Sourdough:
My Personal Approach
I want to get this on the table first: I am not a professionally trained baker.
I was a banker.
For 11 1/2 years I crunched numbers and cleaned up excel spreadsheets for a living, but on March 17, 2017, I traded in my corporate career for the much more gratifying role of “Chief Operating Officer” of our household and became a professional stay at home mom.
It certainly was a role that took some getting used to. While I may not have been living by my Outlook calendar anymore, there was plenty to do every day to create the home atmosphere my husband and I wanted for our family. Less rushing and more enjoying of each moment; fewer laundry piles and more hanging and folding of clothes…fewer processed dinners and more “from scratch” cooking with whole ingredients.
I’ve always been a process wonk (I wrote many, many procedures while working at the bank) and I’ve watched enough of Martha to know there’s a right way to do just about everything around the house. In my mind nothing was more foundational to learn than how to bake a proper loaf of bread.
BREAD IS LIFE
It has sustained humanity for thousands of years. What could be more foundational than that?
I prefer a more analytical approach when learning something new, so I started with the America’s Test Kitchen book Bread Illustrated: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Bakery-Quality Results at Home.
The authors of the book take great pains to detail the why’s and how’s of making bread and explain the tweaks or embellishments they apply to recipes so the reader can understand each ingredient’s impact on the overall recipe. I had some great success making the challah, kaiser rolls, a sandwich loaf, and a rustic Italian loaf, to name a few.
It also includes instructions for establishing a sourdough culture from scratch, which I was successful at building up and equally successful at allowing it to fail from neglect. That got me looking all over Pinterest for ways to store a healthy culture without having to feed it every day, but wasn’t having much luck in finding one that worked.
---> IN THE MEANTIME,
while I was somehow keeping my first attempts at a culture alive, I picked up a book self-published by none other than my own mother. It was a sweet Christmas present to her children that year and my very worn copy - smudges and dog-eared pages and all - is still in heavy rotation.
She included a sourdough starter recipe that was carried across the Oregon Trail and uses potato water! It also includes a number of recipes like hot cakes and waffles that you’ll be reading about on this blog in the near future👀… It’s so fun working these classic family recipes and sharing them them with my own kids, as well.
I’ll admIt here that I sort of gave up on my sourdough progress sometime in the spring of 2018. I was still under the impression that my starter required daily feedings, though small, so it became a bit of a chore to maintain. It got completely forgotten when we moved that summer.
Once we got settled into our new house and the kids were off to school again, I popped down to the bookstore,
determined to find another resource for mastering the art of bread baking.
Enter my very favorite book on the subject thus far: Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza by Ken Forkish. An award-winning, New York Times Best-Selling cookbook written by an Oregonian who also left one career track to adopt a whole new obsession in bread.
Forkish’s book gets credit for helping me understand more nitty-gritty details about how managing hydration levels and using proper weights creates a balance for these four basic ingredients that results in - for me - the most outstanding home-baked bread and pizza dough I’ve had from anyone. His instructions also include a method for storing the levain (the French word for leavening/sourdough) so I can set it aside and come back to it when I’m ready.
No more wasting flour to only be discarded in the trash the next day!
Now I know how to preserve it for weeks at a time and wake it up when I’m ready to bake again.
In fact, thanks to Forkish’s book and my mom’s family recipes, I’ve defined a baking schedule that allows me to use all of my starter on a rolling basis and hardly ever discard any!
This low-waste method helps to save money, time, and allows our family to enjoy even more of that sour-goodness.
As mentioned on my home page, I prefer a schedule that allows my bread to enjoy a full 24 hours between initially mixing the dough and pulling the end product out of the oven. (If you’re counting the levain acculturation time, we’re talking more like 36 hours!) I’ve found that this longer fermentation allows the yeasts and lactic acid bacteria to develop their flavors to create a pleasant tang without actually tasting sour-sour.
I use a covered bakers to ensure a cozy, humid environment for the crumb to bloom and the crust to develop and finish with the lid removed just long enough to deepen it’s color and refine the texture for that classic sourdough crunchy-chew.
It’s the kind of bread I always wanted to make - and I’m proud to have the opportunity now to share it with more people like you.