Sourdough bread confession and attempted breakout.

[Norm Matthews]

I thought I had  been making sourdough bread for around forty years.  I thought.  Maybe I was fooling myself.  The recipe was called King Arthur Flour Rustic Sourdough bread.  It says it is sourdough bread and it is from King Arthur Flour for goodness sake.  But here is the the problem.  The ingredients are sourdough starter, flour, water, salt, and sugar and yeast.  Yes store bought yeast.  I read somewhere years ago that you can make sourdough starter using store bought yeast because it is a hybrid and cannot reproduce itself in its hybrid form but will revert back to its original wild yeast form. I had heard that when commercial bakeries made sourdough, they used the starter for flavor and regular yeast for dependability. Now I don't know if that is still true today as it might have been a while ago before fast rising yeast was developed.  I found conflicting opinions on whether or not that is cheating. If I have sinned, forgive me.  I want start doing more stuff with my sourdough starter besides  the same loaf I have made since forever. It  was easy, dependable and everyone, I mean everyone likes it. 

 

Now that sourdough has become popular, there is more information about it out there and also the recipes are easier to find.  So I started fermenting flour and water to get 100% wild yeast. I made three starters. One with whole wheat flour, one with AP flour and one with rye flour.  They all started and I grew them all for a while. I ended up keeping the rye starter but have been feeding it with AP flour since then, so now it is just white flour starter. 

 

In the pictures, the round loaf and the French bread loaf are the same sourdough recipes I have always used but without any yeast other that what was grown in the new starter. The recipe is one cup starter, 1 1/2 C. water, 2 teaspoons saltr, 1 Tablespoon sugar and about 5 cups of bread flour.  I say about because, since everything else was measured by volume, 5 cups isn't always exactly enough.  This time the dough was a little wetter and stickier than normal which means it had higher hydration and so the air bubbles are a little bigger than before.  The round loaf was baked in a preheated cast iron Dutch oven. 

 

The recipes for the sourdough apple fritter bread  and the sour dough pancakes with the notes and that came with them are at my blog. I am not sure I am allowed to post them here.  I think the fritter bread would be improved with the addition of chopped pecans. The blog address is at the bottom of the page.  

 

I welcome your thought and comments.

[MaryIsobel]

Jumped on sourdough bread during Covid. I've baked bread for years but had never done soudough. I like the taste of sourdough but honestly the babysitting got to me and now I normally just go with a classic french loaf, or a no knead boule made in a dutch oven or foccaicia. Not that I would ever turn down a loaf of sourdough - especially if it were enjoyed in San Fransisco. As a kid, when I was 9, we sailed from Vancouver to Southampton and stopped in San Fransisco. My mom was insistent that we found sourdough bread, so that and a few other things were are picnic before getting back on the ship.

[TdeV]

Norm, I've tried using sourdough, but with less success than you. These loaves all look delicious. So do the photos on your blog dated 02 September.