David,

Your bread is beautiful as usual. I'm amazed at all the baking you do and such a variety. Great job. When you mentioned keeping a starter for up to three days I thought I'd mention what I've been doing with older starter.

I did a couple of experiments with Pierre Nury's Rye (which has a very small amount of rye). I made the recipe with a refreshed (the day before) sourdough starter to make the levain and I made the recipe with sourdough that was refreshed four or five days before. The bread made with the five day old sourdough in the levain was delicious with a mild sour and slight tang that we love. It's just delicious. We don't like too much sour at all. The other bread was good but no where as tasty as the old SD starter bread.

This morning I finished another batch of this bread. I doubled the recipe to make 4 loaves. I used a five day old sourdough starter to make the levain that then sat out for 12 hours. Then I made the final dough and after 2 stretch and folds I let the bread sit out 2 hours then divided the dough in two. I put both in the fridge (well a cold room) as the recipe called for but took one of the doughs back to the kitchen after about 3 hours and let it warm up about an hour and a half and divided it in two and baked them. The other dough I let sit in the cold overnight as called for in the recipe and baked them this morning. I wanted to see if there would be any difference in taste if they were retarded or not. I found no difference, both are delicious. For me the flavor comes from an older unrefreshed sourdough starter used to make the levain. To me some recipes with a very long fermentation and an overnight retarding sometimes makes bread too sour, an almost spoiled kind of taste. Just me. What do you think? 

So, for me, to get great sour flavor that we like I use an unrefreshed sourdough for the levain and I don't think it matters if it's retarded overnight or not. The flavor is already in the dough. I have no trouble with the dough rising, in fact this morning the second batch of dough from the cold room was more than double. The bread has plenty of holes and is so good. I mix by hand. By the way, have you tried Pierre Nury's Rye yet? I don't know why he calls it rye, it just has a tiny bit in there. But it is good. Thanks to zolablue I found a favorite.

Again, great bread. Thanks for all your posts.                                                                     weavershouse

I'm fairly certain he tasted sourdough breads that he liked. His main complaint was due to the unpredictability of the process / results. He made sourdough bread quite a few times with different results in different regions ... or sometimes different results just around the corner. His recommendation to improve the predictability of the results was to use yeast with the sourdough ... but ... he also realized that sourdough was immensely popular and prefaced a recipe with, "But for those who like a challenge, here it is; ..."

His book "Beard on Bread" dedicated 2 pages to salt-rising bread and 3 pages to sourdough.

Given the advances in recent year bread-making I would expect the book to be totally different if written today. He was a neat guy.