Who else is baking bread, or beginning a starter?
I'm now T-1 to 2 days from having my sourdough starter that was created from nothing but natural yeast around where I live (and obviously generous amounts of flour or water) to being ready to bake/cook with. This is my first time working with starters, and dough in general, so I'm really looking forward to baking my own sourdough bread in the oven, or making a classic sourdough pizza with mozzarella and a marinara sauce (this is first on the list!).
I've been feeding it twice daily for several days now, and am getting close to the doubling-within-a-day metric many use as a baseline for when it's "ready", although I haven't tried the float test quite yet It's got an almost fruity, alcoholic aroma to it—with no funky, displeasing notes.
Here's the first recipe I'm planning, unfortunately our oven barely goes above 500°F, and I don't have any handy sources of thermal mass to properly cook a pizza, so I'm hopeful a cast-iron approach to really crisping the base on the stove first will pay dividends.
Seamus Blackley has also been a bit of an inspiration.
Anyone got any tips? Recipes to share? Surely I'm not the only person on Tildes trying this (for obvious reasons).
One very important tip for bread bakers - the mineral content of the water you use matters, and you should avoid chlorinated tap water for sensitive natural starters.
Fizzy mineral water works for small batches if your tap water isn't suitable, but the cheapest way to add a little extra calcium is to use about a tablespoon of liquid milk or 1 tsp. of powdered milk for every cup of flour. When I was obsessively experimenting, I found that EmergenC Electrolyte formula packets add both ascorbate (Vitamin C - improves dough elasticity and inhibits competing bacteria) and a little extra mineral content for better yeast growth. Dissolve 1 packet per 4 cups or liter of water you're adding to the starter. Pineapple juice works as well.
Seed Culture Recipe (from the Pineapple Juice thread):
Day 1: mix...
2 tablespoons whole grain flour* (wheat or rye)
2 tablespoons pineapple juice, orange juice, or apple cider
Day 2: add...
2 tablespoons whole grain flour*
2 tablespoons juice or cider
Day 3: add...
2 tablespoons whole grain flour*
2 tablespoons juice or cider
Day 4: (and once daily until it starts to expand and smell yeasty), mix . . .
2 oz. of the starter (1/4 cup after stirring down-discard the rest)
1 oz. flour** (scant 1/4 cup)
1 oz. water (2 tablespoons)
** You can feed the starter/seed culture whatever you would like at this point. White flour, either bread or a strong unbleached all-purpose like King Arthur or a Canadian brand will turn it into a general-purpose white sourdough starter. Feed it rye flour if you want a rye sour, or whole wheat, if you want to make 100% whole wheat breads. If you're new to sourdough, a white starter is probably the best place to start.
On average, yeast begin to grow on day 3 or 4 in the warmer months, and on day 4 or 5 during colder times of the year, but results vary by circumstance. Feed once a day, taking care not to leave mold-promoting residue clinging to the sides or lid of your bowl or container, and refer back to the different phases to track progress---particularly if it gets stuck in the second. Once you have yeast growing (but not before), you can and should gradually step up the feeding to two or three times a day, and/or give it bigger refreshments. Before yeast, don't feed too much; after yeast, don't feed too little. This is the point at which I generally defer to the sourdough experts. There are several good books on sourdough which address the topic of starter maintenance and how to use it in bread. Just keep in mind that the first days of the seed culture process have nothing to do with developing flavor or even fostering the most desirable species. The object is simply to move through the succession and get the starter up and running. The fine-tuning begins there. Once yeast are growing well, choose the hydration, temperature and feeding routine that suits you, and the populations will shift in response to the flour and conditions that you set up for maintenance.
I have also been making more bread and pizza recently. I simply use dry yeast because I'm just starting out and trying to get the basics down. Pizzas from a normal home oven are great, although you will never match a wood oven pizza.
How come you are trying sourdough?
New Zealand is nationally out of yeast! Apparently everyone wants to be a baker now. 😆 (Although it appears to be mostly resolved though). I also have a friend who bakes sourdough bread from a sourdough starter he obtained, so it seemed like a natural place to begin for me—it really helps having someone in a position of knowledge guide you through the process—I also used the King Arthur Flour recipe that was linked down-thread.
I also had a hampering for pizza around the same time this saga began, but New Zealand is also out of pizza bases too...
I've been baking my own bread for a while now (a year, maybe two?). In the beginning I mostly stuck to Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast book, but by now I mostly slap together what I feel like flour-wise and add enough water until the dough feels right
I've thought about posting this thread for weeks now. This is the first time in a few years that I've had access to an oven and low-heat stove, so I have been going nuts with cooking and baking. It's such a relaxing hobby (for me, at least). Pan-style pizza - like Detroit-style pizza or what Pizza Hut does - is one of the best ways to go when making one at home (clearly demonstrated here). My starter is still growing up, so I'm not sure if having sourdough crust is a real difference maker to the cooking process, but with I think you'll be ok without having to crisp up on the stove top. It certainly isn't necessary with normal pizza dough if you're going to oil up a pan or cast-iron and let the dough rise in it. I tried the stove-to-oven method once and it was tough to keep everything even when I was putting toppings on. The guy in the video I posted is much better at cooking than I could ever be, but you can still kind of see the bubbles it causes in the video. Either way, at long as there's some oil under that thing, it's gonna be good. The thing I can't stress enough is the importance of making your own sauce and getting a quality cheese that isn't pre-grated.
As for non-pizza cooking and baking, the thing I've been obsessed with lately is making bagels. Having a good bagel with a crunchy exterior and a soft middle is so difficult to find in my neck of the woods, so making them myself has been one of the highlights of being back home. I don't have much knowledge around baking, outside of the occasional pizza and a basic bread loaf, so I was nervous about how they'd turn out but they're so easy to make! It took about a week or so to get barley malt syrup, but it was totally worth it. They're best when you keep them in the fridge overnight, which is great because you can wake up and get right to cooking them for breakfast.
I've made some basic no-knead bread this week. It turned out fine, but not as good as I'd hoped. I may try again this weekend. We'll see.
I recently fell down the rabbit hole of Kenji Lopez-Alt's youtube channel and came across his no-knead pizza recipe[1], and then found his no-knead bread recipe[2]. I am going to try it out this week!
Any suggestions/things you would do different the second time around?
Measure twice, cut once. I'm pretty sure I got the amount of flour wrong because I had to split it between 2 bags. I had a 2 lb. bag with about a cup and a half left in it, and then a new 5lb. bag. Somehow, the dough was much wetter than his in the video. I also did it by volume. I have a scale, but didn't use it. So I'd do it by weight for the reasons he mentions.
I did not try the beer. That's an interesting idea. (I can't drink beer due to a barley allergy, so we never have it in the house, though.)
So I think I'll try his suggestions and see if it turns out better.
I did find one thing odd about his recipe. He mixes the salt and yeast together. I've always been told to keep them separate for as long as possible because the salt will kill the yeast. The recipe I have has you put the yeast in 90-100°F water for about 5 minutes before adding it to the flour and salt. Not sure how much difference it makes, though.
Hey, thanks for the suggestion of Kenji Lopez-Alt's YouTube channel! I followed his directions much more closely and it turned out tons better! I also read up a little on yeast, and I think I had the water temperature too low. (I notice he doesn't say how warm his water is in the video!) I had it between 90 and 100°F, but it should really be between 100 and 110°F. I also did it by weight instead of volume, so that may have helped as well.
Cheers! I did try the no-knead pizza this weekend, and it did come out pretty good as well :)
I will have to see if I can modify this to make some focaccia bread.
Thanks for the tip, I will have to keep that in mind and make sure my water is in that temp range next time. I had just microwaved a mug of water for a few seconds to warm it up.
I'm going to share some dirty sourdough tricks I learned from the bout of mad sourdough science I went through 20 years ago...
If there's a local bakery that makes a sourdough bread you really, really love, you may be able to seed your culture with a piece of their bread. Most bread bakeries have widespread contamination with their predominant yeasts - they settle on everything, and usually get on baked loaves during the course of packaging. That's how I faked Zingerman's Bakehouse sourdough. I took a piece from the bottom of a loaf, soaked it in a cup of warm water with a gram of sugar overnight, then used the water for a fresh starter batch.
There are sources for prepared sourdough culture starter:
I'm including the World Heritage Sourdough Library, not because it sells starters, but because it's a wealth of information on what sourdough cultures are made of.
Note that "sourdough culture" is an intensely local product. Even if you start with a defined commercial culture or migratory yeasts from imported fruits/vegetables, chances are that your local yeasts and bacteria will take it over eventually. The best way to maintain a distinct culture is to dry and freeze starter from a batch with desirable qualities.
Is there a simple clear recipe for sourdough starter (like a single image with everything) ? I've googled it a bit but the results give me headaches.
Try this one from King Arthur Flour.
I've been working off of this guy on youtube. I go to youtube for most recipes and cooking tips because I can't stand having to read through someone's blog before getting to the recipe (yes, I understand the irony). Also, watching things play out on video really helps for technique.
Oh man, I hate this so much. I don't care about the blog author's history, or how the ingredients are made, or the chemical reactions involved. I just want to make some $%#% bread (or dinner, or cake, or whatever). It's so irritating.
That said, what I've taken to doing is just start scrolling until you see a list of ingredients. When I find it, I copy and paste it into my notes app under "Recipes" along with the cooking instructions. I then have to clean up all the advertising crap like links to "buy flour here," etc. Then I never have to go back to that blog ever again.
I'm almost certain it's some kind of bizarro SEO thing, or old wives' tale SEO thing that has propagated so much it's still common to see. Whatever it is, it certainly isn't user-friendly.
It totally is an SEO thing. It's equal parts of the following:
This ties into how I think Google is a stupid shadow broker of content culture—this is just the way (I think) they do it, but it's certainly not the best way. Just a byproduct of how they index and what people optimize for as a result.
Yeah, I can buy that. The other thing I'm seeing lately is that when you click on a link from a search engine to a recipe site, they show you the first few lines of text and then you have to click a "View Recipe" link to actually see the recipe. WTF? It's probably to stop screen scraping or whatever, but it's irritating as hell to users. So again, I copy down just the ingredients and directions and never go back to those sites. I pretty much won't click on any link with allrecipes.com in it for this reason.
I thought about trying it this week but I have not managed to find any flour. Almost every item in every shop is back to regular stocks but flour is all gone.
Same over here. My girlfriend visited three different stores yesterday, and she still couldn’t find either flour or paper towels at any of them.
I’ve managed to procure all the tools to make bread (a Dutch oven, a large plastic tub, etc), but I haven’t been able to find flour since the lockdown began. It’s a shame. One of the loaves I made — a white bread with 80% biga (from FWSY) — was the perfect soup accompaniment.
It's more expensive, but I strongly recommend King Arthur Flour products and recipes for beginning bakers. Their flours and other ingredients are super-consistent, and the recipes generally do what they say on the tin.
Footnote: I just checked and their shipping time is currently 2 - 4 weeks!
If you want to get really insane about it, you can grind wheat berries in a blender for whole wheat flour.
I managed to pick up a bag of King Author before the lockdown, and the couple loaves I made with their flour were fantastic. Maybe I'll try ordering directly from them!
I could only find flower at an actual mill, a whole month after the lockdown started.
I've had luck with restaurant supply stores. You'll buy it in 50 lb bags, but it keeps for 6+ months and if you have a friend or two who'll go in on it with you it's a great way to stock up.
If you have a Costco available, they're another good source for large-quantity general baking ingredients. Maybe find some friends or neighbors who'd like to split that 50 lb. bag of flour or sugar, though.
Yeah that's far beyond my logistical means, unfortunately. Not just for a lack of vehicle but also: I just don't have any space here to store that. From friends who work in restaurants I've heard even they are having trouble getting them though (along with other basic dry goods), since apparently the public at large has caught on to this idea as well.
I managed to find some yeast in the store the other day and followed this recipe for a no-knead loaf: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/279501/no-knead-country-bread/
It wound up better than expected, and I've been enjoying it for the past couple days.
Does a bread machine count?
But some things that I have learned:
Hell yes! Bread machines are awesome!
So this is something I'm really confused about. If you watch something like the Great British Baking Show, Paul Hollywood is constantly talking about how he separates the yeast from the salt when he makes his bread. He'll pour in the flour, then put the yeast on one side and the salt on the other.
Over the weekend, I watched this video and followed it as closely as I could. He just dumps the flour, salt and yeast in all at once; they mix freely and it turns out great. I did this as well, and it turned out the best of any bread I've made yet. (Though maybe the amount he recommends is significantly less than your other recipes?) So I'm really unsure of how to take this yeast/salt advice.
Been trying to do my own starter with my dad as of late... it’s been a hard journey with little to no rising, which is disappointing. Lots of bubbling ! Lots of nice taste ! But... it’s just not rising the way we want it to :/ anyone else experienced this kind of problem?