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Sergeant Foley

Sergeant Foley

Well-known member
Bear Ribs said:
I've been making my own sourdough for about two or three years now and I've gotten down making a good one that works in bread machines at this point. My personal recipe is as follows:

1/2 Cup Sourdough Starter
3 Cups Bread Flour (Not all purpose, that will give you a bowling ball)
1 Cup Graham Flour
1 1/4 Cups water
2 Teaspoons Salt

1/4 Cup Flax Seeds (Optional)

If you don't know how to make Sourdough Starter I'll go over that soon. Put your starter and water in the bottom of the bread pan. Give it a stir or two with a wooden spoon to mix the yeast and water a bit. Add the flour next, then the salt and seeds if you want those in it.

Run the bread machine on the "dough" cycle. Run it about three times in a row to get the gluten properly stretched out. Note this is why you can't make bread with all purpose flour: it doesn't have enough gluten. All purpose flour is for things like muffins or banana bread, things that are crumbly instead of stretchy like sourdough bread. If you have a food processor with a dough hook, use that instead of a bread machine, it will work better. This saves you all the stretching and kneading serious sourdough fanatics have to do.

After three doughcycles in the bread machine, transfer the lump of dough to a floured proofing basket. Rice flour works best but you can use all purpose flour to coat the basket just fine. Put it in the oven with the oven light on and leave it about six to eight hours. This is a tricky bit because you're not working on exact time schedules, you're using wild natural yeast and every town's yeast is a bit different. You just have to check it periodically to see how it's going.

Once it's risen take it out and put a dutch oven inside your oven. Heat it to 450 degrees and leave it for half an hour. Put the loaf out of the proofing basket and onto a sheet of parchment baking paper, then transfer it to the oven. Slash the top with a groove, a lot of bakers get fancy with complex patterns but I generally just put an X on it myself. Before putting the bread in the oven, you can baste the top with olive oil, or sprinkle some sesame or poppy seeds on it, there's a few ways to dress it up if you like.

Bake it with the lid on about half an hour. Turn the temperature down to 400 degrees and bake it with the lid off for another half an hour. Put it on a wire rack to cool and don't cut it until it's fully cooled, the inside is still cooking during this stage.

Click to expand...

Does that include melted cheese? 😃
 
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Bear Ribs

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Sergeant Foley said:
Does that include melted cheese? 😃
Click to expand...
After slicing and toasting mine often does.

Anyway Sourdough Starter:

Actually pretty simple, you're trying to cultivate wild yeast. You can use all-purpose flour for this, it's the cheapest. However you'll get different yeasts from different flours, f'rex if you use graham flour your bread will wind up much sourer. Once your starter is going you'll get the best results from using the same kind of flour you bake bread with.

Take a jar and put a scant cup of flour and half a cup of lukewarm water in it. A smooth-sided glass jar works best, like an old peanut butter jar, so you can see the yeast bubbling inside. Water temperature is important, max-hot tap water is enough to kill yeast and cold water will make your yeast multiply very slowly, so try to get roughly body-temperature water. Also, don't use chlorinated tap water, it will kill the yeast so if your water has chlorine in it, let it sit so the chlorine evaporates out before using it. Mix the starter thoroughly so there's no dry flour anywhere. Cover it loosely so the CO2 the yeast makes as it eats the flour can escape and leave it all day. A slightly warm location like on top of the refrigerator helps.

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The next day throw away all but half a cup. Add another cup of flour and half a cup of water and mix it up again. You may see some tiny bubbles at this point but not always.

By day three you should see small bubbles appearing in the mix. It may start getting a sour yeasty smell. Repeat the entire routine, throwing all but half a cup away and adding another cup of flour and half a cup of water.

Repeat this for a week. By day 5 it should be pretty bubbly. By the end of the week, it will be ready to make bread with.

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Continue feeding the sourdough starter daily forever. It will continue to subtly change and become more effective over time, and your breads will gain a better and richer flavor the older the starter is. Certain Amish families are known to have starters over three centuries old, passed down in the family for generations, that create incredible breads. Many people name their starters and treat them like pets.



If a thin liquid forms on top of the starter, you can stir it back in. This is called "Hooch" and it's mostly alcohol, it indicates the starter isn't being fed often enough. If you don't want to feed the starter every day you can put it in the refrigerator, this will retard the growth of the yeast enough that it only needs feeding about once a week, however it will need to be fed at room temperature for a day or two before it regains enough strength to make bread.


Protip: When starting out, put a rubber band around your jar where the top of the starter is and you'll be able to see that it's actually growing. Once it's really going you probably won't need that visual clue that it's growing anymore though...
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Husky_Khan

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
A Chef in Nigeria set a new record for 'marathon cooking' by cooking up tasty dishes for over a hundred hours.

www.guinnessworldrecords.com

Nigerian chef Hilda Baci bids for longest cooking marathon with 100-hour kitchen stint

Nigerian chef Hilda Baci took on a 100-hour stint in her kitchen in the hope of breaking the record for longest cooking marathon (individual).
www.guinnessworldrecords.com www.guinnessworldrecords.com

Hilda Bassey/Baci beat the previous record established by an Indian chef named Lata Tondon who cooked for a mere 87 hours straight. Using 55 different recipes, she made over a hundred ten meals of various mostly Nigerian (but some foreign) cuisine... including Jollof Rice. 🤤

Even the President of Nigeria sent his congratulations.



Just proves how natural Women are in the Kitchen.

 
Zyobot

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Well, since @Bear Ribs brought up sourdough:

Bear Ribs said:
*Great big snip.*
Click to expand...

An interesting recipe! 🧐

Otherwise, any uses you've found for the discard? Myself, I've found some interesting recipes you can use discard for instead of throwing it away, such as all the variety of options presented here and here.

In fact, posting them here for everyone's convenience:







Never made them myself (though I'd like to try some day), but food for thought in terms of getting the most out of one's starter.
 
A

ATP

Well-known member
Interesting thing about South America - according to polish traveller,Wojciech Cejrowski,indians in Andas live practically only on patatoes,and those in Amazonia,when they could not hunt something bigger,eat fish soup named kiri-piri and bread.

And,they live realtively healthy.
 
Zyobot

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Actually, since you bake your own bread, I don't suppose this would interest you, @Bear Ribs?




See here for the actual recipe on his website.

While I'm not a big baker myself (apart from a few experiments here and there), I can definitely sympathize with Jack's unwillingness to deal with all the discard buildup. 😩
 
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