Cooking Cheap

I’m making pulled pork for Fridays dinner. Tradition would suggest more dense, softer white bread. Hamburger buns actually. I’m going to use sourdough though because I’ll learn something. I’ll worry about hydration and weights tomorrow.

A month or so back, I saved a ‘chef’ from a batch of sourdough bread and I kneaded in as much flour as it could absorb and then wrapped in layers of plastic wrap and it’s been in the fridge for a long time. I’ll use that instead of the jar of starter. After weeks (or months?) the chef is actually pretty sticky. It did grow a bit in size in the fridge. I only needed half of it to start my normal 1 oz of flour and 1 oz of water. It’s going to take some extra time I think to get the next chef working (compared to the more liquid starter like I have in the jar. The smell is subtlety different, not better or worse, just slightly different. That may not carry over to the final loaf.

It took a long time to get the chef to consume the 1 oz of flour and 1 oz of water so I went to bed. It took some time to consume the 3 oz of flour and 3 oz of water at the next feeding. It’s taking some time for the first rise after mixing all the ingredients. I’d like to bake this off tonight even though it will be very late, but I’ll up with the BBQ smokers anyway. The recipe, I just took the one out the bread machine cookbook and adjusted it for the amount of starter, and going for 60% hydration. For that 8 oz starter of starter, that was 11 oz of bread flour, 5 oz of water and the shortening, sugar, salt, milk power for a 1.5 lb loaf. I even used the bread machine to knead it.

The bread is being extremely slow about rising. I won’t be able to bake it tonight. It’s rising but very slowly. I’ll have to retard. Something happened in the chef that I saved and strong yeast activity is not one of it’s attributes.

I divided the dough in into 6th’s. Rolled them a bit and placed them on a baking sheet. . I put that in a plastic garbage bag and the into the fridge.