Sourdough 4e - The Disaster.

I followed the Bredtopia No Knead instructions to the letter and I know that the dough was meant to be wet, but mine was a big soggy mass, there was no way that I could shape it into a ball as it just oozed all over the place. I had to scrape it back into the bowl and add lots more flour just to keep it from escaping. I baked it in a Le Pentole saucepan with a lid which is the nearest bit of kit I have to the mysteriously named 'Dutch Oven'. The bread looked fantastic and smelled lovely and sour, but when I poked around inside a big crack on the top I found to my dismay that the inside was not cooked, so I vandalised the loaf a bit by tearing off some of the crust and bunging it back in the oven for another 15 mins. It didn't work......the crust is lovely, shiny, crusty and sour but the inside is a damp mess. There seem to be some bubbles but bleargh.

I don't know how to alter what I did - perhaps my starter was too runny, perhaps making the starter in a hot and humid heatwave wasn't the most sensible thing to do, perhaps mixing one person's starter instructions with another's cooking instructions wasn't a good plan......

So I suppose I'll feed my starter again tonight and start the process again and bake on Monday or Tuesday. This time I'll follow Dan Steven's recipe as I've made the starter his way but I think that I'll cook it in the pot even if I knead it, as I like the contained shape and the perfect round. I like the shiny super crispy top and if it rises more next time it should be lovely.

The experiment continues.

Watch this space for Sourdough 5.

Sourdough 4d

This morning I fed my starter in the same fashion as Tuesday and yet again it did nothing much until about 5pm and now it's lovely and bubbly and has risen nicely. Which means that it takes about nine hours to peak.

I've been trying to work out when I can actually make some bread with the thing as it's quite easy to forget that that is actually the aim of the whole performance! I'm out working all day tomorrow and won't have time nor inclination to play with flour before I leave or when I get home. I'll be at my birthday bbq at mum's all Saturday afternoon and no doubt evening too, so the last thing I'll want to do is faff with bread when we get home. So Friday's my window of opportunity. I'll be at yoga from 9.30 - 11.00, and home by 11.30 so my plan is:

Miss the morning feed tomorrow (Thursday).
Feed at bedtime tomorrow so that it's at it's peak about nine hours afterwards which will be about 7.30 so if I'm super organized, at about 8.30 before I go to yoga, I can mix the dry ingredients, cover and ignore for 18 hours which will take me to 3am on Saturday. I'm sure a little longer proving won't hurt and then when I surface on Saturday (9.30ish) I can shape the dough, leave for another 1.5 hours and then bake before we go to mum's to celebrate my 38th.....Then I can eat fresh sourdough bread when I get home!

I'm definitely doing the no knead method as I think that it sounds like a technique which I can actually manage nicely now that I'll be going out and doing a proper job for a change.....

I'm getting excited about it now and keep chattering away to poor Peter about starters, bubbles and feeding schedules! He might appreciate it when there's actually some bread to eat!

Sourdough 4c

After the spectacular rise of the starter on it's second day, it fell right back to where it had started from and this morning looked a little sad. The instructions for this morning were a little different:

Discard half the starter - this part always hurts, throwing all that lovely (and not inexpensive) organic flour down the plughole.
Add one cup of cold water and 150g flour (which I made up of a random mix of white and rye)
Mix and store.

Same again tomorrow and according to the book for a week, but I don't fancy waiting for that long so will do doubt bake earlier. It sometimes seems in this process that more time is spent faffing with flour and water and watching bubbles than actually baking and eating the bread!

Sourdough 4b

After a day of doing practically nothing, my starter obviously leapt into action as soon as I turned my back and went to bed because when I checked it before going to the gym at about 8.30 it had most definitely doubled in size and was bubbly, light and frothy. Hurrah!


So instead of making an early start on the treadmill I did what I had to do:

30g Organic whole rye flour
120g Organic strong white flour
250ml (1 cup) spring water at 40 degrees

All in a bowl and attacked with my electric hand whisk for about five mins.
In to the plastic tub, lid on.


Off to the gym for a run and some weights!

Added at 11.00
Back from the gym and it's all action on the shelf after just 2.5 hours.