The Sourdough Chronicals - Part I

The search for a simple sourdough recipe began easily enough. All I wanted to do was create a sourdough starter that I could keep alive for years and years and and years. You know...something that I could pass down to my boys. Right.

The recipe was easy. 1 cup of raisin water and 1 cup of wheat flour. Mix and leave in a open container, somewhere warm. Raisin water, in case you don't know is water that has been soaked in raisins. Supposedly all of the nooks and crannys in a raisin contain some kind of natural little beastie that will help our little culture grow. I placed the container on top of the fridge and waited.

I fed it daily as instructed. Throwing out half of it, and adding a 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of flour. I kept this up for 4 days and like the recipe said, rite on the button, my started, started to bubble. At this point I had a culture growing. I could now cover it with some ventilation and keep in the fridge only feeding it once a week and I would be good for life.

After a couple of days, I decided to try my hand at my first sourdough loaf. According to the directions, I made a sponge by adding 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of water and letting it sit for a couple of hours. Then I mixed in basically some of the sponge 2-3 cups of flour, 2 tbs of oil, 1 cup of water and salt. I went to kneading and right away I noticed something different. The dough was very very stiff. It was very tough to knead and almost felt like play dough. I reasoned that I didn't hydrate it enough. However adding water didn't really seem to help.

After letting it rise, as you can see, it didn't really double in size like I'm used to seeing. The ball of dough just kind of sat there...staring at me. Mocking me.

I asked my bride to take over and punch it down and shape it and prepare it for the oven. I thought I would let it rest and rise again for another hour and perhaps her delicate touch would coax the glutinous mass to come out and play nicely. Even after waiting for a time, it did plump up a little bit, but I was not holding out hope.

You know that feeling you get when you just know something isn't going to turn out. Kind of like when you were in little league and you just knew that ball was coming your way and you knew you were just going to drop it no matter how hard you tried? Yeah, that's what happened with this loaf.

During baking, the bread did rise, but the taste was just kind of underwhelming. It was a very dense bread, kind of like my first loaves when I didn't knead enough.

I reasoned that in this loaf, I could have waited longer for the sponge to grow, even over night as the recipe suggested. Next time, in part two we'll visit the longer sponge time and longer rise to see if we improved on the sourdough. Oh, by the way, did I mention, NO tangyness what so ever. There was nothing sour. I wanted like the pictures on the Thefreshloaf.com, with the cool irregular holes and fantastic taste.