Sourdough: An Introduction
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Most breads and other baked goods include leavening to make them "rise", or fill with gas bubbles so they will be light and tender. The main leavening agents these days are baking powder and two different kinds of yeast. I'm not concerned here with baking powder. Since I am the only kid on my block with a high school diploma from East Anchorage High School in Anchorage, Alaska, I have a faint and far-away claim to the title "sour-dough", and therefore I will disdain and ignore baking powder.
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Most yeast used today is "tame" yeast, or in other words, commercially-produced yeast from carefully selected, carefully bred, and carefully controlled strains. About the time of the Civil War, companies began to develop and sell these strains of tame yeast. They gave more consistent, predictable results than wild yeast, which made them popular with bakeries. They also gave the bread a milder flavor, reducing or eliminating the sourness imparted by most wild yeasts. And finally, they were less trouble to deal with than a sourdough containing wild yeast, and this ensured their popularity with the general public.
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A dedicated minority of bakers, however, still uses wild yeast, in the form of sourdough, for some or all of their bread making. I am one of those bakers. Also, I am a sourdough purist. I can explain that best with a brief summary of the history of yeast and humanity.
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Yeast spores are everywhere, more or less. This "wild yeast" was once the only yeast used in bread baking. It was quite easy to capture some wild yeast and bake bread: you simply mixed up a batter of flour and water and let it sit. Yeast and lactobacteria from the flour and from the air would colonize your batter. Soon, it would begin to ferment and bubble. This was your "sour dough". Sometimes it would smell really ghastly and you would throw it out. Sometimes it merely smelled horrible, and you would use it in baking. (Later, I'll mention something you can do when using really raunchy sourdough.)
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If you were especially pleased with the wild yeast you had captured - maybe it just smelled slightly horrible - you might preserve the strain by using only a part of your sour dough for baking bread. The rest you would "feed" with more flour and water and then set aside for the next time you baked.
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To make your bread, you added more flour and water (and usually some salt) to your sour dough, kneaded the result, let it rise, and baked it. Leavened bread was made this way for millennia.
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Today, a lot of concoctions are called "sourdough"; some of them are even made with commercial yeast. Some bread is baked with sourdough for flavor and commercial yeast for leavening. And bread is sometimes baked with something other than sourdough that gives it the flavor of sourdough bread. Or sourdough bakers buy a starter. However, I am a purist, as I said. That means that when I am baking sourdough bread, I do it the old-fashioned way: I use a sourdough I created myself by capturing a wild yeast, and I don't add anything to it except flour, water, and salt.
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Capturing the Wily Wild Yeast
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Starting your own sourdough is quite easy. It is actually two cultures in a slurry of flour and water. There is a yeast colony in there, to be sure, but there is also a colony of lactobacilli. These two colonies are symbiotic and support each other once they are established. So ... time to begin.
Go buy some whole grain rye flour, some bottled water, and a glass container with a close-fitting but not airtight lid. Wash the container well and dry it thoroughly. Vigorously stir up a batter consisting of half a cup of rye flour and half a cup of bottled water, put the batter in your glass container, put the container in a warm spot, and wait. The batter will start to ferment fairly quickly, and you have created a sourdough. It's that easy. There are, as I said, yeast spores anywhere you are likely to be, and there are even spores clinging to the flour granules. There are lactobacilli everywhere, too. These free-living microorganisms are all you need to start a sourdough culture.
Once you've created it, though, you will need to care for it.
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The Care and Feeding of a Sourdough in Captivity
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A new sourdough "starter" such as the one you just created can smell pretty ghastly. I don't pay any attention to the smell of a new starter, since I know it will be nasty. Be patient. I have found that even very "barfy"-smelling sourdoughs mellow out after a few days, after the yeast and the lactobacilli stabilize their relationship. My primary sourdough, the one I use most often, smells fairly yeasty now and makes tasty, mild bread, but it started out smelling terrible.
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Your new sourdough is young and needs special care for the first few days. Taking care of it will be easy once you realize what it is you actually have. You have a flour and water mixture that is providing a home and a food supply for symbiotic colonies of yeast and lactobacilli. To keep your little community healthy, simply feed it and keep it away from excessive heat and metal containers. (The lactobacilli give off acid. This acid protects the bacilli and the yeast from invaders, but it also reacts with metal containers, tarnishing the container and contaminating the sourdough with harmful metal compounds.)
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While your sourdough is young, you should feed it every 24 hours. Here is a good routine for that chore:
- Pour the sourdough into a clean glass or plastic bowl.
- Thoroughly wash and dry the glass container that houses your sourdough.
- Discard half of your sourdough.
- Mix a half-cup of flour and a half-cup of bottled water into your remaining sourdough. Blend well.
- Return your sourdough to its glass container.
- Return the container to its warm spot.
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This feeding routine provides a renewed food supply for your culture and reduces your population of "yeasties and beasties" by discarding half your sourdough. Reducing the population assures that there is plenty of food available for the remaining microorganisms.
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For the first three or four feedings, you probably should continue to use whole grain rye flour to feed your sourdough. Rye is good for beginning a sourdough because it contains a lot of sugar that the yeast can get to easily. After a few feedings, however, you may wish to begin feeding with an increasing proportion of another flour - bread flour, for example, or whole wheat flour - since rye will flavor and darken your bread. If you don't want that, start introducing another flour.
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After three or four feedings, you should have a robust sourdough that begins getting bubbly fairly quickly after each feeding. If not, continue feeding for two or three more days. If it still doesn't seem active, you probably should start the process over again. I've had that happen. The culture just never seems to get on its feet.
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If your sourdough is vigorous, it's time to move it from its warm spot to the refrigerator, and to start feeding it either weekly or after every use. Note, however, that if your sourdough still smells nasty after this long, you may have captured a bad yeast. You have the option of starting over, whether the colony is robust or not, or of trying it out in a loaf of bread. See the notes below for a comment on using really raunchy sourdough starter.
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A Word on Hooch
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"Hooch" is the liquid that forms on the surface of a sourdough, especially an established sourdough kept in a refrigerator. This is harmless stuff. Just stir it back into your sourdough before each use or feeding.
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Baking with Sourdough
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To make simple sourdough bread, follow these steps:
- Remove your starter from your refrigerator. Stir the hooch back into it. If you have time, let it sit and warm up before you proceed.
- Mix up a batter of one cup of bread flour and one cup of room-temperature or lukewarm - not hot! - bottled water, then add one half cup of your sourdough starter. Blend thoroughly. This creates what sourdough bakers call a "sponge". Now feed your remaining sourdough and return it to the 'fridge.
- Let your sponge sit in a warm spot until it gets bubbly. Sourdough bakers call this process "proofing", which just means fermenting. Don't let it proof excessively long - the yeast will deplete this new food supply and start to die off - but I've left a sponge proofing overnight and still made good bread with it.
- When the sponge is nice and bubbly, add 4 ½ cups bread flour, 1 cup bottled water, and 2 teaspoons salt to it. Sifting the flour is probably a good idea, but I don't always bother. Mix these ingredients thoroughly.
- Flours differ in their absorbency, so your dough may need adjusting. If necessary, add small amounts of flour (if the dough is too wet) or water (if it's too dry) to get your dough to the right consistency. Judging the "right consistency" is a skill you will have to learn by experience; it is difficult to describe the feel and consistency of a good dough. The ball of dough is soft, but you can pick it up without tearing it, and it won't seem intent on oozing out of your hand at the first opportunity.
- Knead your dough on a floured surface. Many recipes call for 10 minutes or so of kneading, but I don't knead that long. Maybe I should, but I'm usually content with two or three minutes.
- Form the dough into a ball and put it in an oiled or greased bowl. Roll it around to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with a towel and set it in a warm spot. Let the dough rise to double its original size. This will probably take at least two hours; it could take considerably longer. Sourdough bread usually rises more slowly than bread made with commercial yeast. (On occasion, I'll proof a sponge overnight, mix up my dough in the morning, let it rise while I'm at work, and finish the bread that evening. Sourdough baking is not for the impatient.)
- When your dough has risen, remove it from the bowl, knead it lightly, and divide it into two equal portions. Form each half into roughly loaf shape. Drop these into greased medium loaf pans, cover them with a towel, and set them in a warm spot to rise a little. I generally don't wait for them to double in size again, but that's one option.
- Put the loaves into a cold oven. Set the oven to 375 degrees and bake your bread for about 50 minutes. Watch your bread, and learn to thump the tops of the loaves. If the tops are firm and starting to brown, and the loaf sounds hollow when thumped, it's done.
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Some Notes
- If I seem a bit casual in my bread-making, it's because I am. If I succeed in baking good-tasting bread the old-fashioned way, I am content; every loaf does not have to be perfect, and every loaf does not have to be identical to every other loaf. Besides, the "Sour-doughs" Jack London wrote about lived in harsh conditions, worked long hours, and occasionally found themselves "stampeding" in the night after getting word of a gold strike somewhere. I suspect they sometimes baked their bread fairly casually, too.
- Municipal water supplies are treated with either "free chlorine" or chloroamine. Free chlorine will dissipate if the water is left standing, or it can be boiled off. Chloroamine does not dissipate and does not boil off. If you know for sure that free chlorine is used to treat your water, you can use tap water that you've boiled or left standing in an open container for an hour or so. Otherwise, you should use bottled water for creating and nurturing your sourdough and for baking with it, since chloroamine is designed to kill just the sort of little critters you are trying to grow.
- The acids generated by lactobacilli will tarnish metal containers and introduce metallic compounds into your sourdough, so use glass or plastic containers. On the other hand, stainless steel spoons are fine for stirring and mixing. They aren't in contact with the starter acids for very long, and stainless steel is pretty stable. If you can find plastic utensils that are sturdy enough, use them, but remember that bread dough is fairly stiff stuff. Many people will recommend wooden spoons, but I recommend against them. I believe they killed one of my sourdough cultures. I think the porous wood retained dishwasher detergent - which is powerful stuff - and transferred it to my culture, killing it.
- Your sourdough bread will have a firmer crust and chewier "crumb" than store-bought, commercial yeast bread. It won't necessarily rise to match the loaf with the bulbous top you see in the grocery store. But it will have a great flavor, and it will be entirely your own. There are so many variables in creating, nurturing, and using your own sourdough that you can be sure your bread is unique in all the world.
- Some evidence suggests that sourdough bread is more nutritious and more easily digested than commercially-produced bread. Mrs. Baird probably doesn't agree, though.
- Sourdough bread is supposed to have a tougher crust than "normal" bread. To help the crust form correctly, fill an ovenproof bowl with water, place it on the floor of your cold oven, and leave it there while you do your baking. This produces enough humidity to do the trick.
- Your oven, either with the light on or with just the pilot light (if your oven has one), is about ideal as the "warm spot" you need for letting bread dough rise or letting your sourdough starter mature. Just don't forget it's there and turn your oven on without removing it!
- When you are confident of your skills, you can begin making your dough a bit stiffer. When it has risen, knead it lightly and form it into somewhat flattened balls. After letting them rise again - if you choose to do so - cut crosshatch patterns in the tops and bake them on a baking stone. This will create "real" sourdough loaves such as the one pictured at the top of this page. (I don't do it, but I'm told that brushing the tops with cold water once or twice as they bake will give the loaves a glaze.)
- If your starter is a bit raunchy - you kept it, even though it didn't mellow all that much from it's stinky beginning - and if you aren't a bull-headed purist like me, you can add a teaspoon or two of baking soda to your bread dough - not to your starter - to tone down the sourness.
- I found out that the oven on my gas range was not well-calibrated. When I set it to 375 degrees, it actually heated up to almost 450 degrees. The knob could be adjusted a little, but not enough, so I still have to set the oven to 350 degrees if I want to bake at 375 degrees. You might want to invest the $5 or so it will cost to buy an oven thermometer, to check your cooking temperature.
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A Note for the Discerning Reader
You may be asking why, if I'm such a purist, I don't mill my own flour for baking my sourdough bread. Good question. Freshly ground flour is, they say, tastier and healthier than processed flour. But there are some drawbacks to the idea:
- A good hand-cranked grain mill for grinding wheat "berries" (as the wheat grains are called) will cost at least $150. Add a motor and some basic options to allow grinding a variety of other grains and seeds, and you have a $350+ gadget that takes up about as much room as a trash compactor and that has to be stored somewhere when not in use. So far, I just haven't felt that the cost and hassle are justified.
- Wheat berries have an incredible shelf life, but fresh, unprocessed flour has components that don't last very long once they are exposed to the air. The oils turn rancid and the proteins start breaking down. The flour quickly turns bitter and makes lousy bread. So if you want to make your own flour, it almost has to be part of the bread-making process. You can't expect good results if you mill a month's supply of flour and use it at your convenience.
- I haven't wanted to deal with the issues of finding a source for wheat and of arranging a dry, insect-proof place of sufficient size to store it until I'm ready it grind it.
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Where From Here?
Hopefully, you will now start experimenting.
In summary, sourdough bread baking consists of innoculating a part of your flour and water (the sponge) with your yeast-and-lactobacilli culture (the starter), then letting the microorganisms grow and reproduce (proof) until you have enough of them to leaven your bread, whereupon you add the rest of the flour and water and some salt. You prepare the dough by kneading it and letting it rise, then you bake it.
Once you succeed in baking a good loaf of sourdough bread, you should feel confident enough to take any recipe that calls for flour, water, and yeast and modify it to use sourdough. Just make up a sponge with part of the flour and water called for in the recipe, add some of your starter, and let it sit until it gets bubbly. Then just follow the recipe, using the remaining flour and water and adding your sponge when the recipe calls for yeast. The only other change you may need to make is allowing more time for the dough to rise if the recipe calls for that.
Don't forget that there are any number of baking-powder recipes, too, that a tried and true Sour-dough such as you can at least try.
Go experiment, and good luck!
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