Cooking: Sourdough Bread

A good friend of mine got me into trying to make bread (Thanks Patrick!).  He told me that as he read about bread making he saw that it is an art not a science.  I understand science, but I am a poor artist.  So my first attempt at making sourdough bread was not a piece of art, but it sure was good to eat.

Sourdough bread making in general has two steps.  The first is to make and "feed" a sourdough starter.  After about a week or more of feeding the starter you can complete the second step of actually making the bread.

There are all kinds of recipes out there.  Like I say, it is an art and so everyone has little difference in the way they do it.  The King Arthur brand website has a lot of resources and I used a lot of info from their site. Check it out for even more resources. 

1.  The Sourdough Starter

There are a few ways to get a starter.  The starter basically consists of flour, water and yeast.  There are two ways to get the yeast.  The first way is to stir 1 cup of flour and and 1 cup of lukewarm water together in a bowl.  Then just let it sit for a day.  Every day, take one cup of the "starter," one cup of new unbleached all purpose flour, and one cup of  warm water and mix them together.  There is yeast everywhere in the environment, so over time natural "wild" yeast is finding its way into the starter and the population will slowly grow.  The other way is when you make your starter from scratch you will add one cup of flour, one cup of lukewarm water, and some yeast from the store.   This will go ahead and inoculate your starter and make things progress a little faster.  In both cases you need to feed your starter which mean each day you are taking one cup of the starter, one cup of flour, and one cup of water and mixing them together.  This also means that each day you have almost 2 cups of old starter you are throwing away.  This brings us to the third way to get a starter going.  Instead of throwing the old starter away, you can give it to someone else and then they have a starter to begin feeding each day.  There are also recipes for the discards like pretzels if you feel bad about wasting.  No matter how you get a starter going you should feed it each day, but pay attention to the temperature which is important to yeast.  The location of the starter should be at least 72 F or above, with 75-85 F ideal.  You can find warm spots in the house like on top of stove that was just used or beside an appliance that might give off heat.

Regardless of how you get your starter you are "feeding" it more flour and water each day to give it a fresh food supply to continue to grow and nourish the yeast population.  Typically you will do this at least a week, but it is ready to use a bread recipe when you see lots of bubbles, it starts to get thicker, and it seems like it has gained some volume.  The longer you let it go and more mature it gets then then more "sour" it becomes.  So you influence the taste of the bread by the age and yeast population of your starter.  

2.  Making the bread

Once you have a starter that is showing good activity you are ready to make some bread.  There are so many recipes.  I chose to use a recipe from the King Arthur site.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/PrintRecipe?RID=91&radio=1

After adding all the ingredients, you will get a nice dough ball,

Just let the dough ball sit in a bowl for about a couple hours in a warm place to rise.

Once the dough rises, it can be carefully separated into two loaves and placed on a baking sheet.  Lightly cover the two loaves and let them rise for another hour or so until they have risen as well.

Then it is just a matter of baking the bread in the oven.  Next time I will shape the loaves a little higher so i get bigger pieces of bread when I cut it.  However the bread was really good.

The rustic was good, but I tried a second recipe the next day that as sweeter.  It contains one of my favorite ingriedients, sugar.   See below for that one.  The ingredients, cooking time, and steps vary slightly and you finish it off by brushing it with melted butter, but the overall concept is the same as the rustic recipe.   I think this is the recipe I will stick with for awhile.   It is delicious.   

 This is the fun of bread making; changes in just a few different ingridients gets you a very different tasting bread.   If you have other favorite bread recipes then be sure to share them!

http://www.food.com/recipe/light-almost-airy-sourdough-bread-322348