I try not to eat too many carbs \u2013 as in not too much bread, rice, pasta, spuds etc and I very rarely eat sweet stuff. Spuds and pasta were never my favourites, so I can take those or leave them (much to my husband\u2019s chagrin) but I love bread and so the one loaf I bake each week has become truly precious. And it has to be sourdough.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always loved sourdough bread. As a young’un I used to buy a small hard brick of rye sourdough from the Health Food shop when all my friends were in Woolies buying the pick\u2019n\u2019mix. When I got it home I\u2019d cut thin slices and eat it with butter \u2013 pure bliss. Everyone thought I was bonkers then (and truth be told probably still do now).<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve changed a little since then, OK quite a lot, but my love of sourdough bread has never diminished. And the sourdough you can buy has come a long way in the intervening years too. Instead of the small hard bricks of rye you can now buy lovely pillowy loaves of any size, shade or grain you could imagine. And I\u2019ve even managed to convince my family that it tastes better than pappy white sliced. Not that it took much convincing really as they agree that it\u2019s the food of the gods. So when we moved to the wilds, with no proper bakery (then) within many tens of miles, I needed to make my own.<\/p>\n
My first several attempts at making a starter ended in tears. I slavishly followed the instructions to weigh out equal amounts of flour and water, mix and put in a jar, double the amount the next day and the next\u2026..until I ended up throwing fairly large quantities of well, mouldy old dough (yes I hear the music too) in the bin. On the one occasion I managed to get a bubbly starter it gave up the ghost after a few weeks of use and believe me, in those days it got used and fed regularly \u2013 I was so excited at having a working starter I was baking damn near every day.<\/p>\n
I still don\u2019t know why my starters didn\u2019t work. Maybe it was the flour, maybe it was too warm\/cold in my kitchen, maybe the environment in general is wrong – we\u2019re half a mile from the sea and probably only a couple of hundred metres above sea level, or maybe I was too scared to love it, talk to it and nurture it. Your guess is as good as mine. Whatever the reason it didn\u2019t work and I gave up.<\/p>\n
As I said at the beginning I don\u2019t eat many carbs (usually just once a day) and rice is another dish that I try to make a real meal out of when we have it about once a week. The way I prepare my, always brown Basmati, rice is to put equal amounts of rice and water with a sloosh of lemon juice or vinegar in a bowl, cover it with a tea towel and leave it to soak for 7-8 hours. Then at dinner time I drain it, add double the original quantity of water, season it, chuck in a knob of butter (or coconut oil) and the seeds from 2-3 cardamom pods. Bring to the boil, cover, lower heat to minimum setting and leave for about half an hour. Perfect fluffy rice, every time, with no digestive issues \u2013 too much information?<\/p>\n
Well, sometimes things go awry and one day the bowl of soaking rice got left for 2 days (or maybe 3). You read all sorts of scare stories about rice so I was about to throw it away when I caught a whiff of it \u2013 it smelled yeasty just like sourdough. My husband and I discussed this amazing development and decided to go for it. So I drained the rice but saved the water and added it to an equal quantity, by weight, of flour. Within 24 hours I had makings of the best bubbly starter I\u2019d ever seen and it\u2019s still going strong now, somewhere approaching 4 years later. (Oh, and we ate the rice, just in case you\u2019re wondering \u2013 it was delicious as usual).<\/p>\n
When I helped my daughter set up her bakery my starter went there and is used in her sourdoughs. I\u2019ve split off portions and converted them, to rye, white (at the time I preferred organic wholemeal wheat flour) and my new favourite spelt, all with similar success. It occurred to me, more recently, that those who follow a gluten-free diet, through necessity or fashion, would be able to sample the delights of sourdough bread making a starter using the rice water method and their gluten-free flour of choice.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned before I now only bake once a week (or we get it from our daughter if she\u2019s baked the sourdough on the day we want it). So my starter sits in the fridge, sometimes for several weeks, and it has never failed to revive. I do try to remember to feed it at least once a week but time flies doesn\u2019t it.<\/p>\n
Sourdough bread takes very little time but a bit of forward planning. When I want to use my starter I pour off any liquor that\u2019s collected on the top (my gal has made some splendid cider with it, but that\u2019s for another time) and feed it with equal quantities, by weight, of water and flour. In baker\u2019s terminology that\u2019s a 100% hydration starter. I\u2019ve read about reducing the water content to around 30% – that\u2019s roughly a third of the weight of water to flour \u2013 or even less until the starter is a solid lump, for long term storage, but I\u2019ve never tried that. But I digress. The starter is now sitting on the worktop – 1 part starter, 1 part flour and 1 part water (by weight). It\u2019s warming up a little and starting to feed on the flour. It generally takes 3 feeds to get it back to its glorious bubbling self, ready to be converted into bread or other goodies.<\/p>\n
Custom and practice would have you doubling each feed (by weight \u2013 if you haven\u2019t sussed it by now bakers do everything by weight, not volume) and then discarding half. Not in this house! I honestly cannot believe that any good baker ever threw away perfectly good starter, apart from anything else good quality flour is not cheap \u2013 how do you make money throwing perfectly good stuff away? Can you imagine the pioneers travelling across America, discarding little piles of sourdough starter on their way? So what to do \u2013 especially if you\u2019re controlling carbs and can\u2019t bear to throw away huge quantities of starter?! Feed it less.<\/p>\n
I keep my sourdough in a 500ml honey jar, in the fridge. It\u2019s about half full (I\u2019ve had accidents where full jars have blown and poured over \u2013 it\u2019s not nice cleaning it out of all the little nooks in the fridge door it gets stuck in). There\u2019s roughly 200g of starter in it. By the time I\u2019ve discarded the liquor (which changes the % of course, but don\u2019t worry about that) I\u2019ve usually got about 150g. To this I add 150g water and 100g flour \u2013 see that 50g water that was lost has been replaced (400g total weight). About 8-12 hours later I feed it 100g of water and flour (600g total) and then again in another 8-12 hours or so. It does vary if it\u2019s very warm or cold but basically morning and evening works for me). So now I have 800g of bubbly starter. I use about 300g to make my loaf, 200g goes back in the clean jar, into the fridge and I\u2019ve got about 300g left over to play with. And I\u2019ll tell you what I do with that another time\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
Green Aura<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"