Simply Sourdough:
Baking All Natural Breads with Wild Yeasts
By: Melissa Naasko
All Rights Reserved Copyright 2012 Melissa Naasko
Smashwords Edition
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• Introduction • Creating a Sourdough Starter • Baking with Sourdough • The Fridge Method • Creating a Recipe • The Straight Dough Method • The Double Rise Method • Adapting Recipes • Troubleshooting • About the Author • Other eBooks by this Author • Dedication • Index of Images •
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The aroma of fresh bread baking with its yeasty, caramel notes is one of life’s simplest pleasures. But as hard as it initially seems, you can actually bake your own bread. While some bakers can make elaborate and difficult breads with complicated recipes and processes, it doesn’t have to be that way. This booklet is about bread as it was meant to be: simple, uncomplicated, natural and risen with wild yeast. All you need to start is some flour, water and air.
Sourdough is an older form of bread baking that uses wild yeasts naturally occurring in the air rather than commercially available yeast. These yeasts exist with probiotic lactobacilli, which are helpful bacteria that act on the flour to make it healthier. These bacteria break down lectins* and polysaccharides which might contribute to allergies*, phytic acid which bonds with critical minerals preventing absorption* as well as polyoligosaccharides which cause gas* all of these can be prevented by sourdough fermentation. One of the benefits beyond nutrition is increased moisture which prevents the bread from drying out so quickly and a higher acidity which preserves the bread and protects it from mold. Before the days of little packets of dried yeast, all bread was made in this way and no bread needed extenders and preservatives.
Some bread enthusiasts simply prefer the tang of traditional sourdough while others bake it strictly for the improved nutrition but whatever your reason, beware the imposters. Traditional, properly made sourdough has no need for dough enhancers, commercial yeasts or extenders. Most commercial breads, including ones labeled sourdough, will use dough conditioners like citric acid, extenders like soy, sweeteners, and commercial yeast relying on the sourdough starter as only a flavor enhancer. If you want true sourdough bread, made the old fashioned way and with only pure ingredients, you’ll likely need to make it yourself. Your own homemade bread can have the nutritional profile you want, be non-allergenic, as well as having as many or as few additions (like nuts and seeds) as you want.
Sourdough rises bread through the action of the yeasts and the bacteria on the flour as they eat the sugars and convert them in to gas. The small bubbles of gas provide the lift to the bread causing it rise and become fluffy. This action takes time, far more time than commercial yeast which often relies on added sugar to feed the yeasts to produce the gas bubbles which rise the bread. Whereas commercial yeast risen breads take as little as an hour, sourdough bread can take as long as six or eight, which is perfectly fine since this allows more time for the anti-nutrients to be neutralized.
Sourdough starts, easily enough, with a starter. A starter is a combination of flour and water with addition of wild yeasts and bacteria “caught from the air”, which is added as part of the liquid in baked good recipes. A starter is rife with living organisms like yeasts which need to be “fed”. Feeding a starter is the process of adding additional flour and water which increases the bulk and provides water, food and space for the probiotics and yeasts to multiply. Keeping the proper balance of wild yeasts and bacteria is critical to the proper functioning of the starter. If you have other ferments in your kitchen (e.g., kombucha, water or dairy kefir, cheese and yogurt) keep some distance between each culture, at least a few feet. When feeding your starter, you should whip air into the starter with a fork or whisk and then cover it with an air tight lid, such as a canning lid. Keeping the stater closed will prevent it from drying out in dry climates or while in the fridgexse.
~Creating a Sourdough Starter~
The process of catching a starter is really very easy but takes almost two weeks. Think of these days as an investment in your health and the quality of your bread and enjoy the process of slowing down and creating real food with real meaning. It all starts with flour and water, and perhaps some pineapple juice. You can use any flour (whole wheat, spelt, Kamut, rye or even white bread flour) and no matter what you feed your starter, it can be used to rise bread of all kinds. Each flour and each region will produce starters with different flavors and fragrances which contribute to the unique quality your own bread will have. If you buy a starter, overtime it will change as it is populated by your local yeasts. I myself have started several pure starters using a variety of flours: white bread flour, red wheat, white wheat (which is whole wheat flour ground from a lighter and milder variety), Kamut and rye. Rye produces the most acidic starter with the most aggressive sour taste while the natural sweetness of Kamut produced the sweetest, least sourdough tasting bread. The spectrum of acidic to sweet grains progresses from rye to red wheat to white wheat to Kamut. White bread flour lacks sweetness and depth but the familiar sourdough flavor headlines and is what most commercial sourdough is made of in whole or part. If you like switching flours all the time, you might want to keep a neutral starter with white bread or white whole wheat flour. I have cultivated and maintained a variety of pure as well as combined starters and recommend simply maintaining the combined.
Some of the sourdough flavor comes from long, slow ferments which both help rise the loaf and break down anti-nutrients but increase the acid content in the bread and the number of sour-tasting lactobacilli. Some breads are fermented for as long as 24 hours which moves to the point of killing off many yeasts and results in bread that is very healthy but flat and sour, which in some applications is the desired flavor profile. Another way to encourage more yeasts to rise the bread without as much sour flavor is to use a wetter dough, which might mean using a pan or baking in a cloche or Dutch oven because the dough is too soft to avoid spreading out. If you can leave a handprint on the surface of the ball of dough, you will have a mild flavor and a quick rise. If it is a very firm ball the bread will have a stronger flavor and take longer to rise.
Days 1 to 3:
Start with a clean quart jar. Add 2Tb of flour and a scant amount of water until a paste is achieved when blended with a fork. Scrape down the sides and cover with a cloth and leave at room temperature. Morning and night for three days feed by adding 2Tb more flour and some warm water. If you live in a very humid climate, or you often notice a musty smell in your wet laundry your area might have a high concentration of leuconostoc bacteria. You'll need a higher acid level to kill it off and should use pineapple juice instead of water when starting a new starter to increase the acidity of the starter and prevent these unpleasant bacteria from getting a foothold. If at any time you notice a musty smell, sweeten the dough twice with pineapple juice as the liquid to rebalance the starter.
Days 4 to 10:
After the first few days, you can close the lid on your starter. You will remove half the starter (compost it) and add 4Tb each flour water every morning and evening. Removing half of the starter will increase the concentration of yeasts without increasing the volume of starter, which sounds counter-intuitive but it's all about exponential growth.
Say that there are 100 yeasts in an imaginary cup of starter, all evenly distributed. Yeasts will double every two hours or so, given sufficient food, temperature and space. But if you leave the starter alone, the number of yeasts will actually go down because the yeast will have run out of food. When that happens, your concentration will go down as the yeasts die off but the lactobacilli go up and this means less rising power and more sour bread. So if you feed it, without dumping any, an amount equal to one half cup, then in four more hours you double and double again to 400 yeasts in one and a half cups which is an average of 267 per cup now. If we feed it again but do not remove any then in four more hours we will have 1600 yeasts in two cups or 800 per cup. We started with 100 per cup, and at four hours we had 267 and eight hours later have 800 per cup but the lactobacilli have come along for the ride. This might be a good thing as the lactobacilli contribute to the tangy flavor, the higher acidity and promote nutrient liberation, but eventually you have to bake it or toss it because it will get too big.
If we start with the same theoretical cup of starter with 100 yeasts and we follow the process of dumping half and then feeding, initially you will decrease to 50 yeasts which in four hours will double and double again to 200 in the same volume of starter, one cup. If you dump and feed again, then in four hours you will increase the yeasts to 400 per cup without increasing the lacto-bacilli as much and end up with sweeter starter. We started with a single cup of starter and 100 yeasts and four hours later had 200 and eight hours later we have 400 yeasts but in the same amount of starter. But if you feed again without dumping because you are building enough starter for a recipe, you will increase to 1600 yeasts in only one and half cups or 1066 per cup of starter. An initial removal of part of the starter promotes more yeasts in concentration (that is per cup) and a sweeter starter as it encourages the proliferation of yeasts without as rapid a proliferation of lactobacilli (which make sour tasting dough). With a very acid starter that smells very sour and is excessively stretchy, follow this process of halving and feeding to increase the yeasts and decrease the lactobacilli. It is known as sweetening because it results in a sweeter smelling and tasting starter.