Bread with sour dough starter

[pmer]

We've been baking our own bread for a week or more using sourdough starter and its been turning out pretty good. Golden brown crust and moist crumb on the inside. Are there any folks baking bread with starter for yeast? Our current recipe is just flour, water, salt and starter. I begin around 7 pm to mix fold the dough and rest the dough on counter overnight. Refrigerate the next day at 5 - 6 am and bake it after work.

We have a loaf of cheap big box store bread that no one's touched since doing this so it must be good LOL, no it's actually pretty good. It looks like those artisan breads in the bakery.

I think this is the oldest way to use yeast in baking bread. The starter is the yeast and it gets that way from fermenting flour in water. Through the magic of bacteria it makes its own yeast. This is a separate process that's done before mixing the dough.

I haven't ventured to far off except for sourdough pancakes and that was awesome too.

[kungfustyle]

We do and it's fantastic. This company has great flour https://sunriseflourmill.com/
You can freeze your starter. When you want to bake with it take it out a couple of days before you want to bake with it and take out about 50 grams of the starter with 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour. Feed the starter by mixing it all together and let it sit all day when it doubles in size its ready to bake with.
https://www.theperfectloaf.com/ good place to learn more. Best of luck to you and enjoy, great stuff.

[William Yanda]

I have a vague memory that Gold Rush miners created their starter by grating a potato and allowing the culture to grow. Can anyone confirm that?

[MT Gianni]

You can find raw yeast anywhere, aspen leaves, raw potatoes and several other sources. The issue is taste.

We refrigerate our starter and my wife uses it for a lot of baked goods. She just can't eat them much. I have made four ingredient bread as you do though I don't refrigerate as I need all the rise I can get. I have cut it 50-50 with whole wheat flour with no loss in flavor.

[BLAHUT]

We've been baking our own bread for a week or more using sourdough starter and its been turning out pretty good. Golden brown crust and moist crumb on the inside. Are there any folks baking bread with starter for yeast? Our current recipe is just flour, water, salt and starter. I begin around 7 pm to mix fold the dough and rest the dough on counter overnight. Refrigerate the next day at 5 - 6 am and bake it after work.

We have a loaf of cheap big box store bread that no one's touched since doing this so it must be good LOL, no it's actually pretty good. It looks like those artisan breads in the bakery.

I think this is the oldest way to use yeast in baking bread. The starter is the yeast and it gets that way from fermenting flour in water. Through the magic of bacteria it makes its own yeast. This is a separate process that's done before mixing the dough.

I haven't ventured to far off except for sourdough pancakes and that was awesome too.

My starter is documented back to the Alaskan gold rush; old timers said that it didn't develop its flavor until it was 100 years old or more; my starter sits on the counter and is fed every day; I use only bread flour; I leave out the salt; time is all that is needed for good baked goods with sour dough; My job as a kid was to get dressed when bread came out of grandma's oven; take it out side and through it up into the air; when it came back down it was frozen and put up in the cash; I still bake just not as often as I would like; don't have the boys at home now, so I don't use as much bread as before; home baked sour dough bread and pastry's can't be beat;

[Rapier]

When my FIL passed at 95 his ages old starter went.....it was like a religion to him. A religion that I sure did not want to get baptized into. It was good bread, but not good enough to be married to. My wife or our daughter did not want to adopt it, so....

[armoredman]

And I felt good about using a bread machine....

[Wayne Smith]

My wife is sensitive to flour, milk, and tomato, so we have flourless bread. I doubt that a starter would do well with it, think gluten free, but she is not sensitive to gluten.

[huntinlever]

Yep, I'm an experienced baker, since the '90's. I do a lot of breads weekly mostly sourdoughs in the German French traditions. As people have said, you can make sourdough from just about anything - potatoes, unsulfured raisins, grapes, whatever. Really, nothing more than flour and water will work, though it takes some time for your particular environment to settle out its own ecology, so you have the culture you want and it is effectively outcompeting unwanted species of yeasts and bacterias.

A few recently. A "Sonnenblume Schrotbrot," which has no flour - just cracked rye of varying coarsenesses (I mill at home), roasted sunflower seeds, sourdough and a touch of barley malt syrup ("inactive").




A "Frankenlaib," a rustic sourdough seen in Franconia:



A Kasseler, which is one of the most common sourdoughs seen throughout German households. This one is "würzig," which implies spicier or more strongly flavored. It has a higher degree of whole rye flour.



Just some random others.

[BLAHUT]

Yep, I'm an experienced baker, since the '90's. I do a lot of breads weekly mostly sourdoughs in the German French traditions. As people have said, you can make sourdough from just about anything - potatoes, unsulfured raisins, grapes, whatever. Really, nothing more than flour and water will work, though it takes some time for your particular environment to settle out its own ecology, so you have the culture you want and it is effectively outcompeting unwanted species of yeasts and bacterias.

A few recently. A "Sonnenblume Schrotbrot," which has no flour - just cracked rye of varying coarsenesses (I mill at home), roasted sunflower seeds, sourdough and a touch of barley malt syrup ("inactive").




A "Frankenlaib," a rustic sourdough seen in Franconia:



A Kasseler, which is one of the most common sourdoughs seen throughout German households. This one is "würzig," which implies spicier or more strongly flavored. It has a higher degree of whole rye flour.



Just some random others.

Can I get in line to get some of these ??? A lot like what grandma use to make ? I miss a lot...

[huntinlever]

Can I get in line to get some of these ??? A lot like what grandma use to make ? I miss a lot...

You bet man. Pretty grateful to be part of a German baking community, who have taught me a lot.

[Hogtamer]

I used sourdough starter a couple of time a week for a couple of years. Just stopped this summer. We don’t need it and were eating a lot more than we should have! Started mine with yeast, a little sugar, a little water and dried mashed potatoes. Left it on the counter about a week, fed it once with more mashed potatoes and water once and started baking. Don’t think there’s much better than slicing a loaf right out of the oven with plenty of butter and honey. I have the waistline to prove it.

[Good Cheer]

Married a baking quilter that thinks it's normal to grind her own grain.
She's 75 now but still at it.

[MaryB]

And I felt good about using a bread machine....

I use my starter in my bread machine... nothing wrong with saving wear and tear on my shoulders from kneading bread! I use the dough cycle and bake in the over on my baking stone, gives a much better texture...

commercial quality stones for home ovens, check dimensions!! https://fibrament.com/shop

[MaryB]

My wife is sensitive to flour, milk, and tomato, so we have flourless bread. I doubt that a starter would do well with it, think gluten free, but she is not sensitive to gluten.

Has your wife tried flour from old strains of wheat? Modern wheat has 5 times the amount of one protein and some people(me!) are sensitive to it. I grind my own flour from old strains of wheat because of it. Healthier too because it is literally whole wheat, modern flour has the wheat germ removed to extend shelf life. And as soon as flour is ground it starts losing nutrition, grocery store flour is dead, empty calories... I only grind the flour I can use up in a week.

[huntinlever]

Has your wife tried flour from old strains of wheat? Modern wheat has 5 times the amount of one protein and some people(me!) are sensitive to it. I grind my own flour from old strains of wheat because of it. Healthier too because it is literally whole wheat, modern flour has the wheat germ removed to extend shelf life. And as soon as flour is ground it starts losing nutrition, grocery store flour is dead, empty calories... I only grind the flour I can use up in a week.

Concur with Mary 100%. I mill emmer, kamut, spelt and einkorn. All of these are ancient wheats and have an excellent reputation for digestibility relative to modern wheat.

[pmer]

We do and it's fantastic. This company has great flour https://sunriseflourmill.com/
You can freeze your starter. When you want to bake with it take it out a couple of days before you want to bake with it and take out about 50 grams of the starter with 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour. Feed the starter by mixing it all together and let it sit all day when it doubles in size its ready to bake with.
https://www.theperfectloaf.com/ good place to learn more. Best of luck to you and enjoy, great stuff.

Thanks for info, The Perfect Loaf helped a lot. I learned that I'm treating the starter wrong and adding it at the wrong time. In fact up to now I haven't even used the starter at its peak 🙃. I think the short answer is that I've been using fresh discard. Mixing discard, water and salt then throwing bread flour on top of that. It rises like it should but the process isn't correct.
I need to follow instructions better lol.

[huntinlever]

The Perfect Loaf is a good site, good guy. Also, The Fresh Loaf. Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread is an excellent book, a teaching book, and really accessible. (I have this edition - there are many out there and they are not this expensive).

Though various methods of starter development work, most of the "added" ingredients like honey, fruit, potatoes, etc., are to help give a kick start to the yeasts and bacterias you're looking for but again, flour and water and time, are about as simple as it gets. What matters is your environment - temperature, ratios (starter:new flour:water), time. Changing these will make anything eventually come to the same culture, no matter how you got there - honey/pineapple juice/potato, etc., or flour - it will all be the same very shortly, if you simply maintain your environmental parameters the same.

And while "old" starters maintained over many years have their lore, and are definitely cool, there's nothing special about them, really; in fact many artisanal bakers start over every month or so, when they're starter starts behaving outside certain parameters. Too often, I feel, we needlessly complicate the thing.

I used to maintain several starters: A "liquid" rye (water:flour 1:1 or 100% hydration), liquid wheat, "thick" wheat, "levain chef," (water:flour 55% hydration), Lievito Madre, and "Hefewasser" or "yeast water," made from soaked raisins and barley malt syrup to start, then replenished whenever used.

Now, I do one, and it works for all my breads. 1:1:1 cold, mature liquid rye starter (the Germans call it "Anstellgut" or "ASG" - mature leftover starter, kept in the fridge): medium rye flour (i.e., a flour with some of the bran removed - available commonly), water at 104F. Mix together, maintain at 82F x 4 hours, then into the cooler until needed. I replenish this way approximately 3X weekly, or as needed due to baking. All the above breads are made with the same starter.

This is rye. Using flour with some of the bran removed nourishes the starter without giving it so much nutrition (i.e., with whole rye flour) that the fermentation explodes out the gate. Using whole flour anytime is never a bad thing, and in fact can help rejuvenate a flagging starter.

If using wheat, even simpler. Everything is fine at room temperature.

Maurizio at Perfect Loaf does a good job at explaining the most important thing, which isn't written procedures or recipes, but observation. Getting to know you're starter, which is unique to your home and materials - when it peaks, when it falls, etc. There are no shortcuts and only experience can tell you this.

[MaryB]

Thanks for info, The Perfect Loaf helped a lot. I learned that I'm treating the starter wrong and adding it at the wrong time. In fact up to now I haven't even used the starter at its peak ��. I think the short answer is that I've been using fresh discard. Mixing discard, water and salt then throwing bread flour on top of that. It rises like it should but the process isn't correct.
I need to follow instructions better lol.

I was taught to NEVER add salt to the water and starter, add it on top of your flour and work it in from there... adding it before raises the salinity of your starter and can kill yeast!

[BLAHUT]

Yep, I'm an experienced baker, since the '90's. I do a lot of breads weekly mostly sourdoughs in the German French traditions. As people have said, you can make sourdough from just about anything - potatoes, unsulfured raisins, grapes, whatever. Really, nothing more than flour and water will work, though it takes some time for your particular environment to settle out its own ecology, so you have the culture you want and it is effectively outcompeting unwanted species of yeasts and bacterias.

A few recently. A "Sonnenblume Schrotbrot," which has no flour - just cracked rye of varying coarsenesses (I mill at home), roasted sunflower seeds, sourdough and a touch of barley malt syrup ("inactive").




A "Frankenlaib," a rustic sourdough seen in Franconia:



A Kasseler, which is one of the most common sourdoughs seen throughout German households. This one is "würzig," which implies spicier or more strongly flavored. It has a higher degree of whole rye flour.



Just some random others.

YOU should offer classes on how to do this ? I would gladly attend ??