I've been meaning to do this for ages, but this weekend I've finally made a start on it. A day in I now have a jar of slightly odd smelling, slightly bubbly white sludge...

Following the technique from this web page http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/sour.htm

Wish me luck

My wife has the same lump of sourdough growing in the fridge for the last five years... It's yummy.

Hopefully in about a week I'll get to see if mine is...

Supposedly you aren't supposed to create your own starter- something about not being able to control the bacteria you get. At least that's what all the sites that are trying to sell you culture say. Sourdough bread starters and cast iron pan seasoning seem to be the most controversial issues in kitchen techniques- at least on the Internet.

We shall see...



http://www.flickr.com/photos/andynormancx/7774987926/

At the moment I have a bubbly crust, a layer of clearish liquid (which I assume to be hooch) and a white bottom layer that is somewhere between single and double cream in thickness. And I have a not quite beery, but definitely fermenty smell going on.

So I think it is heading the right direction. Need to find a different container though, would be very nice if:

- I could fit a ladle through the neck
- it wasn´t pink

I've done my own starter, many years ago, and it really is quite simple. However...

- In the beginning, the smell will be quite awful. Keep the daily throw-half-away feeding ritual going for a week. Your starter will stabilize with lacobacilli making it more acidic and killing off competing bacteria. Yeast are, of course, perfectly happy in the acidic environment.

- Once you've got a stable starter, you can stuff it in the fridge. Just do the throw a bunch away and restart it thing prior to attempting to bake with it, so you've got freshly active bacteria and yeast.

- Yeast replicate faster than bacteria. You can observe this because you'll get a bubbly dough within a few hours, but if you leave it alone for a day or two, it will get increasingly sour, and the gluten will be destroyed by the lactic acid given off by the bacteria.

- I've been following Peter Reinhart's various bread books on baking technique and have settled into a "binary" method where you make two separate doughs. One will have the sourdough starter, while the other is a "soaker" (flour, water, salt, nothing else). Since I like to do rye and wheat breads, I'll do the sourdough with the wheat/rye grain, and the soaker with the white flour. This means that less of the white gluten is destroyed by the lactic acid. You mix these up, leave them at room temperature, combine 24 hours later, and bake within a few hours of combining. Yields lovely bread. You can do the mixing with a machine, but if you do it by hand, you get a nice marbled quality to the bread. Tastes the same either way.

BTW, yeast reproduction is fascinating stuff.

I wouldn't say the smell is awful yet, just a bit odd.

And yes, the bubbly crust appeared after just after 12 hours in, which surprised me at the time. It really is amazing that there just that much yeast just lurking around ready to get going.

Not just reproduction, yeast in general is fascinating. The current book I'm reading is titled Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation. Really interesting stuff.

Any update Andy?

I'm curious as to how your starter went and whether or not you got to the breadmaking stage and how it turned out?

Cheers,

Adrian

My first attempt failed. It stopped producing bubbles and started smelling very sour.

I did some checking and discovered that the airing cupboard where it was living was topping out at 40 degrees celsius, so far too warm for bread yeast. I assume the heat killed it.

I was also using some crappy generic white flour. I started again yesterday, with some better flour (part white, part rye). I'm following a slightly different technique, with a much drier starter:

http://sourdough.com/blog/sourdom/beginners-blog-starter-scratch

(at least it has pictures to compare against)

Its also something I've been meaning to try for a while, your post prompted me to try!

Starter was, erm, started on Sunday. Have been feeding it 100g of flour and water per day and most days removing half. This morning there were a few tiny bubbles (if you looked hard) and a later of hooch.

I poured half away and Refed this morning. Tonight its full of bubbles and climbing skyward towards the top of the jar, I've just had to put it inside a bowl in case it makes a real bid for freedom!

Pretty amazing stuff really.

Adrian

Once you get it going nicely, perhaps put a half-cup or so into the freezer as insurance.

I lost my 25yr old starter here by having it go bad (unfed, unmaintained) while travelling abroad two years ago.

No backup.

Probably can't take that along on a plane now a days

Took a tablespoon of the wholemeal starter and added it to another jar with (very) strong white flour in it.

Read up on the net about how changing the food for it can cause it to "have a strop", but the new jar was full of bubbles this morning when I gave it another feed.

Hopefully sometime this weekend we might actually get to use some of the stuff!

Adrian

My second attempt failed in a mouldy mess, when I left it untended at room temperature for several days.

The results of my third attempt has been more successful and is now ticking away nicely. I'm using a much drier mix this time, roughly following these instructions:

http://sourdough.com/blog/sourdom/beginners-blog-starter-scratch

Had my first baking attempt with it the other day, with a rye heavy loaf. That was a mistake, tasted good but very dense.

Today was my second try, all white loaf this time (apart from the rye in the starter).



Looks good, tastes good*, still not as light as I'd like it. My starter doesn't yet seem to be as vigorous as it could be, still creating relatively small bubbles.

It probably didn't help that I forgot to use strong flour for today's loaf.

Making progress.

* it is quite bizarre to think that the taste comes from just flour, water, a bit of salt and some yeast and bacteria that were floating around

Looks really good. How much of a rise did you get?

Not enough, was a bit dense.

Looks lovely, has anybody tried no knead bread?

http://forum.downsizer.net/viewtopic.php?p=1095345#1095345

I'm not sure what the benefit of that is, I actually like the kneading bit

I like the kneading too, but I can see why people might want to go with the no knead method.

Definitely dense, how long did it prove?

Until it stopped getting any bigger, about 3 hours or so. It didn't quite even double in size.

No advice to offer, just wondered. I'm the only one in my family who likes sourdough

Damn, I thought you were about to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong

Thankfully, even though dense, it is very tasty. Very light on the sour taste though, I suspect most people wouldn't notice it. I'm informed that to get a stronger taste I need to use less starter and leave it for longer.

Yeah, everything I've read is about leaving it for ages.

A couple bits of experience:

- Sour flavor and bread with a lot of rise are mutually exclusive. The very same thing that gives you sour goodness (lactobacilli doing their thing) also gives you acid (lactic acid), which nukes the gluten you need to otherwise have bread with lots of air in it.

- You can cheat and use chemical souring agents ("souring salts" in the King Arthur catalog). Don't do that.

- You can keep your sourdough starter at a lower hydration. I keep mine at 50% (i.e., one ounce water to two ounces flour). This seems to help a bit.

- You can adopt a binary method, where you make two balls of dough. One of them has flour, salt, water, nothing else (a "soaker"). The other one has sourdough starter, flour, water (a "preferment" or "poolish", among other synonyms). You let these go for a day or more, combine, wait a few hours for the sourdough to rise things, and straight into the oven. (Greater than a day, put the soaker in the fridge so it doesn't start fermenting on its own.) If you're doing a mixed grain bread (e.g., part rye, part white), then do the soaker with the white flour and the preferment with everything else. Thus, you're building up sour goodness and acids where they won't nuke all the lovely gluten.

Any tips on my lack of rising ?

My starter will double in 3-4 hours after feeding, yet when I used it to bake it didn't really come close to doubling and after 3 hours just seemed to stop.

Ambient temperature has a big impact on rise times. How cold is it where you're doing the rise?

Also, you can tweak your hydration numbers. Standard French bread is always at 60% (i.e., for every 10oz of flour, 6oz of water). When you go to a higher hydration, then you've got more water that becomes steam, and that steam powers the "oven spring" that gives you the extra loft you really want. (It's extra important to properly "slash" your bread, so the steam gets out in stages rather than building up in big bubbles then blowing out anywhere it can.) Note that higher hydration turn dough in to a sticky mess. I don't usually go beyond 70%, and I use a ton of bench flour to coat things to keep them from sticking. That means my final hydration isn't going to be quite as high.

Higher hydration plus a long primary rise is the essence of "no knead" bread. You can still do this with sourdough, but if you go with a binary method, as above, then you need to combine the two bits of dough, which will require some kneading before the second rise. It's unavoidable. You can do it with a mixing machine, but one cool trick, if you keep rye flour on one side and white on the other, is that doing it coarsely, by hand, will give your final bread a nice marbled quality to it.

Anyway, don't stress out too much about not getting a light airy loaf. If you really want that, don't do sourdough. Use commercial yeast, particularly with the "no knead" method. That gives glorious air.

About 23C, sat next to a handy open sided PC



My attempts so far have all been 50%.



I'm not stressing about it. I don't tend to manage light airy loaves even with commercial yeast, think my technique needs work somewhere.

I'm planning on doing a one day breadmaking course next spring, think I need to go back and learn the basics from someone who actually knows what they are doing.

Same here, if I had the time I'd book a course here:

http://www.breadmatters.com/advocacy.htm

Definitely up the hydration on your bread. I'll typically do sourdough between 65-70%. You won't necessarily get more rise before you bake, but you'll definitely get oven spring.

If you really, really want super airy bread, try some variation on the no-knead recipe. That's super-wet dough, super-sticky, so you generally get your hands wet each time you stick your hands in the bowl to minimize sticking. Plus you handle the dough as little as possible to keep all the bubbles intact. Also, if you don't want to monkey with the whole Dutch oven aspect of the recipe, definitely get a baking stone, a steam pan of some sort, and use silicone parchment paper (or reusable silicone baking mats) to make it easy to get the dough into the oven.

You might try being scientific about it. Mix up some dough at three different hydrations (say, 50, 60, and 70%) and do a double-blind tasting with some friends.

Classes are fun and all, but you only really need a good book. (Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice is the classic, but his newer Artisan Breads Every Day may be less intense and more helpful.) It's also helpful to have access to a guru to pick for advice. I got a lot of mileage out of a friend-of-a-friend who was a serious baker.

Making definitely progress, very much happier with the rise on this one.




I'm also experimenting with the no knead bread, though I think I should have used a bigger bowl, will probably escape by the morning...

That looks really good.

That's about as good as you're going to get out of sourdough, in terms of air. How's it taste?

I tried this today and it was an unmitigated disaster. It rose beautifully, both before and after I knocked it back.

But it stuck to the whole of the bottom of the pan, I had to dig it out in pieces. I also didn't cook it for long enough, it was doughy even though the skewer came out clean.

To top it all off I didn't put enough salt in and also the crust is solid and chewy.

Looked very pretty before it got baked though...

Only a tiny sour taste, which I'm fine with. Even without a strong sour taste it still tastes better than bread made without the starter.

Yeah, I wondered how it came out but there was a discussion on there about sticking and it didn't seem to be an issue. I definitely need more practice to find out where I'm going wrong, even with unleavened breads; when I make chapattis sometimes they're light and blow up in the middle and other times they just don't and end up a bit chewy.

You wouldn't think it'd be so hard to get right!

On the no knead:

I've done this a lot, and I've never had a sticking problem. It's possible that your pot isn't well seasoned. You might also go with a more traditional baking stone and steam pan. If you do that, try the silicone parchment paper trick. It's fantastic.

On getting extra sourness:

To some extent, you're at the mercy of your local bacteria and yeast. You get what they give you. There are a few variables you can tweak, like time, temperature, and hydration for the preferment, but ultimately you get what you get.

If you take leftover bread and make French toast (pain perdue), you'll find that sometimes intensifies the bread's flavor. Sourdough becomes more sour. Rye bread becomes more strongly rye flavored.

It really did stick well: