Sourdough 2011

I have returned from nursing my mom after knee replacement surgery (she is fine and back to her old life, thanks) and the kids are all back in school, Yeah!! Time to renew my sourdough efforts.
I blended a new batch of starter 2 1/2 weeks ago and I have used it once for bread and once for blueberry muffins. I seriously over rose the bread twice so by the time I got around to baking it didn't rise well and was rather dense. The good news is that it had no bitter flavor and had a acceptable sour tang. I am now working on determining the ratio of starter to flour needed to allow the bread a long fermentation (at least 7 hours total to neutralize phytic acid and enhance nutrient content) without over proofing. This is the plan.

I added about 3/4 C. starter to 4 C. warm water to my Bosch mixing bowl at 8 a.m.. Then I added 8 C. of freshly ground Kamut flour to this mixture and blended it well. I usually add closer to 11 C. flour to my yeasted bread but decided to leave the dough rather wet since Kamut tends to absorb more liquid than other flours and I have other ingredient to add after the dough has proofed for at least 5 hours. After 5 hours (or maybe sooner if need be) I will add the remainder of the ingredients for Honey Wheat Bread and knead the dough for 10 minutes with the Bosch. I will let it rise in the bowl for the time it takes to double and then turn the mixer on again to punch it down and then shape the dough into loaves to rise before baking.

Sourdough experiment continues

I have been feeding my starter for a couple of weeks and reading websites on the subject. I have discovered that it takes about 3 weeks to really develope a good starter feeding it twice a day. I have to make a trip to care for my mom after her knee surgery so I won't be around to baby my current starter. I will try and bake bread with it one more time before I leave just to see if the bread has a less bitter flavor since I stopped feeding it with rye (which may have been rancid to start hence the bitter flavor) and started feeding it with unbleached, white, all-purpose flour.
I have read on several websites that a growing starter needs to be feed twice a day for 3 weeks. Each feeding consists of 1/4 c water and 3/8ths cup of wheat flour, then add about a cup of the growing starter discarding the remainder. I cover mine with cheese cloth but one web site used plastic wrap. Check out this website, I really liked it. It is gnowfglins.com. It is a teaching website and asks people who use it to pay what they can afford to send. I think it is worth using. The site has excellent videos demonstrating the process of starting a starter.

First sourdough loaves

The loaves of bread made on Sunday rose beautifully. The flavor however was not so great. The bread had a sour flavor, but also a bitter aftertaste. I was using rye flour that I had in the freezer and maybe it was rancid. Rye flour will go bad faster than white flour. I have decided to continue to feed the starter for another week with unbleached white flour and see if the bitter taste goes away. If it doesn't improve I may start the culture over with fresher flour. My son Tom and I are the only people in the family who ate the bread. It didn't bother Tom, although he thought it tasted weird. On the other hand, I had some digestive issues that might be related to the starter since I ate some of the bread warm and I know that yeast will stay active in bread for a day.

Mixing and Baking sourdough bread

It is now Sunday afternoon. This morning I removed the flour, water, starter mixture from the basement and set it upstairs in the kitchen to warm up a bit. At 10 a.m. I added 2 tsp. Real Salt, 1/3 Cup melted butter and 1/4 cup of honey to my Bosch Universal mixer and poured the starter mixture in with it. After adding one cup of whole grain, white, winter wheat flour to the bowl, just to create some friction, I turned on the mixer and set the timer for 10 minutes. For the first couple minutes I added additional flour until the dough cleaned the sides of the bowl and then I just let the Bosch do my kneading. After 10 minutes I turned off the machine and left for church not knowing how risen the dough would be when I got home.

Once home I wet my pointer finger and poked the dough. The dough sighed and collapsed a bit. Darn! Over Risen. Don't know now if it will rise properly in my bread pans but I am preheating the oven and the shaped dough is covered with a damp towel and rising in the pans. Only time will tell. Will it even taste good? Smelled pretty bad. I read on one sourdough website called Sourdough Home, that the good bacteria eventually overwhelms the bad bacteria and the starter will improve over time. It also recommended using processed white flour to feed the starter because the yeast in the starter comes in part from the grains themselves. By using dead white flour you are not introducing any new varieties of yeast that might compromise the starter. Not sure I really care at this point because I don't have enough experience to know what is good or bad in a starter.

I am going to bake this bread in the same way that I bake my Honey Wheat bread as far as timing and temperature goes. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Sourdough Starter

I have been fermenting freshly ground rye flour in water for a week now in a cheese cloth covered bowl. I started with a 1 Cup of rye and a 1 cup of water that I let sit out on the counter over night so the chlorine could gas off. The recipe called for filtered water, but this is what I have available. Everyday for a week now I removed 1/2 cup of starter and then fed the remaining mixer 1/2 cup of rye and 1/2 cup of water. If the bowl looked crusty I transferred the mixture to a fresh glass bowl. The starter is now bubbly, smelly, sour and somewhat bitter tasting. Ready to try making bread now. Tonight I will add 1/2 cup of starter to 4 cups of wheat flour and 2 cups of water. I want it to ferment nice and slow so I am going to put it in the basement closet where the temperature is about 63 degrees F right now. In the morning I plan to add the remaining ingredients and let ferment upstairs while we are at church. We will see what kind of science experiment we come home to after church. I will publish the process when I have achieved success!

French Toast in a Bowl

What do you do with bread that is a bit dry or crusts that your kids won't eat. You make French Toast in a Bowl!

First grease a microwave safe bowl with a finger full of butter. Crack in 1 egg and add milk in the quantity of about 1/2 the volume of the egg. Just eyeball it. Whip the egg and the milk together with a fork. Crumble in about one slice of bread or the equivalent amount in rolls, hamburger buns or odd pieces. Mix in the bread with a fork so that it is all uniformly moist. If you have a bit to much liquid in your bowl and don't want to add more bread push the mixture toward the sides of the bowl so there is a doughnut hole in the middle. It will fill in with cooked egg, otherwise it will just be soggy bread. Microwave the mixture in the bowl for 1 minute and 25 seconds. This is approximate, you can change it up or down by a couple of seconds. Take the bowl out of the microwave, slice the results right in the bowl, add butter and syrup and eat up! It is so easy a kid could do it.
For those of you who have sworn off microwaves throw the same mixture into a fry pan with some butter and cook until firm. Flip the pile over and cook the other side. It will still taste the same but won't be as convenient. You could try baking the mixture. I haven't tried this but it should work.

See the article that mentions me in the Denver Post

Last Monday, I was mentioned in the Denver Post. See it here.

The recipes mentioned there are not mine. My recipes are still here in the Better Bread Blog.