Sourdough experimentation and the efficient foodie.

I continue to play around with the sourdough starter I ordered a few weeks ago, and am pleased to report that I have not killed it yet.  I've made a couple of successful loaves of traditional sourdough -- mind you, they are still denser than yeast-risen bread -- and also a few big failures (not so bad since they make yummy melba toast).   The add-some-sourdough-to-my-normal-bread-machine-bread technique is robustly successful.

But I have to tell you, I am not actually focused on producing the "perfect" loaf of sourdough bread yet, tweaking recipes to get the best texture and flavor.  I am a foodie, there is no getting around it; but I aspire to being an efficient foodie.   

You can start with the perfect recipes, and organize your life around your trips to the greenmarket, co-op, and Penzey's, around the cycle of driving out to the farm to pick up your free-range chickens (with extra feet) and bringing them home to skim off the foam as they simmer gently on the stovetop with leeks, carrots, and bouquet garni, and around the resting/kneading schedule of your home-baked rustic loaves, and the garden with its bounty of pole beans and heirloom tomatoes and pots of herbs, and you will produce wonderful food and your friends will toast you at your dinner parties.  Sounds like a nice life. Possibly describes my retirement, or at least it would if I wasn't married.  (I wonder if those mountaintop yurts have six-burner gas stoves?)

Me, I have this life that I am already living, and so my very first consideration -- this is how I do ANYTHING new, it was the same thing when I took up swimming or baking muffins for breakfast -- is -- can I figure out a process that, given the constraints I live in, produces acceptably reproducible results?

Because if I can't come up with a process, it doesn't matter how outstanding the results, I won't repeat them.

On the other hand, a workable process can be tweaked to improve the product quality.  Process first; formulation later.

So anyway, the sourdough.   After the weekly refreshing and after setting some back in my fridge for later, I'm left with approximately 2 cups of fresh sourdough batter, typically first thing in the morning.  Right now I'm keeping two strains going (in case I kill one in my inexperience -- I'll go down to one later) so I produce the two cups of batter two times per week.  You could call this the input to my process.  Given two cups of fresh sourdough batter in the morning, what can I make from it?

One possibility for the two cups of batter is working pretty well.  It's this:  one cup goes in a loaf of "normal" bread machine bread, the other cup goes into a loaf of traditional sourdough (and the loaf isn't actually produced until the next day).    

I also need something to do with two cups of batter, other than adding enough other ingredients to bake two loaves of the same bread with it (which makes more bread than my family can eat).  There are a number of possibilities open to me here.   I could figure out a way to turn the whole bowl into pancakes or waffles, for one thing.  (I'm a little underwhelmed by sourdough bran muffins so far).   I plan to try sourdough bagels or soft pretzels at some point.  

But what would really be easiest -- if it would work -- is to get 2 cups of fresh batter into 1 loaf of traditional sourdough, and so that's what I tried for the first time this week, with plain 100% whole wheat.  

With no recipe to guide me, I stirred a cup and a half of whole wheat flour into the batter and let that rest a while, then later added oil, sugar, salt, and gluten (I was going for a plain sort of loaf) and let that rest overnight before shaping it. 

I am discovering something about sourdough:  The dough can change dramatically during resting time, and generally gets more "batter-y" the longer it sits.  I think the bugs break down a lot of the gluten, or something like that, because what was a dough last night was more like a batter this morning.  I couldn't knead it so much as roll it around on a pile of flour on the bread board.  So I worked enough AP flour into it so it could hold its shape a bit, put it on a cornmealed baking sheet, and stuck it in the oven.  We'll see if I rescued it.

I'm thinking that if I start with two cups of sourdough rather than one, I probably don't need to ferment it as long, duh, because there's already twice as much live culture in the dough to begin with.  And if that's so, maybe I'll have an advantage.  Maybe I'll get lots of sour flavor out of a faster-to-bake dough.  But, I will have to wait till next week to see.

(Christy P is experimenting with the same starter here.)

(Previous sourdough posts are:

sourdough, how were the sourdough waffles?, what to do with a rye sourdough baguette that's too dense and didn't rise, sourdough not-fail!, success with a classic sourdough rye.) 

Comments

[Christy P.]

Made a much better muffin this morning. Will post the seriously altered recipe on my blog sooner rather than later.

[bibliotecaria]

You might want to check out Peter Reinhart's book on whole grain breads. He has a good bit of science at the front that may answer some of your questions. I'm still working my way through it.