Hi everyone...
I just found this site and I just wanted to introduce myself and tell you about my strange starter.
I'm not really sure what to say about this. I followed instructions to make a sourdough starter here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/recipe-sourdough.html, and I have more of a solid starter that kind of puffs up. In order to use it, I'm told to pinch off a bit of it the size of a tangerine (about enough to fill a 1/2 cup measuring cup), mix it with two cups of warm water and two cups of flour, let it sit until it gets nice and bubbly, and then scoop out cups of starter as needed.
I went about doing it this way, and it seemed to yield some decent results (I'm still a beginner at this, and my first two or three starters got infested!). However, after looking around for a while at this and other sites, I notice that NOBODY ELSE DOES IT THIS WAY! Has anybody heard of doing a starter this way? Did I do something wrong?
Allaya
I just found this site and I just wanted to introduce myself and tell you about my strange starter.
I'm not really sure what to say about this. I followed instructions to make a sourdough starter here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/recipe-sourdough.html, and I have more of a solid starter that kind of puffs up. In order to use it, I'm told to pinch off a bit of it the size of a tangerine (about enough to fill a 1/2 cup measuring cup), mix it with two cups of warm water and two cups of flour, let it sit until it gets nice and bubbly, and then scoop out cups of starter as needed.
I went about doing it this way, and it seemed to yield some decent results (I'm still a beginner at this, and my first two or three starters got infested!). However, after looking around for a while at this and other sites, I notice that NOBODY ELSE DOES IT THIS WAY! Has anybody heard of doing a starter this way? Did I do something wrong?
Allaya
Category:
Replies
You're well on the way into the world of great flavourful sourdough breads.
TP
Also, I've been reading about %hydration, but I'm not sure what percent my starter is at right now. How can I calculate that? Thanks everyone!
Allaya
Tony
TP
Do you think I ought to feed my starter every day? If there's one thing I've learned from this site is to fee often! LOL I dont' know if I should put it in the fridge...I'd probably have to cover it in plastic, since I don't want it to dry out. I keep it in a glazed clay pot with a lid right now. Thanks for being patient everybody! I'll get the hang of this eventually
Allaya
I'm not sure if you are aware of a 'Bakers Percentage' and 'Seeding Percentage' but i'll break them down and explain them to you to give an idea :)
A bakers percentage is based on the constant known ingredient, being flour at 100%. All other ingredients are set as a percentage of this foundation.
A seeding percentage refers to the amout of active ferment (starter/leaven) to fresh flour. You can then control how you want your leaven to be with the amout of water/hydration you use. The amount of hydration will determine the flavour, acidity/sharpness, extensibility, texture, amoungst other things of your bread. Water temprature is also used to control the fermentation process as is ambient temprature.
It is important also to get the yeast into a routine by refreshing/feeding it at the same time each day. This will increase the yeast strands stengh and doughs extesibility as well as a lot of other things.
eg: Flour 100% = 1000g
Leaven 10% = 100g
Water 60% = 600g
*F.D.W 170% = 1700g *Final Dough Weight
This will give you a fairly stiff leaven with a high protien flour. The protien level and quality will give variables and can be ajusted with experience.
once your leaven is healthy and your confidence has grown tou can start to get creative by blending flours and or using meals to give different flavours and textures etc. Keep in mind that this will effect your hydration which can be adjusted accordingly :)
With your new and inproved Leaven you can now produce a beautiful loaf of bread full of all natural goodies using only flour salt and water :)
Here's a basic formulation for you to try:
Flour 100% = 1000g
Water 69% = 690g
Leaven 45% = 450g
Sea Salt 3% = 30g
F.D.W. 217% = 2170g
Mix together your flour and water by hand in a large bowl until roughly cleared, this will only take a few minutes. Now cover it with a damp tea-towel and leave is sit for 25-30 minutes. This is known as an autolyse, it is used to hydrate and strenghthen gluten protiens. Now add your leaven and mix through, if the dough becomes to hard to work just leave it to relax for a few minutes covering with the damp towel and then go again. Once the dough is almost cleared turn onto the bench top, add the salt and work until fully developed. Salt can inhibit yeast and gluten development thus by delaying increases their strength.
I hope this is of some help to you Allaya :) We all look forward to seeing some result. Remember that all us artisan bakers are band together as one and are here to help you on you journey to making fine bread.
Good on you for have a go, striving for answers and not giving up :)
Cheers Mate!
Rob Booth
flour Bakery GC QLD Australia
I really think I need to start over with my starter. Sometimes it gives okay results, but other times it just doesn't do anything. It takes a few days for it to rise and puff up at room temp, which is why I'm hesitant on keeping it in the fridge. That's why I'm thinking this solid starter might work a bit differently. Either that or the yeast floating around here is crap and I need to try different flour. :) I'd be sad to do this because the flavor this starter has is fantastic. It just doesn't really get that active.
Today I tried breaking off a piece today and hydrating it with water and a combo of regular flour and some whole wheat to see if that would punch activity up a bit. Usually the starter starts foaming with a vengance once i start mixing everything together. Today, I barely got a fizzle. Who knows? Maybe I'll just keep this starter out until it puffs up before I feed it...It seems to get overwhelmed if I feed it too often...loses the sourness. Back to the drawing board...
Allaya
As for my little starter slurry I created yesterday, I didn't have the heart to throw it away. Before I went to bed, it had seperated, and barely any activity at all. But this morning...WOW! All of a sudden, something kicked in, and it's bubbling away (lots of tiny bubbles, not the large ones I've seen in other pictures). I'm going to have to dough it up later and see what happens. Maybe the addition of the wholemeal yesterday gave it the extra kick it needed? Who knows. Have a look...sorry for the bad picture...I only have a cell phone camera.
This starter has some superb flavor, that's for sure. However, like I said, the results were good. Not as lovely as the loaves and boulles I've seen here though! I'm going for larger bubbles in the crumb. Like you said earlier, it's more likely than not a yeast population issue. On a mission now. You know, you guys have made me completely fanatical about this. Thanks for that. :)
Allaya
Initially, the dough was okay to work with. It was sticky, yes, but the gluten was forming quite well and that was keeping it from being pasted to the table. However, after I shaped it and let it proof, it was so sticky it wouldn't even come out of the floured bowl. Did I do something wrong? Do I just need more flour? I understand that if you keep the dough more hydrated you get a better rise, but at what point is it okay to start or stop adding flour? Sorry for all the questions...this is so different from any other bread I've worked with. Here's a picture of how the dough was looking after kneading it for a while. The gluten development looks pretty good, but I'm sure you can see how sticky it is.
Allaya
Tony
Best
TP
I am going to see if I can just keep the more liquidy starter alive (started with a pinch of my old starter and following instructions on the starter tutorial) just for variety.
But here's the question...I have the liquidey starter and the solid one now. Assuming I want to make something out of the solid starter, say the recipe mentioned above, for instance...I need to hydrate it to the %hydration of the more liquidey starter to begin, right? Before when I did it, it was pretty unscientific...I'd just break off a piece and add two cups of water and two cups of flour. In the interest of science though, I am assuming that I will only be adding water this time to hydrate it to an appropriate %. Please correct me if I'm wrong here.
Now that the starter is in its new solid state, I have to say that it's not smelling as nice and sour as the original mother starter. I got the mother to acquire this flavor by letting it sit out for two to three days without feeding it, but as far as I've learned, that doesn't make a starter very happy. The problem is, every time I feed it and take away most of the dough, most of the nice smell (and I'm assuming flavor) goes away with it. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Allaya
I wouldn't worry about the starter smelling "as nice and sour" at all times. When you feed it, you dilute it greatly and it smell's like fresh dough with a bit of "fermenty smell", rather fully fermented/ripe starter.
On the smell, I think what we smell is that slight alcohol/beer smell - as you don't actually smell lactic acid (unless I have that wrong). But that doesn't mean there's not acidic sourness in there. If it's gone acetic a tad you will smell a slight vinegary smell, because if I'm right acetic is volatile while lactic is not. (I thought I had major problems when mine went very vinegary, but it's nothing to be worried about if it happens - another story.)
So when you take a bit of starter and make a sourdough/sponge/whatever-you-call-it, it won't smell much initially because it's well diluted. It will ferment up over the next 10-12 hours (for my ratio of starter to fresh dough, hydration and temperatures) though, just fine. Then of course if you're doing the two-stage thing, you mix up the bread dough from that initial sourdough and you are diluting it again. So again it will smell more like fresh dough. The whole bulk ferment and prove is getting sourness/flavour/airiness to be right at the END, not at the start.
Here's another thing I've noticed, on sourness. If I eat some of my sourdough just after it's cooled I don't notice so much sourness. A day later, there's some. Two days after baking I reckon it's more noticeable again. Now I don't believe it's getting more sour, it's just that it seems more noticeable; don't know why!
On hydration, I've got to confess I don't measure what I keep my starter at - it's between batter and dough, slightly more doughy, but I do it "by eye". In any case, I know fairly close what consistency I'll get when I do add that relatively small amount of starter at that approx consistency to a larger quantity of flour/water that IS measured, and even then, I now have enough feel to adjust it for appropriate (for my liking!) softness, stickiness, for my mix of flours. This is no doubt a bit amateur, but that's also my attitude to stir fries. Enough logic/measurement to make sure the overall process is in-control, but a dose of feel/intuition in the fine tuning.
I wonder, if you use a "floured bowl" for proving, whether it's cloth-lined? I had problems with sticking initially but have reduced that by a few things. One I think is making sure the dough is properly kneaded and then stretched and folded through the bulk-ferment. This has given me a more springy and less tacky dough by the end of the process, even if it starts out sticky as fly-paper (I use a good dose of rye in the dough which adds stickiness). Also, I dust the cloth AND lightly dust the shaped boule before putting it in the cloth-lined bowl. I don't use that much dusting flour in total and the loaves are not caked in flour, but they don't stick any more, even though I am increasing the wetness of the dough.
I saw a nice tutorial on shaping on another website. I believe it might have been www.northwestsourdough.com. The woman in that tutorial used baskets and semolina with no cloth. I do not have appropriate cloths at the moment nor baskets, so I'm sort of experimenting until I can find something more to my liking. :) I've been taking her lead on the semolina, which works quite well and does not incorporate into the dough while proofing.
I have yet to try the bulk ferment. I wasn't quite sure when and where to do it, but now I know! LOL There was also a nice tutorial showing bulk fermenting on the site I mentioned. I'm glad to hear that this helps with the stickiness...I'll give it a try. This round, I was curious about just how active my starter was, so I just let it sit in a bowl. It proved in less than three hours (in fact, it was on the verge of spilling out of my bowl!). At the moment, the boulles are sitting and holding their shape quite nicely. I guess that means I can pop them into their bowls. :) I'll post photos as soon as I'm done...this looks like it will be a successful batch. :)
Allaya
Oh, and when I said it gets less sticky after starting out really sticky, I meant starting out really sticky on mixing but before kneading.
So I didn't mean that I think a few stretch and folds during bulk ferment will take a dough that's gluey at the end of kneading and make it non-sticky at the end of the bulk ferment. I reckon the dough development through kneading seems to make the biggest difference. But I DO think it (the later stretch and folds during bulk ferment) helps keep it not-so sticky. I reckon you can feel the stretch-and-folds during the bulk ferment putting back a bit of spring and tension into the dough that is otherwise progressively being lost as the dough slightly slackens as it ferments, and I just feel the dough is slightly tighter/springy that way and *maybe* less prone to sticking to stuff. Maybe I'm dreaming this effect, but anyway!
My times are like this - initial sourdough mix (a bit less than 1/3 by weight active starter) is fermented 10-12 hours, then I add more flour/water, again so that the fermented sourdough is a tad less than 1/3 the weight of the newly mixed dough. This second mix is the "bread dough", which I knead and then bulk-ferment about 3-4 hours depending on how warm is the house (longer if cold, shorter if really warm). I do about 4 stretch and folds during that bulk ferment at a bit less than hourly intervals.
Then I scale the semi-fermented bread dough (cut into even weights), rest 10-20 mins, then shape the loaves and and prove them for 3-4 hours (longer/shorter on temp) and bake, or shape and put straight into fridge for anything up to 20 hrs, then re-warm at room temp 2-3 hours and bake.
Here they are after the first shaping. They held their shape pretty well after the second time.
Fresh out of the oven! Not as dome-like as I'd like, but it's not flat, so that's good.
Cross section of the crumb...
Observations:
I decided to use the more liquidey starter for this batch since it was bubbling away, and I'd just fed the solid starter and needed to let that sit for 24 hours before using it. The starter was pretty raging...It doubled in bulk in about two hours! I think I let the boulles proof long enough, about 1 hour. I still had a problem with the boulles spreading out. Maybe, as the previous poster noted, I should try doing the bulk ferment, stretching all the while. This might strengthen the gluten to hold the shape a little better.
The crumb is surprisingly fine. From the looks at how the starter was bubbling away, I was fully expecting a mix of large and medium sized holes. Not sure why it worked like this. Don't get me wrong, the texture is quite lovely...it has a light, soft, silky...almost buttery texture. The flavor though is only slightly sour with a slightly bitter aftertaste.
BTW your bread looks mighty fine. It's takes time to get the exact outcome that you're going for, but as long as you like the bread along the way, then great. To get the exact outcome each and everytime takes longer still. Looks like you're on your way. Good luck.
As far as leaving the loaves sit for a couple of days...I don't think that is possible...I peeked in the kitchen this morning, and one loaf was already devoured! LOL I'll see if the second loaf survives till tomorrow. ;) I like the idea of hydrating prior to mixing though...I'll see how it works out. I'll be posting trial two shortly in another thread. Thanks again for your help!
Allaya
Your crumb looks good! Keep baking...there's lots of breads to enjoy. Like FB said to drpete, join the bake-offs and play.
TP