Sourdough 101?

[Odsox]

It's an Americanism, MMM.

Anything 101 is an introductory course - first year college courses for example e.g. Philosophy 101.

I didn't know that either, just goes to show I lead a sheltered life, or maybe because I detest American television shows.
Still can't see the significance of the "01" bit though, why not just Philosophy 1?

[Green Aura]

[grahamhobbs]

Jessiebean, try to be a little bit patient, what you have created is something that could potentially last a life time. I would suggest that you refresh the starter a couple of more times.
in the meantime I think we need to do a little maths. Although you can make bread without measuring things, for predictable results, especially if you are not making the same loaf every day, you need to measure things and measure preferably by weight and in grammes (appologies to Americans).
Say we have some dough weighing 750g and say we used 300g of water in making it, most people would say there was 40% water - well in baker's percentages it is 66%.
It is important to grasp that baker's percentages are different and that they are always in comparision to the weight of flour used not the total weight of the loaf or dough or whatever. So in the above loaf, there would be 450g flour and 300g water, so the weight of water to flour is 2/3 or 66%. ( I should have said dough instead of loaf, because when baked the loaf will lose about 10% in weight, so a 750g dough will bake to a 675g loaf)
Now a typical bread mix is 100% flour 66% water 2% salt (2% yeast if using normal yeast). In fact this mix was laid down in law for the baking of french bread. (I would these days reduce the salt to 1.5% to 1.75% to your taste)
As I said there is always 100% flour in any baker's recipe, although it can be made up of white, wholemeal or whatever different proportions of flours, including importantly the flour in our sourdough starter when making sourdough.
The type and mix of flour you use is not only important in the resulting bread but so is the proportion of water. 66% may be the standard, but it can vary from below 60% for beigals to over 80% for ciabatta type breads. Most rustic artisan breads will be in the 70 to 75% range.
At the moment your sourdough starter has 100% hydration (or could have had 150% if you had used rye flour), that is 100% flour 100% water. This 100% mix is quite good in that it is vigorous (useful for getting it started) and it is also easy to calculate the amount of flour and water in it. However this is a wet mix, if you were going to make bread everyday you could keep it like this, but if you are baking only once or twice a week it will probably be better to change it to a stiffer mix, usually called a levain or leaven, as this will be a bit slower and will not need feeding quite so often. But your levain will still need feeding 2 or 3 times a week, although it can be kept in the fridge and then only refreshed say once a week. If you do not feed your starter or levain, it will rapidly deteriorate and get off flavours.
Ideally you should refresh your starter/levain whilst it is 'puffed up' and before it collapses, collapsing means it has run out of food, but this is not always possible and not serious if not left too long.
In converting from a starter to a levain you have a choice of what hydration you choose, you could go for 66% (calculating with 2/3 is fairly easy) but if you are always baking say 70% breads then you could make the levain the same, so that you always know that the flour and water are in the right proportion. So once you think your starter is ready to start baking with (after several refreshments), with the following refreshment you add more flour but reduce the water to reach the desired mix for your levain, that you will have to do a little calculation for.
I suppose I ought to say what amount of levain you should be thinking of aiming for - you need about equal weight of levain to the total weight of flour you normally would bake in a session, so if you normally say bake with half a bag of flour, 750g, then you need to maintain about 750g of levain (flour and water combined). Don't get to hung up about quantities of leaven, you can always refresh with more than double, treble if necessary. The important thing is to know the proportions of flour to water in your leaven and in the recipe you want to bake.

[Millymollymandy]

It's an Americanism, MMM.

Anything 101 is an introductory course - first year college courses for example e.g. Philosophy 101.

I didn't know that either, just goes to show I lead a sheltered life, or maybe because I detest American television shows.
Still can't see the significance of the "01" bit though, why not just Philosophy 1?

See I was thinking of Room 101 but couldn't make sense out of that, or even our 101 uses for..... threads, but couldn't make the connection there either!

(and I agree with you Tony!)

[Green Aura]

Ah now room 101 is Orwellian - from 1984. Excellent book.

[Millymollymandy]

Is it? I only know it as a telly programme!

[Green Aura]

It was the room where dissidents were tortured by exposing them to their own worst nightmares! Bit like our house really

[Helsbells]

Hi Jessiebean,

If you fancy trying out another type of bread recipe take a look at this tutorial on my blog:

http://serendipitychild.blogspot.com/20 ... orial.html

Plus, if you take out a little bit of the mixture after it has been left to rise the first time and put it in the fridge then you can use this next time you want to make a loaf instead of mixing the yeast and water. Just add more water and flour to it.

[Big Al]

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I am keen to try more "artisan style" breads, sourdough I suppose but I would like an easy one that lovely Ishers have tried and tested...can anyone help me? I normally use an automatic breadmaker so treat me as a total beginner!

I haven't read any of the other posts yet but I've learnt to make artisan bread very easily... it's called time.

I use a bread maker and to be honest the bread has always been shite but having not much use in my hands and arms I put up with it. I then got to using the dough setting and this takes 1.5 hours on my machine. I then knock it back and leave it to rise again for anything up to 1 hour 15 mins. I then knock it back and form this dough into the bread shape I want and leave it for a further 1 hour then bake it at 230 deg C and it is absolutly wonderful. For the pain of 5 minutes each knock back I'll suffer for some delicious bread.

I'm also using dried yeast
My recipie is
650g of allinsons strong bread flour ( the light green bag although the premium flour is even better)
7g of dried fast bake yeast
425 mls of tepid water to 43Deg C
15 g of marg
2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

Bung it all in the machine, wait for the beeps, em[pty it out onto the bench, knock it back, cover with oiled clingfilm, knock it back, form into loaf, cook and then pig out on hot bread and suffer the indegestion, lol....

Put this with some of Green Aura's bacon.......

HTH

BA