Loaf 86 – Successful Sourdough (whew!)

Posted on Dec 2, 2012 in loaves, starter

My recent failures with sourdough have me pretty upset, and I’ve been pondering what might be the cause. My theory is that my starter isn’t as active as it needs to be. To test this I did a feeding on Thanksgiving, while I was doing all my other baking, and I monitored it’s growth closely.

When my starter is healthy it doubles or triples in volume in six to eight hours at room temperature and then dies down to about 150% in another six to eight hours. This feeding took 15 hours to get to just 167%, and never doubled before going back down. Clearly it wasn’t as healthy as I thought it was. The next day I did another feeding at 2pm, and this time it was almost twice as big by 6:20pm and peaked around 8:15pm at 2.5x. By the next morning it had come back down to 2x. Hooray! The patient has been revived.

For this batch of sourdough I fed the starter on Thursday night (four days after the last feeding). It doubled in size overnight. On Friday night I used the starter to make the levain for Tartine style sourdough. The levain is a mixture of 20% starter, 100% water and 100% flour. The levain rose 2.3x overnight, and I began mixing ingredients at 8am that morning.

I used King Arthur All Purpose unbleached flour this time (rather than experimenting further with the bread flour from Loaf 78’s attempt). I also used a warmed up pizza stone to keep my oven between 80 and 85° for proofing the dough. I followed the Tartine recipe closely.

The dough behaved beautifully this time. By the time I did the pre-shaping step it had developed a little bit of loft, and after its 30 minute rest it was already feeling airier than most of my prior sourdough loaves. They continued to proof in round bannetons until baking time. The only problem I ran into is that I didn’t put enough flour in the bottom of the bannetons, and both loaves ended up sticking and stretching a bit as I removed them for baking.

As is usual now with these loaves, I baked one in the Dutch oven and the other in my regular oven, hearth style (with a pizza stone and steam). I prefer the results from the Dutch oven, but I can only bake one loaf at a time in it and it takes longer than the hearth oven style.

Both loaves came out great. The flavor has a nice sourdough tang to it without being overbearing, and the crumb is nicely open. It is chewier than I remember my other sourdough loaves being, a feature I like but Sarah isn’t crazy about.

I’m relieved to have found what I believe to be the source of my sourdough frustration: unhealthy starter. I’ll make sure to feed it a few times well in advance of baking with it again.