Cooking Cheap

I’ve got to take the library book back soon so I need to enter the recipe for French Bread. I’m also trying an experiment of drying the starter, shipping it and reviving it with a volunteer on the East Coast (of the US). I’m also finding I have a lot to say so on topic so this is about “starter” and the recipe will be next.

Making dried Starter is easy. Starter and flour and roll it out thin and leave it to dry for some number of days. Then break it into chunks and pound the chunks to make big crumbs. Attempt to put the crumbs in a mini-processor (doesn’t work). Wrap and label half of it and put in in an package and send it on it’s way.

A Place To Call Home

I use a cheap plastic storage container you can find in the supermarket if not your cupboards, probably two quart size, put the crumbs in it and a cup of water and let it set covered for a half hour or so just to start moistening up the crumbs. Then I added a cup of flour,and a cup of water, and stirred it up. It was a little too thick so I added about 1/4C of water more. You want a consistency like a thick lumpy batter bread mix . I put it in my 85 degree spot and I’ll check it and stir it up in a couple of hours; by then it should be active and assuming it is I’ll leave it overnight and check the smell in the morning.

[Later, Yes, drying, re-hydrating and feeding works fine.] It’s been about 24 hours since I re-hydrated and feed my dry mix. during that time it tripled in volume in 12 hours or so and stayed that large until around the 20 hour mark when it dramatically fell to only double in volume in less than an hour. I was fooling with the temperature, so those are only data points, not rules. That collapse means that most of the food is gone. In making bread you don’t want a collapse, but you need to know it can happen. When feeding our micro-organisms, it’s no big deal unless your container was too small to handle a tripling of volume.

Sourdough really needs a place thats 85F. For pancakes you can feed it and set it out overnight on the counter in at room temperature and it should work out.. That’s for pancakes. For bread, yeast have to do all the leavening and the ones in the sourdough need 85F. It’s the sweet spot for both leavening and souring.

Using a instant read roasting thermometer I found a spot in my house thats close (or close enough) to 85F and I’m writing this during a snow storm. My spot happens to be the under-sink cabinet in the main bathroom which isn’t that far from the forced air furnace.

I’ve read you can build a “proofing box” from an inverted Styrofoam cooler, a light fixture and a light bulb of the right wattage (somewhere between 5 watts and 15) say. That’s what I’ve read.

Caring For Your Starter:

If it’s been in the fridge for a couple of weeks without use or long enough to get the gray/black hootch on the top, IMO, you would do well to feed the starter twice (which does add a few more hours to an already long process). There’s lots of ways to feed (or double feed a starter). Here’s what I’ve tried. Stir up the starter (and the hootch). Remove a cup of the starter. Add a cup of flour and a cup of water. Some people suggest 3/4C water and I tend to follow the less than a cup idea. Serious people would do it by weight to a specific hydration ratio they want to achieve. Put the starter with it’s new water and flour in your rising spot and let it do its magic, In three to six hours or so you should see some sign of yeast at work: bubbles and holes in the mix, possibly frothy on the top (thats a good thing). If you’ve got the time, or the starters been unused for a long time, repeat the feeding: Stir, remove a cup, add a cup of flour and a cup of water (or slightly) less. It shouldn’t take as long for the second feeding to really get cranking.

What to do with the one or two cups of starter you removed to make room for the feeding? If it was a recently used starter you’d you’d proceed to make the sponge/batter/biga with what you took out. If you think the starter is probably a little tired you have to sacrifice that removed cup to the the gods of hot water and clean drains. Do not pour in on the carpet and let it dry (trust me). Do not let young children play with it. When dried, this a strong glue. You could give it away. You could dry it. Supposedly you can freeze it. Or you could create a new batch of starter using some other type of flour (whole wheat for example).

For example, if was I going to make bread tomorrow and it’s 7:00PM tonight. I’d take out the container of starter. Since I baked last week it’s not that tired. I also took out a cup for drying purposes a few days ago and didn’t replenish it (There are no hard and fast rules), I’d take the container of starter out, stir it and feed it the the cup and cup (stir again of course) and let it proof. About midnight, assuming its all frothy and happy, I’d stir it again and remove the amount required for the recipes sponge/batter/biga. If it was an tired starter I’d have wished I’d started at 4:00PM.

It sounds complicated but it really isn’t that hard. You’ll quickly develop a feel for how much to feed (or not). Starter is yeast and lacto-bacillus feeding on flour in a liquid bath and if it can survive the refrigerator and freezing (so I’m told) and drying, it will survive a lot of mishandling be it underfeeding, overfeeding or neglect.

There two beasties in the culture (starter). Yeast and something called a lacto-bacillus. Yeast eat flour and produce gas and alcohol (the hootch). The lacto thingies give of the sour flavor. An aquarium of tropical fish also need a balance of food and water supplements at certain times based on the kind of fish, their size, the size of the tank and the mix of the species. Too hot or too cold, you’ve got dead fish. Yet people manage to keep aquariums. Sourdough is a lot easier to take care of than a fish tank. A lot easier.

There’s are alternate methods of managing your sourdough and I do know it works because that’s how my culture came to me or is commonly used by others.

If you need a cup of starter for your overnight sponge/batter/biga, you stir up your starter to mix it up, remove the cup of starter for your recipe, and add a cup of flour and about that much water to the starter, stir, put the starter next to the sponge and after the starter is pretty active put it back in the fridge (not the sponge though). This isn’t much different than my procedure. I feed the starter and watch it proof before making the sponge but I need enough head room in the starter container. If I get started late I’ll use this method of making the sponge and feeding the starter in parallel.

The next method is to take out the cup of starter. Put the starter back in the fridge. Make your sponge according to the recipe but add an additional cup of flour and an additional cup of water and leave overnight. The next morning, you stir the sponge and take a cup of that and put it in the starter container in the fridge.

These are all variations of a theme for keeping the starter at roughly the same size and active.
1. Add a cup of feed and water to starter, proof starter, remove a cup, make sponge.
2. Remove a cup, Add a cup of feed and water to starter, make sponge and proof starter together.
3. Remove a cup. Make sponge with additional cup of feed and water, put a cup of the sponge back in the starter..

At this point, I don’t know which method, if any is really better in taste or in starter health. I like #1 because I believe you’ll get the maximum yeast action.