Magical Sourdough

It's so amazing it'll make you believe in Intelligent Design

One summer when I was a kid, the retired lady living behind us got into the habit of baking sourdough bread every few days. This was a treat for us kids, a sufficiently fed but perpetually hungry bunch who, at least in part, lived off the land. We stole raw lemons and grapefruits from backyard trees and sometimes spent the better part of an afternoon using a hammer and screwdriver to open a found coconut.

The Hermans didn’t waste money on air conditioning, especially not when the oven was roaring, so the smell of bread escaped Bobbie’s kitchen and wafted between the houses, summoning the neighborhood gang to gather at Bobbie’s back door. Through the open window we saw her lift the loaves out of the oven and put it on a cooling rack, where it would sit undisturbed for a good two hours.

She saw us waiting there and said, “Come back later.”

Bobbie explained that cutting into hot or even warm bread destroys the still-developing crumb, a cardinal sin as offensive as cutting into a beef roast before it’s been properly rested.

Finally, the nice woman handed each of us a crunchy and chewy slab too thick for a toaster. We ate it plain, without butter, as if it were cake. It was better than cake.

Sourdough bread is what most bread was until around 1825, when easy and dependable compressed fresh yeast was invented. Before that, you made yeasty sourdough starter with only flour and water and patience, Or, if there was a brewery in town, you could use its byproduct to get a starter going fast.

Instant dried yeast (the stuff in the little yellow envelope) wasn’t invented until 1943, when it helped provide World War II soldiers with fresh bread. After the war, it became popular with mothers with little time to babysit sourdough.

Commercial bakers also loved the new dried yeast. For them, it was important to make bread quickly and consistently. Industrially. The bread lacked character in most ways, but, doused with preservatives, it lasted a long time on the shelf and it was sweet and cottony and pre-sliced for busy people.

I first made sourdough bread in my thirties. I think I might have cheated and created my first “starter” using a packet of dry yeast. Maybe I lacked the imagination to believe there was wild yeast everywhere, including in the flour itself. There are lots of other “foreign” items in flour, which is why the bag warns not to eat it raw. (Who would eat raw flour?) By the way, because it’s less processed, organic whole wheat flour is the best for getting a starter going. You can use regular bread flour after that, which is a good thing, because organic flour is pricey.

During those days, I kept a rather disgusting looking beer pitcher of pancake-batter-like starter on top of the fridge, open to the air, as I remembered Bobbie had. My young life was busy, so I gave scant attention to the microbial zoo that bloomed. When a dry crust formed, I stirred it back in before anyone could see it, and it magically disappeared. I wonder if I fed everyone mold.

(Incidentally, if you see telltale spots on top of your starter, it’s probably mold. Don’t do what I might have done. Throw it out and start over. Do not think scraping it off is safe.)

By the way, starving sourdough starter — that is, one that has eaten all of the flour — develops a grayish liquid on top. It’s alcohol, called “hooch” by bakers, who blithely stir it back in to the starter until it’s homogenous and creamy again. Yum.

I remember making some decent bread back then, but the process required too much diligence and work to sustain, so I went back to using dry yeast, or not making bread at all.

Retirement has given me the time to make sourdough again, this time with the help of the many YouTube experts. It’s not as disgusting this time — my starter is kept in the refrigerator most of the time — and I’ve made some quite delicious bread. And I’m still learning. Sourdough bread is trickier to master than “regular” bread.

Sourdough bread is hearty. It’s got a thick, chewy crust and a tender fluffy interior. You can crush a loaf in your hands and it springs right back into shape. Because of the natural acid in the bread, it doesn’t develop mold as easily as dry yeast bread.

Here’s the basic sourdough bread recipe I use today, the origin of which I’m no longer sure.

Basic Sourdough Bread

120g active levain (40g each of starter, water, and flour, left to double in size, from a half cup to a cup.)
310g lukewarm water
500g bread flour (All purpose flour works OK, too)
12 g salt (2 teaspoons)

This makes a standard dough with about 75 percent hydration. Higher hydration will give you an airy crumb like ciabatta, but requires some skill and practice to handle.

Getting back into sourdough baking. This one with Everything seeds.

There are lots of videos about how to make sourdough starter. Essentially, you just add flour to water and encourage the natural yeast already present in the flour and the air to grow. The main thing you need to do is keep it warmish and “feed” it with water and flour every day (“discarding” all but a tablespoon of the stuff each day) while the microbes battle it out.

Eventually, yeast and lactic acid bacteria (LAB) will team up to heighten the acidity of the dough, which kills off the bad microbes, stuff like molds and e coli.

Importantly, you don’t want to make bread during the starter’s first week, while the initial battle is raging. You will be tempted to use the young starter because it looks very active, very bubbly. But this is a false “rise,” the result of the microbial war, and not an indication that the starter is ready, which takes a minimum of a week and usually longer.

Procedure

When making bread with dry yeast, I usually knead it with a powerful stand mixer bread hook for a few minutes. Sourdough is better served by a light touch and time. Turns out you can achieve an elastic yet extensible dough by replacing kneading with three or four “stretch and folds,” with a 30-minute rest between each one.

The famous “stretch and folds” are exactly what they sound like. With one hand, dipped in water to ameliorate sticking, you reach under one side of the dough, grab it lightly, and pull it up without tearing it, then lay it down over the rest of the dough. Turn 90 degrees and repeat. It will become more difficult to stretch with each round of stretching and folding, until the dough will lift completely out of the bowl instead of stretching at all. You can stop at that point or gently shake the dough to encourage it to stretch. You do not want to tear it.

Here’s the bread process step-by-step. It’s not as easy as bread made with dry yeast, which is why dry yeast is so popular. Yeast bread is OK, but sourdough is downright magical.

1. The Autolyze: Add the 310g water to the 500g flour in a large bowl and combine until a shaggy dough forms. It will be sticky. Let the dough rest in the bowl, covered with plastic wrap, for one hour or more, perhaps while your levain grows.
   
   During this simple process, the proteins in the flour get wet. This lets the proteins “unwind.” When the proteins get back together, they form gluten strands. This happens even without kneading, which is why “no knead” bread recipes work. Put another way, time can be used instead of kneading. Time is important to sourdough. The several stretches and folds we do later will align these handy gluten strands into a structure capable of trapping the carbon dioxide gas created by the yeast and the bacteria. That’s where the holes come from, of course.

2. Add Salt and Starter: When the levain is ready, sprinkle the salt around the perimeter of the autolyze, poke holes in the mass with your fingertips, then pour the starter in. Mix well by hand until you stop feeling the granules of salt and the sticky mess is relatively homogenous. Scrape the dough off your hand with a silicone spatula. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes.

3. Stretch and Folds: Do the first of 3 to 5 stretch and folds. Wait 30 minutes and do your second stretch and fold. Repeat depending on the strength of the dough. If you use whole wheat flour, more stretch and folds will be required.
   
   As you proceed, the dough will change significantly, becoming more easy to handle and becoming smoother, more elastic and extensible, which you can see with the “windowpane test” you may have heard of.
   
   The last two stretch and folds should be done gently. The dough will become elastic more quickly than it did during the first few stretch and folds.

4. Bulk Ferment: Form the dough into a nice ball and transfer it into a covered container and put it in the fridge to sleep until the next morning. The long, slow ferment will develop the taste of the bread.

5. Shaping: Take the dough out of the fridge when you wake up. A couple hours later, or after the dough has risen about 50 percent, do a pre-shape to create a smooth ball. Let the dough rest under a tea towel for 30 minutes. Then shape the final loaf and turn it upside down on a tea towel sprinkled with very little rice flour. Using the tea towel as a sling, lift the dough and lower it carefully into a bread pan or other container. (This is a makeshift banneton.) Cover it lightly with oiled plastic wrap and leave it to double in size.

6. Flip It and Score It: When it’s doubled, take off the plastic wrap and replace it with a piece of parchment paper. Lay an upside-down rimless cookie sheet on top of the parchment, then carefully flip the whole thing over gently. Remove the bread pan you used as a banneton, then carefully lift off the tea towel. Gently brush off any clumps of rice flour that remain.
   
   If you want seeds on the bread, brush it lightly with egg wash or simply spray it with water to activate the sticky starch, then sprinkle on the seeds. Score the loaf with a razor blade or sharp knife. (Scoring is an art. It will take some time to get it right.) Don’t score it until you’re ready to put it in the oven!

7. Bake It: Using a sprayer bottle, spritz water into the hot oven to create steam. Immediately after scoring, slide the dough onto a baking stone using the parchment paper to help slide it off the rimless cookie sheet. Spray more water into the oven and close the door. Spray water directly on the bread; the idea is to prevent a crust from forming too early, which limits the oven spring. (Steam is the main reason home sourdough bakers use a Dutch oven.)
   
   After ten minutes or so, when the bread is firm, use a spatula to help hold the loaf and separate it from the parchment paper while you pull the paper out from beneath it. Twirl the bread 180 degrees. Spritz it.
   
   You can experiment with temperature and time, but 450-degrees F for 30 minutes is a good start. The inner temperature should be about 210-degrees F. Preheat the oven for a good hour to make sure the stone is nice and hot.
   
   Note: Lots of sourdough bakers cook the bread in a Dutch oven to maximize steam, but I don’t. I just use my spray bottle. Maybe someday.

8. Let it Cool: Put the bread on a wire rack for about two hours. Slice it thick with a bread knife. Electric knives work well, too. Don’t skimp on the butter.

Sourdough bread is not just more delicious than store-bought, it’s also better for you, especially if you’ve got gluten problems.