June 26, 2009 - 2:58am
Sourdough recipe
My starter is 12 days old, has doubled in size and is bubbly under the surface, but no froth or bubbles on the surface, is it ready to use? Also can any body recommend a good plain recipe to start off with. Thank you Abigail
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...but the only way to know for sure is to give it a try. If you search the site for "sourdough formula" or "sourdough loaf" you should come up with many option to choose from. This is the recipe for one of the first loaves I made that really worked. It is posted by AnnieT and is in the second comment titled "sourdough."
Have fun, I hope it comes out great and let us know how it all goes.
Marni
Abigail, one point that I haven't seen mentioned much lately is that your starter should be stirred down before measuring so that you don't just get bubbles. I read this suggestion somewhere on TFL and it makes sense, and I am careful to stir mine well when baking and when feeding. Hope you enjoy Susan's loaf as much as I do, A.
I want sourdough but only on an occasion, is there a way to have sourdough started only the day or so before? I really don't want to babysit something that is only going to be used once a month or so.
thanks
No.
David
I am WAAAAAY below David in skill level and expertise, but I think I have stumbled across a way to have 'sourdough' without babysitting. I'd love to hear David's and others' thoughts on this, of course.
Please allow me to preface this with a sense of perspective: someone like Big Brick House probably isn't going to want a purist answer, and probably wants an approximation of a sourdough flavor with greater convenience. The following method is not intended to replace traditional sourdough methods. It is a shortcut for the likes of BBH, someone who simply won't go throught the hassles of feeding a starter all the time.
Background: Being very new to baking bread and sourdoughs, I recently made quite a comedy of errors which resulted in, first, a sourdough starter that was much too sour (I had neglected to discard half before feeding, several times in a row, and then left a very liquid starter refrigerated for a week -- yes, now I know better!), and second, a dough that was much too sour (due to scooping flour rather than weighing it, I ended up with an impossibly dry dough which didn't rise -- then stupidly :) I thought I could both hydrate it and get it to rise better by adding an extra cup of my sourdough starter). When I tasted the dough, it was lip-puckeringly sour. Eew. No need to berate me. I've learned my lessons.
Anyway, I'm the type to throw caution to the wind and try new things, which is how most great failures and a few great, accidental successes occur, so I decided that I should try splitting this overly sour dough into many parts, freezing them, to thaw and add to new doughs as a pate fermentee, or old dough. It should in theory, I thought, add not only complexity to a new dough, but also a bit of the sourdough twang that really livens up a bread, and the rest of the rising power could come from commercial yeast.
I tested this last night, and it worked quite well. 200g of the overly sour old dough, thawed and chopped up in pieces, then added to the liquid for the new dough (a two-boule batch) , mixed, then adding the other ingredients, produced a dough with a more complex flavor and a nice sourdough-like flavor.
So someone unwilling to babysit a starter could get one started, NOT discard any of the starter, let it get REALLY sour, then intentionally make an overly sour dough like I did with extra starter in it, and divvy it up into a dozen or twenty pieces and freeze them, drying and freezing as well a bit of the starter to start it up again months later.
Then just thaw a piece when needed and add it to your occasional 'sourdough' batch.
Again, this isn't intended for purist ears. Just imagine you didn't read this, ha ha!
Kent in Taibei
However, you can build your starter if you're willing to take time and put in a certain amount of dedication. Once it is lively and has had time to mature a little in order to develop good flavour and consistency, you can then cut right back to a rather small amount you keep in the fridge and only need to feed once a week or so, maybe longer if your starter if more on the stiff side.
Because you'd be keeping a rather small quantity, feedings are also small so you would be using less flour. When you want to bake in a couple of days, you take out your starter and feed it but keep it out of the fridge, then give it two or three feeds to get it active after it's mini-hibernation. This will give you an opportunity to bulk up your small starter to whatever size your favourite SD recipe requires.
But no, there is no shortcut to cultivating a good, lively sourdough starter. Once you get it going, however, there'd be little point using it all up and starting again from scratch in two or three weeks when it's so much simpler to just feed your small batch once or twice in the interim.
David is correct. The real answer is NO. And, I hope that some day you figure out that feeding the cat or dog every day or fish for that matter, isn't much different from feeding a few Tablespoons to your culture. The food product you consume will be better for you and it isn't necessarily "sour".
That said, try adding 1 or 2 Tablespoons of vinegar to the water when you mix the dough. I haven't done this with white bread but it works with rye breads. You don't taste the vinegar but the pH is lowered and there is some flavor component.
Eric
I have no experience adding vinegar to a dough, as Eric suggested. The bottom line is that, if you want sourdough bread, you need a sourdough starter. You can make your own or buy one. If you only use it once a month and don't want to feed it every week, even, then you can freeze some, although I have never done that myself.
BTW, my 3 year old starter was originally purchased from KAF.
David
If you won't be using it for a week or more, just feed a tiny bit of ACTIVE starter with an equal amount of water and enough flour to make a stiff dough (kind of like a bread dough). Then, just refrigerate until a day or two before you need it. The extra flour will give it plenty of food to last for a long period of time in the fridge. Before you are ready to use, take it out and feed it a few times until it has waken up and you have the amount you need plus the tiny bit to feed and save.
I have found that storing it in stiff form allows it to stay healthy for a longer period of time than a thinner dough. I usually only save a couple of tablespoons worth of each starter.
Nancy