I agree about being amazed at the power of sourdough after using yeast for so many years - it's like as a culture we forgot how it was always done before commercial yeast was invented.
Sourdough: Many million mighty multiplying metabolizing microbes.
Tony
I've been leaving mine out on the counter and only refreshing it on baking days, which these days is once or twice per week. It seems to do fine this way. I just use it for the baking, and replace what I've removed with flour and water, and leave it out. The next day it's foamed up and overflowed and then I guess it goes dormant and waits for the next time I need it.
"Now - you try doing THAT with a chicken...."Yes, that was my point.
Jim"
But I don't think it's a sound analogy! That's MY point. If you don't feed a chicken - it dies. Lower down the evolutionary tree - a little - when food etc gets scarce and conditions not so good - a frog, for instance, or a tortoise will hibernate and go dormant. Not dead - a few months later, up they pop; a couple of good meals and they are as frisky, if not more so, than when they went dormant.
Get down to simple or single cell organisms, such as the algae, sprirogyra, amoeba etc in shallow ponds - they grow like crazy. The pond dries up - they go dormant. Perhaps for weeks, perhaps for years. Come the rain - the pond fills up and within days - or even hours - they've all come back with a vengeance.
The same happens with yeasts in the wild - the ones on grapes which make them ferment, the ones on apples that turn them into cider, and the ones on grains which raise a starter. They proliferate in the warm damp autumn when there is plenty of sugar rich food for them. They go dormant in the frost of winter and the baking sun of summer. Come the autumn, warm and moist and loads of sugar rich food - they come back with a bang.I think the yeasts in my starter are more like yeasts than like chickens - and they behave like it. But if you prefer to compare yeasts to warm blooded creatures - an over fed labrador dog is slow, fat and lethargic. An underfed racing greyhound is lean, healthy, hungry - and fast!
My stiff starter really does perform well being kept in the fridge and fed as and when. I'm not saying that my way is the right way - just that it works for me. And it is very convenient...
Andrew
I'm not an expert to sourdough bread but the starter I am using will double with one feeding (I feed an equal amount of flour and H2O, the same total amount as the starter I use. I have been baking bread with 100g of starter, so I take out ~50 g of starter from the fridge and add 25g H20 and 25g flour to it. Within a 4 hours (tonight) it has doubled. Sometimes take a longer. I should mention that I typically bake once a week; usual 1 loaf, sometimes 2.
I just use it once it has doubled. Is that wrong? It seems to work out well, nice crumb with large channels and a great taste. I would like to hear what others have to say. Why wait till it quadruples? I have read 2 to 3 times in size is enough. I want to get it mixed at it's peak tonight but I think it is still growing! That said can I just use it now since it has doubled already?