Sourdough and its aftermath

This is a picture of Oscar, my sourdough starter. I've had Oscar for two years now and truth be told, I've been abusive to him. Most bread books I've seen so far say that you should feed a starter every twelve or eight or even every four hours, constantly. Not me. When I'm done with my final build of dough before baking I stick Oscar in the refrigerator until two days before I mix my next batch of bread. I've gone as much as a month between bakes and there is actually very little complaining. Three or four feeding,s 12 hours apart and it's ready to go. Just in case though, there is an Oscar 2 patiently waiting in the wings (the freezer) if I ever make a horrible mistake and use all of Oscar 1 in a recipe.

To back up a little bit. Two and a half years ago I built an outdoor brick bread oven. This was in spite of the fact that I had never laid a brick before or baked a loaf of bread. I have since put it all down to a senior life crisis. But after 30 bags of sakrete, 30 concrete blocks, 400 brick, multiple bags of mortar and insulation and two attempts at a sourdough starter, I have a hobby that ends in a pretty good loaf of bread (thank you Alan Scott). My baguettes are actually starting to look like baguettes. This may be the summer I start trying to sell these at farmers markets.
The one thing in this post that I would like to give credit to is a spreadsheet developed by the person that writes the blog “The Fermenter”. You input the number of loaves you want to make and at what weight (in grams). You also enter the hydration of the starter, percentage of starter in the dough, final dough hydration and percentage of salt in each loaf and it gives you the quantities of flour, water, starter and salt you need. Mathematically challenged that I am, this is much simpler than sitting down with a calculator and trying to figure this stuff out.

I know a lot of this sounds like inside baseball but as soon as you start baking bread regularly a few things become important. First, everything gets weighed. A level cup of flour can weigh from four to five ounces. Recipes are much more consistent to repeat if you use 16 oz flour rather than 3 ½ cups which could be 14 to 17 ½ oz. of flour (I love my scale). Second, you find out what amount of water as a percentage of the total weight of flour (called dough hydration percentage) that you like to work with. Most of the bread I make is 67% hydration. There is a growing trend towards wetter doughs of 70-75% hydration and above, but thats the dough I like to work with. Third: patience. Yeast doughs in general and sourdough in particular take time for the flavor to develop and the dough to rise. My bread dough, for example, is mixed in the evening, allowed to rise for an hour then retarded (refrigerated) overnight.

I take it out of the refrigerator the next morning, let it come to room tempurature (two to three hours), shape it and then let it final rise for another three hours or so before baking. There is also firing my wood stove for six to eight hours before the bake in there also. And you end up with something made of flour, water and salt and love that tastes like there is a God.