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