Finally, we arrive at The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Basic Sourdough Bread! Which is pretty much one reason to live, as far as I’m concerned. I grew up in California, thinking a good and sour sourdough was my birthright. So it astounded me when I moved to Austin and tasted what was considered good sourdough bread at a great bakery downtown. It wasn’t sour! At least not to my San Francisco sourdough accustomed tastebuds. And thus began my education in the reality of local airborne yeast strains and how much they influence the nuances of sourdough bread.
You see, you can buy sourdough starter from San Francisco online, and you can do everything completely right, but unless you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you will eventually end up with a sourdough starter that makes good bread, and yet tastes nothing like San Francisco sourdough. Really. I know you must be fascinated.
But to those of us who bake bread, who are crazy bread-baking nut-cases, this matters a whole lot. Plus there are other things to know about sourdough. Such as, when you first cultivate a starter (from scratch even!), it will not be very sour. That can take months of care and feeding and sweet-talking to get to. It’s like having a pet you can keep on your kitchen counter, and then throw in the refrigerator when you take a trip out of town. Some people name their starters, and they have several. I am so not making this up.
So the first thing I did all those months ago, when I joined the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, was to make my sourdough starter with rye flour and pineapple juice (and no purchased yeast at all!). Because I wanted to be prepared when we reached this point in the book. I wanted to grow a kick-butt starter. I wanted my starter to have lived through a lot; that’s what makes it have personality. That’s what allows it to incorporate all that natural yeast in the air and turn it into pure tangy goodness. I haven’t been disappointed in my quest.
Peter Reinhart gives wonderful instructions on how to do this in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Some people in the challenge used other methods to make their starter, and believe me, there are many ways to do it. But Peter’s way worked for me (he doesn’t over-complicate the process), and I therefore have a wonderful, good-natured, 9-month-old baby sourdough starter to play bake with regularly.
The picture above is a loaf of bread I made when the starter was young. While very pretty, with a high rise, it didn’t bowl me over with sourdough flavor. Now (see the first picture), the starter has a depth that only months of fermenting, discarding, and refreshing can develop. It’s like the difference between a sweet, innocent child, and a complex adult with some interesting life experience. They aren’t the same thing at all.
This particular loaf didn’t rise as high as most of mine do, because I was impatient and my kitchen is about 60 degrees in the winter. (I made another loaf for this post, and I tried to coax it along by letting it rise in my warming oven. That ended in a partially-cooked dough ball, since I hit the wrong button on the oven. Thank god for a sense of humor.)
For some reason, I’ve become obsessed with letting the dough go through the final rise in a cloth-lined bowl. Which brings me the same pain I have with very wet dough. No matter how much I flour the cloth, the dough ends up sticking a little bit when I transfer it to the baking sheet.
Which, of course, only makes me more determined to get it right – one of these times! If you would like to get your own countertop pet starter, you can read more about it here, although I truly encourage you to buy the book. It contains so much information, and so many wonderful recipes (even variations on basic sourdough, should you ever grow tired of eating fantastic, plain sourdough), that you will never regret your purchase. But beware – it’s addicting. You, too, could find yourself talking to a gooey mass of bubbling starter, and become known as just another crazy bread person. I guess there are worse things!
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