Make Sourdough Bread

I was kindly gifted some dry sourdough starter and want to start baking some fresh loaves. I've never baked before so this whole process is new to me.

A sourdough starter is a mixture of flour and water that captures wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria from the environment, flour, and water itself. The process goes as follows: You mix equal parts flour and water by weight, creating a hospitable environment for wild yeast and bacteria. Over time, naturally occurring yeasts and lactic acid bacteria feed on the carbohydrates in the flour. The yeast produces (CO2) during fermentation, which causes the starter to rise. Meanwhile, the bacteria produce lactic and acetic acids, which give sourdough its tangy flavor. Regular feeding (adding more flour and water) sustains the yeast and bacteria, keeping the starter active. The image was taken from a study showing all the different yeasts and lactic acid bacteria in a sample of 17 starters showing how even the bakers' hands influence the starter -- all the bakers were from a different country and told to make their starter at home then bring it. "Both yeasts and LAB work to make their surroundings inhospitable to most other microbes. Yeasts give off ethanol, but oddly enough, the LAB can tolerate ethanol quite well. On the flip side, LAB secrete acids, but wild yeasts are also tolerant of the increasingly acidic conditions."

okay -- day 3 (morning), seemed like the starter raised a bit from last night, there were minimal bubbles on the surface plenty on the sides, then I went to discard the top half, and there are so many bubbles on the new top layer and it definitely smells sour. I fed it again with equal parts water and flour, (by weight). I don't want this batch to get moldy so I transferred it to a new jar and took a picture next to my key for raising reference. Probably 3 moves days of this?

Almost a week in, (5ish days), and I think it’s ready. The keen eye will notice a difference in color — I can’t read danish and accidentally bought rye flour instead of wheat flour. Over the last couple days, I’ve been transitioning the starter from rye to wheat and last night I tried a new method: Leave 113 grams of mixed starter after discard, add 113 grams of water and flour. Mix, cover loosely, wait and wait. Now I think it’s time to move on to the next steps!

In my last progress update, I mentioned that because I had bubbles, I considered my starter activated. Although I believed that to be the case, I went to the bakery next-door to me and asked them if they though my starter was active -- their response was rising. You will constantly read about starter doubling in size, but I was told from a couple different people it didn't matter. I decided to wait and a few day later my starter is rising. I discarded 100g of starter twice a day since my last update and added 50g of flour of 50g of water by weight. In the image you can see the hairband I used to document where the starter began at 9:00am this morning and now at 5:00pm the starter has elevated greatly. (You are supposed to wait 12 hours to see the full difference). The red line shows where the starter currently is.

I went through the stretch and fold process (1 and 2 -- 30 minutes apart), bulk fermentation for about 10 hours covered with a damp cloth, shaped the dough, then did an overnight cold proof in the fridge for about 9 hours. In theory, this should've worked fine. The dough never held shape each time I tried to stretch fold or shape. Although I did the float test with my starter, I am wondering if it wasn't strong enough, the room was not warm enough and the dough didn't process etc.

Even though I had all those issues that I mentioned in the previous post, I still went along with baking the bread. At first, it came out looking like a white mess with flour spots everywhere -- maybe I didn't mix well enough, maybe I had too much flour during the stretch process, I'm not quite sure yet. I baked at 190C for 45 minutes to get that result. I decided to add olive oil to the bread and broil for another 15 minutes. It came out looking better, but as you can see when I cut it, it was very dense -- it did not rise enough and probably was not fully proofed. I am very open to suggestions :)

My original starter died so I had to cultivate a new one. Doing so, I baked a very solid loaf by loosely following the recipe below. I don’t have a Dutch oven so I had to make some of my own modifications: - I used a cake tin - I put a pot of water in the oven as well so provide the extra moisture that was missing from the dutch oven - although the bread rose well, I needed to keep it in the oven for probably another 10-15 minutes. - also, the parchment paper (not shown here) stuck to the sides of the bread and cause uneven crisping of the crust so I will probably not use it next time. Maybe I’ll just check a Dutch oven. With that said, though, it tasted great and I’m happy with the result :)