Cooking Cheap

[Updated Nov, 24, 03]

Yes, the [7] means its sourdough. I think of it as a hobby. I’m not baking this stuff to eat. I can’t eat that much bread. I know I should make bread crumbs or croutons with the left overs but I don’t need a lot of those either. I toss loaves of bread away after I cut them to see what the texture and crumb is and have a slice or two with dinner. I don’t love sourdough, I love learning about sourdough. Also, it keeps me from writing very much about politics which is a good thing.

Anyway, the usenet FAQ convinced me that there are technical reasons, perhaps even scientific reasons why one has to feed the starter with more flour and water than you’ll take out, and that really heavy feeding is good for the culture and good for the bread making process. More about that later.

Last night the quarter cup of new starter I cloned doubled in size in under 3 hours and at 5 hours it had clearly reached it’s peak. By hour 7 it had started to shrink. Twelve hours later it was the same size as I started with. What did I learn about that? I learned to read the FAQ and my library book with a perspective of experience.

I left the cloned, now flat deflated starter on the counter during the day. I don’t want to see what it does whens it’s chilled and re-primed. I want to see how fast it can consume a huge feeding. It’s an S-shaped curve for leavening with food (flour) on the Y axis and time on the X. OK, there’s a Z axis of temperature. What comes after the Z axis? The O axis for obsession, perhaps?

It’s an hour and a half into the heavy feeding and it looks to me like it’s going to double in volume around the 3 or 4 hour point. If it does, I’m going to make a sponge and let it go overnight to develop the sour taste. From what I read, the yeasts do their thing for a few hours (leaven) and then when they overpopulate and die off, the lactobacillus start stinking it up. By aggressively feeding the starter, the theory is that one can get maximum leavening and then sour. It didn’t make sense to me either until I remember that yeasties tend to grow geometrically or is it exponentially (help?), which I think means the time to maximum leavening is inversely related to volume. If a cup of goo takes 3 hours, say, then 2 cups of go will be ready in less than 6 hours. Maybe or Maybe not because if that’s true could I build a time machine with a whole lot of bags fermenting flour?

Fermenting barley and changing time would be a different recipe ;^)

[Next Day, Nov 24, 03]

Looks like another learning experience. The sponge was incredibly soupy after 12 hours but was still bubbling. I added the dry ingredients (a little less whole wheat this time, a lot more white bread flour) and I kneaded it by hand for 20 minutes adding flour until it wouldn’t take anymore. Perhaps. I formed it into a round ball on the cookie sheet, covered with plastic and let it rise. Looked good at 1 hour. By hour 2 it had fallen and spread. I’ve already made those kinds of loaves. I know what’s going to happen.

It’s time to invent plan B which is to punch it down and reshape it for the loaf pan Let’s try for a second rise. Miraculously after two more hours it looks like a loaf of bread that’s ready to bake. I would have let it go longer but the surface was starting to get moist and I have reason to believe that signals a imminent collapse.

Oops, I forgot to spray the loaf pan with non stick spray. I was able to shake it out with only minor damage. The bits that stuck to the pan taste fine. After cooling, I cut it in half. Actually the texture is getting there, it was a little soft, probably because its was still warm or not baked enough, but there we tunnels, not a lot and not very big, but the texture is opening up with every experiment.

I’ve always said there’s nothing humans do that can’t be over-analyzed which IMO is the reason the web has been such a hit for people with that problem.

Yes, it’s another sourdough post. Do the appropriate thing.

Before the web, there was ‘usenet’ which at the time was purely a text only bulletin board or newsgroup. What people call a ‘forum’, these days. The smiley faces we can’t remember how to type and ‘FAQ’ were born on usenet. ICQ and IM came later, not that it matters.

The usenet sourdough FAQ is one of those troves of conflicting information certain compulsive people are drawn towards. One can “grok” the subject if one is sufficiently enlightened. Somewhere in the FAQ, a master claims there are two paths to sourdough, rise once and rise twice which is why my library book and the eGullet procedure are so different as to procedure and the master cautions the initiate to know which path his guru is on.

That doesn’t tell me what to do (a footnote from a different master suggests newbies use the rise once method until mastered and then move to the two rise technigue. I was pleased to note that my solution to flat loaves is quite similar to the FAQ solutions so I’m getting the feel for whatever it is that I’m doing. All the masters claim sourdough is forgiving but I think thats a from a masters perspective.

It did become clear I need to learn more about my culture. I suspect mine was used mostly to tasty up pancakes rather than leaven bread. I decided to start a variant culture, feeding it a good deal less water than flour (by volume). I’m measuring the time it takes for peak fermentation and how long it will hold that peak before collapsing. 1/2 cup starter, 1/2 cup flour, 1/4 cup water. It’s only been 2 hours but the new culture is in happy froth and the replenished starter hasn’t made a move yet. I added back the same amounts of flour and water to the original starter so I won’t lose the original but there is a difference in volume ( and temperature ) between the offspring and the mother. Mother starter is larger and takes longer to warm up. That’s a good piece of information to “know”. I mean I sort of knew it, but there’s nothing like a demo. That’s what the marketing department says about their expense reports, so I keep the salt handy.

Yes, dear readers, it’s another sourdough post and of course more mistakes to learn from. Not content to acquire knowledge one sip at a time, I took on a bigger challenge, a whole wheat & rye loaf, which are harder to leaven than white bread and I’m not going to put it in a loaf pan, just a round ball.

The familiar starter priming: Add 1 cup of flour and some water to the starter about noon time) and let if get a good roll on by 11:00PM. Take 1 cup of starter, mix in 1 1/2 C of white bread flour and 1 cup of water, cover with plastic and let it do it’s magic for 12 hours. Previously, I had my doubts that 12 hours is too long for my culture and I now I’m know that is right. After 13 hours, it didn’t have enough poop and actually had started to dry and harden on the surface. Still, one must continue.

I mixed in 1tsp of salt, 1Tbl of sugar, 1 Tbl melted butter, 1/2 cup warm, milk, 1/2 cup rye flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, 2 C of the sponge (all actually) and white bread flour until I couldn’t stir in anymore and then I kneaded it with more white flour, adding more flour than I thought it could really use. I thought it was a pretty stiff dough. I formed it into a ball, covered at let rise. After two hours it looked like it was close to doubling and it was holding the loaf shape, so that a major improvement. I decided to let it rise another hour.

Bad mistake. When I checked at hour 3 it had lost it’s height and spread. There’s nothing to do but bake it up at 375 for 40 to 45 minutes. This time a put a pan of hot water in the oven which should provide a better crust.

The crust does look better and I did get a bit of oven spring (it got larger when placed in the oven) but it’s a pretty flat loaf and I suspect too moist. I just cut it. Yes, there isn’t the texture isn’t what I want, but the crust is better and for my money the whole wheat and rye make for a nice nutty flavor, even it it is a bit dense.

I think what’s happening is that that extra hour of rise (from 2 to 3) allowed the balance between flour and micro-beasties liquid producing habits to shift in the wrong direction. I could have kneaded in more flour or I could have baked sooner. This also means I could possibly bake a loaf without an overnight sponge. Prime the start the night before, make the sponge in the morning and let it go for 6 to 8 hours, add all the other stuff and knead, rise for 2 hours or so and back. That’s a lot easier schedule to follow.

Yes, it was another day in the CCDL Test Kitchen. Different recipe, different procedures, different operator errors and different guesses what to do. About the only thing different is that I’m still not bothering with getting the best crust and it’s the same starter. Here’s a link to the picture of the loaves. The square loaf was obviously put in a bread pan and the round loaf was without benefit of a pan but there’s another about the two shapes after I tell you that I only have one loaf pan and considering how often I bake bread, it’s a very lonely pan. So why did I make enough dough for two loafs? That’s the recipe I’m working with.

The good news is the square loaf is OK (doesn’t suck). I don’t know all the fancy bakers terms but that loaf has a pretty good texture, lot’s of small open spots, a few large ones (but no tunnels). The round loaf is another too moist mass. They taste about the same, but the texture is better on the square loaf. The round loaf was doomed from the beginning, but it taught me something which I’ll write here. If you have no interest in bread making feel free to read something else.

I took the starter out of the fridge late Tuesday night, fed it a cup of flour, almost as much water and left it on the counter for a full day, while I went looking for the place in the house that is close to 85F. Late Wednesday night (10PM), it was a very active starter. Tonight I see I was only supposed to add 1/4C water. Oh well, it’s the starter, not the sponge. I also noticed I used up all my bread flour. I’ll some more the next day.

Mix two cups of starter, 3 cups of bread flour and 2 cups water, stir (it’s soupy) cover with plastic wrap and put in that warm place, for 12 hours. Yes, twelve hours. That’s why I have to make the sponge late at night. Then I watched some TV and wrote a blog entry and looked at the sponge a few hours later. Whoa! It’s about to bubble over the top of the bowl and I don’t want to clean up a spill-over inside a cabinet. Clearly I used a bowl that was too small. So I poured it into a larger bowl. Well, not so much poured as guided it out with the help of a spoon, covered that bowl with plastic and wondered if I knocked it down.

Thursday, I got up earlier than I wanted so I could knead the bread before lunch with Vern. It was a pretty good size mass of goo, clearly doubled but I also noticed the center of the plastic wrap had a blob of goo on it which means that it reached the top of larger bowl while I was sleeping and fell back, and in fact it was not actively bubbling, much.

The recipe called for 2 Tbl of melted butter, 1 cup of milk at 85F, 2 tsp of salt and 2 Tbl of sugar mixed together then added to the sponge and up to 6 cups of bread flour which one stirs with a spoon and kneads. This was when I discovered I don’t have 2 TBL of sugar. I have 1 3/4 tsp. I’ve got a 12:00 appointment and there’s no way I can get to store and back and knead. What the hell, the other recipe didn’t use any sugar. I also used up the last of the salt. What are the odds of this I wonder.

I got 4 cups of flour stirred in before I quit stirring and went to kneading the remaining flour in. I’m not sure how long I did the hand kneading but it probably wasn’t enough in light of the cookbook saying you will never overwork the dough by hand. When the sweat started to run off my face and threaten to become a flavor ingredient, I divided the dough into two sections and shaped one for the single bread pan. Now I have a problem to be solved. I know the dough won’t hold it shape, it’s too soft. I kneaded in more flour. balled it up on a cookie sheet, covered the loaf pan and ball with plastic wrap and put them in the warm place to rise. I double checked that the recipe did not call for oiling the top of the dough before covering with the plastic.

One hopes that omission was fixed in his latest book. Spray or brush the top with oil. Trust me. After a long lunch the loaf in the pan was clearly ready and the round loaf was an inch tall and had spread to cover half the cookie sheet, which is clearly not what I want. Being the master of planning ahead, it also occurs to me that I can’t bake both of those together at the same time. The spreading mass has to be sacrificed. The loaf pan goes into a 375 oven for 10 minutes and then turn the dial down to 350 for another 45 minutes.

What to do with the second loaf? The cookbook says *most* sourdough doesn’t have the leavening power for a “punch down” and second rise. In the heat of the battle, it never occurred to me to stretch the spreading mass into a ciabatta, punch some indentations sprinkle with fresh rosemary (which I do have in endless quantities) and pour a lot of olive oil over it. That would be a lemonade approach to adversity. I reshaped the spreading mass into a nice ball and having knocked the air out of it, it was holding that shape. I’ll cover it it plastic wrap and we’ll just see if my sourdough starter can do a second rise after I put in the fridge to slow it down. That’s when I discovered I had four inches of plastic wrap left.

“Oh Well, Bother” I might have said in another universe. In this universe I have access to more colorful phrases. After the sandwich loaf was done baking and I had burned my hands getting it on the pie rack, I took the round thing out of fridge and put it back in the warm place for a while. “Tipper Gore, me besotted mates”, It’s risen, and quite unexpectedly considering what I did to it. I also don’t really care if it’s doubled or would triple or would eat Los Angles on Saturday.

In so many ways, I’ve screwed this up (loaf number two is well beyond counting FU’s) but the road to knowledge always had bumps and if you know how to read them to properly, up you can incorporate the feedback the rocks in the path provide you.

I learned my starter has maximum leavening power somewhere between 4 and 12 hours and it can be knocked down, almost like a yeast dough if you do the knock at the right time. This is important because it means I don’t have to make bread at midnight.

I don’t have a sour sour culture. There’s not much difference in sour-ness between the first four loaves and these two, Texture, crumb, and moistness mistakes aside, for the flour I’m using this is what it going to taste like. Procedure and timing won’t change that taste much.

Sourdough is forgiving within the boundaries of the culture and flour you are using. I can make a nice loaf of bread for a sandwich.

Hand Kneading is not a joyful back to mother nature, free your soul, become one with the zone experience. Naw, it’s just hard work and you hope you get a reward. That said, I’m starting to feel a one-ness with the dough. Time to change subjects.