Bread with sour dough starter

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.

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.

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?

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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;

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....

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

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.

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").

Attachment 319857
Attachment 319858

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

Attachment 319859

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.

Attachment 319860

Just some random others.

Attachment 319861Attachment 319862Attachment 319863Attachment 319864
Attachment 319865Attachment 319866
Attachment 319861

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Originally Posted by 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").

Attachment 319857
Attachment 319858

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

Attachment 319859

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.

Attachment 319860

Just some random others.

Attachment 319861Attachment 319862Attachment 319863Attachment 319864
Attachment 319865Attachment 319866
Attachment 319861

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

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Originally Posted by BLAHUT

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

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

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.

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

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Originally Posted by armoredman

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

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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

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by MaryB

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by pmer

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.

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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!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 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").

Attachment 319857
Attachment 319858

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

Attachment 319859

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.

Attachment 319860

Just some random others.

Attachment 319861Attachment 319862Attachment 319863Attachment 319864
Attachment 319865Attachment 319866
Attachment 319861

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

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Originally Posted by MaryB

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!

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Mary, my post crashed. It was quite technical and lengthy, so probably just as well. Just to let people know that salt is actually used quite commonly in sourdough starters, usually around 2% of the total starter weight. In German, it is called the "Monheimer Salzauer Verfahren," after the German baking scientist Herr Monheimer, who also gave the world the 1, 2 and 3 stage starter processes (basically, 3 stages where at each stage varying starter thickness, temperature and time optimizes yeasts, lactic acid bacterias, and acetic acid bacterias at each stage).

Yeast can tolerate a fairly high amount of salt - IIRC, up to 8%. So at 2%, they're fine, though they ferment at a much slower rate. Which is why this process is useful. Say, you want to bake next morning at 8 am. Say you have only so much oven space, but want to bake more than one type of sourdough. Normally, without salt, you might take your starter and do a pre-dough starter at room temperature and have a fairly tight window of 12 hours, before the starter is past its peak development and starts to recede.

The salt-sourdough process gives a huge window, anywhere from 16-24, before it starts to weaken and slack. So you can very easily plan for multiple loaves the next day.

The other thing about salt in starter is that whereas yeast has a fairly high salt tolerance, the lactic and acetic acid bacterias have a much lower tolerance. So, by adding a small amount of salt, you are really slowing the bacterias, and consequently limiting the acids produced - which really helps the yeast out.

A lot more, including the way traditional French bakers use salt in making and managing the initial stages of new starter, but that's probably enough here. If people would like more, including specific processes and recipe examples, please let me know.

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Originally Posted by BLAHUT

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

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Thanks Blahut, very kind and I'm actually working on a plan for a very (I mean, like, micro small) bakery for our area, 2-3 neighborhoods only, where I bake and sell directly, to a base of customers. Classes would also be a part of it. I've got a few hundred people interested, which actually kind of blew me away from an initial query to the community. So, very early stages and working on a space. Glad to help out here whenever I can!

These are fresh out of the oven. 100 grams starter, 10 grams salt, 325 water and 475 grams of Big Box Store bread flour. [Added the flour last and it was that fresh disgard]

https://imgur.com/a/IJ8GSQ8

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Originally Posted by pmer

These are fresh out of the oven. 100 grams starter, 10 grams salt, 325 water and 475 grams of Big Box Store bread flour. [Added the flour last and it was that fresh disgard]

https://imgur.com/a/IJ8GSQ8

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Beautiful, pmer. I could down a loaf in 2 minutes.

Y’all have got to lay off the pictures! I’m gnawing my screen now!

Right now I have 4 starters in the refrigerator the youngest of which is just over 40 years old. I keep them in the plastic refrigerator bowls in amounts of either 200 grams or 300 grams depending on the size of the container. I have found that I need to either use them of feed them once every 4 weeks.

To feed them I will add 200 grams of bread flour and 200 grams of water to the starter and let the mixture rest overnight in a warm place. In the summer I can get by if I warm up the oven for 1 minute and put the bowl in to the oven. The rest of the year I maintain a little bit warmer oven by either putting a 15 Watt bulb in the oven overnight OR a 25 watt bulb that is controlled by a baseboard thermostat in the oven. I do this because the starter grows better at 75-85 degrees. The next morning I put the original amount back in the refrigerator container and refrigerate it. This keeps the starter alive and ready for the next batch.

I now have 400 grams of activated starter which is half water and half flour. Take the amount of water that is in the recipe (less the 200 grams that is in the starter) and add any sugar or salt that the recipe calls for. Mix to dissolve the salt and sugar and add this to the starter, mix well. Now add the flour, (remember that there is 200 grams in the starter) mix and knead until it is all mixed together. Add in any oil that is in the recipe and knead until it is also incorporated. You add the oil last so it doesn't coat the flour and keep it from absorbing the water or milk. Do 4 stretch and folds an put the dough back in the oven for the first rise.

After the dough has risen until it is about double in size (2-4 hours) take it out, do 4 more stretch and folds, shape it into loaves, put into loaf pans, and let it rise again until double. This will take 1-3 hours. Take the light bulb stuff out of the oven along with the now risen bread.

Preheat the oven, bake, bake and enjoy.

My sister in law wants some starter. What would be the best way to do that? Should I just take fresh discard and feed it like normal starter? Then I'd have 2 jars of starter going till she picks hers up?

Today I'm trying the "My Best Sourdough Recipe" from Perfectloaf.com. The Levian is going and Autolyse starts in 5 minutes. This recipe seems a little more strict for time and temperatures. Should be fun to taste this one.

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Originally Posted by C.F.Plinker

Right now I have 4 starters in the refrigerator the youngest of which is just over 40 years old. I keep them in the plastic refrigerator bowls in amounts of either 200 grams or 300 grams depending on the size of the container. I have found that I need to either use them of feed them once every 4 weeks.

To feed them I will add 200 grams of bread flour and 200 grams of water to the starter and let the mixture rest overnight in a warm place. In the summer I can get by if I warm up the oven for 1 minute and put the bowl in to the oven. The rest of the year I maintain a little bit warmer oven by either putting a 15 Watt bulb in the oven overnight OR a 25 watt bulb that is controlled by a baseboard thermostat in the oven. I do this because the starter grows better at 75-85 degrees. The next morning I put the original amount back in the refrigerator container and refrigerate it. This keeps the starter alive and ready for the next batch.

I now have 400 grams of activated starter which is half water and half flour. Take the amount of water that is in the recipe (less the 200 grams that is in the starter) and add any sugar or salt that the recipe calls for. Mix to dissolve the salt and sugar and add this to the starter, mix well. Now add the flour, (remember that there is 200 grams in the starter) mix and knead until it is all mixed together. Add in any oil that is in the recipe and knead until it is also incorporated. You add the oil last so it doesn't coat the flour and keep it from absorbing the water or milk. Do 4 stretch and folds an put the dough back in the oven for the first rise.

After the dough has risen until it is about double in size (2-4 hours) take it out, do 4 more stretch and folds, shape it into loaves, put into loaf pans, and let it rise again until double. This will take 1-3 hours. Take the light bulb stuff out of the oven along with the now risen bread.

Preheat the oven, bake, bake and enjoy.

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My starter is documented back to the Alaskan gold rush of the 1800; has been sitting on a shelf high up behind the wood stove or on the counter for over 100 years, fed every day with a tablespoon of bread flour and a tablespoon of un-chlorinated water and a little sugar at times; I have eaten sour dough for over 70 years from all over the world; this is the best tasting I have found; when people taste the bread; they cannot believe it is sour dough.........

Attachment 320330
Sourdough 15% rye flour.

Found a manual flour mill to complement our electric.
Looking forwards to experimenting with some multi-grain as well as coarser grinds.