the eibls: Bread Diary - Patrick's Sourdough

Whitney's mom makes a great sourdough, and in trying to help Whitney make it, I did some research to see what the Internet had to say about making sourdough. I came across this guide for making a starter and this guide for baking a loaf. I noticed that these had a different approach for maintaining the starter as compared to what Whitney and her mom do. They feed the starter water, sugar, and potato flakes, resulting in a thin starter, whereas the guides I was looking at suggest just flour and water, leading to a starter with a batter-like consistency.

I decided I would try this other approach and see how it compared. Starting with some of Whitney's starter, I fed it flour and water for five days until it was a bubbly batter. I generally followed the guide above, waking up at 7am one morning before work so I could shape the loaf, do a second rise, and bake it all before work.

That evening we cut it open and I was quite pleased with the result. The inside was chewy and had some great flavor from the fermentation. Whitney's mom's bread has a sweeter note to it, possibly due to the sugar diet of the starter. My bread didn't quite taste like the really tart sourdough you find at the grocery store (which I do enjoy), but after some research I learned that some of that flavor is often artificially added with additional acid rather than what comes naturally from the yeast fermentation.

I'm generally not as big a fan of the very crusty "artisan" style loaves, but that was what the guide was for and it was my first time so I decided to just follow it. Next time I look forward to baking a sandwich loaf, possibly whole wheat if I think I can pull that off. Since we don't have a need for that much bread in the first place, we're hoping to find a technique we like so we can make it all at home!