Understanding a Sourdough Starter | Proof Bread

so this is a bucket of ready to go sourdough starter and we can take a look this morning i wish that i could somehow convey smell but smelling this is an important step every morning to get an idea of development and so if you're using a sourdough starter at the beginning when i was first getting to know harriet and building a relationship with the sourdough starter i don't know if i was like afraid of the starter or or what it is but it's reluctant to do things like smell or taste but this is a really important part of your part of your journey as a sourdough baker and it's very important that at least you smell and visually confirm where your sourdough starter is for for a given day so this is 11 kilos of starter and it's topping out nearly at 20 liters in the bowl so it's it's about doubled i see tons and tons of bubbles on the surface and the way that we like to manage our starter is making sure that it's slowly cooling down as it's maturing so uh the fermentation process on a sourdough starter is not a whole lot different than the fermentation process on your doughs except it doesn't have any salt in it it's just flour and water and microbes [Music] when you feed a sourdough starter white flour the typical time to maturity is six to eight hours if you feed at a one two two ratio so one two two ratio meaning one part mature starter that you have left over and two parts water two parts flour typically at that rate if you get to 80 degrees fahrenheit i think that's 26 celsius i'm not very good with those conversions with temperature but i think it's around 26 celsius you can expect that it will take about eight hours to mature now along that curve what we're trying to do is by the eight hour mark to cool it down um and we're trying to get it into the 50s fahrenheit by the time that it's at maturity and that way we're trapping it in its fully matured state for a longer period of time this is something that took us a while to start doing it's another thing that that anyone watching can benefit from our harder lessons because when we were first starting we were we didn't know anything and we couldn't go into youtube and find a bakery that was doing long format videos and so we had to learn mostly by trial and error and when you're in that mode i mean at least when i'm in that mode i take some safer approaches when i don't know something i only take the amount of risk that that i can sort of plausibly rationalize and in the very beginning stages i couldn't rationalize anything about my sourdough starter you have to understand that if you roll the tapes back four years i had never baked a loaf of bread and that's kind of the interesting thing about our world is when you have to do something in an almost medieval way and if you have to sort of teach yourself from the ground up uh well i mean four years pass and it's just sort of insane how comfortable it feels you know we started this conversation today with the idea that making this particular bread is a very grounding experience and it's because it's so wholesome and simple at the end of the day flour water and salt this is just flour and water the way that you make a sourdough starter is you just put flour and water together we get all kinds of messages all the time asking us about our starter and whether we sell it i've always been reluctant i think we will start selling our starter for those that want it in our new stores um in downtown mesa that we've been talking about a lot so my guess is we will start selling it we're also looking at ways of helping people start with a dehydrated starter but the truth is all it takes is taking flour and water putting them together and holding them at the right temperature for the appropriate amount of days doing the appropriate amount of feedings to build a starter up and it's it's incredible that just flour and water can turn into something that then feeds bread going forward you can imagine that there wasn't probably a whole lot of written down thought on how to develop a sourdough starter 10 000 years ago when the egyptians were making bread with the sourdough starter in other words they were taking pieces of their bread from the day before and using those leftover pieces of dough to leaven the dough the next day that's essentially what this is the starter that we keep is considered a liquid one so liquid starters are anything that looks a little bit more like batter and a little bit less like dough so if you look at the consistency of it it's very batter like now because it's been refrigerated it has a little bit more of the properties of dough at room temperature it's even more liquid the more liquid it gets you want to start questioning whether you've let it mature a little bit too far the as a starter matures all those bonds that happen between flour and water really the gluten that's forming which by the way i don't know if people realize that that's all that gluten really is it's just flour and water combining into a protein web when i learned that it was really clarifying for me because leading up to it i was also subject to everything that's out there about anti-gluten this anti-gluten that and truly people do have gluten sensitivities although if you work with gluten on a daily basis like i do you understand that gluten has a curvature to its development too at first when you first bind it together uh it's not all that strong yet if you rip it it just rips right out uh this same dough in an hour if i do this with it it won't rip like this that because the the web that's forming is getting stronger now that has a finite finite amount so the the web is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger as we're in the bins as we're preparing to do uh the final shaping and then from then on once it sort of reaches peak strength it starts to break down and the same thing happens naturally without any kind of agitation just time so going back to the sourdough starter right now it's really strong for a sourdough starter this is a hundred percent hydration so there's same amount of water as there is flour uh and so the fact that i can sort of pull it without it ripping when it's i mean if you don't believe me simply mix a batch of anything that's just one part flower one part water and watch that it's pretty much liquid the reason that this has any strength right now is is the the web of gluten that's formed being at sort of peak strength at the moment we don't bake bread at peak strength though by the time the bread hits the oven the gluten is actually already weakening because now it's 24 hours old if you were to watch your starter at 24 hours you'd notice what happens basically right now i've got a doubling effect there's there's only 10 point something liters of starter in this bucket and yet volumetrically it's closer to 20. as the starter matures it's going to recede down and lose its strength and become more and more liquid more and more more and more having the smell of alcohol whereas right now it just has a sharp kind of acidic smell to it when it's not mature it has more of a smell of bananas so smell is a really important distinguishing factor on where your sourdough starter is at any given moment going back to the gluten development uh we try to mix and develop our doughs building strength and we try to have our bread ready to go resting in abandon uh at peak strength and then sort of slowly weakening so by the time our customers enjoy the bread the gluten has already kind of been broken down which is one of the reasons why sourdough being a long fermentation process is easier for people to digest a lot of folks that have gluten intolerances a lot of people that claim to have celiac which is actually a true gluten allergy say that they can have sourdough my guess on it is that we all have some sort of level of intolerance to gluten in its toughest form in other words when gluten is is fully developed if you try to digest it at that time it's hard for our bodies to digest it when you look at the way that bread is manufactured and i use the term manufacture because most bread that's consumed doesn't have this level of human input as you scale up bread production i mean consider that this bakery despite to probably many of you being larger scale is a baby baby bakery in comparison to the bakeries that are actually selling most the bread that we consume which are full warehouses filled with assembly lines of equipment no different than than an assembly line that you know makes a car it's it's that automated and so uh when bread is made in that environment it's out of the oven within two hours and the gluten really is just still on its upward trajectory so we are then solidifying the bread and it's in in a very strong form uh whereas sourdough is very different in that regard so i know exactly how much starter i have in this bucket because of what my label says the refresh was so i know i know that it's the exact amount that i need for this mix and we intentionally do that so this is our most common mix and so we we intentionally mix our sourdough starters to where a five gallon bucket of starter is the exact amount that i need for this mix it's uh 11 kilos of dough so i am putting this in because the 20 minutes that i needed for my auto lease are basically up so i just put it in right on top i use the dough scraper to make sure that the inside is is pretty clean uh you can really get a lot of detail dough scrapers are really like our version of a kitchen spatula we have those too but these are i find these to be a little bit more functional for the bakery and my last thing is salt uh jeff can you measure me out uh 1272 grams of salt yep

Channel: Proof Bread

Views: 99,192

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough bakery, microbakery, proof bread, proof bakery, sourdough, bread, baking, cooking, food, gourmet, artisan, homemade, handmade, handcrafted, flour, recipe, how to, kitchen, ingredients, cottage bakery, rustic, small business, entrepreneur

Id: IjVe843a0Kk

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021