My starter is all growed up and ready to make bread

Monday Morning

It's been a week (minus half a day) since the process began, and my starter is completely mature.  This is what I woke up to this morning.

If you haven't been following this blog, the red arrow was where the starter started before being fed.  Unfortunately, it is Monday morning, and I have this day job, thing.  Still, I can't wait until next weekend to give my creation a real test.  I gave it one more feeding as the King Arthur blog suggested, with the intention of baking something when I got home.

The culture was equally healthy when I got home from work, so I set out to find a proper recipe.  The King Arthur site has a recipe for two loaves that still includes some commercial yeast.  I didn't like that idea.  The bread machine sourdough book had a "generic white bread" recipe called World Bread, that I decided to try, with some modifications.  Their recipe called for 1 1/2 cups of starter.  It's not clear whether this is before or after stirring down the culture.  If it's after, that doesn't leave any starter left for future use.  To avoid any ambiguity, I used a kitchen scale and decided to go by weight.  I started with about 7.5 oz. (weight) of starter and 1 1/2 cups of white bread flour.  I set my bread machine to start mixing and kneading.  As with my hybrid whole wheat bread experiment, I found that there wasn't enough moisture.  The dough ball was many small balls with lots of flour left around the edges.

I added 1 oz. (2 Tbl.) of water and started the cycle, again.  There is still a little flour left in the corners, but the dough ball looks better.  There will be some milk and more flour added to this later in the process, so I'll go with this.

Now, here is the tricky part.  The book says to allow this to sit for 8 hours before adding the rest of the ingredients.  I want this process to be compatible with my sleeping and working schedule, so I am going to try this experiment.  I'll let this sit until I go to bed, that's about 5 hours.  Then, I'll add the rest of the ingredients and set the bread machine delay timer to have the loaf ready for my breakfast.

The whole recipe is

Ingredient	Amount
White bread flour	1 ½ cups
Sourdough starter	8 oz. by weight
Water	1 oz. (2 Tbl)
Turn on bread machine for first mix and knead cycle, then turn it off until ready for bed.
Add the following ingredients and set the timer on the French bread cycle to finish tomorrow morning
Milk	¼ cup
Salt	1 tsp
Sugar	1 Tbl
Oil	2 tsp

Next: How it turned out

It's alive!

Sunday

This morning I was pleasantly surprised to find some growth in my starter.

The red arrow shows where the starter was when I fed it.  You can see that it had about 50% growth after 12 hours.  I was eager to try it out, so opted to try making a loaf of bread using my starter supplemented by commercial yeast.  I adapted a tried and true bread machine recipe for whole wheat bread.  I needed to guess about how to adjust the flour and water amounts to compensate for the flour and water contained in the starter.  I underestimated the water I needed at first.  The first mixing cycle from the bread machine made several balls of dough and left a lot of flour around the edges of the pan.  No problem.  I just added some more water and started the cycle over.

	Original recipe	Sourdough version
Sourdough starter	None	1 cup
Water	9 oz.	5 oz.
Whole wheat flour	2 ¼ cups	2 ¼  cups
White flour	1 ¼ cups	¼ cup
Salt	1 ½ tsp	1 ½ tsp
Butter	1 ½ Tbl	1 ½ Tbl
Honey	¼ cup	¼ cup
Yeast	2 ½ tsp	1 ½ tsp

The result was a successful loaf of bread.

It didn't have a strong sourdough taste, but there was a hint of it.  Whole wheat isn't really a classic sourdough bread type.  Now that my starter is showing more life, I'll try a more traditional sourdough recipe next week.

Next: My starter is fully grown

In the beginning...

Many years ago, I maintained a sourdough starter that I started with commercial yeast.  I used it for making bread, pancakes, English muffins, and maybe a few other things that I don't remember.  During a household move, it turned rather nasty, and the other person involved in the move objected to the smell.  Around the same time, bread machines came on the market.  With longer rise times needed for sourdough than the machines provided, I decided to abandon my starter and take the lazy man's approach to bread making using the machine.

Recently, I found a book dedicated to baking sourdough bread with a bread machine.
Worldwide Sourdoughs from Your Bread Machine

So, I decided to give it another try.  One of the authors of this book was quite a purist about not using commercial yeast, even to get your starter started.  I looked into a few retail sources for starter (some listed in the book), but decided to try growing one from the wild.

I had heard that it was possible to capture wild yeast that just happened to be floating around in your environment, but was a little skeptical.  Still, what did I have to lose?  I found this great blog from King Arthur Flour and followed along--still skeptical.

Monday Evening

I used King Arthur whole wheat flour that I happened to have in the house, already.  The instructions suggested pumpernickel or whole wheat, because it tended to have more wild yeast in it, or something like that.  I measured out the ingredients and set it in a relatively warm part of the house--in the basement, near the furnace.  It's about 74F there.

Tuesday Evening

Well, to my surprise, my solution of nothing but whole wheat flour and water had doubled in size! King Arthur's blog had me expecting less after just one day.  Now, I'm excited. I followed the feeding instructions (except using King Arthur white bread flour, rather than all-purpose flour) and waited another 24 hours.

Wednesday Evening

Still looking good.  With all of this yeast activity, I decide that it is time to start the twice-daily feedings as detailed in the King Arthur blog. 

I've also decided to try to keep the temperature a little steadier by keeping the starter in an otherwise empty Styrofoam box.

Thursday and Friday

I continue with the twice-daily feedings.  Activity seems to have slowed down, considerably.  At the time for each feeding, there is evidence of bubbles in the culture, but not much growth.  The red arrow is where the culture started at the beginning of the feeding cycle.

There does seem to be a layer of alcohol on top, and the culture definitely smells sour.

Friday

I decided to try to promote the growth by putting the culture in the Styrofoam box on top of the furnace. That was probably a bad idea.  When I went to get the culture on Saturday morning, the temperature inside the box was 104F--probably too warm.  I hope I haven't killed anything.

Well, nuts! I was hoping to use this to bake some bread this weekend, but I don't think it's active enough.

Next: It's alive!