About the bread

It's been a bad few weeks for bread. For some reason the last three weekends have produced really dodgy loaves, weirdly rubbery and a bit moist, heavy on the bottom and ridiculously over-aerated at the top. Not nice at all - one particularly bad one wasn't even good enough for toast.

So, remedial action. I'd noticed that the dough, which is normally quite loose in this recipe, had been getting more and more liquid, up to the point where it was really more of a batter, and was behaving a bit like crumpet batter at that. So towards the end of last week, I woke my starter up, poured off some of the goopy liquid that was collecting on the top, and fed it with a much more flour-heavy feed than usual. One more chunky feed later and the weekend's baking could start. Again, I added a bit more flour than the recipe demanded.

The most important thing I did was to use the right amount of starter in the initial rise. I'd been using double the amount, which was probably the root of my problems.

The result? We're back in the game. A great, fluffy, flavoursome loaf this time, this one almost too good for toast. It did get a bit lively during the second prove, as the following will show:


The dough was pretty powerful - aggressive, one might almost say. Rumours of my starter's demise are greatly exaggerated :)

Second sourdough batch

Before I begin, let me put your mind at ease - although I do intend to bake a couple of sourdough loaves every weekend, I'm not going to blog about each of them in turn. I thought I'd mention this week's as we're still in the early days of the process and the first one of this batch turned out a little odd.

I bought a new loaf tin this week, so I can bake two at once, instead of having to spend literally the whole weekend with something either baking or proving. This one's actually a little slimmer than the other, so it's producing a taller loaf. I've noticed that the base of this loaf turned out completely solid for about a centimetre up, which I'm putting down to there being too much dough in the tin - it would've risen past the top during the second prove if there hadn't been a teatowel covering it. I'm thinking that the weight of the dough on top flattened out the base a bit during this prove, possibly - the top was also unusually flat, so it didn't seem to rise much in the oven.

The texture on the whole is still looking good; getting more open still, and still nicely elastic. I'm a bit concerned about what seems to be a slightly moist, rubbery quality to it, which I'm putting down to fractional underbaking. Cooler for longer next weekend, I think, this could be me needing to get to grips with my oven. Flavour-wise I think I'm onto something good here, the sourness is really coming out now and the bread has a big, full flavour right through the crust. It's gaining character.

This far it's being mainly used for morning toast, and to accompany cheese. I may start attempting sandwiches with it at some point but I have yet to see what my new job's lunch arrangement is, so we'll see if it's worth bothering before going down that path. There's talk of a wine, cheese and bread event going on at our local wine merchant, so I need to get my bread in shape for that - there's some serious amateur bakers attending and I don't want to be shown up!

First loaves!

It's been a month or so in gestation, but my sourdough starter came of age this weekend. Hoping that it was finally stable, I made a couple of loaves out of it. Things seemed to go well, so I've stopped feeding it and it lives in the fridge now, instead of the sunny spots in the living room. The whole process to date has been about building a yeast colony which is stable - as you may remember from earlier posts, in the early days it changed appearance and smell quite frequently as the yeasts and various bacteria etc tried to reach equilibrium. Over the past week, it's been fairly unchanging, so I'm assuming that's proof of stability.

So, two loaves this weekend. I only have one loaf tin at the moment, so I'm making them in sequence rather than in parallel. Fortunately that gave me a bit of opportunity to make some changes to the second one. So here's the first:


Not a bad start, I reckon. It's a bit wonky, which doesn't really come across in the photo, but the texture is good, nice and elastic if a little less open than I was expecting. The crust is good too, and the flavour's typically sour, with a good depth and a nice, rounded fruity hint. I'm not happy that it split so much, and how lopsided the top is. A bit of research suggests this might be due to an overly speedy prove.

And so here's the second one - a much better shape, possibly due to an extra hour on the second prove. It got right up to the top of the tin this time (the first one fell a little short) before it went in the oven, so I think I need to benchmark it right there. This probably helped the shape too.


So there we go. I'm going to aim to do this every weekend (although I'll be getting a second bread tin, you mark my words), as it's not that much of a hassle. Friday night, combine starter, flour and water, feed the original starter. Saturday morning, beat in more flour and a bit of salt. Five or six hours later, bake. By my reckoning, excepting electricity charges, two loaves of sourdough a week should cost me about $2.30ish for the flour.

Still need to work on that shape though. Will be interesting to see how the flavour develops as the starter matures.

Feeding... and feeding... and feeding...

Open the box. Examine contents for signs of life. Stir the mixture. Pour away 200ml of it. Combine 100g flour and 150ml water. Mix into mixture. Close box.

Twice a day. For two weeks. Apparently this is what it takes to get a sourdough starter to a stable existence, when one can actually make bread out of it. It'd better work.

I'm a bit less concerned about it now than I was, as it's still alive and bubbling, just very slowly. It's behaving a bit like a sulky teenager, responding only to the odd poke and regular feeding. I think the problem is that it's got a bit colder of late, and so our inside temperature is a bit lower than the required 20C (central heating has apparently not made it this far south), and so my little yeasts are working very sluggishly indeed. From what I can tell, this isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it might mean it'll take a while to get stable. I've been placing it in what sunlight our flat gets during the day, and feeding it with slightly warm water to try to keep it cosy.

Hmmm. Ten days or so to go, possibly more.

Phase 2 begins...

After two days of seeming inactivity, I've decided my starter needs feeding. We're six days after birth, well short of the stated ten day minimum in my recipe, but after the five day period that some online recipes say. Also, the book I'm following (Moro) says that after ten days the bag containing the crushed grapes should be inflated - this happened after about three days for me. So here we go, moving on a little early.

As you can see, it's all gone a bit quiet and has separated out quite a bit. After so much activity at the start, I've got a bit nervous with all this quietness.

A quick look in the top shows that there's a healthy-looking yeast bloom on the surface of the liquid and the bag, and there are still a few bubbles coming up from the gunge in the bottom. I'm not sure what this means, but I've embarked on this feeding lark and I'm going to see it through. I suspect yeast needs a firm, decisive hand to coax it into full, breadmaking productivity.

Odour-wise, it's not actually as bad as I thought. It's hardly Chanel No.5, but it's clean-smelling, sour and definitely grapey, with a growing yeasty character. It doesn't smell rotten, and the slight cheesiness I got off it the other day has gone.

So I lifted out the bag, scraped off as much gunge as I could, and squeezed the residual juice out of it, which by now had taken a decent amount of colour from the grape skins. This went into the sink, to be dealt with later on.

A quick stir, and in went the requisite 100g of flour and 150ml water, more stirring and we're done. I realised with some horror that I'd forgotten to discard a third or so of the total mass first, as all the recipes tell you to do, but there's plenty of room in the container, so I think (hope) it'll be ok this once. I've made a mark on the side where the mixture comes up to, so I'll keep an eye on it and see if it's getting unruly.

Here it is after its first feed. It looks quite contented and settled I think. The lumps of flour in it are apparently ok - I've broken them down a bit but didn't want to work the mixture too much. We'll see; if it's still lumpy in a few days I might give it a bit of a go with a whisk or something.

So here we go - two feeds a day at regular intervals for two weeks. Who knows though, this might come together sooner if the process to date is anything to go by. This is the bit I've been worrying about a bit to be honest - it all seems like rather a lot of work, but I'm sure it'll pay off in the end.

I'll post a next instalment either in a week or so, or if anything astonishing happens, whichever comes first.

Poor willpower and over-attentiveness

I've been getting a bit concerned the past few days about the health of my starter. It's turned itself back over, with the liquid now sitting on the top, and the bag of grapes which was quite inflated is starting to sag a bit. It doesn't look at all as lively as it did, either. It smells pretty unusual, but it's not a mouldy or overly unpleasant smell, sort of cheesy and yeasty with a bit of sourness on it, so I think we could still be on the right track.

So I've given in to temptation and given it a stir. I've also turned the bag over in the liquid as it was starting to dry out on the top. Finally, in response to a number of internet sources, I've unclipped the lid, so that the seal isn't airtight, which should let the thing breathe a little whilst ensuring it's not entirely sterile. Letting natural yeasts and things in from the air is apparently to be encouraged. It may start to make the kitchen smell funny though, in which case it's back on with the clips.

I'm also starting to doubt our recipe a little, which says to leave the starter to build for two weeks prior to the first feed. Some online recipes have you feeding it in five days or even less, and normally say it's ready for one once it starts to get active, which it certainly was a few days ago. I hope I'm not starving it. I reckon that if it's not done anything by tomorrow afternoon I'll feed it, as that'll make five days. Perhaps I have peculiarly lively (and hungry) yeasts going on in there, who knows.

It's alive!

This is bizarre, truly bizarre stuff. About 24 hours after kicking off the starter, a layer of yellowish liquid appeared on the surface of my starter, presumably some of the water and grape juice separating out. It got steadily deeper, and I considered stirring it in but thought better of it, deciding to follow the book (which doesn't say to do anything to it for two weeks).



This morning, the Kiwi pointed out (with some alarm) that things had changed somewhat. As you can see from the picture, the whitish goop has surged up from beneath the liquid and is full of bubbles, proving that something is active within the box. The photo doesn't really do justice to quite how mental this thing's gone, and we've still got a minimum of eight days left to go before I'm allowed to tinker with it. The recipe says ten days to two weeks, and I'm sticking to it. The one thing I'm allowing myself to do is to pop the lid every now and then to release any gas - I don't fancy scraping fermenting yeast and flour off my kitchen walls in the event of an explosion.

This is brilliant - a great sign that my starter is alive, for now at least. I'm very proud. More on this as we get it.

Starting the starter

Finding myself recently with quite a bit of spare time, I've begun a project I've been meaning to get into for a while. I'm going to bake my own sourdough bread, but rather than using brewer's yeast of the sort you can get fresh from a friendly baker or dried in packets, I'm making my own sourdough starter, using natural wild yeasts. This is a bit of an undertaking for me, so I'm going to document the process on this blog - it should take about four weeks until I can make some bread, and we're dealing with me trying to keep a bucket of micro-organisms alive for that time, so it could be interesting.

The way this is supposed to work, I think, is that we try to slowly culture yeasts, found both naturally in flour and on the skins of organic grapes, in a food-rich mixture of flour and water, until we get to the point where the starter is a more or less stable environment containing both active yeast colonies and a fair bit of acids and all sorts of good things. Once we're stable, we use a bit of the starter to bake some bread, and feed the starter to replace the lost volume and kick it off again. That's the rough theory, anyway.



So here's where we begin, with the stuff needed to make the starter. I decided that spending a small fortune on organic flour was probably out of the question at this point, so for this run I'm attempting this with normal high grade bread flour. The grapes are organic, all $11.00 of the blighters. I'm also using water that's been out of the tap for a while, to let some of the chlorine gas escape (our water here is somewhat aggressively treated). The water and flour variables are ones I'll change if this doesn't work.



Here's it all mixed together. The grapes are tied up in a light tea towel, so they can be lifted out later on. They're lightly crushed, with the juice mixed in with the flour and water, and then submerged in the goop. Lid on, wait two weeks for stuff to happen. I will report back.