Starter!

What is a Starter

A starter is a little home of flour and water where naturally occurring wild yeast bacteria establish a thriving colony. A healthy colony will contain millions of living and dead bacteria. The bacteria will eat the flour as food, and they expel carbon dioxide and alcohol (hooch).

When given the right environment, the yeast culture will happily reproduce and inflate dough with carbon dioxide - like baking soda or instant yeast but this one is wild

Making a Starter

Making a starter from scratch is quite simple.

In a jar (a mason jar works great because the lid can be on and not tightened all the way):

• add 50g flour and 50g water
  • the water should be room temperature, and never more than 100ºF
  • All purpose flour is just fine but try not to have bleached flour
• wait 1 day
• pour/cut half of that out, saving 50g in the jar
• Add 25g flour, 25g water
• repeat for a week

This process is called feeding your starter. The idea is that there are wild yeast bacteria literally everywhere. You got some in that flour, and it needs to make a home. Cutting it in half helps the colony to get rid of the dead cells and gives fresh food so the living ones can thrive. It's not a perfect process and it makes what's called sourdough discard once the colony is established.

You can do so much with discard. It'll be tangy. You can make crackers, you can make pancakes, you can make cookies, you can make tortillas.

After the first two-three days you'll see some activity, bubbles of gas showing up in your slurry.
Usually this happens early as random non-yeast bacteria live and die. Keep going.

When you regularly see the bubbles coming, rising the starter in the jar and then deflating once a day, you have created a living, established, wild yeast colony

It is customary to name your starter.

Keeping a Starter

You can keep the starter in 4 main ways:

• on the counter!
  • just be sure to feed it every day
• in the fridge
  • feed it about once a week-month
• in the freezer
  • long term but do make sure it revives every few months
• dried
  • you can preserve your established starter!

Starters are hearty fellas. They are honestly quite hard to kill if you are up on it. Keeping them in a cold enough fridge in a clean enough jar can keep it living forever. Several bakers just keep a jar in the fridge, feed it for a loaf, and whatever is left after the loaf just goes back.

Preserving a Starter

Starter once dried correctly is shelf stable and can survive indefinitely. Literally thousands of years.

All you need to do is

• pour the starter onto some parchment/baking paper on like a cookie sheet or counter
• spread to a very thin level and make it basically even
• wait.

Don't let ANY of it be even a little wet.

Once it's all dry all the way, we can break it down and store it in an airtight container like another jar.

Reviving a Starter

When reviving a dried starter, it's not much different than above. It's like making a starter but having a starting place.

• crush out 25g starter preserved into a fine-ish powder
• let it soak in 50g water for 30 minutes
• add 25g flour and mix
• wait a day (or two if you want) and feed as normal

You should see good solid activity because the yeast are already there. You can let them colonize the flour you gave them and then you can keep it happy.

Sourdough!

Using the Starter, or, Making a Levain

Starter is just the start. Now we need to use it to make a leviathan.

A levain is just the starter that's been given purpose.

This recipe will make 1 loaf.

Start with 30g starter, add 30g flour and 30g room temperature water

wait 4 hours or until the levain has peaked it's activity

Autolyse

While you wait for your levain to grow, we want to build the gluten strength that will make your loaf. Gluten are these coiled up protein strings all throughout the flour, and a well developed gluten structure keeps the sourdough firm and chewy

Add 325g flour to 235g room temp water and mix well. let it sit for 1-3 hours to develop.

Bulk Fermentation

The fun part

Including your things

Pour your levain on top of your autolyse and push in with your fingers.

Start pushing through and pulling to mix the two together. add 8g sea/kosher salt

• it's sort of important to be sea salt or kosher salt. They're stonger

wet your hand and dig in, you could use your right hand to stretch and fold the dough with the left hand turning the bowl. It usually takes 3 - 5 minutes to mix the dough properly. Cover the bowl and let the dough rest for 30 minutes.

Completing a Turn

once it's all mixed an has sat, you're going to fold 4-5 times over a period of about 5 hours.

What is a fold?

with a wet hand:

• reach under the dough from the top,
• grab from the bottom of the bowl,
• pull and stretch it up and over the rest.
• rotate the bowl 90º and do it again, for a total of 4 folds as if in 4 directions

Do this after the 30 minutes rest, then wait 45 minutes.

do it again then wait another 45 minutes.

Do it again and wait 60 minutes.

Do it again and wait 90 minutes.

Final Preparations

After it has a good long rest, you can start the final countdown

Pre-Shape

Put the dough on a lightly floured work surface. You don’t want to incorporate any additional flour to the dough at this stage.

Use a bread scraper or a long flat thing to round off the loaf, moving the scraper around the dough and shaping it into a ball. You don’t want to over do it as you will risk tearing the dough, you want to use as few turns as possible to avoid losing the gas from the dough, really just one rotation to tigh

Bench Rest

Let the dough sit right there as a boule for ~30 minutes, to relax all that gluten strength you've built. It'll be flat when you see it again and that's okay.

Final Shape

Now we can incorporate a little flour on top so you can quickly push your scrape beneath and flip it onto the floured side.

The final shape of the dough helps to ensure even baking and a strong body.

Almost like a turn we did above, we want to pull from the bottom of the dough (towards you) and stretch it up to about 2/3rds up the dough body.

Pull from the left and stretch it 2/3rds to the right, and the same for the right to the left.

A final stretch from the top to 2/3rds to the bottom.

Finally some pizazz. sorta just pinch and braid together along the seem from top to bottom and roll it down into a little log. The Grant Batty site has a great series of GIFs to show it.

https://grantbatty.co.uk/sourdough-bread-recipe/

Final Rise

A Bread Bowl

You may or may not have a bread bowl/basket/banneton. It's basically a little wooden basket sometimes with a cloth you cover in rice flour or other flour to let the bread do it's final rise.

With one, it may add some neat lines. It's not necessary.

Without one, use a bowl and a tea-towel that's well floured. You don't want your boule sticking to it.

Put the boule into your bowl or banneton, I recommend seam side down.

Let it sit here, at room temperature, for another 30-45 minutes.

Then put it in the fridge for 12-18 hours...

I know.

The Bake

When the next day comes, and you're getting ready to bake, go preheat the oven to REALLY HOT like **475ºF-500ºF**

This also takes a long time so don't pull out the dough quite yet.

As the oven is preheating, if you have a dutch oven (a big cast iron-ish pot with a lid big enough for your dough), preheat it and its lid in the oven for at least 30 minutes.

Taking the dough/bowl/banneton out of the fridge, and placing parchment paper over it, flip the boule onto the paper on a work surface.

Scoring

Get a single razor blade and score or slice about a half inch deep straight from top to bottom, dragging at a mostly horizontal angle so the dough doesn't drag along the blade much.

Scoring helps your dough to expand in the oven, giving the gasses a specific path to exit and so increasing the rise of the dough.

Using mitts because the dutch oven is hot, open and place the dough using the paper into the dutch oven and cover with the lid. Or put the loaf on one pan and ready the other pan with ice.

Put the loaf in the oven on the middle-ish rack, and bake for 25-30 minutes. Remove the lid (if you have one), reduce the oven to ~400ºF, and bake another 20 minutes.

Take your bread out, and if you can, let it cool all the way.

Enjoy!