Quote:
Originally Posted by To Be Quite Honest
Here's something to try!
I started thinking about making my own bread and stumbled upon this website.
http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm
My bread started tasting good with my sponge being 2 weeks old. I'm on my fourth batch with this same sponge (added a bit of four and water every 4 days or so after the initial sponge was made). Try it if you really like sour dough! |
I have had sourdough starter for about 25 years. I started it on my own and over the years, have shared with many. I noticed the recipe at that site calls for sugar. I only use honey when baking with sourdough, or maybe syrup if I am low on honey.
Any time you use some of your sourdough starter, you need to refresh it. I usually use 1 cup flour, 1 cup lukewarm water and 1 Tsp honey. Stir it up a bit, it does not have to be lump free, cover, and then allow it to reactivate at room temperature. When your starter is very active, it reactives very quickly. If I plan on making quite a large quantity of bread, I simply double or triple those amounts until the right amount of starter is achieved. If you are going on vacation, or don't plan on using it for awhile, you can simply refrigerate it. In fact, when we did our home renos a couple of years ago, I never used mine for 2 years. Then I had to let it sit at room temperature for about 10 days, feeding it regularily, to get it good and active again. They have actually found dried up sourdough in the Egyptian pyramids, added water, flour, etc and reactivated it.
Sourdoug really is amazing stuff. It is actually a natural yeast, so when you bake with sourdough, you dont add yeast that you would buy in a grocery store.
And sourdough pancakes or sourdough waffles are unto their own, especially the pancakes. They get a lightness and moistness that does not occur in regular pancakes.
The only way you can kill sourdough, and yeast too, is with too much heat. It is a living organism and will die if it gets too hot. That is actually what happens when you bake with sourdough or yeast. Once the bread gets put in the oven, it gets a final proof or rise until the heat kills the yeast. At that point, your loaf of bread, or whatever you are making, will not rise any further.
Many bakeries still use sourdough, but would be more the artisan bakeries. However, large grocery store bakeries could certainly use it just for their specialty artisan breads or sourdough breads.
Here are some sites where you can drool over some amazing breads. Lots of recipes for making sourdough starter and breads.
http://www.northwestsourdough.com/discover/
http://www.wildyeastblog.com/
And these sites have both regular and sourdough breads.
http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2010/01...tting-1-15-10/
http://www.thekneadforbread.com/
These are my sourdough multigrain loaves. They are freeform, in other words, not baked in a pan. I let them rise in a bread proofing basket, and then transfer them to the oven, and bake them on a preheated baking stone (also called bread or pizza stone). You can also bake them in preheated enamelled cast iron Dutch ovens.
