Cooking Cheap

You know what the [9] means.

I’m not sure why I want to learn baking with sourdough. A few weeks ago I had to buy a jar of yeast for US$7.00 which I’ll only use half of, so sourdough is a lot less expensive. Having produced a couple of decent loaves in a bread pan, it’s time to step up to the next level, a loaf of French Bread, without the fat’s and sugars and without the support of a metal mold, just flour, water and salt and the beasties.

I picked up another book on the subject at the library today. It’s pretty much the same techniques and recipes, the same cautions and discussions. There’s a recipe of course but it’s not really a procedure that makes a lot of sense unless one’s failed many times. Easy to read, impossible to follow exactly. This not unlike BBQ — It takes a long time and every time is different and my procedure won’t match your procedure because things are different: ingredients, equipment, skill and attitude.

I do know that a properly activated culture is critical. You can’t bake bread if you only use the culture once every two weeks to make sourdough pancakes, If you use it every few days or feed it heavily first , it’s almost like making regular yeast bread. Mostly almost. Temperature is important. You can take it out of the fridge, make the sponge, feed the culture and leave them out over night on the counter. That’s fine for pancakes where you want the taste of sour but not the yeast. For bread making, you need happy beasties chugging down the starch and farting CO2 before they drown themselves in their self produced alcohol. The trick is, you have no idea how long any of that takes.

Obviously (to me), the bigger the batch of starch (flour) to the starting amount of culture determines how it takes to proof, rise, and rise again. Sadly it’s non linear, but I’ve mentioned that before. Since we are growing little beasties for their fart producing qualities it only makes sense to provide an environment where they can do that best. 85 degrees (F) and just as importantly they need to be really happily farting before you feed them more flour to make bread.

I’m betting that a craft style bakery doesn’t refrigerate their starter. Just before they leave at 6:00PM, they feed it (make the sponge) and at 3:00AM they start mixing and rising so the loaves come out of the oven at 9:00AM. (for example). I know I’ve seen the owner of the nearest craft bakery, Zeppoles in the Albertsons buying old style double edge razor blades in some strange wee-wee hours. They can do that because they have to and because their starter never gets a rest.

Do not underestimate thermal mass, I took my cloned starter, the one I’ve been feeding only bread flour and water to, out of the fridge two hours ago and it’s only beginning to warm up. That’s the starter I used just a few days ago and left over night after a feeding. No hootch on the top either since it hasn’t had enough time to settle out. I’ll take a cup or two out for the sponge for tomorrow (what my latest cookbook calls ‘batter”, which IMO is a more accurate description than sponge, but the thats the joy of language).

I know the stuff in there will leaven twice, even on a whole wheat/rye/white mixture. I know this because it did it before. Now I’m going to depend on it because I think I can. When it turns bad tomorrow, it won’t be the culture or the ingredients that fails. Just clueless me.

That’s not a bad metaphor for all of life is it? Even I might think about that one but I need to check for bubbles in the goo first.

[Update 2006-08-06]
That Was the first loaf of bread that looked almost right. That was made with the sponge method (very liquid, overnight) if I remember correctly.