What to do with your starter excess?  I always feel bad just pouring it down the drain.  However sometimes I have to pour out the full cup of each starter to make room for the cup of new feeding that has to get added in.  Even when I do use the pour off for sourdough pancakes, there is often a good 0.5-1 cup of excess re-fed starter in the proofing bowls.  In either case, I hate to pour good starter down the drain.  If I follow the recipes in books like Tartine they really are only using a very small fraction of the total starter, albeit for great recipes.  I wanted to see if I could use the starter as the basis for a bread by having it substitute for comparable quantities of water and flour.    My first try at this was two weeks ago.  I didn't use any olive oil or leavening.  I had chance to have long rise times.  This time around I had some new garlic infused oil I wanted to try using but didn't have enough time to allow the sourdough to definitely rise in time so added 0.25 tsp of yeast.  I'll try to post pictures later, but the results were great!

Ingredients
    •    However much 100% (by volume) starter you have left over.
    •    Additional water to get to 1 cup total water
    •    0.5 cup wheat flour
    •    Additional white flour to get to 3 cups of flour
    •    1.5 tsp kosher salt
    •    1.5 tsp sugar
    •    2 TB olive oil
    •    up to 0.25 tsp instant yeast

Directions
    1.    Night before, your excess starter from feeding cycle into measuring cup to determine total amount of existing water and flour.  Based on 100% hydration, if you have 1 cup of starter you'd have half a cup of water and half a cup of flour.  Preferably have 1 cup of starter or more for this step.
    2.    Add the half cup of whole wheat flour and let soak over night.
    3.    In the morning before making bread, mix in olive oil, sugar, yeast (if used) and additional water.  Mix thoroughly by gently  stirring/folding.
    4.    Put additional white flour into a bowl leaving about 1 cup or so on the side for kneading.
    5.    Pour starter mixture over the flour and incorporate completely
    6.    Leave rest in the bowl, covered, for 30 minutes
    7.    Work additional flour in and knead in bowl until ready to be turned out onto floured surface
    8.    Knead dough incorporating enough flour to achieve nice smooth consistency.  Knead for 10-15 minutes.
    9.    Spray metal bowl with PAM and place dough in bowl covered.
    10.    Let rise until doubled in size.  Will be about 2-3 hours with yeast and longer than that without.
    11.    When double in size turn out onto floured surface and cut into number of loaves you want (probably 1-3).  
    12.    Work dough into balls and let rest for 30 minutes.
    13.    Form dough into final loaf shape and place on parchment paper. Cover, either with a bowl or other covering or a damp towel.
    14.    When doubled in size preheat oven to 500 degrees with stone and tray for steaming.
    15.    At this time uncover the loaves, coat with flour and slash.  If oven will be longer than 15 minutes to come to temperature re-cover the loaves.
    16.    When oven is up to temperature boil 2 cups of water in the microwave.  
    17.    Place loaves on stone by working the parchment paper.
    18.    Put 1 cup of the boiling water into the pan
    19.    Close oven and set thermostat for 450 degrees
    20.    Bake for 30 minutes (or longer to get more crust).
    21.    Remove from oven and let cool before serving.

Over Christmas I had a gay old time back home in WY collecting freshly fallen snow and leaving various casques of wet grains sitting around on the countertops to see if any "beasties" (as people seem to call them on TFL) would come to visit. I ended up having some success with some spelt-noodles which I left out with water and a bit of vinegar, and too with some organic irish oats that I left out, again with water and a T or so of standard $1-per-huge-container vinegar mixed in. I set one or two plasticwrapped bowls of flour-mixes (used organic AP once, I think, and then just switched to whole-wheat) on the heat-ducts at night to help the critters get the ball rolling, and also emplyed the heat from the pellet-stove in a similar manner. (I actually cooked two of my starters because I'd turned the heat up too high at one point. They were apparently both viable because they'd both risen before being somewhat solidified in place and turned into not quite "bread" by the heat. 'Shame really.)

I came back on the plane to Indy (I study here) with four jars, and after some feeding it was clear that TWO of them had made it (largely as a result of the type of lid each jar had been sealed with). After a bit of downtime, I got Rocketstarter (who survived in checked baggage somehow) forming a very nice head of foam using... of all things, OAT flour (it can triple in under a day if it's given the right amount of water and flour in one feeding) and Applestarter was able to follow once I learned it preferred some of the wheat-flour I have here.

I've since divided both and now have whole-wheat and rye versions of both, and have one spelt (a child of Rocket's) who's gradually gaining footing. I decided to try it because I actually took my starters into the winter farmer's market here on two occassions to ask a very knowledgable strictly-organic baker who appears there every week about strategy, feeding schedules, and how my starters were looking and smelling. He's been incredibly helpful in many ways but I won't go into too much detail. (The smell-part is not something I can really ask about online, somuch, and I'm still training my nose in this context, so that was definately one thing.) But, where to go from here? Ideally I'll ofcourse get really good at making sourdough pancakes, but I'm looking to get a favourite starter or three into the fridge so I can get a proper routine going, and get a consistent supply of real bread flowing. (It doesn't have to be sour, necessarily.)

On tap, I've got organic AP flour coming out of my ears, roughly two cups of rye left, roughly two cups of whole-wheat, and plenty of spelt. Also I have a ton of bulgur, and a ton of vital wheat gluten, and milk-powder, honey and turbanado... salt ofcourse... (While I'm at it, I've also got quinoa, millet, and amaranth which I could grind, but I know those can be more of a challenge to bake with, thus I'm leaving those till later.) SO, is there some way I can compare how the starters all behave during baking under similar conditions given what I have around? (more info just ask...) I've got a reasonable knead and stretch-and-fold down now, and now that I'm back home I've got an accurate digital scale, now I just need a reasonable recipe (or set of similar recipes) to use to compare what I have. (I may have just found a decent baking stone on craigslist. I've used one twice and both times it was like I'd died and gone to heaven, but I digress.) Any suggestions?

Maybe it's more of a pain au je ne sais quoi...

After seeing Shiao-Ping's post, "Pain au levain with wine," (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13989/pain-au-levain-wine-60-hydration#comment-86360) and Yozza's wine bread with sesame (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13949/winebaking-part-ii-what-happened#comment-86222) - and simply the sight of their absolutely gorgeous breads, I had no choice but to try it again!  Yozza had excellent recommendations, and Shiao-Ping seemed to have a resounding success with her sourdough starter;Yozza's seemed excellent, as did hers...   Unfortunately, I have never really liked sourdough, so on her recommendation of an alternate starter I tried a slightly different formula...  

Admittedly, I'm an amateur - this was simply improv on my part, probably foolhardy.  Here goes:

I've had great luck with the technique I first learned in Rose's Bread Bible - the method of letting a sponge rise beneath a flour mixture - so going off of some elements of Yozza's bread and Shiao-Ping's sourdough, I tried a variation, though in a smaller loaf.  

Starter:

80 g flour

110 ml warm water

1 tsp sugar

3/4 tsp yeast

Flour mixture, well mixed: 

120 g flour

4 g salt

1/2 tsp yeast

1/2 tsp sugar

And: 20 ml semi-sweet red wine (12.5 %), allowed to "breathe" at room temperature for 2 hours.  

(With the proportion of wine to water, I was trying to imitate Yozza's ratios.)  

In a midsize bowl, I mixed the starter until smooth and soupy, then sprinkled about half of the flour mixture on top and allowed it to ferment for approximately 2 hours, until the starter bubbled through the flour.  

At this time, I measured the wine and set it aside (I wanted to achieve the wine taste, but worried about the potential problems it might cause with the yeast, so I thought that perhaps letting it "breathe" at room temperature during the rising time would balance it out).  

After 2 hours, I began to mix by hand the rest of the flour mixture.  Then, I slowly added the wine.  It made for a very sticky dough, but very elastic and similar to what I have had in a semolina torpedo, with lots of gluten strands.  But there was no purple tone to be seen, and I wished I'd begun with more wine... So with the recklessness of a beginner I mixed about 25 g of flour with a further splash of wine into a paste, and gently kneaded this into the dough.

I allowed the dough to rise on its own at about 70 degrees F, until a depression in the dough rose back on its own.  Then, I softly stretched the dough, like I have with ciabatta, and shaped it into a rectangular loaf.  It was quite sticky, but manageable.  Here's the shaped loaf:

I let it rise for about an hour, while preheating the oven to 230 degrees C (all we have on our oven).  Then, after dusting it with flour, I popped it in on the lowest rack

, with steam.  After ten minutes, I removed the steam and reduced the temperature to 205.  After ten more minutes, the loaf had browned nicely on top, and the thermometer read an internal temperature of 208 F.  

The result:

And taste verdict: not at all bitter, as I had found my previous wine boule!  Not art, exactly, but enjoyable.  The crumb:

Chewy, though it had only a few of the iconic ciabatta holes.  But not nearly enough salt!  The wine taste didn't come through at all, so I am thinking that for the next experiment I'll substitute far more of the hydration with the wine, and adhere far more to the stretching process of some sort of ciabatta-type bread.  Any thoughts, suggestions, advice?  Thanks to Shiao-Ping, Yozza, and everybody!

(p.s. If anybody is interested or bored, there's more pictures of our continuing stages of winemaking on my blog: http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com/)

Eight mini-loaves.  Contain chopped crystallized ginger, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and chopped sour cherries.  A little too dense and the cherries vanished in the baking, but not bad.  Glazed with honey/cinnamon/egg/sugar on the darker four and just egg/sugar on the lighter four.

In my first post, I mentioned the recipe I started with.  Here's how things have evolved since then.

My first problem with the original recipe was pretty major: I could never get a enough of a rise to get two loaves with the pans I had.  Given I was making bread for a family of five, my first change was to simply double everything.  From this doubled recipe, I made 3 loaves.  This seemed to work out pretty nicely.  I generally ended up with 3 2-lb loaves of bread from each batch.