[Sca-cooks] Starter went 'Pffft'
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
Tue Nov 30 07:53:29 PST 2004
I think I've found the problem.
Apparently, according to English Bread and Yeast Cookery, English bakers
make sourdough by making a tame yeast sponge and sitting it out until it
goes sour.
Americans, however, do a three step process, where they start with the
flour-water slurry and wait for it to bubble, then make a sponge, etc.
In other words, Americans require WILD YEAST to make a sourdough, while
the English are content to wait for wild lactobacilli to infect a tame
yeast sponge.
Now, here are some examples.
One from Laura Ingals Wilder, writing of
her girlhood in the 1870s, having little to nothing to do with San
Francisco:
"But how do you make the sour dough?" Mrs. Boast asked.
"You start it," said Ma, "by putting some flour and warm water in a jar
and letting it stand till it sours."
"Then when you use it, always leave a little," said Laura. "And put in
the scraps of biscuit dough, like this, and more warm water," Laura put
in the warm water, "and cover it," she put the clean cloth and the plate
on the jar, "and just set it in a warm place," she set it in its place
on the shelf by the stove. "And it's always ready to use, whenever you
want it." -- _By the Shores of Silver Lake_
Writing in _The Little House Cookbook_, Barbara M. Walker says, "A
sour-dough starter is leaven that develops from microscopic WILD YEAST
and bacteria present in the air."
>From _Real Bread_ by Maggie Baylis and Coralie Castle: "A 'starter' is
the beginning of all sourdough breads; it looks like thick pancake
batter, is basically flour and water (some call for dry milk, another
for potato water, etc.) that is set in a warm place where it will, you
hope, capture wild yeast spores out of the air and maintain them... the
older the starter, the more tangy its behavior."
from _Bake your Own Bread_ by Floss and Stan Dworkin: "What is
sourdough? Actually, it's _free yeast_.... If you can encourage wild
yeast to grow in a favorable medium (such as a wet and warm mixture made
from milk and flour) they will multiply and act for you like prepackaged
yeast-- with the major difference that the taste is a 'sour,' winey,
rich flavor... (There are, in various cookbooks, recipes for making
'sourdough' starter using tame yeast and flour and milk, or tame yeast
and flour and milk and a shot of vinegar. It's not the same -- it's not
even close. Tame yeast is tame, and only wild yeast gives you that great
sourdough flavor.)
If you bake with your new starter the first week, you may be
surprised at how bland it is that first week. It seems the sourdough
culture likes to mature for a few weeks before it hits its full flavor
stride. It will raise your bread immediately, but the flavor needs
maturing, at least until the second week."
>From _World Sourdoughs from Antiquity_ by Ed Wood:
"A true sourdough is nothing more than flour and water with WILD YEAST
to make it rise and special bacteria to provide the flavor... sourdough
yeasts grow best in a slightly acide dough, while baker's yeast does
better in a neutral or slightly akaline one. Baker's yeast is
represented by a single species, Saccaromyces cerevisae, while
sourdoughs are usually leavened by multiple species in the same dough,
none of which are baker's yeast. This mixture of yeast types contributes
to the DISTINCTIVE SOURDOUGH TEXTURE... The wild yeasts in sourdough are
anything but uniform, and they vary from country to country...
...sourdough bread is the product of not one microorganism, but two. The
wild yeast make it rise, and bacterial helpers produce the flavor. These
beneficial bacteria are primarily lactobacilli, so named because they
produce lactic acid, which contributes to the sour flavor. And they
don't do it very fast. Experience has shown that the lactobacilli
require approximately 12 hours to fully develop the authentic taste of
the sourdough..."
--
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"The toad beneath the harrow knows/exactly where each tooth-point goes,
The butterfly upon the road/Preaches contentment to that toad."
- Rudyard Kipling
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