Sourdough Bread Machine Bread, Also Without Suck
When you say sourdough, most people think of San Francisco sourdough white bread. But any kind of bread can be a sourdough -- white, wheat, rye, raisin, buns, and even pancakes. The difference is that a sourdough is made not with commercial yeast but with a starter. This is a mix of water and flour that lives in your fridge (or counter top if you bake A LOT) that has a active culture of yeast living in it (either from a commercial strain or a wild one). Packaged yeast is alive, of course, but not active. It's sleeping -- in suspended animation really -- until you wake it up with water and flour. A starter culture is already alive and requires regular feeding and maintenance. Kind of a little yeasty pet. Here's a nifty site about starters.
Some starters are actually sweet (like Amish friendship bread) but all have a complex flavor caused by the digestive cycle of the yeasty beasties plus the good bacteria they attract and support. A basic starer with flour and water will tend to sour over time. A sourdough starter will need a lot more time to raise a loaf of bread but that bread will, in my opinion, taste very very good.
I have a starter I made by "catching" a wild yeast strain in my kitchen. It lives in the fridge until I need it and I feed it regularly and pour off the "hooch" -- the alcohol the yeasts produce along with their little carbon dioxide burps. Over time it's grown very sour. My starter is roughly a half and half mix of water and flour (a little less water maybe) to make a very batter-like starter. Some starters are much thicker and can even be solid.
I wanted to create recipe for sourdough bread to use in my machine. I knew that the regular bread cycles wouldn't leave enough time for the dough to rise, but I didn't want to use the "artisan" cycle on my machine because it requires that you remove the dough and do the final shape, rise, and bake externally. That's fine, but fully automatic was my goal. I got a couple of books at the library but was disappointed with their recipes. All the sourdough recipes added a lot of extra yeast to the mix, so much that my loaf over proofed. When I reduced the amount of extra yeast, I got a regular loaf of bread with no discernible sour taste. That makes sense. After all, commercial yeast is a very hardy strain that will take over any environment where it's introduced. My poor wild culture wouldn't be able to keep up -- which means it wouldn't have a change to populate enough to impart it's flavor to the bread.
I knew that without added yeast I couldn't make the machine do all the work (unless I hung around and paused the machine at intervals to impart extra rising time). At the same time, the added yeast was killing off my flavor. Then, I had an Epiphany. If I modified my sponge recipe to use the starter and then added the additional yeast on top, I'd get a long slow overnight ferment and rise to create flavor and the commercial yeast could take over the next morning to keep the bread moving fast enough for the machine.
I started with 1/2 cup starter (which is a half and half mixture) plus a quarter cup each of water and flour. This got mixed for 10 minutes and then additional flour plus other ingredients were added. A small amount of yeast (a scant 3/4 teaspoon -- this for a 1lb loaf) was carefully poured in a little well in the dry flour to keep it segregated from the sourdough sponge. Since the sponge bubbles up through at the corners, I put the extra yeast in the middle, away from the salt.
The result was very promising. While still mild compared to some sourdough breads, the finished bread had a sour tang and good flavor -- better than my regular sponge bread -- but rose nicely in the machine and was of "normal" bread density. Remember my goal here is sandwich loaves, not the crusty breads with big holes that truly need time and handling.
My next attempt was a rye sourdough which came out very sour, if a bit heavy (more extra yeast for the rye I suspect -- or I should catch a rye yeast for a separate starter). The next white loaf I tried had 3/4 cup starter, 1/4 cup water, and 1/2 cup flour -- with more of the finished bread being the sponge. This was even more tasty. I believe I could take this even further, until almost all the flour would be incorporated into the sponge with just a thin layer separating the salt, sugar, and extra yeast.
I'll have to try that experiment soon.
Some starters are actually sweet (like Amish friendship bread) but all have a complex flavor caused by the digestive cycle of the yeasty beasties plus the good bacteria they attract and support. A basic starer with flour and water will tend to sour over time. A sourdough starter will need a lot more time to raise a loaf of bread but that bread will, in my opinion, taste very very good.
I have a starter I made by "catching" a wild yeast strain in my kitchen. It lives in the fridge until I need it and I feed it regularly and pour off the "hooch" -- the alcohol the yeasts produce along with their little carbon dioxide burps. Over time it's grown very sour. My starter is roughly a half and half mix of water and flour (a little less water maybe) to make a very batter-like starter. Some starters are much thicker and can even be solid.
I wanted to create recipe for sourdough bread to use in my machine. I knew that the regular bread cycles wouldn't leave enough time for the dough to rise, but I didn't want to use the "artisan" cycle on my machine because it requires that you remove the dough and do the final shape, rise, and bake externally. That's fine, but fully automatic was my goal. I got a couple of books at the library but was disappointed with their recipes. All the sourdough recipes added a lot of extra yeast to the mix, so much that my loaf over proofed. When I reduced the amount of extra yeast, I got a regular loaf of bread with no discernible sour taste. That makes sense. After all, commercial yeast is a very hardy strain that will take over any environment where it's introduced. My poor wild culture wouldn't be able to keep up -- which means it wouldn't have a change to populate enough to impart it's flavor to the bread.
I knew that without added yeast I couldn't make the machine do all the work (unless I hung around and paused the machine at intervals to impart extra rising time). At the same time, the added yeast was killing off my flavor. Then, I had an Epiphany. If I modified my sponge recipe to use the starter and then added the additional yeast on top, I'd get a long slow overnight ferment and rise to create flavor and the commercial yeast could take over the next morning to keep the bread moving fast enough for the machine.
I started with 1/2 cup starter (which is a half and half mixture) plus a quarter cup each of water and flour. This got mixed for 10 minutes and then additional flour plus other ingredients were added. A small amount of yeast (a scant 3/4 teaspoon -- this for a 1lb loaf) was carefully poured in a little well in the dry flour to keep it segregated from the sourdough sponge. Since the sponge bubbles up through at the corners, I put the extra yeast in the middle, away from the salt.
The result was very promising. While still mild compared to some sourdough breads, the finished bread had a sour tang and good flavor -- better than my regular sponge bread -- but rose nicely in the machine and was of "normal" bread density. Remember my goal here is sandwich loaves, not the crusty breads with big holes that truly need time and handling.
My next attempt was a rye sourdough which came out very sour, if a bit heavy (more extra yeast for the rye I suspect -- or I should catch a rye yeast for a separate starter). The next white loaf I tried had 3/4 cup starter, 1/4 cup water, and 1/2 cup flour -- with more of the finished bread being the sponge. This was even more tasty. I believe I could take this even further, until almost all the flour would be incorporated into the sponge with just a thin layer separating the salt, sugar, and extra yeast.
I'll have to try that experiment soon.