Hi there, I'm also from Ohio.  I have been a member of TFL for a couple of years but, honestly I think this is my first post!  I have been baking bread, rolls and pastry for longer than I care to admit.  A friend recently gave me some sourdough starter, which is what brought me back to the forums in earnest.  It's been interesting to learn about sourdough, and I really like baking without commercial yeast.  The advice and recipes here have been very helpful- thank you!

Cheers,

Jen

"Hi all,

So this week I tried to make my first sourdough, and seeming as how I live in San Francisco I was pretty excited about this! I have been thoroughly enjoying "The Bread Baker's Apprentice," so I figured I'd use Reinhart's formula for Seed Culture, Barm and Starter.

From Day One, starting the Seed Culture, it looked like something was wrong. First off, my dough was quite wet - almost the consistency of pancake batter, while Reinhart's instructions said the Day One mixture should be a "ball" and to be careful to make sure all the flour was hydrated. I double checked my measurements, and still I had the pancake batter consistency.

Moving on to Day Two, Reinhart said to expect ver little if no rise. My Day One mixture bubbled like a jaccuzi and grew to twice its size in 24 hours. None the less, I soldiered on. At the end of Day Three, after having thrown out half the Day One/Two mixture as per the instructions and added the new ingredients, everything just stopped. In the next 24 hours, the Culture showed no activity at all. I let it sit another 24 hours, and this morning what I saw was this unrisen goo with a film of vinegar-smelling ooze on top. Terrific.

So today I'm starting over...and looking for help. I started again with the Day One formula, and again, it was the consistency of batter (4.25 oz. rye flour to six ounces water). So I added more flour until it truly was a ball and had the consistency of a regular dough.

Any other suggestions? Any assitance would be greatly appreciated!

These are inspired by the "Chocolate Things" at the Cheesboard Bakery in Berkeley. However, since I've become somewhat obsessed with my sourdough starter (Sebastian) since growing it (him?) a month or so ago, I of course, decided to modify the recipe to use up some of my discards.

Recipe (all measurements are in volumes, and are also approximate--I am chronically incapable of sticking with any precision to any recipe whatsoever. I know it would probably help my baking if I did, but going by dough-poking feel is more fun.)

Combine in a bowl: 3/4 cup sourdough starter discards (straight from fridge, they'd been accumulating for about a week), 3/4 c water, 1 c flour. Let sit for 2 (or more) hours. Mine bubbled, but didn't rise very much.

Add in 3/4c water mixed with about 1/4 tsp. dry yeast (I was worried that my discard starter needed a bit of help, but you could probably skip this), 1 egg, 2 Tbsp sugar, 2 Tbsp very soft butter, and about 3-4 c flour until a soft, fairly moist dough forms. Knead for a few minutes, then cover and let rise for about 3 hours. My dough almost tripled in this time.

Fold/knead into the dough about 1cup coarsely chopped chocolate chips. Shape into balls (or a loaf) and let proof on a baking sheet for about 45 minutes while the oven preheats to 400. Bake for about 20 minutes. I sprayed the oven for steam right as I put them in.

The sourdough taste is less pronounced than I'd like, but they are great for a breakfast or snack treat. As the dough isn't too sweet, the chocolate doesn't seem too overly decadent. (Which of course is my justification for eating them right out of the oven.)

Thanks to all the good advice I received here I finally managed an entirely staisfactory sourdough loaf. The full story is at my blog, but the bare essentials are that I made a 60% hydration dough with 100% strong Manitoba flour. The starter was 10% at 100% hydration. I stretched and folded during about three and a half hours bulk fermentation at a hot room temperature, then formed the boule and let it rise for an hour or so before putting it in the frdige overnight. I baked from cold, into the hottest oven I could manage. And the ugly looking scoring was achieved with a pair of scissors, snipping the dough four times.

Thanks again.

Hello everyone. I'm new to the site. I found it a couple of weeks ago and was immediately astounded by the quality of the breads and the advice that was here. I've been baking bread for around 7 years. I started with a castoff bread machine, graduated to pan breads and then one day about six years ago I was eating a piece of store-bought sourdough and thought "I wonder how hard it would be to make this." I ordered a sourdough starter from Sourdoughs International in Idaho and it's been percolating along ever since then. I tried Carl Griffith's starter and even made my own, but I kept coming back to the San Francisco starter I purchased from Ed Wood's company. I spent a lot of time on the rec.food.sourdough newsgroups and subscribed to Mike Avery's mailing list before I found this site. I've made a lot of bread in the intervening years, most of it good-flavored but mostly uninteresting pan breads. Don't get me wrong, my kids don't eat store bought cardbread unless we're really in a pinch and I haven't been able to bake in a while. My standard daily bread for the past few years has been good, just not great. My baking road has been long and bumpy, and several times I almost gave up altogether. Finally, a few weeks ago I caught the bug again and I'm proud to say that everything seems to be coming together this time.

For a long time I was really nervous about degassing my sourdough. Somehow I had it stuck in my head that a sourdough starter just couldn't produce the kind of oomph a yeasted loaf could, so I resisted handling the dough very much, mixing it until the gluten developed and then letting it sit until risen. A few weeks ago I stumbled across a method on Mike Avery's website to let the dough do all (well, most) of the work in developing the gluten. He mixes the final dough together until it's a very rough mass, then lets it rest for a couple of hours, stretching and folding the dough two or three times during the rise. I know I've read similar techniques elsewhere, but for some reason his explanation stuck with me. I decided to give it a try and immediately noticed a huge improvement. The other things that have greatly helped in recent weeks are the addition of split firebrick as my baking surface and the purchase of the SuperPeel from Exo Products.

I've always baked primarily for myself, but if my family and friends didn't enjoy the fruits of my labors, I'm sure I wouldn't be nearly as motivated to continue and improve. In the past couple of weeks, I've received three compliments (unsolicited, of course) that have each made my day. A coworker said "This is just like something you'd get at a bakery." A lady at a neighborhood party said "I pay good money for bread like this," and this morning I presented my wife with the best looking baguette I've ever produced and she responded with "I've had baguettes in France that weren't this good."

I obviously still have a lot to learn, but there's just something about finally reaching a goal that has taken so long to achieve that makes me want to shout about it from the rooftops. All day long I've felt like a kid at Christmas, and I keep sneaking downstairs to cut another slice. It's amazing that something so fundamentally simple can be so universally fulfilling. I feel like today's batch of bread was finally good enough to photograph and post for all of you to see. Any comments, suggestions, or questions are welcome. Happy baking!

Today I made my first sourdough bread! The starter had been bubbling for almost 11 days now, so I decided to give it a try. At first it didn't rise much. I guess I simply didn't knead it properly in the beginning, but by the time it came out of the oven there was a queue waiting to take a bite out of it. I got the recipe from here.

Here's the loaf when it came out:

And this is the crumb:

My starter is slightly thicker than pancake-batter. Does anyone know any other good recipes that will work with a starter such as mine?

Thanks

Fence

It seems like most everyone on this site is a sourdough fan. For those of you who are, what is your opinion of the bread served at Claimjumper restaurants? I have never been a big fan of sourdough breads. It could be that I have never met a truly good one, or it could be that I just don't like it. The bread at Claimjumper was totally inedible to me.

Since there are so many versions available, I am wondering if I should try it on my own and risk throwing it straight into the garbage after putting a lot into it (even if it is the best bread ever made by your standards) or resign myself to excluding it from my "playlist".

Thanks for your opinions,

Paul

We've got so many jars and tins and boxes and bottles in our house. I "digged" in our cellar and found an old jar of dried apples. Dried 1998, surprisingly still look alright. Found a bag of organic buckwheat flour which my parents brought home from the Bretagne, France some holidays ago. And found a glass with some kind of Estonian instant Buckwheat which our Estonian exchange student left here two years ago. Everything looked alright, smelled alright, felt alright, I decided: It's time to use it!

End of August - The fall is coming! What about an Buckwheat Apple Bread, that sounds good and seasonal. It just had to be created. That's where I came into play. I intensified the apple flavor trough some cider, which we had in our cellar as well, and added a little bit of pear honey as well. Rather easy, utterly delicious.

The apple and the buckwheat are not only on the picture a nice couple, I found that the light sweetness and the sour tang of the apple worked very well with the nutty buckwheat flavor. Especially the crunchy loaf had a very interesting mouth feel!

Buckwheat Apple Sourdough

Ingredients

liquid levain
100 g buckwheat flour
125 ml cider
15 g mature starter

final dough
385 g bread flour
15 g Vital Wheat Gluten
230 ml cider (start with 200 ml and add more cider as required)
12 g salt
a little less than 1 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp pear honey ("Birnel"), can be substituted by any sweetener
40 g dried apple rings, chopped
1/2 cup whole buckwheat

1. Mix the ingredients for the liquid levain, put aside for 12 hours.
2. pour some hot water over the whole buckwheat and let it soak for a while.
3. In the meantime, mix the liquid levain, the flour, the Vital Wheat Gluten and cider and let it autolyse for some time. I let it sit for about 15 minutes, as long as it took to clean up after lunch. Watch out with the amount of cider added, I had to juggle a bit with some extra flour and extra cider until I found the right consitency, a tacky but not sticky dough.
4. strain the buckwheat berries and let it drip off well.
5. mix the final dough, but don't add the apple chunks and the buckwheat yet. Knead until the gluten is developed, then incorporate the apple pieces and about 2/3 of the buckwheat berries.
6. Let the dough ferment for about 1.5 hours, with one fold after 40 minutes.
7. Divide the dough into two, shape two boules. I rolled one in the leftover buckwheat berries and let it proof on the board, the other one proofed in a proofing basket.
8. after the proofing, I decorated the second boule with an apple sign (Cut out an apple out of paper, mist the boule, place the apple on the loaf and dust the loaf now with flour. Take the apple paper away and in the oven it goes).
9. Bake the loaves on a preheated baking stone with steam at 430°F, lower the temperature when the loaves take on to much color. (I finished baking at 400°, after about 40 minutes of baking in total)
10. let it cool on a rack and enjoy plain, with butter or with a mild cheese.

Simply autumn, doesn't it look like it?

No other pictures of the "sleek" apple loaf, I gave it away to somebody who has borrowed me her car for my driver's license preparation a couple times. Of course I couldn't cut into it. ;)

Salome

Could I get a little advice on my next bread machine purchase.   I want to extend the rise time when using sourdough starter.   Are there machines available that allow for extended rises?

Thanks

Mike

I'm a long time lurker and first time poster.

Last week I finally got a decent sourdough starter going, based on the instructions in Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. I used it successfully to make Pierre Nury’s Rustic Light Rye and some Sourdough Waffles, both of which came out well with the clear instructions provided. I decided to try making some 100% whole grain bread, which I've never had much success with, and finally settled on jmonkey's recipe.

I used the stretch and fold technique for kneading, shaped it into a boule, and baked it in a 450ºF oven on a stone. Also, since I can only get soft whole wheat here, I added vital wheat gluten to the flour to compensate (around 2-3 tsp/cup).

It might be too caramelized for some tastes, but I liked the way it came out (thanks jmonkey!). I expected the crumb to be more open based on what the recipe said, but I think I may have underproofed the loaf a bit. Next time I will also put the stone lower in the over since the bottom took much too long to finish. As far as taste goes, it was delicious, one of the best whole grain breads I've had. What do you think?

Chris