Thread: Sourdough starter and bread making tutorial

Hi,
As promised on another post, I will write a tutorial on sourdough starter and bread making.

Starter:
3 ways of doing it:
1st: simply mixing two third of a cup with warm water and 1/3 with flour .
Your water should be spring water or rain water but not town water containing chlorine as that will slow or even stop the development of the natural yeast. Leave the mix into a large bowl somewhere reasonably warm. Top of cupboard should work. Do not cover it as the idea is to trap the natural yeast present in the air.

2nd method: mix 1/3 warm water, 1/3 of the juice of a squeezed orange ,1/3 flour. Expose into a bowl as mentioned above.

3rd method: get a handful of dried sultanas or raisins. Chop them in smaller pieces and mix with 2/3 Rd of a cup of warm water and wait for 1 hour. Drain the juice you get and save it to mix with 1/3 cup of flour. Again put into a bowl as mentioned above.

So in the three cases, we are exposing a little quantity of very wet flour to the environment where the natural yeast will start to develop. The advantage of using orange juice or the water juice from raisins is that a natural sugar is added to the mixture and does accelerate the fermentation. The ascorbic acid present in the orange juice helps a bit as well. And for the raisins they tend to have dried yeast on the outside of their shell as well.
The use of a brownish flower rather than a white flour helps to make for more interesting flavour. You can experiment with both white and brown in two separate starters if you wish to.

So I will carry on the tutorial tomorrow, but basically we are going to add a cup flour and cup of warm water to the starter once a day every day for the next three to five days.

On the to do list, cheers.

Thanks Friwi, will get onto that

For those that are going to try this , this is not bread as you know it . Think of it as more of a cake , when it is warm it is more bread like . But when it has cooled it does not hold together very well because all of the gluten which holds it together has been removed and does not have that soft rubber texture .

What sized container is recommended to start with? The instructions give an indication it is going to get substantially larger.

I started mine last night into a smaller dish. You can always poor it into a larger container as it goes on.

So today ,I am going to add 1 cup of flour and one cup of warm water. Stir it well, and cover with film or a cloth the top of your container.
Translated from the French , it is called refreshing your starter.
What we are achieving is progressively feeding the yeast the complex sugars within flour and we are progressively getting the yeast to evolving and naturally selecting themselves to be more efficient at developing and reproducing into that flour environment.it is also the beginning of the fermentation stage where the Yeats is transforming the sugar into energy (heat) and CO2. The CO2 is what makes the bubbles into the bread.
Very little of the gluten is consumed by the yeast, if your bread crumbles it is because your flour is not right or the kneading process was not achieved properly.
You will see in the next few weeks, that your starter gets more and more efficient at consuming the flour and your bread will prove faster provided it is in the right environment ( temperature , moisture and atmospheric pressure to a certain extend all play a role in the dough proving)

This is the link to bio grain . They produce some of the best flour you can get all Stone ground on French made grinding stones.
New Zealand Bio Grains Ltd. - Flours - Online Shop

This process is more gentle on the grain grinding and flour extraction and does not disturb the gluten the same way as on more modern cylinder grinding. Although the flour does not warm up during the process with the old grinding method.
It seems that people who are slightly gluten intolerant, can eat sourdough bread made with the older processed flour better than the more modern processed style white flour.

Sour dough fermentation uses bacteria as well as yeasts. The Bacteria digest the gluten and the yeasts are limited by the amount of sugar that is present. So sourdough bread is superior to modern yeast leavened bread from a health perspective because the bacteria have pre-digested the proteins that give us trouble, in the same way that yogurt is superior to milk because it is pre-digested by the lactobacillus. The downside is that the proving (rising) process is slower with SD.

Originally Posted by Moa Hunter

Sour dough fermentation uses bacteria as well as yeasts. The Bacteria digest the gluten and the yeasts are limited by the amount of sugar that is present. So sourdough bread is superior to modern yeast leavened bread from a health perspective because the bacteria have pre-digested the proteins that give us trouble, in the same way that yogurt is superior to milk because it is pre-digested by the lactobacillus. The downside is that the proving (rising) process is slower with SD.

and the other down side ......…. it tastes better so you eat more, and home cooked fresh bread DESERVES plenty of lovely butter (bad for the waist line)!

Originally Posted by hotbarrels

and the other down side ......…. it tastes better so you eat more, and home cooked fresh bread DESERVES plenty of lovely butter (bad for the waist line)!

What's bad for your waistline may be good for mine.

Going to start on this tonight with a little luck. As the grandson of a baker I feel I should redeem myself for the fact I've never made bread. I've sort of done that for my father not being able to shoot, ... well at least by getting his granddaughter to shoot.

Originally Posted by gadgetman

Going to start on this tonight with a little luck. As the grandson of a baker I feel I should redeem myself for the fact I've never made bread. I've sort of done that for my father not being able to shoot, ... well at least by getting his granddaughter to shoot.

Beer bread is about as quick and easy as bread gets.

Originally Posted by veitnamcam

Beer bread is about as quick and easy as bread gets.

The first ingredient is not safe for me to work with.

I made this yesterday.
I have dried my sour dough starter as I was starting to eat too much bread.
Once every so often is enough for me, but I’m looking forward to pictures of progress.
Good on you @Friwi

Do you have a dehydrator to dry your starter out?