that thanksgiving thing

Thanksgiving is always an active time here in our family. Last year we invited some friends over and had the seven of us around the table; this year in addition to my parents, I invited a friend if mine who is going through a divorce to come over with her two daughters but she decided to decline. I re-extended the invitation again Wednesday, but she decided to stay at home. The big activity at school this week ― it was Wednesday morning, not quite five-thirty when I wrote this ― was the school's Harvest Festival, which probably should just be called Thanksgiving, but isn't.

It's traditional for the children to make some sort of communal meal they invite their parents to come share with them for lunch. In first and second grades, it was stone soup. And yes, they really did put stones in it. This year they made some kind of vegetable noodle soup, but because of my reputation as someone who bakes bread, Evangeline's teacher asked if I could help them make some bread too. She seemed surprised that I don’t have a bread machine, but agreed the students would probably find it more fun to mix and knead it all by hand.

So Tuesday morning I got up bright and early, boiled and mashed some potatoes, adapted some recipes on the fly from my cookbook so we could try them with sourdough, and took all the ingredients to the school so the kids in Evangeline's class could have fun making potato rolls and sourdough muffins. Wednesday morning I got up bright and early to bake them, and I have to say that they turned out all right.

The kids had a good time making them, too. I think the biggest excitement wasn't skipping their regular work plans, and it wasn't even the idea of making bread. It was getting their hands mucky in the dough, and getting to punch it as part of the kneading process. At least one kid had a nice rhythm going, as though he were using a punching bag. (I had to tell him that wasn't the idea.) When I picked Evangeline up yesterday, at least three kids ran over to tell me, "Mr. Learn! The bread’s getting bigger!"

I doubt any of them will remember the history and science I cunningly tried to sneak in there, but you never know. I’m sure they’ll all remember the taste. My bread is good enough that Evangeline's teachers last year all lamented at year’s end that they wouldn’t be getting it any more for holidays or when it was Evangeline's turn to bring in snack.

sourdough resurrection

The sourdough is alive once more.

 

I don't know what exactly happened before -- I suspect I wasn't mixing the starter up enough when I measured it out for baking -- but I had a problem for a few weeks with my sourdough starter where it just wasn't working right. It would take over a day sometimes for a batch of dough to rise, and it didn't taste right any more. The bread was too dense, the crust was too flat, the bagels too hard and floury.

 

I finally gave up two weeks ago and bought some conventional yeast packets at the store. I mixed one of them in with my inert starter, and watched it froth back to life in no time. The frothing has continued through a pizza crust, two loaves of bread, some hamburger buns, and now a batch of bagels. The sourdough is alive and, what's more, it tastes like sourdough again.

 

Whew! Finally.

sourdough death

About a month ago my sourdough starter started taking went from rising almost as quickly as baker's yeast to taking a dozen hours or even a couple days to rise enough.

Because I'd come to depend upon Fancy Cashews and Coma for pizza crusts, bagels and homemade bread, to say nothing of the occasional batch of sourdough pancakes or strombolis, this was, to put it mildly, frustrating. I was feeding the starter, keeping it in my fridge, and using it in the same amounts I had been doing all along. The sudden loss of yeast activity was devastating. Twice we had pizza with crust that didn't seem to have risen at all, and several times Evangeline refused to eat breakfast because she she wouldn't eat anything besides a bagel.

I had no idea how it had happened, but it looked as though our sourdough pets had died. I think the truth is probably a little more tragic: We ate them.

Over the course of the last few months, familiarity and custom have made me a little too casual with the starter. When you're plannig to make something new with sourdough, one of the things you're supposed to do is to mix in as much flour and water as the recipe calls for starter, and let it set overnight. The time gives the yeast to work its way through the batter, making a fresh dough, so that you can measure out the starter you need and put the rest back into your jar, to keep for later. Instead, I'd been pouring the starter straight from the jar into the mixing bowl, and adding fresh flour and water into the jar. I'd still wash the jar once a week or so, but that essentially is what I was doing.

As a result of this lazier approach, there probably came a time when I poured out the active part of the starter into the mixing bowl, and what was left behind had no living sourdough culture to keep the process going. Instead of getting a layer of alcohol atop the flour, all I was getting was floury water as the flour settled to the bottom of the jar.

This is all hindsight, naturally. Last week, sick of the problems I was having, I bought a yeast packet at the supermarket and mixed it in with the bread dough. It lacked the sourdough flavor that I've come to cherish, but the bread rose in record time and served our purposes admirably. I deduced what had gone wrong, and I've been careful this past week to prepare fresh starter the night before whenever I need to make a bread product, stirring everything thoroughly before I measure the starter for the recipe du jour. So far, it's been working well.

Except for one thing: We're still not getting that sourdough taste. I used my sourdough recipe for pizza crust for dinner last night, and it tasted all right and everything, but the crust was just light and fluffy. It lacked the tang that sold me on the recipe the first time I tried it.

We have a loaf of bread right now, and I don't expect to need to make anything else from it for a while, so theoretically the yeast culture will have a few days to ferment and start producing the ethanol that gives sourdough its distinctive taste. The time also should give any wild yeasts in the flour or the air to start growing too; from what I've read, all yeast cultures in the same house become indistinguishable from one another for this reason after about eight days, so I'm hopeful.

I just have to remember not to get lazy again.


Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.

sourdough buns

We've been invited to a friend's house for a cookout to celebrate her 25th birthday. Since there's a huge crowd coming, and if it's not too tacky, I thought I could defray some of the burden on our host by providing some homemade hamburger buns. So I found a recipe that calls for sourdough, and thought I would give it a shot.

 

Just to be sporting, I'm going to use Coma, Rachel's pet sourdough starter. We last used her about a week ago, to make pancakes, and I figure it wouldn't hurt to put her to use again. It gives Rachel a sense of ownership in the project anyway, and it gives me an excuse to clean out Coma's container too. (Nothing was growing it except Coma, but I don't see a reason to take the risk.)

 

We need to use Coma more often. There was a lot of hooch in her container, though thankfully she didn't seem to be any worse the wear for it.

 

Coma hamburger buns

2 cups sourdough starter
1 cup water
½ cup sugar
¼ cup oil
1 egg
½ teaspoon salt
2½ cups all-purpose flour

2½ cups whole wheat flour

Mix starter with water, sugar, oil, egg and salt. Stir in 2½ cups of all-purpose flour. Once the flour has been stirred in thoroughly, add 2 cups of whole wheat flour and mix thoroughly. When the flour becomes too stiff to stir, knead the dough for 10 minutes on a lightly floured surface, gradually working in another ½ cup of whole wheat flour. Remember that flour amounts are approximate, and depend on the wetness of the starter. If the dough remains sticky, continue to add more all-purpose flour, in small amounts, until the dough is smooth.

 

Place the dough in a greased bowl, turning the dough over. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and let sit about an hour. Once the dough has doubled in size, punch it down and then let it rest 15 minutes.

Divide dough into 20 pieces, roughly the size of a lemon, rolling each piece into a smooth ball. Flatten pieces to ¾ inch thick. Place pieces two inches apart on greased cookie sheets, and let them rise until they are almost the desired size.

Bake 15 to 20 minutes at 375 degrees.  Makes about 20 buns.

 

For hot dog buns, pinch off pieces the size of an egg.  Shape to the length of a hot dog, and roll to about ¾ inch thick. Place buns one inch apart on greased cookie sheets.  Makes about 24.

sourdough bagels

So I found a recipe to try for sourdough bagels that I think I shall try tomorrow, since we have just one bagel left and they are Evangeline's premiere choice for breakfast. The recipe, which I've already modified to reflect some of our eating preferences, including Evangeline's preference for miniature bagels, goes like this:

1 cup fresh sourdough starter
¼ cup vegetable oil
¼ cup warm water
2 teaspoons salt
1¼ cups all-purpose flour

1¼ cups whole wheat flour

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl and knead until smooth. Let the mixture rise until it has doubled. (I'm guessing this will take about an hour.) Divide into 16 portions, and roll each portion into a smooth ball.  Punch a hole in the center of each and stretch evenly until about 2 inches across.  Place on a lightly floured surface and bring a large pot of water to a boil. Boil the bagels for three minutes on each side. Drain and place on a greased baking sheet.  Bake about 15 minutes at 450 degrees.

Will they be any good? I don't know. I found other bagel recipes that use metric measurements, which puts them beyond my use, since I lack a metric scale, and other recipes that claim to be sourdough but require a yeast packet. There's a ton more recipes, including sourdough pancakes, on a page owned by Richard Packham

And the girls assigned a sex to the sourdough pet, and gave her a name. She's Eternal.

The joys of sourdough baking

Rachel has turned into a tremendous fan of sourdough, perhaps in part because I keep referring to our sourdough mixture as "our pet." Today, after we used a generous donation from our pet to make some sourdough pizza, Rachel told me that she wanted to use our pet to make pretzels sometime.

So I have gone and found myself a recipe for sourdough  pretzels. They look delicious. We'll have to try them on Tuesday, when she's  home from preschool.

Next step should be to find a good recipe for sourdough bagels, since  bagels are about the only bread product I'm still buying at the supermarket.  Although of course I don't want to end up baking nonstop, since there are other  things I have to do in life. (But this is fun, and I can't deny a certain appeal  to making bread the way it was made for thousands of years. I'm probably going  to break off some of our pet to take camping next month so we can try making  fresh bread over the campfire if we're up for it.)

The sourdough pizza, by the way, had a very strong flavor to it. I had put  our pet out on the table overnight Friday, and when I came down Saturday  morning, she had swollen to twice her earlier volume. It was a very  striking contrast to what had happened when I made the sourdough bread, and I  now suspect that it was too chilly the other night to proof the starter properly,  which is why the bread tasted kind of bland and floury.

I need to stop referring to this as "our pet." I need to ask the girls to  give the yeast a name, since they've already decided that it's a  "she."

sourdough

Trying something new today -- sourdough bread.

I came across a fairly straightforward how-to guide on the Internet a while ago, and so a few days ago, the girls and I put a cup of flour into a clear plastic container, mixed it with a cup of warm water, and let it sit out on the kitchen table as a makeshift science project. A day later or so, a brown liquid, called hooch, had started to pool on top of the project. We poured it off, tossed half the mixture, and added another half-cup each of flour and water, and repeated the process for another two days.

Yesterday we used half the science project -- or "our pet," as we're calling it -- to make a pizza dough. And added more water, and more flour. I left the stuff sit out again overnight last night, and this morning took half of it, added some more flour and started making bread out of it. The rest, as you can guess, we put back into its plastic container, which we had washed out, and gave it more water and flour.

It took about twice as long to rise as bread I've made with packets of yeast I bought at the supermarket, but the sourdough is growing pretty well. I'm planning to bake it this evening, and have it for dinner with whatever else we eat. It's bread, the way people made it for thousands of years, with a slight beer taste.