My personal challenge: baking my way through "How to Bake". This post is my experience baking and learning new skills from tackling each recipe in Paul Hollywood's, "How to Bake". I will also document any recipe changes that I made - mainly as a result of not having the ingredients on hand (i.e., we never have regular sugar in the house) - and how the recipe fared. I will not be providing the recipes that are in his book.
Over the holidays I decided to give sourdough a try. I love baking bread and I have a few bread recipes that are my "go-tos" and that never fail. But, I love sourdough bread and I can't deny the incredible health benefits like being easier to digest and help regulate blood sugar level so I had to push my fears aside and dive into the world of sourdough. Join me in some of my lessons learned.
Okay, so I am a complete newbie when it comes to sourdough. I guess that can be a disclaimer of sorts. Because I have not had a lot of experience to pull from, I did a lot of research in order to truly understand the common mistakes with sourdough. Again, I am no expert so take my learnings with your own filter. If nothing else, I hope my mistakes will help lessen your mistakes in the kitchen since sourdough is such a big undertaking - amount of flour, time, effort, etc.
Here are some of the lessons that I learned while making the Sourdough Starter from "How to Bake":
Does Water Matter? The short answer is yes. If you don't have pH or quality test strips to see what is included in your tap water, it's best to use filtered water. I mean hey. it takes a little over a week to get the starter ready to bake, so why wouldn't it also require the highest quality ingredients?
Did the Apples Really Work? There are a lot of conflicting information about the use of an apple in a sourdough starter recipe. To the best of my ability, I found that using a grated apple gives the yeast a boost from the apple sugars and can change the strain of bacteria present in the starter. It also provides a unique flavor to the starter. Thoughts? I thought that the apple provided a nice sweet aroma as the starter fermented. Since I never baked sourdough before, I am not sure that I am the best one to comment. My one difficulty, though, is the starter began to change colors after a couple of days and. my guess was because I left the skin on the apple and did not peel the skin. This was an issue because there are a lot of warning about your starter changing colors as some say that purple is okay, and even brown, but pink is not. Needless to say, I was confused, but I keep going since the smell was fine and the apple skins were red, so a pinkish tint seemed normal. When in doubt, trust your nose. Next time, I might just stick with flour and water to make a starter and see how it goes.
Missing a Feeding. My husband and I took a three-day trip in the middle of sourdough feeding and there was a little liquid on the top of the starter. This liquid, I learned, is called "hooch" and it's when the starter is over-active or hasn't been fed properly. It's best to pour it out before feeding if it's a lot of liquid, but as Paul Hollywood says, "stir in some more flour to return it to a thick consistency and leave for a day." I did the Paul Hollywood-way and had to wait a couple of days before it was active again and there were signs or a rise and bubbles. Main tip: If it's a little "hooch", don't pour out and just add more flour before completing a discard step. This can help the sourdough become more sour. If you are making a sweet bread, you might not want the "hooch", so you can choose to drain or keep.
Cleaning or Switching Your Starter Jar. Sourdough has a long life and its bacteria creates compounds that can inhibit mold growth. In fact, soap residue from washing the jar too often can cause the sourdough chemistry to change and be the source of mold by making the sourdough starter unhealthy. I sanitized my jars by boiling water, so no soap. I also switched my storage halfway through as a result of wanting a square glass container and not a jar for ease, but it was not necessary to change. In fact, the sourdough starter it healthier when left in its original home.
Household Temperature. Fun fact: Yeast dies at 60C or 140F, but when you are making your starter and leaving it on the counter, it thrives in warmer climates. The sourdough starter likes it around 75-80F or 22-26C. Well, I made my first sourdough attempt in the winter and even more, we keep of house mo warmer than 60F to accommodate our husky and manage her blowing out (loosing her winter coat). As such, I made it extremely difficult to keep my starter happy. Essentially, I was seeing bubbles but not a rise and fall as is described in "How to Bake". I decided to extend a few of the days in order to ensure that the starter was active. I also kept the sourdough starter near the oven, so anytime I was cooking or baking, the heat would help keep the sourdough at a more ideal temperature. I also wrapped our sourdough starter in a towel to help insulate the heat and prevent too much of the colder air from reaching the glass. One night I also tried placing the starter in the oven with the light on and a few dishes of warm water. After I realized that I had to change the water often, I didn't repeat this trick. Of course, these changes helped, but ideally I would have the perfect house temperature.
Do You HAVE to DISCARD? When I read how many times it was recommended to discard half the starter and add even more flour, I kept seeing dollars signs in my head. Not to mention the amount of waste incurred if you take the word "discard" at face value. I decided to dig into the worldwide web and find recipes to use the discard or other ways to successfully use the discarded sourdough starter and not throw it in the trashcan. Luckily there are a lot of resources out there and I'm sure, even a cookbook or two. Now, the discard is not active enough to make dough rise on its own, so you do need to add baking powder or baking soda to boost the rise. You can make brownies, banana bread or other quick breads, muffins and pancakes. Don't have the time? If you don't have the time to use the discard right away, you can store in the fridge or freeze until needed. And even better, you can keep adding the discard to the first discarded sourdough starter and you don't have to feed it. How's that for time saving? Can you start more sourdough? This was surprising to me. Technically the discard is an offshoot of the mother starter, so it is called levain. You can feed the discard with rye flour while the original sourdough starter is fed with white flour.
Our Review: I did not mind using an apple for this sourdough starter recipe. I actually think it helped the starter become active and combat the colder house temperatures, if I did not have the apple. I am interested in trying a sourdough starter without an apple in the future, though. All in all, the apple smelled nice and you'll see how I fared during the baking process in the next few blog posts! Also, I did learn to keep your mother starter, even if there is very little left. I made two sourdough recipes with this starter and I had maybe 25g of starter left, and I should have saved it and fed it. Alas. I will be starting my sourdough process all over again the next time I want to make sourdough - I guess I will be able to compare my starter efforts and implement some fixes for these last mistakes.
On that note, I hope that you find a recipe book you enjoy, or this one, that I am currently baking my way through. Either way, enjoy baking and nourishing yourself and your family.
All my light and all my love.
Namaste,
Jordan
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