As it has been for most people stuck in the confines of their homes, there have been news world wide on the emergence of people cooking at home and baking breads as well. That is good news! Likewise, people are gaining weight. Why? Because they have nothing else to do but eat. Seriously, some are just bored, depressed, stressed and don’t know what to do because the structure of going to work daily or driving your kids to school suddenly are a thing of the past. Hence, some people are just compulsively eating for lack of better things to do after getting out of bed. It’d just the cycle of eat, sleep, eat and sleep. I for one has ditched my low carb diet several weeks after the pandemic, I felt that my carb diet was restricting me with all the lock down restriction one is aught to go thru. Getting out of that diet and being able to bake again is a way to my freedom path. Hence, I went back to baking cakes, pies, pastries and rustic breads like ciabatta, French baguettes, pagnota, etc. All these goodness starts from fermenting the flour and water to come up with one's home grown wild yeast that delivers a nice aroma of bread once baked. That is the sourdough starter that does the magic!
Each country has a way of calling it. Fermentation process. Italians, "biga;" French, levain: Brits, bram. The list goes on and on.
Currently. I am making different kinds of sourdough starter. I began two weeks ago but due to the cold weather in San Francisco, mine went dead. I thought I could resurrect them by putting them in my oven with just the pilot light on. But still it didn't work. So there, I flushed them in the sink. Now, just a thing of the past.
Right now, on day three, I have four bottles of sourdough. One, is for the biga, whole wheat flour. 1:1:1 ratio. 1 cup whole wheat flour plus 1 cup filtered water, stir. cover lightly then let loose and ferment. Day 2-5, add the same concoction to the original WWF mix and water. By the fifth day, it should be ripe and ready to use to make a ciabatta. I opted for this new recipe I found online instead of my usual Il Fornaio recipe of not adding any flour or water until the fourth day only. The problem with this mixture is the fact that it has the tendency to dry out the flour to a complete cement. So, now I am observing if my current recipe is a lot better. We'll see. In five days, I'd have the answer!
The next one I have is just the sourdough starter using all purpose flour (APF). Mixture is a bit different. 4 oz of flour or 3/4 cups APF plus 2 tbsp of APF plus 1/2 cup water. The dough is very sticky and the yeast development is slow. I am just seeing it on its third day to be a little softer than the night before. But tomorrow, hopefully I'd smell some acid and see some bubbles signifying the presence oxygen in it. The same formula goes until the fifth day then it is ripe and ready to be used to make a sourdough bread. To feed the formula for maintenance, I just have to diminish the yield.
The last two canning jars are Mild Starter (Mother Formula) by Peter Reinhart from his "Crust and Crumb" book. This recipe is so hard to mix by hand using a big spoon. You need a food processor to make it work. Mixture is 1 c. (4/5 oz) whole wheat flour (WWF) and 1/3 filtered cool water (65*F-7-*F). You make it into a ball then insert in a canning jar. Day 2. You cut the dough of the previous day you made into 6 pieces and dump them in the food processor till it forms a ball. Divide this into a ball and press half of it in a canning jar and the other one, toss (or give it away to someone). For this reason, I kept the other half and make another yield and put this half in a canning jar as well. After which on Day 2, you add 1c. (4/5 oz) unbleached bread flour and 1/3 c. cool water to each of the two batches made. Place this ont the food processor plus and the original ball consisting of the WWF. Mix well. Cut in half and put each one in the canning jar. Day 3, observe till the yield of each jar doubles. Otherwise, let it grow some more. This is dependent on the temperature of one's kitchen, the weather where you live, the wild bacteria available in your environment. Day 3. repeat Day 2 process. Let it rise for 24 hours or till it triples in volume. Day 4. When the dough has triple i volume, you are ready to make the levain starter or chef. Allow it to ferment ina covered bowl for 4 hours.
(More to follow tomorrow)
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