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.