Starting your sourdough adventure
Water, flour, yeasts and lactobacillus bacteria! If you’re starting to navigate the sourdough world, you’ll most likely be confused. There are thousands of recipes that all differ from one another, and getting an idea of how to start can look complicated.
I decided to write my own recipes and tricks to hopefully help with that, as well as to help myself remeber what exactly to do if I haven’t baked in months and forgot what I’m supposed to do.
My recommendation would be to proceed as following:
Familiarize with your starter and see how it reacts to different temperatures and feeds.
Once you feel confident enough, try making a recipe that only requires your starter discard.
Third step for me was making focaccia: it doesn’t require to rise as much as bread so even if you mess up, it will come out fine.
Finally bake bread!
Feeding your starter
Let's assume you have some starter, from a friend, from a baker, you made it yourself...At least once a week you have to 'feed' your starter so that it remains fully charged and active: it’s the bacteria that live in the starter that must be fed. Throw away part of your starter (just spoon it out of the jar as much as half of it) and mix in a ratio of water and flour 1:1. The 'discard', i.e. the starter you’re throwing away, can also be used to bake goods that don’t need to rise (breadsticks, naan, pancakes...).
You can measure the exact quantity but I just eye a spoonful of flour and some warm water, you want to have a final consistency that is neither liquid nor doughy.
Mix it, leave it out of the fridge for an hour covered with something but not sealed. If you’re going to bake with it, go to the next step, ‘leaven’. Otherwise, just stick it back in the fridge, where it will rest until your next feed!
Leaven
Culture made by combining your starter, water and flour that you’ll use to make your bread, it contains all the proper agents for leavening.
Since your starter lives in the fridge, and you don't feed it on a daily basis, it needs to be properly activated. You use your leaven to make bread, not the starter!
Consider that you need about 100g of leaven to prepare one loaf of bread and I usually bake two at a time, which will require 200g of leaven. In the morning take 10g of starter and mix it with 20g flour and 20g water into a small transparent container. Cover it and put it in a warm spot in your house. In the early afternoon, repeat with the same ratios: 40g of your initial 50g you mixed in the morning, 80g of water, 80g of flour (always ratio 1:2).
Mark the level where you mixture is with some tape or by placing an elastic band around the container, so you can see its level and easily measure when it doubled.
In the evening your leaven should have doubled and be ready to use! Check out this recipe to make sourdough focaccia, and this one for sourdough bread, you can use your active levain in both.
Flour
You’re going to want to pick a flour that has a high content in proteins (and so, in gluten). It will be more flexible and absorbe more water. You can see that on the side of your package: proteins should be higher than 10%, ideally 12%, so what in baker’s lingo is defined as a strong flour.
Whole wheat flours require less water. Always better to add less than the recipe demand and adding some more later after seeing how much the water absorbed.
Temperature
Temperature has a huge impact in breadmaking. I’m not telling you to get a thermomether and measure the temperature of your dough, but to learn how it affects your final product and especially timing.
Sourdough bread takes much longer time than baking with commercial yeast, and it can be tricky to make it happen if you have a busy schedule. Knowing some tricks on how to speed up or slow down the process, will help you in better managing your time and baking schedule.
Here are the general rules I follow:
Cold slows down the yeast activity.
You want to pepare your leaven at night so it’s early to use in the morning? Stick it in the fridge so it will take twice as long to rise.
You’re folding your focaccia in the afternoon but are planning to go out for dinner? Cold proof in the fridge and bake it the day after.
You’re going on holiday and won’t be feeding your starter for weeks? It will survive in the fridge for long times, just throw away most of it before feeding it again.
Logically and opposite, warm temperature and humidity favour yeast activity. If you want to activate your starter, keep if out of the fridge after feeding it.
If you need to speed up your leaven, place it next to a heater or in your oven with the light on. This is especially important in the winter, as colder temperature make the process of baking with sourdough much longer.
