January 13, 2015 - 1:46pm
Baked sourdough bread gets more sour with time
Hi Everyone,
I bake a French country loaf quite regularly using a firm sourdough starter. The loaf turns out well and, the first day, has very little sour flavour. The next day the sourness is more pronounced and the day after it borders on tasting too sour.
Could anyone help me with this issue? I've looked for answers, but the only thing I'm seeing is complaints about starters, not a fully baked loaf.
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How much lemon juice did you use? 200g is way too much!
The flavour does mature overtime. I think using a firm starter increases flavour and a wetter starter will give a more mellow flavour. You can tweak the taste by using more starter and decreasing fermentation time and quickening the process by fermenting in a warmer place.
The paradox is more starter = less sour
Less starter = more sour
What is your recipe and method?
The recipe I use is Thom Leonard's Country French bread.
The technique is a lazy one. The starter gets made in the afternoon, the bread mixed in the evening and set to rise overnight with minimal kneading. The loaf is shaped and left to rise the next morning, then baked.
The texture and flavour are excellent. The only downside is the increase in souring after baking, which you're saying seems to be normal. I've never tasted this with bakery breads made without preservatives or dough enhancers.
I'll try using more starter and decreasing fermentation. That's a very interesting paradox. Thanks for the tip.
will give more flavour and a wetter starter will give a more mellow flavour. Have you considered keeping your starter at 100% hydration or higher?
Just had a look at the recipe. Looks good and the pre-ferment is already quite high. Just thinking how it may be tweaked a bit here and there to make it more mellow.
Bring the salt down to 22 grams. 1.5% - 2% is a good range. I know 2.3% is not that much of a difference but hey try it and see.
I don't think you can change the fermenting that much. 3 hours isn't that great a time in the first place.
You can try to speed up the final proofing by placing in a warmer area. That'll help a bit.
Otherwise, perhaps a tablespoon of honey into the dough mixture?
Yesterday I was finally able to try your advice. We plan, but then life happens.
I still used a firm starter, but really upped the amount: 40g as opposed to 12g. The fermentation time was cut in half, and voila, a much less sour sourdough.
Thanks for your help.
I made a bit of a boo-boo and I think a more firm starter will produce a less sour sourdough and a more liquid starter will produce a more sour sourdough. You did good and got the results you wanted because its not only the starter itself but how you use it and using more will result in less fermentation time and therefore less sour. So you were right on both counts. You used more of a firm starter and got a bread you like. Sourdough is the process but doesn't have to be sour. What is your recipe again!? I'm always looking for ideas to try myself and perhaps I can experiment too. Adding some toasted sunflower seeds by dry roasting them in a pan produces a wonderful addition to a bread.
I tried two recipes. This one: http://www.karenskitchenstories.com/2015/02/pain-au-levain-with-firm-starter.html
and a variation on the no-knead: 3 cups flour, 1.5 cups water, 1 tsp. salt and 40g starter. Starter was dissolved in water, then added to the flour/salt mixture. I followed the link recipe for the technique instead of letting the dough sit overnight.
I tried two different starters. One started with rye flour, then fed with white (3 years old), and another started with spelt (2 months old). Even though both are fed with white flour, the rye has a more sour flavour than the spelt.
Toasted sunflower seeds sound delicious. The next bake will give these a try. Slowly, my bread is getting better. It still has a way to go for sure, but at this point, it's starting to taste pretty good.
The slower the sourdough is made the more sour flavour & better nutrition.
How to speed it up.
- Keep your starter well feed and use a very strong, recently feed, active starter. So they're all revved up and ready to go. So decreasing your starter container size and feeding it fully every time you make bread will decrease your sourness.
- Have the bread rise in a warmer environment. You can put it high up in the room or my mom use to put it into a small room with a plug-in heater on low. Basically, ignore the recipe given time to rise and go by how much it has risen. I have seen a lot of people say when it doubles in size it's ready for the next stage. The food geek on youtube does a lot of experiments and says to do 25-50% rise.
- Decreasing salt will help decrease the sourness in two ways. One salt enhances the flavour so less salt means less flavour. The second thing salt does is slow down the yeast. So if you lower the salt it will indeed speed things up and decrease the flavour, make sure to keep an eye on your first rise because it should be faster. A bit of a warning is salt is one of the many things that affect gluten development, salt helps to strengthen the bonds. So if you're getting bread with little oven spring, or bad Crumb, your low salt can be part of the cause. Crumb is the air pockets you see in a slice of bread.
- As mentioned before using more starter will also speed up the process and decrease sour flavour.
Now after saying all of that know that more sourness seems to mean more nutrition. I say this because "Yohan Ferrant" recent findings say that the slower your bread is done the more nutrition it has. High nutrition was one of his main goals with his becoming popular "Do nothing" bread. Before him, lots of people have tried to slow down the process to get more "flavour" from their sourdough. It seems that once you start eating sourdough your body starts to realize what it is and then craves the sour in the bread, aka "develop a taste for it". So at the moment, you might be trying to remove the sourness but if you continue you might try to put it back in and then get more of it lol.
To get more sourflavor you can.
- do the opposite of the above things.
- use only 1-2% starter. (same or half your salt weight)
- after you shape your bread you can put it into the fridge instead of baking it right away. People say you can store it to 3-4 days. I haven't tried longer yet.
- Don't feed your starter helps as well. Ben Star proved this by leaving his freshly made starter in the fridge for 5 months than making bread with it. I also do this all the time. It makes the starter "sleepy" and slows. Don't dump the hooch that comes to the top but just mix it back in.
- when rising have it in a cold environment/room. Put it near the floor if possible. I do not know if there is a "too cold" temperature for rising the bread.
- Slowly made sourdough seems to affect the oven spring. So it may be a good idea to disconnect the idea that good bread is one that has a super high oven spring. To me, good bread is one that is nutritious, then tastes good, then the texture/crumb. It seems that nutritious and tastes good go hand in hand, it's just the oven spring that seems to be missing the boat at times.
Another thing to realize is the bread-making industry seems to be in a weird spot at the moment. Bakers obviously try to make money. So they try to find ways to make bread-making simply, easy, and quick to help them in their stores. This has lead to a lot of developments in their Technology and the processes they use. This includes fine white flour becoming popular in the industrial age after it was started to be produced for the rich in 1870. This is because of the long shelf life. Then you have the faster instant yeast which allows bakers more flexibility. Also, they using warm environments for the rise for... you get the picture. Bread-making has come a long way from its original roots. Now things are about to change again. With the increase focus on the American/world's health, findings are showing that the current way bread is made is really bad for you. Bread has historically been a staple food for making empires but it's that bread and our bread is nowhere near the same thing. With nutrition technology getting better and increase research on bread the slow sourdough seems to be the way to go. Also, white flour is taking a big hit. It's likely white flour will either stop being used in bread completely or significantly decreased as some kind of ratio.
Us bakers have a lot of work to do to save our beloved bread. Gluten is already being made out to seem like some kind of poison. People are blaming gluten for their "gluten sensitivity" when really it's a combination of bad bread and unhealthy gut, not a "gluten sensitivity". The poison is not the flour/gluten it's how the flour and bread are made. Sourdough is not just a lost art it's the future bread.
This is such an unexpected rant in the morning. Cheers everyone, enjoy your bread-making. :) Remember I'm relatively new to sourdough bread making and this is not my profession. So take my knowledge with a grain of salt.
Worthy sentiments, however I think there is a counter-point to be made when you say:
The truth is that our modern 'empires' are also nowhere near the same thing - neither in lifestlye nor, most startlingly, in sheer population size and density.
Population size may be a quantitative measure but really large numbers just aren't the same as smaller numbers - they change things qualitatively as well. At some point, things just don't scale - you have to change how you operate, not just the size of the operation.
The simple truth - comfortable or otherwise - is that modern agricultural methods and food manufacturing processes are, collectively, probably the greatest saver of lives in human history. There are arguments to be made that perhaps this greater availability of food has driven (and continues to drive) over-population and perpetuates the problem but the fact remains: people exist and require food to stay alive.
Take Iran for example - the Persian empire was, historically, one of the largest in the world, by percentage of the population covered. Such metrics are never exact but, as a guide, the estimate is that it ruled over ~45% of the world population at the time. That was some time ago, of course, and the world population was only ~120m people, giving the empire around 54m people over an area of some 5.5 million square kilometres at its peak.
Compare that to modern day Iran, which has a population of around 83 million in an area less than a third the size. That's a population density FIVE TIMES that of the Persian empire.
I am using this as an example because Iran eats a lot of bread - 75% more (per person) that the US.
Or look at Turkey, which has a population density TEN TIMES greater than the Ottoman empire at its most populous.
Again, Turkey is a good choice as it exceeds even Iran in bread consumpution, with each person eating, on average, 150% more bread than those in the US, and with bread making up more that half of all calories consumed in the entire country.
As with Iran, this number will of course increase for poorer sectors and it would not be ridiculous to posit that bread might make up three quarters or more of the daily energy intake of the least advantaged and most vulnerable sections of those populations.
There are a lot of problems in both Iran and Turkey that are related to bread and wheat - subsidies, inefficiencies, political corruption and so forth - but the facts still remain: bread is essential to life in those countries and it is not an exaggeration to say that millions would die if bread was not cheaply and readily available. Egypt is similar.
You also say that:
True, but the 'original roots' of bread making are generally agreed to be the so-called 'fertile cresecent' and those earliet breads would have been unleavened and, regardless of grain variety or milling, would have had none of the benefits that are today imparted by even high-volume commercial sourdough methods. But, of course, bread making methods progressed from there and took on more of the characteristics I believe you are talking about, but you did use not just the term 'roots' but original roots : )
One thing that does interest me - mostly because I can't find any scientific literature dealing with the subject - is how sourdough bread may or may not differ in its thermic effect. My thought process is that, as food takes energy to digest, the more easily-digestible a food is, the less energy our bodies must expend in doing so. Thus - or so that line of reasoning might suggest - the more easily-digestible nature of sourdough (and specifically the proteins, having been 'snipped' into smaller subunits by increased protease activity,) might end up decreasing the thermic effect and thus lead - all esle being equal - the a higher net calorie intake for sourdough vs 'regular' bread.
I have also never seen a study (which is not to say one doesn't exist - I'd love to read one!) that compares sourdough and commercially-yeasted bread of comparable fermentation times. Studies instead compare sourdough at either standard (~8h) or long (~24hr) fermentation regular quick bread production - i.e. 1-2hr fermentation. Needless to say that this is not like-for-like and comparing a loaf of quick-process, additive assisted bread to a slow-fermented, 'flour, water and salt only' sourdough is hardly fair.
Sure, most commercial bread is quick but what of the comparison with a yeast bread that is fermented over 24 hours?
Not that any of the above is a challenge to anyone's views - I am genuinely interested in such things and would love to see some studies, if they exist.
d.
The following is exactly the type of un-balanced, apples-to-oranges write up that incites my ire - as an example of what I was talking about in my previous diatribe. It is taken from the page:
https://truesourdough.com/is-sourdough-bread-good-for-you-7-things-you-need-to-know/
Note that the author of this piece is comparing a 'whole grain' bread fermented over a long time to a white bread, fermented for as little as 1 hour. The fact that anyone can so egregiously mislead people is galling to me
Despite the above, however, the very next section talks about phytic acid and its (negative) effect of inhibiting nutrient uptake:
Another extraordinary reaction happens during this long fermentation time the dough has. As the sugars and starches break down, so does another part of the wheat grain. A part called phytic acid, which is known as an ‘anti-nutrient’.
I've cut that up a little for brevity but the point that is being pressed is that long fermentation breaks down phytic acid and therefore makes nutrients available.
This is true.
HOWEVER, there are two massive caveats here. First, the author mentions only the length of fermentation so - if we accept this at face value - this is not an argument for sourdough but for long fermentation times. Second, and this is the more annoying part - whether due to a deliberate attempt to mislead or a shocking ignorance on the subject, the most important part is omitted: that the primary source for the phytic acid causing these problems is the bran layer. Which, if we are comparing wholegrain/meal sourdough to white commercial bread as we were in the first point, we would have to accept that the commercial, white bread does not suffer this phytic-acid problem!
Amazing, isn't it, how the choice of what properties you compare can seems to support an argument.
Now, at this point, I think the above is actually irrelevant as anyway as many commercial white breads are 'reinforced' with vitamins and nuitrients but bread in its un-reinforced form, is actually not a great source of nutrients anyway. If you are concerned about nutrient and vitamin intake (and even fibre) just eat some vegetables. Really. If you're looking to a change to wholegrain/meal bread in order to rectify and otherwise deficient diet, you're looking in the wrong place.
Further to the above, the 'negative' action of phytic acid is not necessarily 'bad'. This is because the action responsible for making these nutrients unavailable is one of forming chelates, which, simply, means that reactive metal ions (like iron and zinc and other mineral nutrients) are bound up into a stable and non-reactive form. It is this action that inhibits absorption by the body and is shown as a negative but the flipside is that the process also performs the same trick with problematic metals - for example heavy metals like lead. Indeed, chelation is a recognised and useful treatment for certain medical problems caused by excess of certain elements.
In short, in a balanced diet, the presence of absence of phytic acid in bread is largely a moot point, as is the availability of nutrients from the bread itself. Just eat another bloody carrot and stop blaming bread. (I am talking to the author of the above-quoted article!)
Gah!