/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Am I the only girl that HATES it when guys try to show off with their sour dough collection? It's just superficial and makes you seem like you're overcompensating

>>8226109
roastie get out

>>8226129

Why respond to an obvious troll?

>>>/Reddit/

>>8226102
Nice, now is the best time to start a sourdough starter. The dodgy airborne anaerobes are just starting to settle out due to the cold and the hardworking cold yeast and lacto bacteria are just getting into full swing before the sub zero temps push them into hibernation.
Keep this lot alive as long as you can and it will provide good clean tasting sourness with a good rise for a long time to come.

>>8226135
Not all insincere posts are "trolling", newfriendo

>>8226175
True. But 9 times out of 10 when the post starts off with claiming they're a girl, it's b8.

>>8226153
>airborne
>it will provide good clean tasting sourness with a good rise
These are myths.

1. When you buy flour, it comes with all the yeast spores and bacteria you need to get a starter going. In fact, a guy named Ed Wood did experiments with sterilized flour, and it was near impossible to get a starter going with 'atmospheric' microorganisms alone.
2. How fast/effective your starter is at raising bread depends on how stable the bacteria/yeast colony is and how you feed it.
3. Sourness/flavor is a function of how long you bulk ferment your dough and the percentage of starter you put in your dough. I can make extremely sour bread or bread with no detectable sourness at all from the very same starter.

>>8226218
Question, since you appear to know something. I've got a starter that gave me great rises and crumbs for the first 6 months, but lately the loaves have not been rising well. Should I make a new starter or what?

>>8226218
Didn't know this friend, thanks for the info.
I'm primarily a brewer instead of a baker and wild yeast in the air does play a major part in terms of sterilisation efforts and infection from malevolent bacteria in brewing. I assumed the yeasts and bacteria involved in brewing and baking would be fairly similar, interesting to know that there are significant differences between the fermentations of the two disciplines

I tried following Tartine bread and he uses a starter. I followed the first chapter but my bread never rose. The starter looked active and the bread tasted good, but the crumb was dense and flat. Do I need to pay more attention to the rise and fall of the starter?

>>8226226
What's your feeding schedule like? If you leave a starter alone for long enough, the yeast will eventually switch from metabolizing the sugars from the flour to breaking down proteins (read: gluten) and your starter will begin to stink like paint thinner (acetone). If this happens, you can generally revive your starter by discarding almost all of it, then rebuilding it with regular feedings - this will take a week or so before the starter is stable again, but even so, that's still a bit faster than starting a completely new one.

>>8226241
Was the starter bubbling vigorously before you added it to the final dough, and had you allowed it to grow for two weeks to become stable?
But your problem might have nothing to do with the starter at all - it's also worth remembering that ambient temperature determines how quickly yeast do their work, so it might just be that your kitchen is colder than the authors. Or maybe you made a mistake in your measurements.

>>8226229
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the main difference between using yeast in brewing vs. baking is that with sourdough, contamination doesn't matter because yeast and lactobacillus eventually form a symbiotic colony that's inhospitable to other microorganisms, so it's nothing at all like brewing where you need to carefully control exactly which strain of yeast is present.

>>8226251

OP here. Thanks for your posts. I love your knowledge.

Ok, so can I do 5 days for a starter and make a good bread?

I was a baker for years but I'm too drunk to contribute much. The only pitfall with a young levain is mistaking bacterial activity for yeast. Young starter can seem active even before the yeast has a chance to establish itself

>>8226320
YW, I love sourdough, this thread made me waste the last 30 minutes re-reading about the science behind how sourdough cultures when I have things I'm supposed to be doing.

5 days to a useable starter is _possible_ if you kept your starter someplace warm and feed it regularly - but there's enough random variation when beginning a new starter that sometimes it takes longer for the culture to develop to the point that it's stable, which is why 'wait two weeks' is the standard advice, particularly to avoid the problem mentioned by this anon >>8226346

>>8226346
>>8226359
Also, check out this page, which explains how a starter gets established (skip to the heading "The First Phase" to get past the theoretical stuff that you probably won't care about if you're new to baking with a starter). The writer here also goes into some detail on the idea of using pineapple juice in a new starter to lower the PH and increase the chances that the starter will become stable sooner rather than later.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10901/pineapple-juice-solution-part-2

>>8226376
>thefreshloaf
This is honestly one of the best sites on the internet if you are interested in creating bakery quality bread at home. I should say as an American that most of the good recipes there are like 10x better than the grocery store bakery you might be used to. We unfortunately have a very shitty baking/bread culture despite eating tons of the shit.

This is a mini baguette I adapted from that site. I use my own starter instead of commercial yeast. You can take most recipes and change them to use a levain as long as you keep the hydration and salt % the same. I've actually modified about 20+ peter reinhart recipes to use my wild yeast starter, it just requires some second grade math

>>8226443
FF?

Lovely picture. Baguettes are the only thing that have eluded me as a home baker, I've never figured out how to get that kind of loaf into my mediocre home oven without deflating the loaves in the process and/or losing too much heat.

What's your trick? Do you use a pizza peel or do you have a proper bakery oven to use?

>>8226457
FF always seems to post as FF, I'm just another anon.

I think baguettes are difficult for everyone. It's something that you never really feel like you perfect,

The biggest deal for me is getting enough steam. I start them at 550 and spray lots of water in my oven before turning it down to 400. These are also 75% hydration, which makes it even more difficult to make them pretty.

I just do a pretty standard proof in a couche and then slide them on to my stone. The only thing I do that may be a bit different is I keep them a little short while proofing and stretch them out slightly when I go to bake them.

Correctly slashing them is also very important. You can google how to do it correctly and it's easy. But many people fuck up scoring their bread

>>8226457
That ain't me.

Here's a loaf I baked yesterday. 100% whole wheat sourdough using coarsely-milled hard red winter wheat.