My first sourdough bread
I baked my first bread today with a home - made sourdough starter! It was adapted from some of the recipes I have seen on the net and the bread turned out to be dense [ but soft] with a very hard crust that was difficult to slice. The sour taste of the bread did'nt appeal to me either.
My starter was made from Potato, whole wheat flour, salt, sugar and water and fermented for 2 days. It had risen well and had a sweetish, sour taste. I used 50 gms powdered Oats and 400gms whole wheat flour mixed with 1/4 cup [ too much? ] starter and sufficient lukewarm water to knead. No additional salt or sugar, which in retrospect I should have added! The dough was kept for about 8 hrs with a couple of kneadings in between. I then baked it in a Pyrex dish with the cover on at 250 C [ this is the max. temp. on my oven] for 30 mts. and uncovered for another 15 mts. After 30 mts. the bread had cracked where I had made a cross on top.
I think this bread will taste better with soup.I would appreciate suggestions on how to improve on this. I'm not fond of using refined flour/ white flour but will try a combo next time. Thanks and regards,Devi
Hey Devi,
Looking over your post, I have a couple suggestions. First off, a two day old sourdough starter is a VERY young starter. Two or three days is about the amount of time needed to get rid of some nasty bacteria that can take over a starter early on in its productive life. Generally about a month is the time I would suggest for getting the starter to a place where the yeast can raise dough reliably. Incidentally, this should also solve some of your problems with the flavor of your bread.
Salt is absolutely necessary, and while sugar isn't necessary I put it into about half of my loaves as well for the flavor.
Let your starter mature. Discard and feed for a month or so, then try again.
Did you also add some yeast to your starter? With your recipe, unless you're putting commercial yeast into your pre-ferment, you're not going to get any rise.
Some seem to refer to any recipe where the pre-ferment sits around for a few days as sourdough even though it uses commercial yeast. However, to many here like me, when you say sourdough, it implies that the recipe relies on wild yeast for leavening, and as G-man mentioned, cultivating wild yeast takes a much longer time.