Making sourdough bread, de-mystified

 
Look at this puffy, beautiful bread that I made tonight; it has no store-bought yeast in it at all! (The baking powder container in the photo has no relevance. I just have a cluttered counter.) The leavening of the bread was caused entirely by the wild yeasts that I captured from my kitchen and domesticated. I’m fascinated by the elegant simplicity of the process.

I’m very casual about bread-baking, since I’ve done it for so many years, but I haven’t worked with sourdough much. Maybe only once or twice, years ago, and I recall feeling a bit intimidated by all the instructions that I read. This time, I didn’t bother looking at instructions — it was just a lark, and if I failed, it would be no tragedy.

So here’s how I did it:

Four or five days ago, I mashed up a leftover boiled potato in some scalded milk. (I recalled that you’re supposed to scald milk when you use it in bread and such, though I often don’t. But I thought scalding it might be a good idea in this instance, since it would be sitting around unrefrigerated. )

I added some white flour and maybe a tablespoonful of sugar to the potato-milk, and about as much water as there was milk. The finished mix was heavy and creamy, like maybe the consistency of pancake batter.

I don’t think amounts matter here, but I ended up with something like two or three cups of the white creamy batter.

I put it in a bowl (uncovered, so it could catch the wild yeasts) up on top of our dish cupboard, in the warm kitchen, and mostly forgot about it. A couple times when I remembered it, I stirred it with a spoon. On about the third day, it was starting to be foamy. I didn’t have time then to do anything with it, so I just put it back on its cupboard.

Today when I was cleaning the kitchen, I discovered it again. It had been so long, I thought it must have crossed the line into spoilage – but it didn’t really look too bad. It wasn’t actively foamy anymore, but it didn’t look or smell spoiled. It had a sharp, slightly odd smell, and it looked pretty much ok. A bit dry at the edges, but no mold spots or fur or anything.

So I mixed more white flour and water into it, and a bit more sugar, and stirred the mixture up. I kept it at that thick, creamy pancake-batter consistency. I put half of this new mixture into a clean mason jar and put the lid on loosely and put it outside in our coolbox. The other half of it I put into a mixing bowl in a warm spot near the woodstove. There was maybe a pint of it in the mixing bowl. I left it there for about 6 hours. In that time, it foamed and puffed up in a very satisfying way, and the slightly odd sharp smell changed into a pleasantly sour bready smell. It was at that point that I felt some confidence that this stuff would actually work for baking.

After 6 hours, I just worked it up the way you would for any bread: adding more flour (about a cup of whole wheat flour, but the rest was white flour because I was craving that white sourdough bread flavor.) I didn’t add any more liquid. I added about 1/4 cup of some leftover peanut oil that was still in the deep-fry pan after my failed donut experiment from two weeks ago. Maybe a teaspoonful of salt. And a tablespoonful of gluten flour for every cupful of other flour, roughly, because gluten flour is the number-one secret to bread-baking success.

Then I kneaded it, made a loaf, put it into a loaf-pan, and back in the warm spot by the stove. I figured that without yeast, it might be hours and hours til the dough rose enough to bake. But after only about 2 hours, it was nearly doubled in size. Amazing!

So I baked it for 55 minutes at 350. And it’s great… It has a fine texture, a chewy crust, and the most wonderfully rich delicate sourdough taste. It’s addictively good. And now I want to learn about just what it is that’s floating around in the air in my kitchen, and how it all works.