Busy Mother's Sourdough Secret - The Easy Way to Make Sourdough Starter and Sourdough Bread

today I want to share with you what I call the busy Mother's sourdough and this is for all of you who have written to me in email or comments and shared your frustrations with trying to get a sourdough starter going and then trying to make sourdough bread and having it all just become a bit of a disaster either you can't get your sourdough starter going or you think you've got it going and you try to bake bread with it your sourdough bread doesn't kurai as it doesn't come out well and you're just ready to give up well don't give up because I've got a little tip here for you that's gonna change everything and even if you're not a busy mother but you've struggled with sourdough this is for all of you hi sweet friends I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's nest where I teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time I upload a new video now I can't take credit for this very clever idea this was developed by a girl friend of mine many years ago we were homeschool mothers together and she was definitely a busy mother she had six children but she really was very devoted to making the transition from a process foods kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen and she wanted to be able to incorporate sourdough bread into her family's diet but so many times she tried to start the starter and it wouldn't work out or she'd forget to feed it or she'd finally get it going and put it you'd get ready to make her bread and have her dough and then she would get distracted because she had to take her kids somewhere or do this that or the other thing and then the dough would over rise and sink it was always one problem after another but then she got an idea she came across a book which at the time was new but now there have been many versions of this book and it was the book bred in five minutes a day but she thought what if I make the dough as is described in that book which we're gonna go over today but instead of using so much yeast I use just a very tiny little pinch of yeast and then I put everything in the refrigerator and let's see what happens well that's what we're gonna do today and we're gonna see what happens well what my friend theorized was could she mix all of this together put it in a plastic container and then not worry about it and just put it in her refrigerator and then when she had the time to bake bread take it out take out as much as she wanted to make a loaf or a couple of rolls whatever the case may be give them time to rise and bake them and be done with it not have to worry about scheduling everything so perfectly about the rise you know the mixing and the rising and then the punching down and the rising and so on and so forth and what she learned was that in fact yes you could do that and this was all outlined in the book bread in five minutes a day but she wanted to take this one step further an experiment what if she put three and a half cups of flour a cup and a half of water these other ingredients the salt the sugar and a little bit of yeast in here let it rise in the fridge pulled it out to bake and took three cups of the dough or a little more whatever the case may be to make her loaf of bread and left enough in her little bin that was maybe equal to about a half a cup and with that half a cup she then went and added three cups of flour and 1 cup of water and maybe a pinch of sugar a pinch of salt no more yeast though mixed it all up with that little bit of dough ball that she had left in there and put that in the fridge would that be enough to allow the next set of dough be able to be turned into into a nice loaf of bread and what she discovered was yes it was sufficient and then she further theorized that over time it slowly took on yeasts that were just in the air in her kitchen and became her busy mother's sourdough starter because she never added any more yeast she just fed it once a week with more flour and water of giving her some dough ready to bake bread or rolls or whatever the case may be she went on to double the recipe often in a bigger container never adding any more yeast just leaving that about half a cup of dough in there scraping down the dried sides on her container leaving the lid off while she'd be working in the kitchen hoping some natural yeast would be coming in there and what she found over time the taste of her bread started to mature the texture started to mature it looked more like sour dough tasted more like sour dough so as far as she was concerned concerned it was sour dough and I think that this can be a wonderful solution if you have been struggling with trying to make a sourdough starter or sourdough bread well to try this method what you're going to need is some flour it can be all-purpose flour or it can be bread flour but I really recommend just starting with plain flour not a whole grain flour in future videos we'll talk about how to transition this and do this with whole grain flours but just to get this going I highly recommend you use something just very simple and plain next you're going to need a teaspoon and a half of salt I've just got a plain fine ground sea salt here but use whatever you have and then I've got a tablespoon of sugar this is an organic unbleached sugar but again use whatever you have in your kitchen and if you have made the transition to a traditional foods kitchen and you are incorporating whole sugars into your diet you can certainly use the dried cane juice known by the name sue can add or anything along those lines maple sugar will work date sugar would work any any type of sweetener you just need a little something and then you're just gonna want a quarter of a teaspoon of yeast and this can be active dry yeast or instant yeast it doesn't matter and next you're gonna need about a cup and a half of water and this can just be plain tap water you don't worry about it being hot or cold it doesn't matter room temperatures fine and you're gonna need one more thing and that's some type of container this is just a plastic food grade Rubbermaid container and I like using these type because they're easy to put in my refrigerator and we're gonna be putting all of this into our refrigerator but if you have a flat plastic container again that's food safe that's fine or a glass container that's fine too whatever you want to work with it just needs to be large enough to hold three and a half cups of flour and one and a half cups of water and room to stir it all together and it has to have some kind of cover on it now the first thing that we're gonna do is to our water we're just going to go ahead and add in our sugar and then we're going to go ahead and add in our yeast and don't worry if it's just room temperature it doesn't need to be so warm we just need to mix that up before we go ahead and add it into our little bucket here now I'm using active dry yeast if you're using instant yeast you can go ahead and put everything in to your container in one fell swoop you can add in your flour your salt your sugar your instant yeast give it a real good mixing and then add in your water but since I'm using active dry yeast I'm going to dissolve it first in water with a little sugar and if you want a discussion of the differences between instant yeast and active dry yeast I cover that in another video and I'll be sure to link to that so if you want to watch and I'll put the time stamp in so you can watch that discussion but all you need to know is you can use either or here now I'm just using the little plastic measuring cup that came with my flour container and this is very forgiving so don't worry you don't need to be super exact but I'm just going to go ahead and measure out my three cups we're gonna put a total of three and a half cups in here and then that's just my final half cup of flour then we'll go ahead and get our salt in there and we'll just give this a real good whisk around just to make sure we get that salt very well distributed throughout the flour and I just want to mention I'm not worried I just wanted to mix this yeast throughout the water with the sugar but I'm really not worried about the whole blooming process my yeast is well within its expiration date and the only reason that I'm mixing it with the water is to just make sure that it's well distributed since it is an act of dry yeast I just want to get the little bit out of the bottom there because I know many of you have told me that you really don't even worry about blooming or mixing your active dry yeast with water if you know that it's well within the expiration date you use it very similar to you the way you do instant yeast and you just throw it right in so that definitely is an option if you're comfortable doing that then I'm going to take a wooden spoon and I'm just going to start mixing this right in the container now you want this to be very wet and Shaggy the wetter the dough the better so if you feel that it's too dry by all means add more water now the consistency of the dough that you're looking for should be very wet and shaggy like this and I'm going to take a close-up video so that you can see what this dough is like very wet like that see how that's just falling right off the spoon then just clean off any extra dough that's on your spoon and get that down into your container a little bit of a sticky wicket I don't like to waste anything and then we'll go ahead and move on to the next step next all we need to do is put our lid on and it doesn't need to be super tight this doesn't need to be an airtight container nothing like that even in this case I'm just gonna kind of leave this corner a little loose there and now I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna put this in my refrigerator and I'm just gonna leave it there for a day day or two and then I'll bring it out I'll show you how the dough looks and we'll proceed with making bread and then we'll try to make another batch of dough to put in the fridge and then over time I'll follow up with future videos showing how the texture and the taste of the bread changes over time to being more of a true sourdough well I left this in my refrigerator for two days and I am so impressed with all the beautiful bubbles that have formed in this dough and I'll take pictures and I'll overlay them from the front and the side here beautiful bubbles and it's amazing just from that little tiny bit of yeast and the aroma is quite lovely not the least bit heavily yeasty or / yeasty it's just a very very mild aroma well now let's take out about three cups worth and we'll make a loaf of bread the first thing I'm gonna do is just flour my board but very lightly I don't think we want to get too much flour into this dough because we do want to keep it very wet because apparently keeping it very wet is what really helps make a lot of that carbon dioxide gas which is what creates all those wonderful bubbles and hopefully now having a little bit of flour on my hands will make getting this out a little easier so as you'll see this is very wet and gloopy now what I did was I kept scissors handy just in case I had trouble pulling off that little bit that I want to leave left in there and that's actually it's not quite a cup I'm gonna add a little more but I think my friend was never particularly super exact about it she would just leave maybe somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a baseball so maybe a half a cup a cup she wasn't really exact about it which is kind of what I really like about this now it's very wet and gooey but you shouldn't be able to pull your hand off of it there'll be some some dough that'll stick but it's really not too bad so let's try and just shape this the nice thing is this is no need so all we need to do is just get a nut flour on our hands to just do the tuck and shape method so to speak where we're just going to shape this into a bowl now what can really help with this process is having a little plastic bench scrape like this or if you don't have it don't worry a spatula if you have a little plastic spatula that'll work well too but I'm just trying to get a little more flour on my hands here but not overdo it and scoop it out like that and just trying to shape this just that little shape and tuck method it's quite sticky I'm resisting the urge to put too much flour and if it I just keep flouring my hands and trying to tuck this little ball under without picking it up it seems like when you pick it up it's just a little - a little too wet but doing like this is working well I just want to get it into a nice smooth ball now one thing I want to mention if you have a pizza peel and a baking stone you can do what I just did right now on my board on your pizza peel and then when we get ready to bake this you can just shake it off your pizza peel and put it into a right onto your baking stone but I know a lot of folks have its appeal and a baking stone so the other options are you can just take a baking sheet put down some parchment paper or aluminum foil whatever you want or you could even just bake it right on your baking sheet but what you want to make sure that you do is put down a little cornmeal or a little flour so nothing sticks and then you can use that to bake it with another option is you can go ahead and do the Dutch oven method with this bread you can put it on parchment paper and lower it down into your hot Dutch oven and bake it with the cover on and bake it that way or if you want you can just pop it right down into your hot Dutch oven some of you have asked me do you really need to use the parchment paper and the answer is no the original method of that Dutch oven bread by Sullivan Street Bakery they didn't use the parchment paper they were just dumping it right into the the hot Dutch oven the parchment paper is really basically I don't have to say invented but started primarily by home cooks who were a little nervous having to get the get their dough and drop it down into that hot Dutch oven so but you can do it either way and but I thought that the easiest way would be to do this on the baking sheet because most folks have bacon have a baking sheet and if not you can take a couple of sheets of aluminum foil and sort of turn it into a mock baking sheet and bake it like that so I've got my baking sheet over here and I've just got a piece of parchment paper on that and I'm just gonna try to pick up my little dough ball here best I can and get that onto there nicely shaped and now we're gonna let that rise for about an hour and my girlfriend never covered hers so I'm just gonna leave it uncovered but if you feel more comfortable to cover it you could use a dish towel and just make sure that it's brushed with a little flour that so it doesn't stick now a couple of tips number one I understand that you may not see a lot of rise out of your bread but don't worry about that it should get a little bit of rise a little bit of what they call the oven spring when you put it into the oven and speaking of the oven you'll want to pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit 20 minutes before you're ready to put your dough in so as this is rising for that hour 20 minutes before that hour comes to an end be sure to pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit now I have a very small oven so I tend to bake my breads in the lower third of my oven because if I put breads on the middle rack they're actually very close to the top heating element and I find that they can Brown too quickly so that's just a little tip I want to share with you if you have a very small oven like me you may want to put your rack in the lower third of your of them but if you have a big oven and you're used to baking breads and so on and so forth on your middle rack and everything comes out fine then that's great now we come to the fun part I haven't here maybe about a half a cup of the dough and that's just what you want you just want to have some in there to help give our next stage a nice boost and what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and add in our three cups of flour we're just going to do three cups because basically we've got more or less that 1/2 cup of dough in there this is my third cup of flour alrighty so we've got that and now I'm gonna go ahead and add in 1 tablespoon of sugar very much like we did the first time around I'm going to do this just until I feel this gets established once I feel that I'm seeing a nice rise in my container and a lot of nice bubbles I'll pull back on the sugar and I'll just let the yeast that's growing in here eat the flour and you get its nutrition from the flour and no longer add in the sugar because sometimes if you add too much sugar you can encourage the growth of good bacteria now that's not necessarily a bad thing because both the yeast and good bacteria can rise your bread but there are taste differences as opposed to if you have the natural yeast which we're hoping to encourage to grow in here rise our bread versus the good bacteria and this time around I'm going to add just one teaspoon not the one and a half teaspoons of salt and the reason for that is since we do have about a half a cup or so of the dough left in here which has some salt in it I don't want to add too much salt so I'm just going to go ahead and put that 1 teaspoon in there and then to start I'm going to add about 1/2 in a cup a one and a half cups of water and this is just plain room-temperature water and that's just about a cup and a half we'll see how it goes it may need more if it's if it's very dry we may need to add more water because you do want this to be a very wet dough if for any reason we added too much water and it's too soupy we can always add an extra flour it's very forgiving now if you have one of those Danish dough whisks you can get in there and and mix this up or you can just use a wooden spoon or if you watch artisan bread with Steve he always likes to use the handle of his wooden spoon and I think that's going to work best for this type of preparation so I'm just gonna get in here and mix this best I can well this is mixing up nicely but it's a little drier than I would like so I'm gonna go ahead and just add a smidge more water just maybe about a quarter of a cup or less and I'll continue mixing it till I get to the consistency that I like and I'll show you how it looks well I think that little extra bit of water was perfect and I'll overlay a video so that you can see it's hard using just it's hard scoop it it's easy mixing it with the handle of the wooden spoon was a little hard scooping some out but I want to show you how wet this dough is and I think that's perfect now I'm just gonna clean off the handle of my spoon and then we'll put the lid on and we'll pop this in the refrigerator so I'm gonna put my lid on again not airtight I'm actually gonna leave this little one on the end a little loose and I'm gonna go ahead put this back in my refrigerator and we'll check on it in another day or two and we'll see if we got any bubbles and how things are going and maybe we will make another loaf of red and see if there's a significant difference between our first loaf but the bottom line is with this bread we're with this dough and with this method hopefully over time we are creating a sourdough a sourdough starter and one that maybe a little easier than the ones where you've tried just doing flour and water on your counter and hoping for the best we are cheating a little starting off with a little bit of packaged jeast but you know sometimes when you're on this continuum of moving from a process foods kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen and there is a particular area of traditional foods that you're struggling with sometimes it's nice to get a little helping hand and maybe just start with a little bit of package east in our case just a quarter of a teaspoon and then over time hopefully you've got a good sourdough starter going well my oven just came up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit so we'll get ready to put our dough which has been rising for an hour into the oven and hopefully it will come out great now I just want to give you one tip if you're doing it like me right here on a baking pan but you want to try to mimic the Dutch oven effect the the steam that is created by putting your bread into the Dutch oven you can take a little pan and put it on the lowest rack in your oven and oven safe pan and fill it with some water and you've just some water I've got my tea kettle over there just some water that you've warmed a new tea kettle and pour as you open your oven pour it into that pan it'll start to create some steam then put your bread in on your rack close your door and hope for the best well I've got my bread in the oven and it's gonna bake for 30 minutes at 450 degrees Fahrenheit now you might wonder why I just put the bread in straight away as it was I didn't slash the top and the reason is I decided to just let it crack basically wherever it wants to give it the most rustic look that's what my Fred used to do but if you have a LOM that's the little razor blade for cutting bread or just a very sharp knife you can certainly make some slashes in it with any design that you want and let it bake like that and I also want to say that everyone's oven is slightly different so even though technically we're going to bake the bread for 30 minutes I highly recommend taking a little peek at your bread at about 25 minutes and if it looks done if the top is nice and golden brown and you take it out of the oven and when you tap it on the bottom it sounds hollow you're good to go your bread is baked however if you find that it is browning on top but it but it turns out to not sound hollow and you need to bake it a little longer but you feel that it's gotten already golden brown enough and you're worried about it getting too dark on top you can just cover it with a little bit of an aluminum tantalum aluminium foil tent and continue to allow it to bake for the remaining five minutes so that the interior bakes but that the top doesn't get too Brown well this turned out to be a lovely loaf of bread I had it in for 30 minutes now it didn't split or anything which is very interesting and it did have some bubbles on top right on top of the dough and I noticed them when I was putting them in the oven and I was thinking maybe I should just take a little toothpick and deflate some of them but then I forgot it but it turned out okay I think they're gonna be probably kind of little fun and crunchy on the top but something that I want to mention is I did tent this with aluminum foil partway through the baking because I checked it and I noticed and it was those little bubbles they were browning quite quickly but also the loaf was browning relatively quickly now I have a very small oven and I did have it on the lower third rack but it still was browning browning quickly so I might lower the temperature to 425 degrees Fahrenheit or maybe even 400 degrees Fahrenheit I'm going to experiment with the next loaf we do and see how that comes out but for now I'm quite pleased even with having to tent it but I wanted to let you know about that so that if you do this keep an eye on it and if you have a small oven probably in a bigger oven it won't be as much of a problem but I have like the smallest wall oven I think so just keep an eye on it and you don't want to you don't want it to burn on top so you may have to tent it well this is still quite hot but hopefully you can hear with the microphone it's got a nice top to it and oh the bottom sounds nice and Hollow so that's perfect I'm gonna transfer this now to a cooling rack will let it cool completely then will slice it well I let this cool for a little bit but it's still warm I think it's hard to resist warm homemade bread so we'll go ahead and slice into it and I'm gonna go right down the middle and then I'll open it up so we can see exactly how the crumb came well this looks quite lovely it's very warm but I'm quite pleased you figured for 1/4 teaspoon of yeast and in the dough left in the fridge for a couple of days oh it smells nice I'll take some close-up shots so that you can see exactly what it looks like you will see yeah these were the little air bubbles that I talked about that I didn't pop before it went in but yeah that's okay but I think it came quite lovely well I'm gonna cut a slice here and we'll give it tastehh well I really love how soft the interior is hmm mmm it's quite hot it's very tasty I'm really pleased now we've got our second batch of the busy mother sourdough starter in the fridge I'm gonna leave it in there for a couple of days and then we'll take it out and we'll see without having added any extra yeast if that little bit of dough that we left in there and then mixed in more flour and water and sugar and salt was able to rise and get some bubbles in there and then we'll bake one more loaf and we'll see how that comes well I left this second batch in the refrigerator for three days and I'm very impressed with what I see it's definitely risen there's a lot of bubbles in here and all overly pictures close-up pictures so that you can see this both from the front angle here as well as the side angle but it's loaded with bubbles so that's definitely a good sign now I want to see how the aroma is oh it smells wonderful mildly yeasty but definitely not overpowering definitely closer to when you have a nice sourdough as opposed to a heavily yeasted dough where you've used commercial yeast I'm also going to take a picture of the top looking down into this so that you can see up close now I don't I don't know how well it's going to show on the camera but there are a lot of little bubbles on top and they're not super translucent so it may be a little difficult to see but there it's it's very bubbly on top it's like bubbles that are like little air pockets that are coming up now what I'm gonna do today is I'm just gonna flour my board I'm going to take some of that dough out and make another loaf of bread I won't walk you through all of that since we did that earlier in the video but I will show you what the bread looks like at the end and we can compare and contrast at least with pictures from our first bread and then in a future video as I nurse this along and keep it going I'll see how it goes assuming that if it continues to say like this and create nice breads I'll definitely do a follow-up video you know maybe like a month or so from now so that we can do a true evaluation of this process well I took out some of the dough and I shaped a little loaf and I left in maybe about a half a cup a cup it's hard to tell exactly but I took a picture so you can see what's in here and it was really wet it was a really wet dough when I took it out so I floured my board and then I floured my hands real well and I used my bench crepe to get this into some semblance of a loaf but it was relatively easy to work with but it is definitely a very wet shaggy dough but not unlike you know so a lot of your typical no needs so now what we're gonna do is just like we did last time we're going to put three cups of flour in here and I'm still gonna continue to add a bit of sugar so I've got that one tablespoon of sugar I'm gonna sprinkle that in and then one teaspoon of salt and then I'm gonna take about a cup and a half of water and this is just plain room-temperature water then I'm gonna take the handle of my wooden spoon and I'm just gonna mix this up like we did last time well I've got this all mixed up and I even use my bench scrape to try and scrape down a little bit of the dried dough from the side and it's the same consistency as last time I'll overlay a little video so hopefully you can see that but it's just the same wet shaggy dough well now this is all ready to go back into my fridge and on the second batch I had left it in the refrigerator for three days so now on this third batch I may let it go a week and see how it does and see if I can still bake a loaf of bread with it so if someone was a very busy mother and they didn't get to it for a week how would it be that'll be interesting to see so I'm gonna go ahead and put this in the fridge well I've got the dough on my parchment lined baking sheet now I'm gonna let it rise in a warm cozy place then we'll bake it and I'll show you how it looks well I baked up this bread and I've got to tell you I'm really surprised this was the second batch that we took out of the refrigerator that I had left in there from three days ago and we added no more yeast that second time around we just added the flour the sugar and the salt and it's got a pretty good rise now I want to tell you that I preheated my oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and then I went ahead and put the dough in I had it on the lower third of my oven where I like to bake my bread and I forgot to lower it down to 425 because if you remember I told you that it browned up a little too quickly and so for the next time I was going to lower it the experiment and lower it to 425 well I forgot till it was in there for about 10 minutes and what happened was this spot right here definitely got a little over browned this is one of those bubbles and so I quickly lowered my oven to 425 and tented my bread so I just want to give you a heads up on all of this as you're experimenting with this busy mother sourdough monitor it and learn your oven and learn how this bread bakes up in your oven because you may find that it Browns quicker than you expect it to well now let's cut this down the middle and I'll show it to you and then what I'll do is I'll get the picture from the last loaf we made which was the very first loaf and I'll try to put it side-by-side so that you can compare it to how this loaf looks and we'll see what direction we're moving in all righty here we go whoops let's oh my gosh it looks great look at this I'm really impressed well I'll take some close-up pictures and I'll overlay them so that you can see this bread as is and then what I'll do is I'll as I said I'll try to put it side-by-side with our original loaf but when you consider this was baked with dough that had been in the refrigerator for three days and part of it was in for two days so some of that dough was in the refrigerator for a total of five days no extra yeast was added the second time around I think it came pretty darn good well this really turned out to be a lovely bread it's very nice it's tender let's give it a taste now and you know I'm thinking I'm going to experiment and I'm gonna try doing this in a loaf pan I want to try out doing a lot of different things with this maybe making rolls maybe even try cinnamon rolls with this dough I think it might turn out quite well well let's give this a taste mmm very good it's tasty I'm impressed well I look forward to sharing more with you about this busy mother sourdough and if you've been struggling with sourdough starter I really hope you'll give it a try I think you're gonna be pleasantly surprised and if you'd like to learn more about how to bake bread with yeast without yeast maybe with sourdough starter if you're up for that then be sure to click on this video over here where I show you how to make all kinds of different breads and I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country kitchen love and God bless

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 132,487

Rating: 4.9290895 out of 5

Keywords: Busy Mother’s Sourdough, Busy Mother’s Sourdough Starter, Busy Mother’s Sourdough Bread, Sourdough, Sourdough Starter, Sourdough Bread, How to Make Sourdough Starter, How to Make Sourdough Bread, Easy sourdough, Easy sourdough starter, Easy sourdough bread, how to make a sourdough starter, how to make sourdough, sourdough starter recipe, sourdough recipe, sourdough bread recipe, sourdough starter from scratch, sourdough recipes, sourdough bread starter, marysnest, marys nest

Id: 2QJuzAL_Osw

Length: 37min 7sec (2227 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020