replacing buttermilk with sourdough
Hello all, this is my first post in the forum. It's a question I've been wondering about and it seems here might be a good place to ask.
This may or may not technically be a sourdough bread I'm talking about but it includes sourdough starter so I thought I'd put it in this forum.
Has anyone got any experience with replacing buttermilk in quick rising/soda bread with sourdough starter? I thought that with the added healthiness of putting flour through the process of being used in a sourdough starter, I could then use it in a quick bread, especially older starter that might not be much use for my normal wheat sourdough. I thought that given the starters acidity I could use it to replace the buttermilk/ cream of tartar in quick rising bread and therefore have the bread rise using just the reaction between baking soda and the acids created by my precious lactobacilli. The problem is to do with proportion, I don't know if I would have to measure the acidity of my starter compared to the acidity of buttermilk, or even if it is possible to have a starter that acidic.
I've looked through many posts but there doesn't seem to be any mention of such a thing. I have found plenty of breads that use sourdough starter and baking soda, seemingly neutralising each other, and then baking powder for more rising power. In these recipes the proportions seem to be roughly half a tsp of baking soda to a cup of sourdough starter. I would ideally leave out the baking powder and rise the bread as for Irish soda bread (being Irish I feel a sense of reluctance to tamper too much with the recipe).
Anyway I'd love to hear your ideas on the topic. Hopefully I've explained it reasonably well.
I just did almost that last night! I wanted to try a different banana bread. (I make some almost every week and wanted a change) I used this recipe with these changes- I doubled the recipe but used the same amount of fat, I also doubled the bananas and used chocolate chips instead of nuts. Finally, I used sourdough disgard instead of sour cream. I didn't have the full 1C so I used what I had. Also, I mashed the banana with fat (I use Earth Balance) rather than slicing it, and mix it all in one bowl.
I don't know if it was my oven or my changes, but at about 45 minutes, I needed to turn my oven down to 325 to keep it from getting overdone on the outside.
It's very tasty. It's not much different than other banana breads, but it is very good and it worked just fine using the starter.
I hope this helps,
Marni
That's really helpful, thanks. Just one question; was your starter old and acidy do you think or reasonably newish? It'd be interesting to know how much of a difference the acid levels have on the reaction with the baking soda.
It was time (or a little over) to feed it, but there was no hooch and it hadn't sunk much. It had been on the counter not in the fridge for about 12+ hours. Also, it's a white flour starter.
Marni