starter

I got a comment asking what I meant by proofed Starter. What I mean is you take your sourdough starter out of the refrigerator and feed it and wait until it warms up and is frothy.

This assumes you have some starter and know what I'm talking about.

If you don't you can create your own starter but you should give yourself a couple of weeks to get it going.

You can buy sourdough starters online or you can get some free from Friends of Carl  

http://home.att.net/~carlsfriends/.

I just pulled some yougurt bread out of the oven (see attached photo).

I really didn't measure anything, I just poured the largest part of my starter which I've had out (not in refrigerator) for about a week (feeding it 2-3 times a day). I just started adding flour to it until it came together and estimated about how much salt it would take (never forget the salt).

I stuck it out in the garage at about 50 degrees to retard (slow down the rising).

My starter was so exuberant at being out of the refrigerator and being fed reguarly that it just about tripled in volume in about eight hours so I folded it to reduce the volume and stuck it in the refrigerator until morning.

It was back up to the same volume so I turned it out and formed it on a floured board. I didn't want to wait while it got back to room temp (I was a little worried I'd over proofed it) so I stuck it in a cold cast Iron dutch oven and stuck it in a cold oven and baked at 350 degrees for a hour then checked on it.

As expected it had taken this opportunity to rise but had not started to brown at all so I set the oven for 450 degrees and gave it andother 30 minutes.

http://i12etu.com

I wish now that I'd taken a picture, but I didn't think of it. I was too consumed with the thought that I'd lost Rhonda Rye, my rye starter. I'd been about a month since I'd used or refreshed her and, while she'd gotten pretty hoochy in the past, I'd never had any trouble with an invasion.

Wow. I opened her up yesterday to see a very, very healthy colony of bulbous looking gray mold all over the surface. For a moment, I thought my only recourse would be to throw her out and convert some of my whole wheat starter over to rye. But when I dug around a bit with a knife, there was a tiny patch underneath that seemed untouched.

Carefully, I took about a gram of that little patch, and refreshed it. At first, the stuff smelled like vomit, but overnight, it rose and started smelling like it ought to again. I won't fully believe I'm out of the woods until I make some rye this weekend, but it looks like I've succeeded.

Starter is amazing stuff.

I've had a number of discussions with TFL participants recently about sourdough rise times versus temperature and inoculation. Temperature has a big effect on sourdough rise times, and sometimes a starter appears unhealthy, when it is really just rising more slowly because of low temperatures in the kitchen during winter. Also, recipes that used to work seem to fail during the winter, but the colder temperatures may be the cause. To adjust for cold winter kitchen temperatures, either the temperature must be managed actively (oven with pilot light or electric light, coolers with a bowl of warm water in them, and so on), or the percentage of fermented flour must be adjusted in the recipe, or much more time must be allowed for the bulk fermentation and proofing.

I constructed a table that provides (in hours) the doubling time, bulk fermentation time, proofing time, and total mix-to-bake time for various temperatures and percentages of fermented flour. The table has two sections, one for no salt meant for unsalted levains, and one for 2% salt meant for doughs or salted levains.

Inoculation, as used in the table, is the percentage of fermented flour contributed by a levain or storage starter to the total flour in a levain or dough. For example, if 50g of storage starter at 100% hydration is contributed to 225g of flour and 175g of water to create a levain, then the total flour is 250g (25g+225g) and the percentage of fermented flour is 10% (25g out of 250g total flour). Similarly, if a dough containing 1Kg of total flour is made by contributing the levain just mentioned to 750g of flour and 550g of water and 20g of salt, then the inoculation or percentage of fermented flour is 25%, or 250g out of a total flour of 1Kg.

The table is made to match up to rise times for whole wheat, high extraction, or generally high ash content flours I tend to use in my sourdough hearth breads. For pure white flour doughs and levains, the times tend to be about 20% longer, i.e. white flour rises a little more slowly.

Your starter may well be faster or slower than mine. If you build a test levain using a representative entry in the table, such as 10% at 75F, you can see how your starter compares to these table entries and then adjust your rise times and proof times up or down by the same percentage. For example, if you starter doubles in 80% of the time indicated in the table, then it makes sense to use 80% of the time in the table for other temperatures and inoculations also.

You can see from the table that the rise times vary over a huge range depending on temperature. Also, inoculations need to be changed drastically for long overnight rises, depending on temperature.

The strategy for maintaining a starter should also change dramatically if the temperature is 65F instead of close to 80F in the kitchen from winter to summer. For example, a 25% inoculation at 65F results in a 10 hour mix-to-bake time, which is a couple of hours before a levain would peak and begin to collapse, but at 80F an inoculation of only 0.5% results in a 10 hour mix-to-bake time. I've used this model at wide ranges of temperature and had reasonable results. The interesting thing to notice is that a 20g:30g:30g feeding at 65F peaks in around 12 hours but a 1g:100g:100g feeding at 80F peaks in around 12 hours, too. Or, if you look at the mix-to-bake time at 65F for a 10g:45g:45g feeding (10% inoculation), it's 12.5 hours, so if you feed that way at 65F the starter won't be getting to its peak and may be overfed if the feeding is repeated every 12 hours, while the same feeding at 80F will peak in less than 8 hours, so a 12 hour schedule will work well at that temperature.

This is simplified from my rise time models, so it doesn't include some additional adjustments for the dough consistency I make in my spreadsheets. Of course, this is a very rough approximation. All kinds of complications may cause these numbers to be different from actual results. So, it's just a guideline and something to think about, and it's biggest use may be as a learning tool or to just get in the general ballpark for rise times. For example, if your temperatures are very different from the ones the author assumed in the recipe, or if you just don't have an idea where to start with rise times for some recipe your trying, maybe the table will help.

Apologies in advance, if it turns out there is a bug in the table somewhere, but at least some of the numbers made sense after browsing through the table.

I work weekends. Sat. 0000-1200, Sun. 0000-1200, Mon. 0000-0700. This is an insanely great schedule for most purposes. But, like all schedules, it complicates and contorts things at times. So begins our story for today. Two weeks ago on a Friday at approximately 1300 CST there we sat with 3 hours to kill before needing to go to bed. I decided to break out the flour and make a quick loaf for test purposes. I began with the following.

• 2c water (115 F)
• 2 1/4t yeast
• 2c flour
• 2t sugar
• 1T oil
  

Mixed this until it was the consistancy fo spackle (or Gumbo for those from Alabama). I then covered it with the following and let it set for a half hour:

• 2c flour
• 1/ 4c dry milk
• 2t salt

In the past, this normally turns out a standard loaf of sandwich capable bread, But this time, it was personal. After the initial ferment, I mixed in the dry ingredients that were on top. But the dough was far too wet. I added 3 add'l cups of flour and the dough was still too wet. I could not get the dough to set up or become anything other than a sticky mess no matter what I tried. So bedtime came and I decided to ditch it into the fridge and let it think about what it had done. At this point there was a small ball of dough in the bottom of a large (4qt) rubbermaid container).

Saturday 1200 CST. I returned to examine the offending dough to notice that it had nearly filled the container while in the fridge. I told my partner to keep an eye on it that night, so it would not eat the entire contents of the fridge. We went to bed. About 0200 Sunday, George completely filled the container it was placed in. My partner contiued to drop the container to deflate it and bought another 24h but again it filled the container. As punishment for its crimes, we left the demonic spawn in the fridge until Thursday at 0600.

We removed it from the fridge and divvied it up to make rolls and to preserve part as a culture to test hardiness. Below are images following feeding and at 1 and 2 hours post feeding. The rolls were delicious.

This is my High Extraction loaf I made the other day. I'm finally understanding the idea of a full bakeand cooling before eating. In the past I'd think it was done baking, only to find the loaf soft and lacking in crust shortly afterwards. This one though had a nice crunchy crust (a little thick onthe bottom) with a solid, hearty crumb. Chewy, not too dense, and definately not too airy to be lacking in stubstance, very satisfying.

If I remember correctly, this was (for 2 loaves)

3 lbs Heartland mill golden buffalo flour (a high extraction flour)

75% * 3lbs tap water (add most to flour/salt for 1hr autolyse, add rest with starter dissolved in it afterwards)

~.7 oz salt

a few tablespoons of starter dissolved in the water

I've been taking a rather lax approach to refreshing my starter right before use, which I know is a recommended method. Generally, I've been taking my starter out of the fridge, mixing it in lukewarm/warm water, and adding it straight to the dough/autolyse. Since gas always escapes my sealed starter jar when I take it out, I take that as a sign that it is still active, and assumed that the flour in the final dough would be enough food for it to rise the dough. I do this partly because I'm impulsive, and partly because it's just more convenient... One day I plan on doing a side by side comparison straight starter addition vs. refreshed starter/sponge in a final dough to see if there's a difference. (any comments on this would be nice).

Ultimately though, a very tasty, smooth bread. No sweeteners, nothing. Very nice. I think I like this flour a lot, since it combines the best of white and whole wheat flours in terms of taste, nutrition, and texture.

u.m.breadman