If you have been following along, you know that the next issues I am trying to solve are how to increase the sourness of my bread and how to get good loft *and* large holes. In this post I’m going to talk sour.

At the time I am writing this, I don’t have a lot of answers, but I do have some successes in both areas, but independently.

The most tasty and sour bread I have made has been very flat and suitable for snacking more than for sandwiches.

For the sourness, what I did was begin with this recipe but start at step 2 and substitute your started for their starter in equal amounts.

I then changed the original rise time from the stated 12-15 hrs refrigerated to 19 hrs, 6 of which was refrigerated (not the last couple of hours, you want the dough room temp before you knock it down).

I then reshaped as noted (I made a loaf, not two baguettes) and let rise another 10-11hrs before baking.

At this point, both times I have gotten sour loaves I have noticed that the dough starts to tear or pull away from itself. For a sour taste, this is a good sign. For a decent lofty loaf, this is a bad sign.

There are more theories out there about increasing sourness that I have tried. One is keeping a stiffer starter. I tried this and while it worked for this person, it did not change anything for me.

Another, that I seem to have lost the link to, suggests aging your starter. I was keeping a cup of starter, give or take, and doubling it as needed and just making and using what I needed when I needed it and otherwise keeping it refrigerated. Currently, I have been keeping a portion of my starter out and feeding it daily. It’s been out about a week now and seems to be thriving just fine. I don’t have huge buckets of it (yet) because I have been making bread and gifting it.

This does make some sense to me as early settlers didn’t exactly carry around refrigerators. It is counter intuitive though and I did reserve a portion of my starter in the fridge “just in case”. So far I have not noticed that this is making any kind of a difference, but it may need more time to be a definitive result either way.

Categories: Food & Drink

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Food & Drink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.