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I thought I would write about what works for me to maintain and use my starter.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I migrated my original starter that was equal parts by volume to equal weights. Technically, the original starter was a 167% hydration starter and the current one is a 100% hydration starter. What does hydration mean. In bakers terms the weight of the flour is defined as 100% and the weights of everything else is represented as a percentage of the flour weight. It is straight forward when working by weight. My 100% hydration starter gets refreshed every day with 80 grams of water and 80 grams of flour.

When working by volume it becomes a grey area. One cup of flour to one cup of water is the usual ratio. The water part is easy. One cup of water weighs 8.34 ounces (if your measuring cup is accurate). But what does one cup of flour weigh? If you follow King Arthur’s practice for measuring flour which is sprinkling flour gently into the measuring cup and gently leveling it off, a cup of flour weighs 4 to 4-1/4 ounces. If you dip the cup into the flour an level it off, on average a cup of flour weighs 5 ounces. In the King Arthur example the hydration level would be over 208% (8.34/4 expressed as a percentage). In the second case it would be 167%. What was hydration of my original starter? I don’t really know but I am guessing somewhere between 145% and 160%. This is why I recommend any baker who is still working with volume measurements to switch to weight now and to make that unit of weight grams. Yes, I know its the metric system. Get over it.

When I first made my starter I kept it in a 1 quart container. I am now down to to a pint container and could go smaller.

As far a maintaining my starter, at 8:30 every morning I refresh my starter. I discard everything but approximately 40 grams. I know that because I recorded the tare weight of the empty container on the container. I say approximately because there is dried starter on the sides of the container that is included in the weight of the remaining starter. I then add 80 grams of Poland Spring Water and 40 grams each of King Arthur All Purpose flour and King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour. That means on a daily basis I am discarding approximately 160 grams of starter. To me that is a waste but for now it is what it is. I hope to reduce that amount in the future a I refine my practices. There are some good uses for discard starter which we may talk about in a future post. my whole refreshment process takes me 10 to 15 minutes each morning.

You might ask “why do you discard so much of your starter. Why not save more?” I have found I have a stronger starter by discarding more. Remember , refreshing the starter is is feeding the bacteria that are helping us make wonderful bread. The higher percentage of food to their weight they get, the stronger they get.

When I first started baking sourdough breads I would increase my starter refresh to include the amount needed for the recipe I was baking. For example, if a bread recipe called for 200 grams of starter I would add an addition 100 grams each of water and flour. That would be 180 grams each of flour. That caused some issues. As the starter expanded it filled the container and actually lifted the lid part way. I use an air tight container that has two tabs to squeeze to reduce the seal to get the lid off. Obviously, that made a mess of the lid and the container. After the second time I learned my lesson and changed my process.

Now if I need 200 grams of starter, 6 to 8 hours before I am going to mix the dough, I weigh out 100 grams of water in a bowl. To that I add 20 grams of starter, mix it in and add my flour and mix it in. For me it works every time.

I should add that even though I have had my sourdough starter since 2013, all the breads I made with it before last November were hybrid breads. In other words they contained both commercial yeast and sourdough starter. My guess is the authors of those hybrid recipes wanted to ensure success and speed up the process. That is the opposite of what I am looking for. I believe that the flavor and texture I am looking in bread comes from slow fermatation of the dough. So far this has proven true.

But first why the name Our Weekly Bread. When I first started making sourdough bread last November it turned that I would mix up a batch of dough on Friday or Saturday to be baked the following day. Hence the title Our Weekly Bread.

My biggest misconception was that it was difficult to make and maintain a sourdough starter. My first clue that was wrong came when my wife and I were on a trip to Alaska. We were on an excursion on the White Pass and Yukon RR. The railroad follows along the route that the prospectors followed during the Yukon gold rush. They were referred to as “sourdoughs” as our guide explained because they always saved a lump of their bread dough and saved it in the sack of flour they were carrying for survival. I thought if sourdough will survive the harsh conditions of a Yukon winter, it ought to survive in our fridge.

Later on that same trip we were in the gift shop of our hotel in Fairbanks and I found a book titled Alaskan Sourdough Cooking published by Arctic Circle Enterprises, LLC. The book told how to make a sourdough starter, I followed the instructions and that is the starter I am still using 6-1/2 years later.

Before I started making sourdough last November, the starter sat in the back of the fridge for 6 to 8 months unfed. After I discovered the Northwest Sourdough videos, I pulled my started from the fridge, converted it from equal volumes of water and flour when feeding to equal weights of water and flour and never looked back. It’s a good thing it worked out well. I only used a small amount of my existing starter and threw out the remainder. In hindsight, that was not my brightest move but it worked out.

So I have learned that sourdough starter is pretty easy to maintain and is very forgiving.

That said, with only two ingredients, both are very important. Recently, my starter wasn’t rising as high as it had been and it seemed week when I stirred it down. I was using the same flour, so I decided it must be the water. I was using filtered water from a faucet with a Culligan water filter attached. The filter insert hadn’t been changed in a while so I put a new one in. I flushed out as the instructions called for and thought everything would be fine. But my starter continued to weaken. On the third day or so after changing the cartridge, I was drawing water to refresh my starter, I noticed the flow rate was way to high to be filtered. The new filter cartridge had failed within 24 hours and I had been adding chlorinated water to my starter and it didn’t like it. I switched over to filtered water from the fridge and my starter recovered in a couple of days.

Another misconception of mine was that all bread flour is the same, in other words, regardless of brand, it will behave the same. I noticed that when I followed Teresa Greenways’ recipes, her dough would be soft and my dough would be very stiff and hard to work. I knew I was using a different brand flour than she uses but couldn’t see what difference that would make. Finally I concluded my flour was absorbing more water that hers. I started adding an extra 10 grams for one loaf and 20 grams for a two loaf batch of dough and I had a nice soft workable dough. The lesson here in this and the previous example is that everything is a variable.

The remaining ingredient variable is salt. A teaspoon of coarse salt weighs less than a teaspoon fine salt. If you’re using weight it doesn’t matter. I use Morton’s Fine Sea Salt. I like it because it dissolves quickly. Other sea salts may not. The one thing I won’t use is iodized salt. I think it gives a metallic flavor to the bread but that may just be me. Quantity of salt is another issue. Under doctors orders I am on a restricted salt diet. So whenever possible I try to control my salt intake. The salt in bread controls the rise by toughening the gluten. Normally the salt is 2% of the weight of the flour in bread. I have learned that different bakers calculate the 2% differently. Some base it on only the flour that goes into the dough. I find that to taste ok. Others however, also include the weight of the flour in the starter in calculating the 2%. That I find tastes too salty to me. I will cut back on the salt amount by a few grams. That said, if following someone else’s recipe, I always follow the recipe the first time I make it. After that I adjust to suit my tastes and ingredients.

Another lesson learned is don’t believe measuring cups. I have had the same Pyrex measuring cups for years. Now I am using grams for both liquid and dry measurements. One cup of water weighs 236 grams if you go though the volume to weight conversion process. I needed 236 grams of water so I grabbed a Pyrex measuring cup, set on the scale, tared out the weight of the cup and poured in 236 grams of water. When I looked at the lines on the cup the level was well above the one cup mark. That meant when I was measuring 1 cup of water, I was getting 7 ounces not 8 ounces. The explained why when I was making yeasted breads the dough always seemed dry. It really was dry.

I have gone on and on about misconceptions so I will close with my largest mistake. I never got the importance of getting the top surface of a loaf tight. All of my loaves tended to flatten out in the oven. Mainly that was because I didn’t understand how to properly form a loaf. I would make the basic shape of the loaf whether round or batard with out getting the outer surface tight. That was another thing I learned in the Northwest Sourdough videos.

Hi, my name is Keith Gierman. I now live in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Some of my fondest memories growing up in New Jersey include waiting for the Bond Breadman to show up at the house for his twice weekly delivery of bread. Yes, I am that old, and both bread and milk in glass bottles were delivered to the house by route men. While Bond bread wasn’t artisanal bread, it was a notch up from supermarket bread.

In this blog I will be discussing my love of making homemade breads and my recent journey into sourdough breads. I will not be teaching you how to make bread. Instead I will be sharing what works for me, in my kitchen, from the ingredients I use. Mainly this blog will be focused on sourdough bread. What I know about making sourdough bread I learned from binge watching YouTube videos by Teresa L. Greenway of Northwest Sourdough (www.northwestsourdough.com) and subsequently taking several of her courses on Udemy. Teresa is a terrific teacher if you want to learn how to make sourdough breads and I highly recommend her videos and courses.

My making of sourdough breads really only started in November 2018. My journey into making bread actually started when I was in my 20’s. I was in my first apartment after graduation. My cooking equipment consisted of one sauce pan and a cast iron fry pan which I still have and use 50+ years later. I decided I wanted to bake my own bread so I went out bought a bread pan, some flour and a packet of yeast. As I remember, I made a mess of the kitchen and made a hockey puck of a loaf of inedible bread. I had a couple more attempts with similar results and gave up.

Jump forward another 10 or 15 years and the desire for homemade bread struck again. So I bought a bread machine. That made good but not great bread. The loaves were oddly shaped and had that cavity in the bottom where the paddle that mixed and kneaded the dough was stuck. What also started at the same time was buying books about bread making. Eventually the bread machine fell into disuse. But the books remained.

My favorite book was and still is Bread Alone by Daniel Leader. That book provided much inspiration and a lot of really good breads were baked from the recipes in it. My favorite recipe in the book is his Pain au Levain. I baked that bread a lot. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it is the beginning of a sourdough bread. It starts with 1/16 teaspoon of yeast, water and flour that gets additions of flour and water over several days while it ferments.

My wife and I have hosted a family get together on Christmas Eve for as long as we have been married. For most of them I have baked bread. The get together is fairly simple with appetizers, soup, bread and Christmas cookies for dessert. Most years I would fret and worry that my bread would not come out but it always did. I cut things too close some years with the bread coming out of the oven as people arrived.

Jumping ahead to the present, why did I get into sourdough? I think because it is elemental. There are only three ingredients, flour, water and salt and everything needed to make great bread is contained within them.

Technically there are two other “ingredients” needed, time and patience. The first I have, the second not so much. And the second is the reason I believe that until recently I never made a great loaf of bread.

I have rambled on in this post but have left out steps in my journey that may ultimately be covered in future posts. I will try to not be so long winded in future posts but no guarantees. I may include rants in future posts about things that drive me nuts.

My next post will address misconceptions I had about sourdough and I have learned.