In a post which I wrote days before Easter, I promised to make videos about making sourdough bread. Today we begin with making your own sourdough starter. Bellow the video is the recipe I follow with some notes that did not make it into the video. Enjoy!
Step 1. Mix 3 ½ tbs. whole wheat flour with ¼ cup unsweetened pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for 48 hours at room temperature. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. (“Unsweetened” in this case simply means no extra sugar added).
Step 2. Add to the above 2 tbs. whole wheat flour and 2 tbs. pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for a day or two. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. You should see some activity of fermentation within 48 hours. If you don’t, you may want to toss this and start over (or go buy some!)
Step 3. Add to the above 5 ¼ tbs. whole wheat flour and 3 tbs. purified water. Cover and set aside for 24 hours.
Step 4. Add ½ cup whole wheat flour and 1/4 to 1/3 cup purified water. You should have a very healthy sourdough starter by now.
While the above recipe, as I mentioned in the video, asks to wait 48 hours between Step 1 and Step 2, the last time I made the starter there was plenty of “activity” to proceed after 24 hours. Stay tuned for the next video tomorrow.
If you ever baked a loaf of bread before, you can easily get hooked on everything related to sourdough. I got hooked a while back, and tried to document some of my early failed attempts to make sour dough starter.
Now I generally bake at least one loaf of bread each week, some times more. I have even made an attempt use the sourdough to make a pecan nut-roll (pictured bellow), made sourdough focaccia bread, sourdough pancakes and some other yummy stuff. Unless there is no other way around the recipe, I tend to stay away from commercial yeast.
Sourdough Nut Roll
My wife’s recent video inspired me to make a few videos as well. To start off it my first videos will be related to sourdough bread making.
I plan to being those videos tomorrow. To star off, I will show you how can you make your own sourdough starter. I will follow what I call a “bullet proof sourdough starter recipe“, which I learned form the good folks at Breadtopia.
If you would like to follow along, you will need the following:
Whole wheat flour. I recommend the King Arthur flour, but any whole wheat flour will do.
No sugar or unsweetened added pine-apple juice. Look for it in the whole food section of your store. If you can’t find it, just pick can or two of diced pine-apple. Look for the kind that says “no sugar added” or “unsweetened”.
A plastic container (about 1/2 to 1 quart)
Even if you never backed a loaf of bread before, you might enjoy doing this with me. While sourdough bread tastes great, there is also another aspect that I truly enjoy when working with sourdough- and that is working with nature itself, where nature is actually the true artist.
Enough said! Get your ingredients together and come back tomorrow!
As painful as it is to write this, I need to say that everyone should completely ignore anything I have written about starting from scratch your own sourdough starter. Unless of course it is your goal to fail.
As many people before, I saw extreme activity in my culture during the first day, bubbles smell and the culture even more the doubled overnight. Then during 2nd, 3nd, 4th and 5th day i barely detected any activity in my starter. Just before feeding I saw some bubbles, but it all disappeared right after feeding my starter. So as any frustrated bread maker would do, I turned to the internet for answers…. Turns, out if there is not enough acidity in the starter, the “bad guys” grow in your culture preventing the good ones from taking off. In fact there is one recipe that allows you to bypass one of the steps in making starter by raising acidity from the get-go disallowing the “bad guys” to grow in your culture. It took me just one feeding where I substituted water with pineapple juice for my starter to really take off.
The Pineapple Juice Solution For Sourdough Starter
I am certain now that if I ever need to make a new starter again, I will follow the recipe I found at Breadtopia.com (see the video to the right). All previous recipes I tried to follow called for water and flour- this mixture is not acidic enough allowing some other bacterias to grow whose behavior can be mistaken for actual wild yest by an inexperienced bread bakers. The sourdough starter recipe I found at Breadtopia.com allows you to completely bypass the step where the “not-so-good” bacteria dominate in your stater. By the way, I highly recommend to subscribe to Breadtopia.com to stay on top of Eric’s (the site founder) newest videos on bread making. At Breadtopia.com you can also purchase number of outstanding products you might need on your sourdough baking adventure.
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