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After another 24h both glasses are already raising. The sourdough started is now active and can be used for baking. I'll still feed them and let them stand for another day, but in principle this is how it should look and what you need to do.
Sourdough in about 4-5 days from scratch, using nothing but flour and water. Nature provides really everything you can wish for 🙂
After another day, the sourdough should be already pretty active. A slight soury smell and visible bubbles are arising. This shows us, the bacteria are active and doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
Until now I made a very generic sourdough. Now it's time for the dough to specialise. With specilise I mean, that we create trunks for the different flour types we intent to use. I mostly bake with wheat/spelt and with rye, so I'm gonna create two types of sourdough.
Ultimately I want to have two different jam glasses in the fridge, one for wheat/spelt and one for rye. In general sourdough likes it to always have the same kind of flour and because wheat, spelt and rye are different grains it's recommended to have different sourdough for each of them. I mix spelt and wheat together, because until now I had good results with this combination.
So, I take now two jam glasses, fill them 1/4 with flour and add 4 tablespoons of our sourdough to each of them. Then I mix the contents and add warm water until we reach a very liquid, but sill doughy consistence. This we now let raise for another day.
In about 12h we're probably have to feed them again. Now the activity of the sourdough should be already pretty good.
Day two of making sourdough from scratch. The dough starts to have some larger bubbles and already smells mildly sour. Looks good so far!
I removed more than half of the dough and fed the remains with fresh flour and water. After re-feeding all of the bubbles are gone. After some minutes some small new bubbles start to form. This is a good sign for activity and shows us, that we are on the right way. Actually a bit faster than I though 🙂
Looks like we're soon ready to make new bread again 🙂
Just a tiny update on the sourdough process. After 1 day some small bubbles start to form. I've fed the dough using again 50g flour and 50g water. On day 1 I don't remove old dough, as I think the number of absolute bacteria is still low and needs to be increased first.
We're having about 19 degrees here in the house. It's not optimal but it seems to work. Could be that it's slowed down a little bit because of the temperature. Anyways, the bacteria are pretty resilient, so no need to worry. Might just take a day longer 😉
I'm starting a new sourdough culture from scratch. All you need is flour, water a nice and warm spot and some time.
Mix everything nicely together and put to rest for a day. The bacteria prefer temperature between 20 and 25 degrees. Low temperature encourage lactate-bacteria growth (sour taste), higher temperature yeast bacteria. In the end you want to have both, so keeping the temperature in this range is recommended.
Also making sourdough and bread from it is one of the crucial skills everyone should know for the unavoidable upcoming zombie apocalypse 😉
Another rainy Sunday, another bread recipe.
Today I was gonna try to make a full-rye bread. I used my own sourdough starter, and let the dough ripe overnight. Stirring and firmly mixing the dough of a pure rye dough turns out to be fairly exhausting. The consistency is super gluey and it's more like fresh concrete or grout.
Anyways, after mixing I gave it a third rise by using some fresh yeast (10g yeast per kg dough) and let it rise for another hour before baking. So in total, there were 3 rises (sourdough, mixed ingredients, and with yeast), the first one being overnight, the other once roughly an hour.
Ingredients for this bread are: rye flour, water, salt, sourdough starter (from my own culture) and a little bit of fresh yeast.
The taste is very good: It has it's own aroma, coming from the sourdough and the rye and does not necessary need additional spices. It tasted very nice on it's own and with butter and does not become boring like this. I can see this bread to be very nice together with some blue-cheese and honey.
Summary: I'm satisfied with the result for a new recipe and the first try of it. Looking forward to tomorrow's breakfast!
Another new bread recipe, that I'm right now working on. From the same book as the last experiments, and because of copyright reasons, I won't put the recipe here (Get the book!)
I am very happy that the bread didn't glued too much. In the meantime the kitchen smells amazing, and I can't wait for tomorrow morning to try out this beauty.
For now, good night.
Refreshingly simple recipe with a strong taste. Consider adding fresh peppermint and a lime
Peel and cut the Ginger into stripes. Put the Ginger into the water, add the juice of the lemons and cook for 5 minutes. Still in the hot pan, blend it using a hand blender. Then add the sugar and cook it for another 5 minutes.
Put into bottles. Recommended to use within half of a year.
I just found a new book to work with: "Brotbackbuch Nr. 1" from Lutz Geißler (in German) and love it from the beginning. Every recipe is listed with the effective and absolute time it needs, and apart from the recipies it also incorporates a lot of background informations and craftsmanship knowledge. I came to this book via the (also German) podcast Chaosradio Express, or more specifically, episode 213 - "Brot".
But enough waffle.
My latest creation is the most basic recipe from the book: The "Landbrot"
The recipe is very basic but because I cannot find it publicly at brotbackbuch.de I have to assume it's under copyright. Still some notes about making this bread
Another weekend, another bread.
This time I was trying myself on a very simple sourdough recipe, for a tasty bread without any yeast
The recipe is really simple, and split into two parts: The sourdough and the actual bread:
Sourdough
100g flour, 100g water, 10g sourdough starter
I fed an took care of the sourdough started for about 4 days, until it was active enough to get to the bread. Then take out 10g and mix all ingredients together. Let them stand for about 12-16h at 25 degree.
Bread
Sourdough, 400g flour, 200g water, 10g salt
Mix together, and let stand for about 30 Minutes. Then knead it by hand for some minutes. Let stand for about 6 hours at at 25 degrees.
Bake at 200 degrees for about 40 minutes.
The result. The form is not so round because it was to gluey for the bread form, resulting in half of the bread sticking there and consecutively ending up in the sink 🙁
Initially I declared the other half on the baking tray as failure, but because the oven was hot and I wanted to try the taste I was anyways going to bake it. Turns out, that the bread was kind-of self-healing. Lesson learned: Bread can excuse small (and big) mistakes pretty well. At least this one 🙂
The inner part of the bread has very nice pores and tastes fluffy. Pretty much impressive for a bread without any baker's yeast! Nature gives you all you need, you only have to know how to use it. And it takes it's time. You can't hurry a good bread.
Taste-wise I am a bit disappointment. The bread has many aroma, especially in the crust, but the interior is a bit too sour. The reason is probably, that the sourdough started had too many sour-bacteria and too less yeast cultures, but something that I can make better the next time by selectively feeding the yeasts before starting the sourdough (so called "Hefeführung"). And let the bread-dough stand for not so long, not even to peak height.
Well, it was a try, and for now I am happy with the result. Especially after I wanted already to declare it failed after half of the dough sticking to the bread basket.
And for now: Happy baking!
