My first sourdough boule

I had tried making sourdough bread before, always without real success. After reading more materials, and after a lot of Internet coaching from Melissa McCall, I was able to make
a decent “test” loaf last week. Today I baked my first real loaf, based on a mix of mostly bread flour with a little rye flour. Although I didn’t get quite as much rise as I might like,
that will take more practice. Still, it looks like it turned out pretty well…

Bruce

looks great–I will test taste for you.

Purchased starter or home made?

Home made with indigenous yeast. Took about 7 days to get to full strength/float stage.

Bruce

I’ve been reading the Forkish book, Flour, Water, Salt & Yeast, and watching his videos. Here’s the sourdough boule I made earlier this week using his technique–I’m getting closer!

Bruce

How’s it look on the inside?

looks tremendous. incredibly satisfying process as well, right?

Pretty good, all in all. It could still use a bit more of a “rise,” with a more open crumb structure; still a touch on the denser side. But it’s an ongoing experiment in technique and variables (including time).

Bruce

Thanks. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, though. I’ve baked a lot of traditional breads in the past, with standard commercial yeast. You can decide to bake those breads in the morning,
and by the afternoon you have a fully-finished product that can be wonderful.

With sourdoughs, you have to wait 5-7 days minimum just to get the chef/starter/levain/whatever you want to call it to the stage where you can actually start using it to bake bread.
And even at that point, you typically have to start the process the day before you want to bake the bread. And if your chef/starter/levain hasn’t been recently fed, it may take 1-2 days to
revive it to the point that you can bake with it again.

Plus, I have so many containers, measuring devices, scales, etc. that it’s not clear if I’m making sourdough or running a meth lab.

BUT, once you finally get a good, fresh, homemade sourdough boule then it’s very satisfying!

Bruce

hmmm…shouldn’t take that long. if you have a healthy starter, it should be ready to use within 2-3 hours of you taking it out of the fridge, feeding it (adding 50% by weight water and flour). i typically put the glass jar in a pot of warm water to get it going. as soon as it’s bubbly it’s ready - it doesn’t have to double, just float in water.

i typically make the dough early evening and bake the next morning after a retarded ferment in the fridge overnight.

the other option is to just do it the weekend before, then bake the next weekend. 7 day ferment.

Right, but that’s after you’ve already got the chef/starter/levain established. If you are starting truly from scratch, then it takes several days before you’re ready to start baking.

Bruce

well, yeah. but you only start from scratch once. my starter is going on 5 years old!

I started a new starter several weeks ago, but there were some aspects of it that I didn’t like so I decided to start over from scratch–now on Day 4 of the new starter.

5 years old; you must be so proud! Does your starter have a name?

Bruce

there’s no benefit to making your own starter other than to say you did it.

pm me your mailing address and i’ll send you mine if you like.

Why wouldn’t the local yeast work better? sure after 100s of iterations the local should take over but still, why not start fresh?

“work better?”

a native yeast should ferment stronger and cleaner as it’s used to ambient conditions, not the least of which the hardness of the water.

hmmm…i’d love to see some source for these claims. not sure what stronger and cleaner means in this context.

does this mean that my NYC starter won’t work sufficiently well in Los Angeles?

I’m curious what Bruce used to start his starter, but he was leveraging the bacteria in whatever fruit or vegetable source he used. Was that plant matter grown in and around Los Angeles?

I based the last starter on a book given to me that recommended using some commercial yeast to get the starter going. Which worked (of course), but as I’ve now read elsewhere, you don’t
want commercial yeast anywhere near your starter since it tends to take over the colony and dominate the starter. So while you’ll get a starter that works (as mine did), it won’t have the same
tang and character as building your starter solely on indigenous yeasts. So I’m on Day 5 of the new, 100% indigenous starter and I’m close to being able to bake with it. At least based on smell
alone, the 100% indigenous starter should be more pungent. Once I’m ready to bake a test loaf, I’ll see if it’s noticeable in the finished product.

Bruce