Today’s Bake:
95% King Arthur Special Patent Bread FLour
4% King Arthur White Whole Wheat (from Starter)
1% FarmerGroundFlour Organic Rye (from Starter)
2% Salt
20% Starter
80% Hydration
I was fascinated by the Tweet from a microbiologist that I posted earlier. He stated that yeast was everywhere and suggested soaking some dried fruit in water and creating a starter with that.
I found some hardened, old organic raisins in the pantry, so I swished them in filtered water and started them with Organic Rye flour. It was bubbly the next morning but stinky. I then started discarding ⅔ of it and feeding it with half rye and half Special Patent flour and this continued for 3 days. On the 3rd day, I thought I might have discarded too much as there were barely any bubbles, so I swished a dried organic fig in water and used that water in the feeding. It supercharged the starter. I then started feeding it with my usual mix of 45% Special Patent Flour, 45% White Whole Wheat, 10% Rye.
Each day, the starter smelled sweeter and began to behave like my regular starter, doubling within 3-4 hours and even tripling. I was feeding it twice per day. On the 6th day, it looked and smelled ready. On the 7th, I made dough with it using just bread flour as I wanted to see how it tasted on a blank canvas. After an overnight fermentation in the fridge, I baked it and it was delicious!
The rise is as good as any I’ve baked, if not better. It barely has a sourdough taste at all, it’s sweet-ish, like a loaf of good white bread, but the crust and chew are amazing!!! Now I’m going to have to bake a side-by-side comparison with my 5yo starter and favorite flour blend and see!
Since yesterday was World Baking Day…
It was the perfect time to compare my new dried fruit activated starter against my years-old starter. I also got a big bag of King Arthur’s Organic Artisan High Gluten to play with. I’m hoping the high gluten (14.1%) wil allow me to incorporate a higher percentage of whole grain while keeping an airy structure.
Other than the starter, both loaves are identical:
52% King Arthur Organic Artisan High-Gluten Flour
24% Arrowhead Mills Organic Rye
23% Four Star Farms Stone Ground “Warthog” Whole Wheat
1% King Arthur Special Patent (from the starter)
18% Starter
2.5% Salt
83% Hydration
Because of the high percentage of whole grain, it absorbed more water during the mixing process to form a supple dough. The dried fruit starter (Round Boule) was just a touch more active than the older one and rose a little bit faster. Texture was virtually identical. The older starter loaf (Oval Batard) tasted just a touch more sour. Both were very tasty. More experiments are needed
You can make your starter more or less sour by the hydration level of the starter. I don’t mind pretty sour most of the time. I can make a decent loaf but your cuts are really inspiring. Nice job.
I’ve been experimenting with flavors and fillings.
For this one, I used high-gluten flour and made two batches of dough - one plain and one with 12g King Arthur Black Cocoa. Both were autolyzed, mixed, and coil folded separately. They were then laminated with a sprinkling of rehydrated dried tart cherries. One more coil fold before shaping and 14 hours in the fridge.
My first attempt at a starter died about day 5. Tried to keep it simple 4oz water / 4oz AP flour. Day 2 thought I was rockin’ it, rising and bubbling. Day 3 still good as far as I could tell. Then died down and hootch. Went from 24 hour feed to 12 hour. No luck. RIP
Starting over…and I’m NOT a baker by any means
Was just reading a new article on sourdough starters on SeriousEats, and you might be interested in the comment from Kristen Dennis (@foolproofbaking) in reply to someone with your problem:
I love Serious Eats and I love Kristen Dennis. I learned a lot from her Instagram feed. Yes, there’s often a “stall” at day 5 and can last several days. That’s when most assume it’s a failure and dump it. You just have to keep at it. There are so many posts on Sourdough FB groups where someone has nearly given up and then on day 14 or more, BOOM, it’s going gangbusters.
It took me two tries. I read a tip somewhere to substitute pineapple juice for some of the water. Whether that helped or I was just luckier on my second batch, I’m not sure. Either way, it worked and I’ve had success since.
I just got Apollonia Poilane’s “Poilane: The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery”, which came out last year, and I am reading the sourdough recipe, which she came up with to mimic the bakery’s miche for the home baker. I’m a big fan of their bread, which Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge has FedExed in every Wednesday (there must be some connection, because she was a 18 year-old Harvard student when her parents died and she had to take over the bakery in Paris). It’s a much better sandwich bread than the typical Tartine-style loaf, more dense and less crusty, so it doesn’t hurt your mouth when you bite it.
Interestingly, the starter begins with live-culture yogurt and 2 one-day fermentation steps before you can bake. It is a firm starter with the consistency of dough and can be fed every day or two, keeping it in the fridge (if I’ve understood the recipe correctly, there are a couple of unclear points). However, it is not a pure-sourdough recipe, since some ADY is added when making the bread. There is also minimal folding, which presumably accounts for its denser crumb. It not exactly what they do in the bakery (certainly no yogurt or ADY!), but she says the result is a very close mimic in regards to taste and texture. I’m going to give it a shot since I can compare it side-by-side to the genuine article.
Just as I was wondering how I was going to bake bread on hotter days, someone on FB posted bread baked in a Turkey Roaster. Well, I have to say that was GENIUS! My kitchen stayed nice and cool while this puppy, which had been languishing in basement storage did its work.
The bright pink/purple dough is made with purple sweet potato powder. Both doughs were roughly:
65% King Arthur Organic High Gluten Flour
15% Jovial Organic Einkorn Flour
15% One Degree Organic Sprouted Spelt Flour
1% Rye from the Starter
Remaining 4% Purple Sweet Potato Powder or KA High Gluten Flour, depending on the dough
80% Hydration
2% Salt
