bethesdabakers

Hi Cakewalk You're right - regular baking solves most sourdough problems. But the only reason I can think of for dough not rising in those circumstances is because it's pretty seriously overproved and just at the point of collapse when it goes in the oven. At home, with my regular starter it's 4 hours fermentation (or overnight in the fridge) and 3.5 hours prove. I'm an armchair baker for the next few days: Paid a visit to M. Brion's stall at the Sunday market yesterday!

Hi Cakewalk Go ahead. No problem with using a loaf pan. I just prefer free-form. Mick

Hi Sylvia I'm with you - good story. Mick

Thanks for your responses. The flour and water in a starter provide the medium for wild yeasts and bacteria to inhabit. You mix it up and wait for the little bugs to come along and take up residence – in the case of the yeasts they are probably already dormant in the flour. The first few days are very uncertain. The yeasts and bacteria need to be ones which will thrive in that environment and at the temperature of the mixture. So if you like, there is a lot of jockeying for position before any wildlife balance is achieved. (You can tell I never passed a science subject in my life.) The bubbles that appeared in the first few days were pretty superficial and probably evidence of the presence of bacteria not yeast activity. The point where I baked the loaf was probably the earliest the starter could have provided the rise for the bread. The mixture will still be very fragile and will continue to develop for several weeks but if it survives that long it will probably have become very robust. My real starter is celebrating a lonely 15th birthday in the fridge back in Wales but I am totally confident that it will be fully active again within two refreshments when we get back after four weeks. At this stage it would be pretty pointless to compare this starter or the bread it produces with any other – it’s just too immature. If you want to be a good sourdough baker the best thing to do is ditch your commercial yeast along with a lot of the mythology around starters. Once they are established they don’t improve with age. Anytime you hear about a bakery with a unique, centuries-old starter which is kept in a safe whose combination is known only to the senior member of this fifth generation baking family, you know you are involved in bread theatre. Same applies to legendary starters that can only be found in one particular part of the world. For that matter having a comparatively mild starter can be a positive asset. The starter is only one factor in the flavour of a loaf, the others being the flours used and the length of fermentation. If like me, you only make sourdough and want to make the full range of breads - savoury, sweet, enriched – a mild starter is very useful.

The purpose of this little adventure has been to show that you can make a sourdough starter using just flour and water - small amounts of flour at that – and go on to make bread with minimal equipment even in an unfamiliar (and foreign) kitchen. I think too often people are put off making sourdough by overcomplicated, inaccurate and incomplete instructions. There isn’t a method as such – all you do is mix a little flour and water, wait for it to start fermenting and then feed it more of the same until it becomes fully active. As with all natural processes there is some uncertainty as to when the fermentation process will begin and how to encourage it along. It might not begin at all in which case you have to start all over again but at the end of the day you will have a starter which, with a little care, will produce the greatest bread in the world for the rest of your life. You refine your techniques, before you know it you have started a home-based microbakery with the surplus, transformed your finances and freed yourself from the chains of wage-slavery. Nothing to it really. So a couple of Mondays back I mixed two tablespoons of T65 white flour with enough tap water to make a thick paste, covered it loosely and left it on a shelf to stand. Two days later there were clear signs of activity in the form of surface bubbles. I “refreshed” the mixture by stirring in 50g water and 50g flour. For the next few days I refreshed the mixture sometimes after 12 sometimes after 24 hours. This was just guesswork trying to encourage the fermentation process. To keep the mixture down to a manageable size I took 50g and stirred in 50g water and 50g flour. Once (again guesswork) I mixed a portion with double its weight of water and flour. Throughout I had surface bubbles but couldn’t get beyond this point. This is a really stupid way of looking at it – we are just waiting for nature to take its course. But after a few days you start getting jumpy and five days on I went out and bought wholemeal wheat (T110) and wholemeal rye (T130) flours and split the mixture into three. I probably should have kept my nerve and let the white flour starter run its course. By Tuesday evening the rye was clearly active. By the following morning so were the other two but I dumped the rye because it was just a fail-safe and the white because the wholemeal looked the more active. So, Wednesday evening (14 days after starting) I mixed the dough using the wholemeal (T110) starter at 100% hydration (equal weights of starter, water, flour). The formula I would have used in UK here substituting 50% T110 & 50% T65 wheat flours and withholding 50g water because French flours absorb less: Strong Bread Flour 252g 50% Wholemeal Wheat Flour 252g 50% Water 315g 62.5% Starter 141g 28% Salt 8g 1.6% Dough had three short kneads over about 15 minutes. Stretched and folded after one and two hours then fermented overnight in the fridge. Shaped into a boule in the morning, proved in a tea towel lined colander for four hours. Baked at (an imaginary) 230C for 60 minutes. My verdict: I’m happy. For a first loaf made from a totally immature starter, using unfamiliar flours, baked in an oven which hasn’t the heat to bake good bread – it’s brilliant. Back in 2007, just before I set up my microbakery at home in Wales, we were over here for two months when I was writing my first bread book. I spent a few weeks messing round with other bakers’ starter methods just for fun. You can read about them here if you are interested. Mick

Let me finish my summary of what I've done and the I'll try and answer your questions. Please note I'm nowhere near Paris - I'm in Arcachon which is on the Atlantic coast South of Bordeaux. I've been making sourdough since about 1995, succesfully since 2000. Many of my sources have been American and the word "hooch" has always been around in that context - the Alaskan prospectors supposedly had their starters strapped to theirs waists to stop them freezing and drank the hooch as ...hooch. Where did I get that from?

Sorry - still having net problems. The oven is pathetic when it comes to baking bread hence pale crust. Good lift Written summary to follow. Mick

Truth Day. Mixed the dough last night. Let It sit for a couple of hours with a couple of folds. Put it in the fridge overnight. Shaped this morning. Proved for four hours in a tea towel lined colander. The oven is a supermarket combination oven - i.e. it's basically a microwave that can do convection if you can understand the instruction book. Claims to be able to do 230C and claims to manage this in about 5 minutes. Baked the bread for 60 minutes at 230C (at home this would be 50 minutes at 210C.

Might have been a little pourable camenbert, a bleu de chevre and an aged compte but I wouldn't want to upset you. And if you like the starter joke wait till you see the oven if the starter takes off. The starter has taken off: This is the rye "looking a little perky" last night. The size of the bubbles are not big but you can see the whole mixture is in ferment - bubbles all the way through. This morning I woke up half an hour after the alarm should have gone off and we had a train to catch to Bordeaux. So (another little starter joke) both the rye and the wheat starters decided this was the time to go berzerk. Just had time to refresh them and grab a shot of a thicker mixture I had in a glass so I could see what was going on: Same when we came back this afternoon. The starter in the glass had turned into a cocktail: Looks like we are going to have to try a loaf tomorrow.

You're right. Having to cope with bread like that is pretty hard. We're just going to round off the day with cheese on his wholemeal: I'm just using water straight from the tap because I just want to experiment with the basic ingredients. I'm not saying anything but the rye starter is looking just a little perky - probably just a starter joke.

I'm having more than just internet problems. My starter won't go beyond a certain stage of development but on the other hand it's not dying and smells sweet. Took drastic action on Saturday. Bought wholemeal and rye flours and split the starter in three: They are still just limping along so I shan't post again until there's a little more drama. In the mean time we have to put up with loaves like this: a semi-complet from Marc Brion of Biganos

Repost - I hope Hi Elsie - It's sitting in its little glass bowl, covered with clingfilm on a north-facing windowsill. That's because it's the only windowsill in this tiny studio. The weather has been pretty warm he this week ranging from about 22C-30C. Cakewalk - I knew someone would pick me up on that: No, we haven't had a sudden breakthrough. That's an old picture of an active starter. Obviously it's a close-up and taken for effect so don't judge your own by it. Unestablished starters tend to have individual bubbles that stand out from the rest of the mixture because there's not a lot of ferment going on. Back to the show: Thursday morning, 24 hours since its last refreshment, the starter is clearly active but still looking a bit limp. We are entering that period where after the initial excitement the mixture seems to hang around deciding whether to perform or not. Refreshed it with equal weights of flour and water, decided I had too much and dumped half, then, typically, decided perhaps I should have kept more. Thurday evening. We were invited for an aperitif with the owners of the studio in which we are staying and their neighbours. They have a magnificent house (where Napoleon III once stayed) with a grand white-pebble terrace immediately above the Bassin d’Arcachon – the evening was perfect, the tide was high, so we sat outside. There was more than one aperitif, the conversation flowed and there was a beautiful sunset to admire so that I nearly forgot my photographic duties. Hence the change of location to get the last available light. It’s looking a bit sad and it’s cast a little lake of hooch. I poured this away and refreshed it as before – equal weights of flour and water. We are holding our nerve!

Hi Elsie - It's sitting in its little glass bowl, covered with clingfilm on a north-facing windowsill. That's because it's the only windowsill in this tiny studio. The weather has been pretty warm he this week ranging from about 22C-30C. Cakewalk - I knew someone would pick me up on that: No, we haven't had a sudden breakthrough. That's an old picture of an active starter. Obviously it's a close-up and taken for effect so don't judge your own by it. Unestablished starters tend to have individual bubbles that stand out from the rest of the mixture because there's not a lot of ferment going on. Back to the show: Thursday morning, 24 hours since its last refreshment, the starter is clearly active but still looking a bit limp. We are entering that period where after the initial excitement the mixture seems to hang around deciding whether to perform or not. Refreshed it with equal weights of flour and water, decided I had too much and dumped half, then, typically, decided perhaps I should have kept more. Thurday evening. We were invited for an aperitif with the owners of the studio in which we are staying and their neighbours. They have a magnificent house (where Napoleon III once stayed) with a grand white-pebble terrace immediately above the Bassin d’Arcachon – the evening was perfect, the tide was high, so we sat outside. There was more than one aperitif, the conversation flowed and there was a beautiful sunset to admire so that I nearly forgot my photographic duties. Hence the change of location to get the last available light. It’s looking a bit sad and it’s cast a little lake of hooch. I poured this away and refreshed it as before – equal weights of flour and water. We are holding our nerve!

Thanks, Anna. That’s my mission in life – demystifying sourdough. If someone asks how to make a starter on a forum everyone chips in and confusion reigns. I thought if I start a new topic I have more control over the message. Pineapple is for rum punches, etc. Anyway we might need a bit of voodoo yet the way it’s looking. On with the story. Wednesday morning, i.e. 36 hours later - well, all right, nearer 40 hours - we are allowed a lie-in on our holidays, aren’t we? – it looked like this: The colour is probably a bit exaggerated in the photo. It was crusted with a very light mustardy tinge; hint of bubbles and smelling sweet. At this point I whipped out the scales (I didn’t arrive totally without gear) and mixed the paste with 50g water and 50g flour – about the same weight as the original mix – switched containers to glass and the covering to cling-film (again no relevance in the materials used). By Wednesday evening it looked like this – well bubbly but with that tell-tale immature look. Left it in peace overnight.

There’s a persistent myth that good bread is the norm in France. It is a myth which is why I bring my starter with me when we come on holiday from Wales. I’m definitely becoming a grumpy old sod. I was so annoyed by a stupid article in The Guardian newspaper just before we came away a few days ago - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/sep/03/who-will-babysit-my-sourdough-starter - that I thought, for the first time in about 15 years I’m not even going to take my starter, I’ll start from scratch and if I can’t get a starter going, it’s store-bought bread for the duration. Anyway, the four days since we arrived here on Saturday have been so perfect that we are probably never going back home to Wales. So I thought I’d better have a go with the starter. Monday evening I mixed two tablespoons of flour (organic T65 from the supermarket) with enough water to make a stirable paste in a little plastic pot and covered it with a piece of kitchen towel. If you are going to try this, please note that little of the foregoing is relevant – the amount of flour, the type of flour, the fact that it’s French, the type of container, the cover. You just need to make a paste of flour and water and it will either start to ferment or it won’t. If it won’t, you start again. You only have to do this once in your life so the odd false start is not a big deal. This is how it looked after mixing on Monday evening – doesn’t tell you much but I thought you might feel reassured by its ordinariness. Watch this space. I’m going to look pretty stupid if this doesn’t work. Mick

Thanks for your replies but they illustrate my problem - lack of technical and programming skills. When ebooks first started coming available I thought their real use would be for reference books because of the search effectiveness of databases. So I thought things like cook books would be amongst the first to benefit. But if you take a service like Kindle, there's a very uneven spread of titles that get released in this form and there's no standard presentation or search facility. That's without the swamp of low-grade titles that gum up searches by browsing. But that's a side issue. I just wondered if any of you technically smart foodies out there knew of a simple software package suitable for producing ebooks that is particularly suited to e-cook books (even better if they would take interactive spreadsheets). Or even an example of a well-produced e-cook book. Thanks Mick

This is sort of a parallel topic to “How Do You Feel About Buying and Using E-Cookbooks?” I’ve written and self-published three books on sourdough bread and microbakery. I do pretty much everything, the bread formulas, the writing, the photographs, the layout. I have them printed to a high standard in small batches of 50-100 and I promote and sell them through my blog thepartisanbaker. I’m thinking about the future. The books sell steadily enough but I’m probably only covering my costs – that’s OK. Not having (or wanting) a television series I’ve pretty much given up on a publishing deal – like commercial yeast I’ve decided publishers are a distraction and surplus to requirements. I’ve now reached the stage where I’m selling almost as many pdf versions as hardcopy and I’m thinking of abandoning print and producing only electronic books. Again I’m only interested in selling direct and not going down the Kindle/Kobo route. Is anyone out there able to offer suggestions about software suitable for cook books, in particular software that would allow the inclusion of interactive spreadsheet tables. What I want to do is present bread formulas in tables that allow the user to change dough weights and quantities. Thanks for any suggestions – hope this is in the right forum.

So with spare prepared and cooked salt cod from the Pudim de Bacalhau com Ovos recipe, a couple of posts up, I made Avocado Diablo. Gently fried half an onion in butter and olive oil. Added garlic, tomato puree, a little sugar, coriander (cilantro), black pepper, half a large scotch bonnet and fried a little longer. Added the salt cod, a few raw prawns (shrimp), chopped green pepper and tomatoes, juice of half a lime and cooked until the prawns were just done. Served hot in avocado halves (two). Recipe from Kenneth Gardnier's Creole Caribbean Cooking. Didn't last long.

Pudim de Bacalhau com Ovos - sounds better than salt cod with eggs. A Brazilian dish from Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz “The Book of Latin American Cooking” Her quantities for six as a first course: ½lb salt cod 2 tablespoons cornflour (cornstarch) ¾ pint milk 2½ ounces butter 1 medium onion grated 2 medium tomatoes peeled, seeded and chopped 2 tablespoons capers Seasoning 6 eggs grated parmesan Did roughly half quantities. I used the not-stiff-as-a-board type of salt cod which doesn’t need so much soaking or cooking. Soaked the cod overnight changing the water two or three times. Covered it with boiling water, brought it back to the boil, covered and turned off the gas. Removed from the water after about 15 minutes, skinned and flaked. Melted some of the butter in a small pan, mixed a small amount of the milk with the cornflour, stirred in the rest, added to the pan with the butter, stirred till thickened. Melted the remaining butter in another pan fried the onion gently, added the tomato and reduced a little. Stirred in the sauce, cod and capers and allowed to cool. Preheated the oven to 200C (400F, Gas 6). In my case buttered two ramekins, broke an egg into each, covered with the cod mixture, sprinkled with parmesan, baked 8 minutes. A really nice combination of two of my favourites, salt cod and baked eggs.

Same way as you lose anything else. You put it down, move a few things around, forget it. Come to slash the next batch - no blade. I run bread courses, organise baking weekends. The more people the more chance of losing a blade. People put them down on aluminium pizza trays, i.e. they become invisible, dump them in proving baskets, you wouldn't believe it ...

Dan Lepard used to say, "slash like you're slashing a throat". People can be a bit tentative. Work out the line you are going to take, steady the dough with one hand and slash confidently with the other. There isn't really an answer to this question. There are a whole variety of doughs so one blade really isn't enough. At the end of the day you find what suits you and the different doughs. I use a razor blade because, if you hold it right, it's rigid and doesn't drag - just use a protruding corner - (can't get a grip on lames), or a really cheap (and viciously sharp) Victorinox tomato knife, or, for heavy miche-type loaves and straight lines, a scaloped bread knife. As regards razor blades and safety - I have a little metal tin - only one blade is allowed to be in use and it lives in the tin and the tin lives under a minature le creuset in which I keep grain for decorating wholemeals. The blade comes out to slash, goes back in the tin and the tin goes back under the le creuset. If the blade goes missing the whole batch gets scrapped. You need a bit of theatre to stay safe. Best wishes Mick

Hibiscus margaritas!

Cardiff: I used to know Cardiff a little ten years ago but it's all changed. Can anyone direct me to a hostelry equivalent to the Harker's in Chester, i.e. a reasonably civilised, large pub/brasserie, that serves half-decent food throughout the day, where there's no need to book in advance. I'm trying to organise a birthday party for myself, not knowing whether two people (including myself) or forty might turn up. It's not a match day or half-term. Thanks Mick

Oof! That's painful. There are lots of things you CAN do but why would you? The simplicity of the sourdough process is beautiful in itself. So what if it takes a few tries to get a starter going? Once it is fermenting, take a little care of it and it's yours for life. I had a mispent middle-age hanging around French boulangeries. It's not so easy. They are often small so there's nothing to see and as soon as you walk through the door, that crowd you were hoping to hide behind evaporates and the woman behind the counter wants to know your order. Get you own starter going and once it's established it will be as good as any veteran culture. A few years ago, on holiday in France, I spent some time trying out different methods. If you're interested you can read the account here Personally I'd stick with straight flour and water but it's a matter of choice. Mick

Flavors Of The Nile On Your Budget - a mere £1.88 on UK Amazon - didn't take a lot of buying.