Sourdough Experiment Success!

I LOVE MY SOURDOUGH STARTER!

It's a tough little beast. I had totally neglected it for several weeks in the fridge (which I have done many time before) but it's always just a happy little monster after I feed it.

Of course I just can't bare to toss any of it, so I am always looking for ways to use it in recipes. This Sourdough crumpets recipe is by far the best use of starter EVER... just add sugar, baking soda and salt to the starter and boom! We double the batch for our family and it makes a lovely afternoon snack with a hot cup of tea!

Generally, I pull my starter out of the fridge, use a couple cups for crumpets, and then feed what's left. I'll do a second feeding 12ish hours later (depending on how warm it is in the house), let it sit for a couple hours and then put it back in the fridge until I need it again.

Here's the stinky part, anytime I want to make sourdough BREAD, I always have my timing off. It's a long process and its pretty annoying when you realize you'll have to do a certain step smack dab in the middle of the night. Another thing that bugs me is that most recipes tell you to feed the starter once or twice and then you measure the ingredients... which is starter, flour, water and salt. then you have to wait some more. But here's the thing... starter is just flour and water... so essentially i'm feeding it AGAIN and waiting AGAIN and well...



via GIPHY

So I searched the world wide webs to see if I could find a recipe that only adds flour and salt. Why, you ask? Here's some math for ya...

*If you don't want to think about numbers or don't care about the reasoning behind why I chose the ratio I chose, you can skip past the following indented portion!*

Let's start with a really really basic sourdough recipe for arguments sake. The ratio is basically 1:2:3 grams of starter:water:flour and then the salt is about 2% of the flour [practically that looks like this-100g(starter):200g(water):300g(flour):6g(salt)].  

But when you think about it, really the starter is already equal parts of flour and water, so what you basically have is 5:7 water:flour, which would practically look like 250g(water):350g(flour):6g(salt), it's just that some of it is already fermented.... but what if most of it was fermented already? 

So using that thinking I actually wanted to try this ratio 500g(starter):100g(flour):6g(salt). Do you see what I did there? Instead of adding more water and even more flour, I just increased the starter to replace the increase of flour and water and just added the extra bit of flour that would be needed for an actual dough. 

Well, I couldn't find any recipe where someone had done this, so I figured I was either crazy to try this, or people had already tried this and failed so I just shouldn't question the ratios out there. But I just couldn't get it out of my mind. So using the ACTUAL ratios of a recipe I've made before (300g:250g:500g:10g) I just decided to go for it and try substituting the equal parts of flour and water for starter (800g starter:250g water:10g salt). I didn't want to use up a ton of ingredients on a bad experiment though, so my actual numbers were 480g of starter to 150g of flour to 6g salt. A 600-ish gram loaf of bread is a decent size, not too small and not too big, so that's why I went with those numbers if you were wondering.

So, believe it or not, the hardest part was deciding on the actual process! Essentially, I was cutting out the majority of the first proof and risking that the bread would become too sour too quickly somewhere along the way. So I just thought through a couple different processes and the reasons behind them, and here's what I ended up with...

1. Autolyse- Mix 480g of sourdough starter and 150 g Organic AP flour into a sticky dough (about 2 minutes using a fork). Cover with plastic wrap and let rest for 30 minutes.

*Autolyse is just a fancy word that means letting the flour hydrate and form some gluten while you sit and drink some tea*

2. 1st Rise- Sprinkle salt over dough and mix/fold into dough to distribute evenly. Cover and let rest another 30 minutes.

3. Shape/Bulk Fermentation-  turn dough onto lightly floured surface and shape according to preference. Place in heavily floured baneton. Seal inside a plastic bag and set in the fridge for 16 hrs.

*I originally planned for 12 hours, but that was middle of the night timing, so I decided in my sleepiness to just let it go till closer to morning, thus the 16 hrs*

4. Proof & Preheat- Set on counter for 3 hours. After 2.5 hours, preheat oven and dutch oven to 500F.

5. Bake- "Finger-poke test" the dough. If ready, then turn dough into preheated dutch oven and slit the top of the dough. Set lid on top and generously mist water into dutch oven before closing the lid all the way. Bake 30 minutes. Reduce temp to 450 and remove lid. Mist dough again and bake until dark golden brown (time varies with size, but this loaf took another 9 minutes).

6. Cool & Serve- Turn bread onto cooling rack and listen to the beautiful crackling as it cools. Slice, butter generously and devour!

AND THE VERDICT IS....

It turned out wonderfully! It wasn't too sour. The crust was perfectly crispy and the inside perfectly soft. The bottom was a little darker than I would have liked, and I'll have to trouble shoot through that, but otherwise it was outstanding!!

Now the real question... did it actually save me "time and effort"?

The whole process took about 22 hours... but really it was only like 15-20 minutes of actual "work". Overall I feel really good about it and will definitely have to try out a more regular sized loaf and see how it goes!

FINAL NOTES:

• If you decide to try this, "listen" to your dough and your starter! Your house temp may be different than mine (it's getting cooler right now so our house is around 73 degrees with the heat on) and that will affect the starter and the dough. 
• Also, I can't remember what time I actually fed my starter before using it for this recipe, but I do know that it looked and smelled great, had plenty of bubbles and wasn't deflating. :) 
• In terms of percentages, this recipe is simply 75% starter, 24% flour, 1% salt. Call me crazy! I think most recipes use 25% starter, but then again, I honestly don't know if that's 25% of the total or baker's percentage or what. The basic ratio is 80g starter: 25g flour: 1g salt. 
• My starter is a 100% hydration starter (meaning I feed the starter with equal weights, not volume, of flour and water)