SC - butter

[alm4@cornell.edu]

> Wow! How wonderful of you. Thank you thank you thank you. I've always
> wanted a recipe for sourdough starter. Thank you. AN one more thing-
> Thank you!
> Angelique

I seem to have resubscribed at the end of a conversation I would have
liked to have seen. ;) Ah, well-- this will be long.

It's not that hard to make your own sourdough starter. All it takes is a
little goo-- flour and water. If your kitchen has had a lot of bread
baking in it, yeast will find the food source and start in on the feast.
Otherwise, prime the mixture with a little bit of commercial yeast.

Basically, a sourdough starter can be quick-chugged in about a week of
daily routine: toss about half out, feed by adding water and flour back
up to the original quantity, stir and ignore for twenty-four hours. The
more often the yeast has to work the sourer the taste. I've heard that a
good sourdough culture from scratch needs about a year of steady weekly
use to really get sour, but I didn't find that was the case with mine. 

My starter is about three years old and either gets used on a weekly
basis, or is ignored for about a month. I merely pour off the hootch,
(which is the alcohol yeast excretes) feed the night before, and go on
with my recipe. I have even rescued my starter from scraps in a bowl
when my overzealous husband dumped it down the drain. As long as you
have a little of your starter alive, you can easily feed it back up to
full strength and any quantity your recipe calls for.

I've been fooling around with bread baking for a couple of years now. Up
until today, all of the sourdough breads I'd tried came out, well,
pretty durn rock-like. Not my idea of bread. I followed this recipe and
procedure over the last few days, and to my delighted amazement took two
loaves of bread outta the oven this afternoon that have almost the
lightness of commercial bread. Almost. ;) 

Wanna try it? Remember, this is procedure, not just a recipe-- and I
make no representations as to its period-ness as I simply do not know
enough about period breads to make that kind of judgment. However, I've
found over a couple of years of experimentation with bread that certain
ingredients cause certain characteristics, hence the particular
ingredients I've used. I'll explain the characteristics within the
procedure.

Ciorstan's Arf-n-Arf Spelt Bread (though whole wheat will do)

Read all the way through before you start.

Day 1: Kickstart your sourdough by priming it with enough flour and
water to make about four cups total. Ignore it for a day, but put it
back in the fridge to bubble ominously. The cold temperature keeps the
yeast from processing into alcohol death too soon.

Day 2: In a large bowl, mix together:

3 cups of starter (put the rest back in its jar in the fridge to ignore
until next project) 
1/4 cup melted butter, left to cool to room temperature
1 cup of white flour
3 tsp. salt
1 1/2 c. milk, room temperature

Mix together. Add slowly:

3 c. spelt flour (or whole wheat)
2 to 2 1/2 c. white flour

Knead in the last cup to 1/2 cup of white flour, until the dough has
that particular silky smooth feeling of well-kneaded bread. Since I'm a
mom, I describe it as 'baby's butt'! It should be a little slack/sticky,
but not much. Put it into a large bowl, cover with a damp cloth and
ignore overnight, if your kitchen is really cold. Otherwise, about three
hours at 85 degrees. Sourdough yeast functions best at 85-- any colder
and it acts slower, any warmer and it will probably start to die. The
damp cloth serves to keep the bread dough from forming a crust on top
due to drying out. Don't use a paper towel-- they don't stay damp very
long.

Day 3: Punch down, knead. Shape into two loaves, put loaves into greased
pans (I also use corn meal for 'mold release'). Let rise in its 'proof'
stage under a damp cloth, about 2 to 3 hours in a cold kitchen, probably
about 45 minutes at 85 degrees. 

Bake, one loaf at a time for perfect crust, at 375 for 45 minutes (my
two loaves weren't the same size, so I put the larger one in first and
by the time the first one came out, the second had risen to match the
first one's size). Cool on a rack until the loaf stops steaming-- if you
cut into it too soon, the steam will collapse the loaf. Usually baking
two loaves of this size at a time will cause the loaves to heat
unevenly, making the crust crack parallel along the top of the pan.
Also, I noticed that the crust crazed a little as the loaf cooled, so
probably a healthy slash or two across the top like the fancy bakeries
would be in order before baking. 

This is *really* good bread-- just a little sour, with a delicate light
texture and loft due to the milk, and nice golden crust due to the
butter. The salt acts as a yeast enhancer. I particularly like spelt
flour over whole wheat, because it isn't bitter like whole wheat (health
food stores have it, so does the King Arthur Flour Catalog). Next time
I'm going to try an all spelt loaf for a more period bread. The interior
of the loaf is a light golden brown in color. Spelt is an older
step-uncle of the current forms of wheat grown commercially these days,
and has been cultivated for some 5,000 years. From a mom's point of view
it's a little more nutritious than regular wheat-- but more to the
point, I like the taste.

Incidentally, if you're impatient, you can combine day 1 and day 2 if
your starter is reasonably active. You want to be within 24 hours of its
last feeding for ideal sourness. And if you really want *sour* bread,
add a little citric acid-- it's a common ingredient in commercial
sourdough breads these days.

ciorstan
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