Bread

I want to get one going. How did you start yours? I just bought a book called Crust and Crumb but it's a tad advanced for me.

I just started with 1/2 cup unbleached flour and 1/2 cup water in a liter mason jar. Every day I poured out half and added the same back, stirred it up (wooden utensils) and did this for 1 week to develop a good culture and flavour. Now it's ready to use. Because I've never cooked with one before I wanted a recipe but since I haven't gotten one yet I'm going to try one of mine and see how it goes. Will post results

I've done it, and it turned out fairly well, and was easy to keep going;

To make the starter, for the first week I used 1 cup of flour, and 1 cup of water. Every day, throw half the mix out, and add a fresh half+ cup of water and half+ cup of flour. Over the course of the week, I built the starter up to about 3 cups worth. At the end of the week, it should be frothy on top, and have a distinct sour, beery smell. Also, store and build your starter in a larger jar than you expect to need. when it starts to froth, it will expand, and if you have it in a smaller jar it will escape all over the back of your counter.

When the first week is done, and you have a frothy, beery, sour starter, pour the entire thing out into a bowl, wash and sterilize the jar you'd been keeping it in, and pour half of it back. Top it up with fresh water and flour, and move it from the back of your counter into the fridge. Make sure the lid is loose, your starter still needs to breathe! You can repeat this every week, and will always have starter ready for a weekly batch of sourdough bread.

Starting with a cup to a cup and a half of starter, and the NIGHT BEFORE you want your bread;

2 cups warm water
5 cups flour (this varies depending on how thick your starter is, how stiff you want your bread etc.
2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar

Mix the starter with water, add the sugar, and salt then start adding flour a cup at at time until the dough is firm.
Knead the hell out of it. Beat it up. Make it beg for mercy. I do this by hand, so I spend a good 10 minutes beating up the dough and taking out my frustrations on it.

Grease a large bowl, form the dough into a ball and place it in the bowl, covering it loosely with wax paper and a towel. Leave it someplace warm overnight to let it rise.

I let the first rise run over night because I found sourdough bread rises much slower than bread made with yeast. You have to give it time to work.

The next morning, turn the bread out onto a floured surface, punch the dough down and seperate it into two round loaves. Cover again, and let it rise for baking until it doubles in size again, could be anywhere from 1 to 4 hours.

I put a bit of cornmeal on a baking sheet, turn the loaves out onto it and put them in the oven at 400F for about 35 minutes.

You're supposed to let them cook on a rack for a couple hours to fully develop the sourdough flavor when they're done baking, but rarely does that actually happen 🙂

Thanks for the recipe, used my recipe and i think it needs a but more starter in it but it turned out. Will try yours load recipe next.

mine's about as basic as it gets for a bread recipe. if you prefer you can add a little oil (tablespoon or two) as well. If I recall, this was a sourdough variation on a simple french bread recipe. At this point, there's very little measuring when I make it, so long as the proportions are slightly more water than starter by volume, and a little more than twice the flour than water. Salt, sugar, oil, and occasionally black pepper are all added in the ever so precise measurements of "dash", "pinch" and "dollop" It's a very forgiving recipe

my dear departed mom use to make sour dough in a 2 qt mason crock with a lid. Dont think I tasted regular bread until I went over to my friends place and had a sandwich. This also was known as chuck wagon bread. :geek:

So my recipe turned out pretty good, nice flavour great crust. Might make it again and use it for some sammich specials at the restaurant.

If you have access to organic, non-spayed grape leaves, consider making a grape leaf starter, I don't know what the difference is but the end taste is different compared to the water/flour starter.

Its the same process to a point, other then you go pick the cleanest looking grape leaf you can find, and you dip it into the flour/water mix and then continue like above, I dipped a leaf each day for the full starting week and its sourdough but its a fuller bodied sour dough..

Sounds interesting

Although I have a stockpile of flour along with the appropriate yeast, I tend to favor the non-leavened bread for several reasons. Firstly its difficult to maintain the temperature without an oven ( assuming a survival scenario), and secondly the difficulty of making it in less than kitchen quality environments. Flatbreads, corn breads, tortillas, and bannock recipes take fewer ingredients and can cook over an open fire, have much less cooking time, and/or if needed, cooked on the end of a stick over the flames. I play with these recipes more at home than with regular bread and have very good results.

Worth mentioning, if you are going to stockpile flour, make sure you have a small can of baking powder for every pail/bag of flour. one is not useful without the other. I cook regularly with these recipes at home, while camping, fishing, and hunting. Also keep in mind that too much wheat flour is not so good for many people when high in the diet. Wheat flour should be balanced equally with other forms of carbs and starches.

BTW its been awhile on this post but I came up with a neat trick for keeping your starter. I bought a few of the plastic, wide mouth mason storage lids (white plastic lids just made to put on in the fridge once you open a jar) and cut a small hole in the top, fitted in an airlock from my brewing stuff and put it in the fridge, now my starter can breathe, wont overflow and just pull it out for feeding once a week or so. I am still using the same starter as when I started this thread over a year ago. Still going strong and tastes great.

that's brilliant GP... I'm going to have to modify a jar lid or two.

I have a question about the starter. When you make it for the first time, do you keep it out or put it in the fridge?

What we do for our starter is start with 1 cup flour and 1 cup water, mix it together and let it sit on the counter. Everyday we throw out half of this mixture and add back 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water, mix well and let sit on the counter again. After several days to a week your culture should have formed quite nicely (try to keep it away from anything nasty as it may pick up unwanted or foul tasting bacteria). You should have a sticky bubbly mixture with a grey liquid floating on top(this is called the hooch or liquor, it is perfectly normal and wanted, just mix it back in)

Once you have done this for about a week your starter should be ready to start baking with. You could continue to repeat this process and leave it on the counter but keeping it in the fridge slows the metabolic rate of the bacteria. This allows you to feed it only once per week or so. I have gotten away with being lazy and forgetting for up to 2 to 3 weeks. The bacteria will go dormant for quite awhile without dying. If this happens bring it out of the fridge, feed it and let it sit out for a day or 2 again and it should come back without much effort.

Hope that helps
GP