Sourdough Experiment Continued – Rye Blend Edition

Since my Sourdough Experiment posts last month, I have spent some time reading about sourdough, and also practicing baking with it.

Part-rye retard-fermented sourdough loaf

The results have been wonderful, and I have found out a lot of very interesting things about sourdough – the chief one among them being that once you get how it works, sourdough bread-baking is not difficult at all, and is actually quite easy to schedule.  The long fermenting times, whether in refrigerator or out, work wonderfully well overnight, which means you do not need to be at home during the day for it to work.  But, I am getting ahead of myself.

One of the first questions I encountered while growing my starter was – is an acetone (“paint thinner” or “cheap nail polish remove”) smell from the starter all right, or is it a sign of something wrong?  I mean, acetone does not exactly smell great, and it is a poison, so it is hard not to wonder if you are doing something terribly wrong and are about to poison yourself and your loved ones.  Searching the net has at first netted me a load of “expert advice” that it’s wrong, bad and it means I should throw my starter away.  Why didn’t I?  Well, this brings us to my friend Sylwia, who comes from Poland, and who is an Nth-generation traditional sourdough home baker, and her words to me, as she handed me a well-travelled Polish starter piece were: “… and you make sure it has a good whiff of acetone, means it is alive, and then proceed…”  So, on I went researching and apparently, those experts who said to throw things away were about as expert as the ones which recommend starting your sourdough starter with commercial yeast – i.e. didn’t know how to find their behind with two hands and a flashlight.  The acetone smell is normal to sourdough starter that hasn’t been fed in the last 12 hours, and it is not actually acetone at all – it is ethyl acetate, which is harmless and produced by the acetic acid bacterial strains normally present in sourdough.  So therefore, my advice is – unless the starter is full of liquid that’s separated, stinks to high heaven, or is turning weird colours, and as long as it rises happily if you take a bit of it and feed it in a clean jar, it’s just fine.

Another interesting discovery I have made is that not all starters produce same-flavoured bread.  As I have mentioned above, my friend Sylwia has brought me a sample of her starter, which according to her has changed hands at least 5 times so far that she knows of (I get to be the at-least-6th proud keeper!).  According to her, the tradition in the part of Poland she comes from (near Warsaw) is that upon moving out on your own, your first sourdough starter should come from a piece given to you by a neighbour.  I guess in my case, one given by a friend counts as well, and now I maintain two retention-sample jars in my fridge, one jar of Sylwia’s Polish-heirloom one, and another of my homegrown Swedish yeast cultivated from local wheat here in Stockholm.  The last bread I’d made was a wheat loaf baked in a pan with a newly-located 12% protein flour and a tablespoon of caraway seeds per 3.5 cup flour batch of dough.  It was the best bread I have ever baked, and one of the finest I’d eaten, and now I am experimenting to see what it was that contributed to it being so wonderful – the pan baking, the caraway or the Polish starter.  I would guess it was a combination of all three, but I do plan to try to combine the factors differently to see which one makes the most impact/difference.  Control group in experimentation is very important!  ;)

As to the bread in the photos, it is a 30% wholemeal rye (finely ground rye flour has been used for better texture) with caraway seeds, which I have done in a single rise with an overnight fridge retardation to extend fermentation time.  Wheat-fed sourdough starter (my own Swedish one) has been used.  This bread was meant to be baked for a Saturday dinner, but I got forgetful and did not feed my yeast until the morning, which meant no sourdough on the day.  As a result, I did not start the sourdough until Sunday daytime, and baked it today (Monday) at mid-morning.  The approximate recipe and instructions follow – you can skip the forgetting and messing up your schedule bits, it works fine without them!

The basic point about scheduling a single-rise sourdough is this -  you need about 12-24 hours for it to rise after the initial knead, rest, knead and shape.

You can start the dough either in the morning, to be raised at room temperature and baked late in evening, or to be put in fridge and baked the next morning.  Or you can start it in evening, stick it in fridge overnight and bake it towards lunchtime the next day after letting it come to room temperature.  Or you can start it in the evening and leave it to rise out of the fridge overnight (provided your weather is not too tropical), and bake it first thing the next morning.  Sourdough is flexible, and since the proofing does not happen too fast, it is not as if missing an hour or two with this will make anything too catastrophic, and certainly not if the dough is left in the refrigerator (what is called a retarded, or cold fermentation – and, as the name implies, is slow and therefore rather controlled).

Double-rise sourdoughs are a little more complex to schedule, and I will be trying them in the future, but in the meantime this works fantastically well (and easily!) for me.

What you need:

• Time:  12 hours to refresh starter, 12-24 hours to ferment, 40 min to preheat oven, 45 min to bake, 1 hour to let cool.
• Optional hand or standing mixer.  I use a hand mixer with dough hooks attachment on low speed.  I imagine that a paddle attachment on a standing mixer (those who own one would know how to set it up), or simple wooden spoon and hand kneading will also work just fine.
• Sourdough starter, fed (refreshed from fridge) at a ratio of 1:2:3 by volume (1 – starter, 2 – water, 3 – flour) in a clean jar.  I used 2 level tablespoons of starter to start with, which makes for 4 tablespoons of water and 6 (level!) tablespoons of flour approximately.
• Other ingredients as follows:

Dough – Ingredients:

• The above starter (all except 2-3 tablespoons for refrigerating for the future bakes)
• 1.5 cup rye flour – I use wholemeal rye, finely ground
• 2 cups high-protein (12%) wheat flour
• 1.5 cups of water (not to be added all at the same time!)
• 1-1.5 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds (if you like them, or fennel, or none at all)

Directions:

• Mix flours, seeds (if using), and salt in a large bowl.
• Add the starter to the bowl and begin mixing with a wooden spoon or dough hooks on handheld mixer (this is what I use, for lazyness’ sake).
• As the starter works into the flour, begin adding water very slowly bit by bit and mixing on lowest speed of mixer until the dough starts to come together.  This should make a fairly stiff dough.  Note: Flours vary in humidity and so does air, so if you are out of water and the dough is too dry, add water a teaspoon at a time and mix thoroughly after each addition.
• Remove dough to a lightly floured surface and knead a few times.  Mixer should have gotten gluten developed fairly well and this is just to smooth the dough.
• Pre-shape into a round by tucking ends under and stretching top of dough into a ball.
• Rest on floured surface and cover with lightly oiled cling film to avoid drying, and allow to rest for 30-45 minutes to relax.
• In meantime, prepare your baking parchment sheet or lightly grease and thoroughly flour a bread pan (whatever you are using).
• Come back to your dough, give it another short and gentle knead (a few seconds), and shape into a round or a loaf for the pan (as per above).
• Gently place onto parchment or into pan, cover with oiled cling film and allow to rise out of the fridge for a couple of hours.
• Wrap in a plastic bag (over the sheet or pan and the cling film), to avoid drying out.
• Place in the refrigerator overnight.
• In the morning, take the bread out of the refrigerator and remove bag – it should have risen to nearly double in bulk.
• Allow to come to room temperature/proof/rise for 1.5 hours or until doubled or more in bulk from original dough size.
• Preheat oven to 220°C.  Remove cling film and slash the loaf to avoid tearing (as you can see, my slashing still needs practice!).
• Set the bread in the middle of the oven, and throw a couple of ice cubes into the oven to create steam.
• Bake at 220°C for 15 minutes, adding 2-3 (small) ice cubes at a time when the last of the water is gone from the bottom of oven.
• Turn the oven down to 190°C and bake additional 20 minutes without ice cubes until bread is medium-brown in colour.
• Using oven mitts, remove bread from oven and from the pan (if using) and tap on the bottom.  It should sound hollow when ready.  (Bread can be returned to the oven without the pan to brown the bottom and finish baking a little if necessary – think 5-10 extra minutes with bottom heat only.)
• Cool on a rack for an hour, or as long as you can stand the smell without cutting/tearing/biting into it.

Proceed with the tearing, biting, etc. as you like!

Yup. Slashing definitely needs more work!

Sourdough Experiment – Day 7 : Update

It also appears that I have been a little too timid in slashing the top, but the bread did not tear too much, and next time I'll know to cut deeper.

Picture, thousand words, yadda yadda!

This morning I started the first bake run of my sourdough experiment with wild yeast.  I fed the starter, gave it a couple of hours to rise, then took a portion, made and kneaded the dough.  I then allowed it to rise for 6 hours before baking it in an oven with a water reservoir in the bottom (for steam).

The colour  of the bread turned out gorgeous, the rise was decent for such a short time, and the flavour is wonderful!  Because of a single rise and the short (for sourdough) rise time, the crumb turned out pretty dense, though in a good way (not stodgy or wet) and while I normally like fluffier (bigger-holed) bread, this is lovely all the same – we ate it a little warm, but I imagine it will make fantastic sandwich or toast bread once it is cooled.

Again, because of the short rise, the flavor was not very sour, but there was a distinct sour note, and a lot of flavor in general -  and it was the right kind of flavor, without a slightest hint of off-taste.  In short, this tastes like bread, the way bread should taste, (and not like a wad of Kleenex the way commercially-made stuff tastes more often than not).

So, overall I pronounce this a success.  T ate his test piece with happy gusto despite having just finished a substantial dinner, and said that the flavour was great and that it was good bread.  The crust is crunchy and cracks in places, and I am definitely making another run this weekend – this time with a full rise time and punch-down for fuller flavor and more sourness, so will start it Friday night for overnight rise #1 and Saturday morning rise #2 to be baked for lunch or thereabouts.

The experiment continues!

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 7

Fast-forward another day, and we are now on Day 7 of the wild yeast sourdough experiment I began last week.

The premise:  there is wild yeast on wheat flour you buy, especially wholegrain.  I have wanted to culture a sourdough starter with local Swedish bacteria and yeast (wheat is Swedish too) the original way – i.e. without adding bakers’ yeast or fruit (yeast growing on fruit surface is, generally speaking, the wrong species of yeast anyway).

The past few days, I’ve been feeding the starter culture white wheat flour rather than wholegrain, as per idea idea that wholegrain has more microbes on it, and once the culture is started, it is better to let it multiply in a cleaner medium than keep introducing new organisms into the mix.  So, to summarize, I started the culture with whole wheat flour, tap water and a few drops of liquid from natural yogurt bucket, and then continuously fed the starter white flour and tap water at 2:1 volume proportion (roughly equivalent to 1:1 weight proportion) twice per day (morning and evening) after discarding half of the starter each time to avoid waste.

I have not sterilized anything after the initial washing-out of jar with boiling water before adding tap water and flour to start.  Again, the theory here is that a healthy growing culture should be able to keep pathogens out on its own – which it appears to be doing fine.  I have heard that some people have mold growing on the sides of the jar of culture, but mine hasn’t as much as shown a spot.  On morning of day 2 of culture, the top layer of the starter looked slightly darker than the rest of it and there was a slight sweet off-smell, but the colour disappeared after the first feeding of day 2, and the scent was gone a day or two after and had not come back, which indicates that the culture is both, healthy and is fighting the competing (pathogenic and otherwise) organisms on its own.  So far so good!

Now, at the end of first week, the starter is doing great.  Both yesterday and today it has risen to about-or-over twice its volume between feedings (check), and the smell is now clean and fresh fermenting sourdough smell, with no off scents (check): it passes the two culture quality tests, and today it is a week old so it also passes the “don’t use starter before it is a week old” instruction.  I have discarded half of it and fed it last night, but this morning I doubled it (instead of discarding half) as I would like to try baking with it once it has risen to twice its volume again (hopefully in a few hours).  The raising and bake-off of bread are obviously the ultimate test – and objective.  Wish me luck!

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 5

… what happened to day four, you ask?

A summer party happened!  It was a sunny and hot-hot-hot Saturday (those happen in  Sweden in the summer!), and we had guests over for an evening of fresh strawberry daiquiries, margaritas, food and fun.  No, I did not take any photos of any of it, I was too busy slurping daiquiries and trying to keep my cooking straight while intoxicated.

In any case, it is not as if a yeast and bacillus culture does that much exciting stuff every day, so I did not feel the need to elaborate on how it was doing.  It was, in fact, doing fine yesterday and the same today, only more so.  I had remembered to feed it twice yesterday as I’d planned, for which I am still congratulating myself, as I believe I was both, tired and not too sober before bed last night.

But, less about drunkenness and more about yeast!  As I mentioned, it was doing fine yesterday and more so today – but what is “fine” for yeast?  Well, the sweet off-smell I’ve mentioned in “Day 3” has disappeared by yesterday (Day 4) morning, and was replaced by a lovely well-remembered from the visits to my favourite bakeries American-style sourdough bread scent.  I’d fed the starter twice yesterday, and this morning awakened to see it had risen well, though not yet quite to twice its volume I am looking for.  The sourdough scent has further deepened and intensified.  So far, so good.

I am not sure I have mentioned this before, but I keep the starter in the not very hot corner of my kitchen, under a vent.  The vent does not provide a draft in the summer, but it does freshen the air a little, and the starter is kept out of direct light of the window, but not very much so (it’s just to the side of it against a well).  The temperature in the kitchen (unless I am cooking) is a comfortable +20°C +/- 3 degrees between day and night, and the starter appears to like it.

Five days done, minimum of two days to go before baking according to starter-maturing instructions, though as mentioned before, the plan is to give it until next Friday to mature and grow.  I have been discarding half of the starter per feeding the past few days, but I will start building up its volume starting Thursday, so that by Friday morning I will have enough to scoop it out and raise bread with it.

Now that it began to both, rise properly between feedings and smell oh-so-yummily like a bakery, I am getting really impatient.  But then, patience is a virtue that I never had in good supply.

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 3

Day three.

After waking up properly (that’s at least 2 mugs of coffee!), I looked in on the starter to see much more activity than yesterday.

Look at all the bubbles!

It has apparently risen and fallen overnight, just as it is supposed to, by about 1/3 again of its volume.  According to all my sources, this is a good sign, though what I am shooting for is at least doubling in size after feeding before I can attempt to leaven bread with it.

The smell was also far stronger today, both sour and with a pungently sweet edge that I am not entirely sure I like.  Based on my reading, it may well go away, as apparently starter tends to smell in a variety of weird ways (depending on what grows in it initially) in the first days of its life.  Interestingly, it smelled better after being stirred (more like sourdough bread and less sweet), which makes me wonder if there was some surface activity by another microorganism (other than the desired yeast and lactobacilli) which is causing it, but I do not have a full lab at home to take samples for identification (although I do have my microbiology book in storage around here somewhere).  In any case, ideally the yeast-and-lactobacilli symbiosis will have killed off any other critters in the starter by the end of the week.

It should be noted that my fears of the starter smelling up the kitchen like spoiled milk or other food-gone-off have not come to pass.  It smells if I stick nose in it, but not of something outright gone-off in a bad way, and it certainly does not smell enough to notice much around the kitchen.  I can live with the faint scent for a few days, and the fact that it can be then frozen or refrigerated in a closed container alleviates my worries about the impracticality of keeping a live starter in a modern kitchen.

In other word, so far so good.  Three days down, and I am getting positively impatient.  I think it’s been many years since I have had properly-raised sourdough bread.  In fact, I think it must have been back in the USA, either at one of those natural-food supermarket’s bakery, or possibly at Saint Louis Bread Company (apparently now it’s called Panera Bread).  It’s not that there isn’t good properly-raised sourdough bread in Stockholm (though if there is any in the UK, it’s hiding rather well!), but that I haven’t gone to look for it in Sweden yet.  I may, yet – if not for the bread, should this experiment succeed, then at the very least for recipe ideas.

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 2

Yesterday I decided to try to develop my own sourdough starter.  I’ve gone and asked my sourdough-baking friends questions, read around on the internet (none of my cookbooks gave any advice, but then I’d not bought them for bread-baking at all), and gave it some thought.  Then I got a clean jar, mixed up roughly 2 parts wheat flour to 1 part tap water, covered it lightly and left it on my kitchen counter.

Oh right, forgot to mention this before – I have also added a drop of the liquid collected on top of my natural yogurt in its bucket, to provide a good proven strain of lactobacillus, in case there weren’t any desirable ones around in the flour, water or on my utensils used to mix the starter.

This morning the starter did not appear to do much of anything, but I dutifully mixed and fed it and left it alone all day again.  And lo and behold, by the end of 24 hours since the start of the experiment I have bubbling throughout the starter and a minimal rise.  It is also beginning to smell less like wet flour and more sweet and yeasty, a slightly pungent and generally pleasant sort of smell.  Apparently there is some sort (hopefully right sort!) of fermentation taking place, so I will feed it again in a little while to keep it happy overnight.

In the process of reading about how to make real sourdough, I have learned several things, the most notable one being that, apparently, most “sourdough” cookbook writers can’t tell find their behind with two hands and a flashlight.  Not naming any names here (that’d be just uncivilized, not to mention unnecessary), but if your cookbook suggests using commercial bakers’ yeast for starting your sourdough starter, it’s one of the aforementioned cases.  And here’s why:

Sourdough starter aka natural leaven is an interesting exercise in home microbiology.  Of course, so is every fermentation process.  Wait, what?  Yes, indeed – all alcoholic beverages, all yeasted breads and all fermented dairy foods such as some cheeses, yogurts and the like all make use of microorganisms, be it lactobacillus in dairy cultures or yeast, or the combination of the two which is the alchemist’s stone of sourdough baking.  In the case of sourdough starter, it is apparently a combination of acid-resistant yeast strain such as Saccharomyces exiguus (most of yeasts are not such, notably including bakers’ yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and a lactobacillus of some sort, which coexist in the acid environment maintained by the lactobacillus, and kill off any other microorganisms in the medium (competitive critters that the single-celled organisms are!), thus making it not “spoil” in uncontrolled fashion (i.e. not grow random mold or the wrong – and likely unhealthy – bacteria).

So bottom line there is that you want to let whatever yeast is on the flour to begin with fight it out with whatever other yeasts are there, and let the one most adapted to the acidic environment win eventually.  Dumping a clump of bakers’ yeast in the starter to begin the process only muddles up the situation, as it may grow well for one or two days, and then die off because of lactobacillus proliferation.  And in the meantime thanks to its quantity and the resulting head start it got, it’d outcompeted all those other yeasts that we want to be in the running.  Not a smart idea in my view.

Anyhow, the point of the above is that one should not start a sourdough starter with the yeast sold for quick-fermenting breads, and also explains why it is not a good idea to use a starter that has not yet stabilized (read: in which the desired organisms have not yet had time to bloodily murder all competitors whom we don’t want there anyway).

One day down, nine to go till the first test baking.  The excitement of kitchen-sink (literally!) biology never ends!

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 1

I have been thinking about making sourdough bread for years.  Or well, not literally for years on end, but the thought came and went whenever I wanted nice summer food, and picnic fare or panzanella, or just antipasti platters with bread came to mind, and I wondered if I could manage to make my own sourdough bread.  But then I inevitably would end up thinking that it was too messy, too complicated, and took too much effort and time, and give up on the idea.

The only thing which was different this summer was having more time to rest, in a long while – meaning that I have had enough sleep for the first time in some years, and thus, brimming with excess energy, I have given my kitchen a thorough counter-tidy and then, in a burst of more excess energy yet, and with a thought of a homemade sourdough bread in mind, I have decided to try capturing wild local yeast for the experiment.

Reading this website and talking to a friend whose mother tends to keep sourdough starter at home, yielded several important pieces of wisdom about starting my own starter (see further below).  Not all the information I found in the course of hours of reading at aforementioned site, Sourdough Home, will get mentioned in this post.  I imagine not all of it will even necessarily make it to the follow-up posts I plan to do for this experiment – and this is what it is, for I plan to figure out how easy and convenient it really is to bake sourdough-starter bread in one’s own kitchen, and how good the results are going to be.

As per advice and reading above, here’s the short list of ideas on which I base the start of my experiment:

• The starter should be started using about equal (by weight) or 1 to 2 part (by volume) measures of water and flour respectively.
• Starting with whole grain flour can give more interesting results due to natural microorganisms present on the bran.
• It is not needed, nor is it useful to add baker’s yeast to the mixture, and same goes for chopped fruit, since the yeast I want is the one present either in my kitchen or the one which comes with the flour itself.

So, without further ado, I’ve sterilized a 1.5L jar with boiling water, put in about 2/3 dl of Graham flour and 1/3 dl white flour, and 1/2 dl water, whisked it all a bit to combine, scraped edges down into the mix, covered with a bit of cling film and left it.  Apparently it is to be checked every 12 hours, and if actively bubbling, half is to be discarded and fed with same amounts of flour and water as above.  And then, obviously, allowed to double and fed double amounts a couple of days before I plan to bake with it.

So far, it’s supremely easy.  Obviously, there is still a week at minimum to go before I will attempt to make bread – as the advice is given, there is no way the starter will be mature enough before the week is over.  So I am shooting for weekend after next, giving myself 9-11 days.  I will post some updates with the progress as I go along, though I doubt anything interesting will happen daily – I’d be both, surprised and likely worried if it does!

And also, no picture so far mostly because an unstarted just-mixed starter is simply a very boring thing to look at.  Perhaps it’ll become more interesting as times goes by and it comes alive – or so I hope, anyhow!