Confessions of a Sourdough Slave: Slogging through the Muck

Well... it's been a whole lot longer than I'd intended, since last I wrote.  And I've read so many people's articles and blog-entries, that I don't think I can possibly reconstruct it all now.  But the important thing, I think, is this: I haven't given up.  My Sourdough Pet is still alive... and it DOES seem to have gotten stronger, over time.

That's just one of the (many) things I wasn't aware of, when I started all this... that it really does take TIME for a sourdough culture to develop strength enough to actually lift bread up in the air.  It's not just a matter of taste... the culture actually needs time (like a month or two) to get strong and vigorous.

Further, it appears to me that the culture will NOT develop that strength while sitting in the fridge. When you put a sourdough starter in the fridge, it severely slows its' growth. In fact, some of my sources say that it declines, and actually starts to die back, while it's in there.  So even when your starter is strong enough to make bread with, it still needs to be removed from the fridge for two or three feedings (figuring you're feeding it twice a day at room temperature) till it's likely to be back to its' old self and ready for action.

So naturally, since I figured that out, I've been keeping the starter on the counter, in a jar, and feeding it twice a day.  More or less.  Some days I forget, and it goes longer than it should... but at this point, it seems to be fairly forgiving.

I'm doing some things differently now.  One thing I've changed, is the hydration-- meaning, the amount of water in the dough, which in turn determines whether the starter is like mud, or like a ball of... well, dough.  My starter was originally at 100% hydration, or one part water, by weight, to one part flour.  It is now at 60% hydration.  That means that for every 100 grams of flour, my starter contains 60 grams of water.

It's actually a very important point, which I've been frustrated to find many people blithely overlooking when they write about this subject, that measuring things by weight is NOT the same as measuring things by volume.  If you put 100 grams of flour with 100 grams of water, you will make a 100% hydration dough.  But if you put a cup of flour with a cup of water... it's not the same thing at all.  Water weighs a lot more than flour... and flour is HUGELY variable as to how much air it has in it.  So while it's entirely possible to grow a sourdough starter without measuring by weight, it's NOT possible to be precise about it.

Don't get me wrong... I know that precision isn't everything.  But it is very helpful when you want to write down how to do something, or you want to be able to do it the same way next time.  So I confess to being a convert to the "measuring-by-weight" brigade.  I figure I'll be careful about things at first, while I'm figuring them out... and then get more relaxed later, when I can pretty much feed Desi in my sleep.

Oh, yeah, that's its' name--Desi.  Short for "Desem", which means (I think) "dry dough".  I thought at first that Desem referred only to a particular kind of bread, the Belgian kind made popular by Laurel Robertson in her "Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book".  Desem is supposed to be really terrific bread... Laurel gets all worshipful when she talks about it.  But it's pretty finicky stuff... needs absolutely pure, fresh, chlorine-free water and organic, fresh flour, and a very cool, consistent temperature (as in, no higher than 65 degrees F, if i remember right).  Oh, and it goes through TONS of flour, especially at first.  I looked at all those requirements, and at my 700 sq. ft. apartment, and realized immediately that traditional Belgian Desem was NOT in my future.  (But hey... if you have a basement, or you live in someplace chilly... it might be perfect for you).

Anyway.  "Desem" refers not only to the Belgian bread, but also more generally to the technique of keeping a sourdough in a more "lumpish" state, where it contains more flour and less water.  When a starter has less water in it, it doesn't expand as quickly after feeding... probably (I'm guessing) because the simple thickness of the dough slows things down.  It's easier to push a spoon through pancake batter than through a stiff cookie dough... same deal.  The little yeast-and-bacteria beasties can reach their food more quickly in a more liquid medium.

So a desem-style starter doesn't expand as dramatically after feeding... but (from what I've been reading) it's stronger.  It's also more forgiving if you miss a feeding.  In fact, supposedly you can keep a desem-style starter alive for weeks in a bag of flour, without refrigeration.  That's how the old miners did it, apparently... carried the starter in a bag around their necks.  Try THAT with a goopy, 100%-hydration starter!

Anyway... hydration affects all sorts of things, but the starter will still grow. I just picked 60% because it makes feeding simpler.  Also I wanted to throw away less flour!  My starter is a lot smaller now, too, only about 60 grams after feeding, thanks to Daniel Dimuzio, who is an admirably clear writer and noted bread-guru.  His writing helped me to begin to understand baker's math (still working on that) and hydration... and how much starter I should be adding to how much fresh dough, at a feeding... and how to plan the size of the starter I maintain, so that I can easily increase it to the right size to have enough to make bread and also continue the starter.

It's a little complicated.  It appears to be true that you need less of a strong, healthy desem-style starter, than you do of a more liquid-y one.  There's a site called Sourdough Home, where the author has done a translation of Laurel Robertson's basic whole-wheat bread recipe from regular yeast into sourdough, using a 100%-hydration starter.  I knew I would need less starter than was listed in that recipe, because mine is lower hydration. I knew I could figure out how much total flour was in the recipe, and I knew 210 grams of 100%-hydration starter is made up of half flour, or 105 grams of flour.  So I figured out that recipe contained about 25% of its total flour, as flour-in-starter.  Since the amount of flour contained in a recipe, or in a starter, is what everything is figured from (that's "baker's math" again), I was able to figure out how much of my 60% starter I would need, by weight, for the flour in it to be 25% of the total flour in the recipe.

See what I mean, that it's complicated?  I HATE math!!  I suspect a lot of other people do, too.  But it IS possible to figure it out... and I've started writing all that stuff down, and making lots of notes... so I can remember what I did, and what worked... and what didn't.

And... Desi is thriving!  Even in the cold weather we've had lately, and my need to keep the house cool at night so I can sleep, he swells up very respectably in his jar, like a small, tan snowball.  When I rip him open, to take out the twenty grams I need to keep him going in perpetuity, he is all nicely spongy inside... really, he looks very much like a bath sponge in the middle!  I weigh the flour and water for his feeding, in a small bowl, put him in, work it all together... and they all become ONE.  Back in the jar he goes... renewed, and ready to eat up all that lovely flour and strengthen and multiply himself.

It seems to me that, when I make bread,  my starter doesn't rise as fast as those of people I've been reading about... I'm hoping that's just a matter of maturity, on Desi's part.  Time will tell!

Okay, that's it for now.  May your pets thrive, and your bread be wonderful!

Confessions of a Sourdough Slave: A Hopeful Beginning

A sourdough desem loaf (not mine!)

I've been educating myself, recently, about whole-wheat sourdough bread-making.  I thought that it would be a fairly straightforward thing, because people were making bread without commercial yeast for-- what?  Thousands of years, I expect, before that stuff in cakes and jars and little foil packets was invented.  So it can't be all THAT hard to do, surely.  Yeast and bacteria (which is what sourdough is, basically) are all around us... and IN us, too... heck, you can't avoid them, no matter how hard you try.  And bread is made of VERY simple stuff.

So I was surprised, I must admit, when the quest turned out to be somewhat difficult.  Oh, parts were easy... getting a starter culture going, watching it develop bubbles, and start to swell... it was kind of exciting, really. Carefully, I followed the instructions in Ed Espe Brown's classic, The Tassajara Bread Book. I fed the starter, nurtured it.  It looked pretty good to me (well... what did I know?)

So then I made his Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread.  The dough came together easily, silky and elastic. And kneading was a LOT more fun than I thought it would be... I actually found myself GIGGLING!  I found myself filled with a strange excitement, an anticipation... almost as if I was on the edge of something... something profound...

The dough didn't rise much.  It spread out quite a bit, though, especially when I baked it. When it came out of the oven, looking like a very promising door-stop, I felt somewhat deflated.  The thing was bread, technically... and one slice would pretty much hold you for the whole day, if your jaw survived the exercise. But my husband (who loves bread, and me, but not in that order) was very kind about it, and we gnawed it down.  After all, it was my first attempt!

Next I made Espe Brown's Whole Wheat Cinnamon Raisin Sourdough Rolls. The book said to let them rise for "fifteen hours or more".  After my last experience, I was prepared to believe that sourdough just really needed an incredibly long time to rise.  Another, more concerted, effort would undoubtedly produce better results.  More diligence! Try HARDER!!

I made the fermented raisins in raisin-water that the recipe called for.  It's a simple process; you put organic raisins in water and let it sit, covered, on your counter for three or four days, stirring once a day. The raisins puffed up, and the water got a little fizzy, which I was prepared for.  It all smelled very interesting... a sort of tangy, spicy, sweet-sour scent.  When the raisins were ready, I got some starter, and mixed up the dough.  I was feeling quite affectionate toward Mr. Ed Espe Brown.  He's really very charming and supportive; you can almost see him, a kind, jolly, relaxed, Zen-Buddhist friend standing at your elbow, cheering you on.

I put the raisin rolls on a pizza pan and set them on top of the fridge.  Ed Brown said to cover them with a damp towel.  So I did that, and went to bed.

In the morning, I got up, and wandered out to see how the rolls were getting on.  Horrors!!  The dishtowel (of course, what was I thinking?) had completely dried out, and combined itself, fiber by fiber, with the substance of the rolls.  They Were One.  Indivisible.

When I peeled off the dishtowel shroud, the poor, sad rolls were as flat as dead balloons.  I sprayed them with water.  I breathed on them.  I talked to them, and begged them to buck up.  They lay there.  So... I baked them.  What else was there to do?

They were a little like tough, thin English muffins... the kind with raisins, of course.  The outside was very dry, thick and hard; and of course, since they were flat, there was hardly any inside to speak of.  And yet... there was something about the tiny bit of inside that there was... a warm fragrance, a hint of succulent sweetness... I put honey and butter on them... and midway through my first one, I discovered I wanted a second.  And a third.  In fact, there was something about them that I just seemed to crave.  Could I be... was there such a thing as... sourdough-deficient?

I think it was the memory of that taste that kept me from giving up.  That, and the fact that I'm probably a tiny bit OCD.  Anyway, I didn't give up.  I redoubled my efforts.  And made a second doorstop.

I had also bought another, later cookbook from the Tassajara dynasty, Fields of Greens.  It had a short section on sourdough that contradicted Espe Brown's instructions in more ways than it agreed with them; it was complicated, detailed, and (to me) thoroughly confusing..  At first, I just gibbered and looked away... but eventually I decided that perhaps since it was a much later book, the information in it would be more reliable, in that it had withstood the test of time.  And Annie Somerville's recipes certainly had a precision about them, a thoroughness that Ed Espe Brown's (that ol' sweetie!) sometimes lacked.  I mean, she even sometimes measured things by weight, in GRAMS!

I've not had much experience with grams... not spelled THAT way, anyhow.  We had gotten a digital scale some time back, for the purpose of weighing our pet conure, and I always measured her in grams, because the vet said to keep her weight between 160 and 180... GRAMS.  That's ALL they meant to me.  180 grams... is a fat conure.

(I'm going to have to continue this another day.  My latest experiment has just come out of the oven, and so I can go to bed now, and it's past two o'clock in the morning so it's definitely past time.  Gotta work on that time thing...;)