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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2RX4fhN
oh, the King Arthur Flour website has like, THE definitive explanation with Science and Weights And Measures And Such. And I sort of wrote a thing up, before, too, but well–
I do have sympathy, because my ADHD ass would absolutely never have taken up sourdough if I hadn’t by pure coincidence wound up assisting my sister hosting a workshop by Amy Halloran (author of The New Breadbasket,flourambassador on Instagram, and also coincidentally my occasional babysitter when I was a tiny child) on sourdough that happened in late January, and after which I took home a little bit of starter.
So I will write my possibly-doing-it-wrong method here, in hopes that it might be more accessible, or might help if you’ve bounced off The Official Sources online. Because I do happen to have a couple minutes now while I’m waiting for my bread to proof! Also the children are locked in a dark closet, which I told them not to close the door of as they trooped up the stairs to look at their glow-in-the-dark stickers, and I just heard them yelling that they’d closed the door, so they’re gonna stay in there while I write this.
(I am kidding, their mom is on her way to release them now, but I thought it was hilarious. They literally locked themselves into a dark closet and at this very instant the kindergartner just came downstairs and won’t stop talking about how much she likes being locked in the closet so I guess we’re going to actually have locked-in-the-closet time every day henceforth, and that’s fucking hilarious so hang on while I email my family about that one. Oh my god the mouths of babes. Uhh also let that be a little disclaimer to you about how great I am at parenting, i.e. not.)
ANYWAY
Re: Exploding: the reason they’d explode is that they double in size, or more, when fed, and give off carbon dioxide I think as a byproduct of fermentation. So they’ll overflow. Maybe they’d also explode– I use a fermentation lock thing so that gases can escape, because i have that kind of equipment lying around, but you could also just leave the jar lid unscrewed, or replace the center part of a mason jar lid with fabric or something breathable, or use a plastic tupperware with the lid ajar. And make sure your container has a lot of headroom. I do well by having a pint jar that I never let get more than about half full before a feeding, and I’ve got a silicone doohickey called a Pickle Pipe as the lid. But before I stole that from my boyfriend’s weird lactofermentation experiments I was just using a regular mason jar lid I didn’t screw on and just left loose.
SO, I have never made a starter from scratch. That’s something you’d have to read the King Arthur thing to find out how to do. I was given my starter as a little piece of Amy’s– actually, I salvaged it out of the completed dough from a batch of English muffins she’d left rising overnight for us to bake, as the final result of the workshop. (It was great, she brought some ready-to-bake ones she’d set to rise that morning, and then brought the ingredients to mix up the dough, so she could just mix up a batch and then immediately pull out the eight-hours-later result and show us the rest.)
So, I got this little bit of starter, and put it into a pint Ball jar because i had one, and then as she demonstrated, every day you put in, like, a tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of water, and stir it well. So I did that for a while and then I discovered you’re supposed to take some out when you do that? I was just feeding it until it was huge and then using a bunch of it up to make a batch of bread, and that seemed to be working just fine. (And the amounts– I stopped measuring the water almost immediately, and just– add flour and then put in enough water that it’s the pasty consistency I like. Some people like a really wet starter; mine is just wet enough that I can sort of pour it if I encourage it along by stirring it with a butter knife. Different drynesses encourage subtly different strains of bacteria, I think; dryer starter is more aerobic, and IDK what it all means really. I bet some of those videos I never watched explain it all.)
About discard, though: My sister finally explained to me that if you start off your feedings by stirring the starter down, then dumping half of it out, and THEN adding your flour and water, the starter is generally more enthusiastic and less intensely sour, and you don’t wind up with it trying to crawl out of the jar because your jar is too full.
So, I got myself another jar (I think that was the idea ofchamerionwrites who also pointed out that a second container safely stored inert in the fridge also means you have a backup if your primary starter goes wrong somehow) and now every morning I stir the starter down, dump about half of it into the other jar, and then put the other jar back into the fridge. And then if I need to make something that takes A LOT of starter, I’ll take the discard out and feed it and let it warm up and use it for that, but mostly there are recipes that call for discard and I just make one of those every once in a while. (Waffles, english muffins, pancakes– stuff like that. Just– if you want to make discard into fed starter, all you have to do is feed it! It’s the same stuff, it just needs some love!)
There is absolutely no reason to actually discard discard, unless it gets moldy in your fridge or something. If you wind up with so much discard you’ll never use it, then actually sourdough probably isn’t working out great for you.
The thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to feed your starter very much! But if you’re going to need a lot, then feed it a lot, and discard less generously. It really doesn’t matter. It’s mostly alive and things that are alive like to stay alive.
The only thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST do, is that you have to feed it every day, twice a day. You can miss one or the other, once in a while, but you MUST feed it reasonably consistently. l If you can’t do that, then look at the videos; a lot of people use methods where they put the starter to bed in the fridge, and they could tell you how to do that. I’ve only done it once, when I went away for a weekend. I put it to bed an hour or two after I fed it, and then several days later took it out and let it warm up a few hours before I fed it again.
oh, the King Arthur Flour website has like, THE definitive explanation with Science and Weights And Measures And Such. And I sort of wrote a thing up, before, too, but well–
I do have sympathy, because my ADHD ass would absolutely never have taken up sourdough if I hadn’t by pure coincidence wound up assisting my sister hosting a workshop by Amy Halloran (author of The New Breadbasket,
flourambassador on Instagram, and also coincidentally my occasional babysitter when I was a tiny child) on sourdough that happened in late January, and after which I took home a little bit of starter.So I will write my possibly-doing-it-wrong method here, in hopes that it might be more accessible, or might help if you’ve bounced off The Official Sources online. Because I do happen to have a couple minutes now while I’m waiting for my bread to proof! Also the children are locked in a dark closet, which I told them not to close the door of as they trooped up the stairs to look at their glow-in-the-dark stickers, and I just heard them yelling that they’d closed the door, so they’re gonna stay in there while I write this.
(I am kidding, their mom is on her way to release them now, but I thought it was hilarious. They literally locked themselves into a dark closet and at this very instant the kindergartner just came downstairs and won’t stop talking about how much she likes being locked in the closet so I guess we’re going to actually have locked-in-the-closet time every day henceforth, and that’s fucking hilarious so hang on while I email my family about that one. Oh my god the mouths of babes. Uhh also let that be a little disclaimer to you about how great I am at parenting, i.e. not.)
ANYWAY
Re: Exploding: the reason they’d explode is that they double in size, or more, when fed, and give off carbon dioxide I think as a byproduct of fermentation. So they’ll overflow. Maybe they’d also explode– I use a fermentation lock thing so that gases can escape, because i have that kind of equipment lying around, but you could also just leave the jar lid unscrewed, or replace the center part of a mason jar lid with fabric or something breathable, or use a plastic tupperware with the lid ajar. And make sure your container has a lot of headroom. I do well by having a pint jar that I never let get more than about half full before a feeding, and I’ve got a silicone doohickey called a Pickle Pipe as the lid. But before I stole that from my boyfriend’s weird lactofermentation experiments I was just using a regular mason jar lid I didn’t screw on and just left loose.
SO, I have never made a starter from scratch. That’s something you’d have to read the King Arthur thing to find out how to do. I was given my starter as a little piece of Amy’s– actually, I salvaged it out of the completed dough from a batch of English muffins she’d left rising overnight for us to bake, as the final result of the workshop. (It was great, she brought some ready-to-bake ones she’d set to rise that morning, and then brought the ingredients to mix up the dough, so she could just mix up a batch and then immediately pull out the eight-hours-later result and show us the rest.)
So, I got this little bit of starter, and put it into a pint Ball jar because i had one, and then as she demonstrated, every day you put in, like, a tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of water, and stir it well. So I did that for a while and then I discovered you’re supposed to take some out when you do that? I was just feeding it until it was huge and then using a bunch of it up to make a batch of bread, and that seemed to be working just fine. (And the amounts– I stopped measuring the water almost immediately, and just– add flour and then put in enough water that it’s the pasty consistency I like. Some people like a really wet starter; mine is just wet enough that I can sort of pour it if I encourage it along by stirring it with a butter knife. Different drynesses encourage subtly different strains of bacteria, I think; dryer starter is more aerobic, and IDK what it all means really. I bet some of those videos I never watched explain it all.)
About discard, though: My sister finally explained to me that if you start off your feedings by stirring the starter down, then dumping half of it out, and THEN adding your flour and water, the starter is generally more enthusiastic and less intensely sour, and you don’t wind up with it trying to crawl out of the jar because your jar is too full.
So, I got myself another jar (I think that was the idea of
chamerionwrites who also pointed out that a second container safely stored inert in the fridge also means you have a backup if your primary starter goes wrong somehow) and now every morning I stir the starter down, dump about half of it into the other jar, and then put the other jar back into the fridge. And then if I need to make something that takes A LOT of starter, I’ll take the discard out and feed it and let it warm up and use it for that, but mostly there are recipes that call for discard and I just make one of those every once in a while. (Waffles, english muffins, pancakes– stuff like that. Just– if you want to make discard into fed starter, all you have to do is feed it! It’s the same stuff, it just needs some love!)There is absolutely no reason to actually discard discard, unless it gets moldy in your fridge or something. If you wind up with so much discard you’ll never use it, then actually sourdough probably isn’t working out great for you.
The thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to feed your starter very much! But if you’re going to need a lot, then feed it a lot, and discard less generously. It really doesn’t matter. It’s mostly alive and things that are alive like to stay alive.
The only thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST do, is that you have to feed it every day, twice a day. You can miss one or the other, once in a while, but you MUST feed it reasonably consistently. l If you can’t do that, then look at the videos; a lot of people use methods where they put the starter to bed in the fridge, and they could tell you how to do that. I’ve only done it once, when I went away for a weekend. I put it to bed an hour or two after I fed it, and then several days later took it out and let it warm up a few hours before I fed it again.
