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Make your own sourdough

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Re: Make your own sourdough

#41

Post by wwweston »

slimbods wrote: post #9

Nice article, thanks. Losing your starter can be painful as it takes at least a week to build a new one. So it's good to have a backup; build a bit extra then freeze it. Should you lose your starter, you can defrost the backup and carry on right away. Especially handy if you go on holiday or can't bake for a few weeks.

It's worth noting you don't even have to freeze it. Spread it out onto a sheet of plastic wrap or wax paper or something, let it dry, crumble it into flakes and store somewhere dry and a temp-stable. I've reconstituted starter from flakes like this at least 6 months out and I'd be willing to bet it'd work at much longer timescales.

Re: Make your own sourdough

#42

Post by slow_donkey »

hendricius wrote: post #38
cup-of-tea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mention of salt in whole page. That is a huge omission. It's not even bread without salt. If you follow this recipe it will taste awful. Use salt if you want your bread to be like bakery bread. And there is no "salt to taste" in baking. 10g per 500g of flour is a good start but the point you add it is important so check a proper recipe.

No salt at all in the sour dough. When baking you will add salt. I like around 2%. But in the mother sour dough you do not want any salt. This link is only about how to get your actual mother sour dough, not baking! That's still TODO and will follow up later. Edit: 2% of the flour's weight in salt. Let's say you bake 700 grams of flour (500 grams flour, 200 grams sour dough) then you would add 14 grams of salt. Note…

2% bp not total weight. Should probably clarify since this isn't a baking audience

Re: Make your own sourdough

#43

Post by mbreese »

ipsum2 wrote: post #16
hendricius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't freezing kill the bacteria and yeast?

Freezing doesn't kill bacteria, it's actually how biologists preserve their samples. Most yeast you buy in a store (e.g. Fleischmann's) are better if you freeze it after opening for best quality.

To be fair, when freezing bacteria in a lab, you usually add glycerol to help avoid ice crystals (which is the thing that would kill the bacteria in the first place). That's not something you'd necessarily do here. However, so long as the dough mixture isn't too wet, I wouldn't see why it couldn't be frozen as-is

Re: Make your own sourdough

#44

Post by hendricius »

slow_donkey wrote: post #42
hendricius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No salt at all in the sour dough. When baking you will add salt. I like around 2%. But in the mother sour dough you do not want any salt. This link is only about how to get your actual mother sour dough, not baking! That's still TODO and will follow up later. Edit: 2% of the flour's weight in salt. Let's say you bake 700 grams of flour (500 grams flour, 200 grams sour dough) then you would add 14 grams of salt. Note…

2% bp not total weight. Should probably clarify since this isn't a baking audience

Thanks

Re: Make your own sourdough

#45

Post by slow_donkey »

atomical wrote: post #40
jvkersch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bread has increased in quality so much by (a) mixing the ingredients (without the yeast, or with only a little bit of the sourdough starter) the night before (i.e. making a poolish), and (b) taking a full day to prepare: you knead a little, let it rest for a couple of hours, give it a few turns, rest, etc. As a result, the bread is much more flavorful, and the flavor is more delicate: not too sour, not too sweet,…

My bread has much better flavor if I let the dough sit in the fridge for four days.

I do this also for time control. I can effectively bake whenever convenient if it's half dormant in the fridge.

Re: Make your own sourdough

#46

Post by atomical »

slow_donkey wrote: post #45
atomical wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bread has much better flavor if I let the dough sit in the fridge for four days.

I do this also for time control. I can effectively bake whenever convenient if it's half dormant in the fridge.

Also, no need to knead with this method.

Re: Make your own sourdough

#47

Post by toredash »

caublestone wrote: post #13

A couple left academia to pursue their passion for cultures and turned their treasures into a market: http://www.sourdo.com Apparently they run into some sticky situations carrying dried yellowish brown powder around in aluminum foil. In Saudi Arabia they were detained at the airport for hours while authorities verified that the sketchy powder was in fact mostly harmless yeast.

Mostly?

Re: Make your own sourdough

#48

Post by th0ma5 »

hendricius wrote: post #22
th0ma5 wrote: post #19

Get some starter for the price of a stamp: http://carlsfriends.net/source.html Or choose from many others for sale: http://www.sourdo.com/our-sourdough-cultures-2/

You can also go to many local bakeries. Here in Germany the are happy to give you some starter for free. But I still think making your own one is so easy, it's 14 minutes of time over a week.

100% agree. Among my favorite things was growing a starter from scratch.

Re: Make your own sourdough

#49

Post by sjwright »

toredash wrote: post #47
caublestone wrote: post #13

A couple left academia to pursue their passion for cultures and turned their treasures into a market: http://www.sourdo.com Apparently they run into some sticky situations carrying dried yellowish brown powder around in aluminum foil. In Saudi Arabia they were detained at the airport for hours while authorities verified that the sketchy powder was in fact mostly harmless yeast.

Mostly?

Presumably the remainder was harmless non-yeast.

Re: Make your own sourdough

#50

Post by etrautmann »

hendricius wrote: post #5
chrissnell wrote: post #4

I had a starter for several years that was descended from the one kept by Dick Proenekke [1]. He lived alone in a cabin that he built himself--by hand--deep in the Alaskan bush. He made sourdough pancakes daily and his original starter came from a friend of his back in town. Someone related to this person sells the starter (on a wooden spoon) that you can buy [2] and use to create your own descendant. There's a fasci…

Really interesting, thanks for the links. I would be curious to see how that starter behaves differently then mine. I really need a good microscope to analyse the different doughs in detail.

I have a colleague who sequences the genomes of the yeast in her sourdough starter to characterize how it changes over time :)
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