First time making sourdough bread
One of the things I've wanted to do for a very long time is sourdough bread. Yesterday I made my first two loaves of sourdough bread made from spelt flour.
I've been dreaming about sourdough bread and pancakes and muffins, but I've never been successful with making the starter. This time I got water from the lake at our cabin and I gave it another try using only water and spelt flour. This time it worked!
I found a recipe based on weight and I find that easy, I can weight the amount of starter I need to keep and use what's left. The biggest difference was however that the recipe I found actually explained something about the process. On the second day I wasn't supposed to feed it, I was supposed to stir it to let the yeast forming on top get into the starter. That tells me something. So I stirred, I fed it again and kept on stirring it every now and then. On the morning of day 6 I had a starter that was ready to use.
Link to the starter I used.
I used organic sifted spelt flour and I did let the day 5 get 12 more hours so that I could use it on the morning of day 6.
Sourdough starter
I saved 224 grams of starter and once I fed it again I couldn't believe how it took off! This is my starter today so I'll be doing some more bread tomorrow!
I searched online and ended up reading recipe after recipe for sourdough bread and I was stunned that for the most part they're really complicated. It doesn't make sense to me that it has to be so complicated to make bread. Some recipes suggested that I would stretch and fold the dough twice every hour, some that I would do a dough before making the real dough or that I would use dry yeast in addition to get a more reliable rise. I've learned that to make bread you let the dough rise in the bowl and then again on the baking sheet before getting it into the oven. If I use a natural yeast that needs a lot of time to perform, why disrupt it? If I need to make it into a 24 hour project to get a loaf of bread then I'm not going to do it and to me the point of using sourdough was to replace the storebought yeast.
So I just stopped reading and found a recipe that I thought had the right amounts of liquid to get me started and then I just made a dough. I used milk, butter and both swedish baking syrup and honey. I did it all by hand with so much love and covered the bowl to let it rise. After four hours I realized it wasn't going to rise. So I went online again. I read somewhere that the dough want the same temperatures that your kitchen gets on a hot summer day when you think it's getting to hot. So I used my oven, with only the light on it got up to 27 C, and after a few hours the magic finally started to happen! By this time we could only let it rise for a few more hours before we needed to use the oven for dinner. I made two loaves and left them to rise on a baking sheet while we had dinner. The loaves didn't look like much, they almost looked sad, but I got them in the oven after two hours and there was some more magic happening. They did rise, but not as much as I would have expected them to do. The taste is great, but they turned out really dense.
There's nothing perfect about the two loaves I made, but I learned from the mistakes I made. I know that next time I'll do much better and that I'll be more successful using the starter and making my own sourdough bread.
Lessons learned, I'll be using loaf pans for the next batch and I'll let it rise in the oven with the lights on.
Until next time, be well!
//S
My wife is gluten sensitive and we have been meaning to make sourdough bread. We are hoping that the yeast will break down the gluten enough that it won't be an issue for her.
Your comment made me think of a flour I used for a while, it was made from roasted oat kernels. It gave the bread a really nice flavour. Have you heard of that? I found what I think is a similar flour here and it's gluten free. When I searched for the flour I used I came across a recipe where they used 20% oat flour, 20% rye and 60% spelt making sourdough bread. Spelt has more gluten than wheat as far as I know so you'll probably want to avoid spelt, but I figured the oat flour might help to get it lower on gluten. I believe I used to replace more than 20% with oat flour when I made bread using yeast. I hope you succeed in making bread that she can eat! I know gluten free bread isn't always so great. I've been trying to cope without any flour in my diet and it makes life so much easier when you can eat bread.
Thanks for the tip on the roasted oat flour! I will pass it along to Aimee.
So glad I visited you page when you had an active post :) My son loves to bake bread and he is very accurate about it. He does the stretch method.
I used to bake lots and lots of bread and even sold it. What I did is make a pre-dough with my starter and freshly milled rye flour and water. Just mixed it enough to be mixed all together. I let that sit for at least 12 hours, sometimes longer. Then, I took my next starter from that, added salt, more flour, spices, herbs, seeds, some water ( I did different varieties). Again, let it sit until it was well risen. Then, I formed it, let it rise some more and bake it.
So, timewise, it was a long process. Workwise, it was not...
It's good to be back and feel like I can do this just a little bit different. I had a hard time finding the kind of posts that I enjoy reading, but I'm working my way back to what I like about steemit.
I hope I didn't offend anyone who is really good at making sourdough bread, that wasn't at all my intention. I got really frustrated when I couldn't find a recipe for something really basic to get me started. I almost got to scared to even try! Maybe with some practice I'll be doing a dough before I make a dough like you, but for now I'm learning to understand the process. And I agree with that, so far I feel it's more time than hard work!
You won't stop baking it now! It's sooo good, and gets easier with time. Well done you!
Thank you, that's what I'm hoping for!
My favorite food in the whole world is sourdough. I could live on that and extra sharp cheese (ok, and red wine). At the moment my situation doesn't allow me to make yummy things like bread or Kombucha BUT that will change. Your post has reminded me how much I miss baking bread and can't wait to get back at it. Enjoy and can't wait to see your loaf pan batch!
That's true, bread is essential for a good life. I might have to try some wine too and I've never had kambucha! I'm waiting for that batch of sourdough bread to rise, looking good so far, I'll make an update when it's done.
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