I’ve had some requests for ‘more about bread’ so I’m going to try and describe the whole process. We make bread with sourdough as the leaven. A sourdough culture is a symbiotic relationship between a wild yeast and a bacteria, working together to consume the nutrition in grain and prevent colonization by competing yeasts and/or bacteria. If you go to a real bread baker with a clean Mason jar they’ll almost always give you some starter, or they can be purchased from http://www.sourdo.com (heartily recommended). One’s starter is a constantly fluctuating population and must be managed to create the right conditions to make bread. I keep the culture in a wide mouth one quart jar in the fridge. It has about three cups in it, half water, half flour. It is refreshed every time I bake and then put in the fridge to slow it’s activity. After a week it will have reached it’s population peak, consumed almost all of the nutrients in the flour and subsided, leaving 1/2 cm of liquid on top. Before bed I discard two thirds of this and stir in a cup of water and a generous cup of flour, vigorous stirring to whip some air into it. Back to the fridge overnight. Now the yeasts, given air and fresh food, start reproducing rapidly. By morning it will be expanded and full of bubbles but not yet resettled. One wants to throw it at the dough when it is on the way up, still creating new yeast population.
In the morning I mix a cup and 1/2 to two cups of the starter with 3 cups of water and 9 of flour, including whatever whole grains or adjuncts are going in. Lately I like a generous cup of rye flour for flavor and texture. Also a tablespoon of sea salt. This dough is kneaded for at least ten minutes until well conditioned. In a large bowl I toss the ball of dough in 2T of olive oil. Cover well with plastic wrap in put in a warm place, proofing box or gas oven with a pilot (that’s what I have and the usual temp is 100F). In three hours it will have more than doubled. Once again you want to catch it on the way up, before it subsides.
I form it into three large loaves. These get spread into long flats and are slapped against the counter, then folded to reform a loaf. I usually do this twice, stretching in the same direction to develop texture and create a protein skin that will contain the CO2 given off by the yeast in the second rise and constrict the rising into a round loaf. The loaves are placed in bread pans painted lightly with olive oil, covered with plastic wrap or the more traditional damp towel, and given another one and a half to two hours in the proofing box. I make a one cm. slice down the center of the loaves and bake for 10 minutes at 420F and 30 to 50 at 320F.
Our current culture is a San Francisco type and benefits from the warmth and speed of the above method. In the past we’ve used a French levain culture with very different characteristics that really enjoyed a long cool rise. In these symbiotic relationships the yeasts multiply first and when enough of them are digesting they change the chemistry of the mix and the bacteria multiply, creating the ’sour’ part of the flavor profile. The longer the reaction time, the less the lift and the more the sour. Whatever culture you use you will find it’s rate of reaction and build your own routine around it. Buen provecho!
