About Sourdough

At first I thought sourdough was just a new posh way to milk more money from me. A bread is a bread, flour is flour, water is water, yeast are yeast, right? There are extra benefits you get when you work with sourdough. Maybe it’s cheaper than yeast? Not sure, don’t care. That’s not why I started messing around with it. Something else about it was calling me. I could almost hear a 3000‑year whisper asking to connect. Some ancient spirit was talking to me from behind traditional bread recipes. Is this how medieval bread was made? Did the San Francisco early miners really eat bread that good? Can a sourdough “mother” live for years? (At least 150?) I bought a book and followed the directions. I didn’t even really know what I was looking for with the sourdough feed and rise. I had a clean, big screw‑top jar, I worked with a scale, but I had no reference. The bread loaves came out nice — flat, heavy, almost no air pockets, but tasty. I used to cheat and add hazelnuts, cumin and white pepper to get some tang out of the mass. It was tasty, but it wasn’t bread. I didn’t give up though. One day, as I returned home with 10 kg of flour, my dear partner told me about the Paleo diet, and the bread factory closed on the spot. BREAD IS NOT HEALTHY. IN ANY FORM. (It’s just tasty and fills your stomach.) I was a dedicated Paleo fan for about four years. I still know that is the correct way to live. It’s the right frequency for me. Then, I went to Paris. Water is an absolutely incredible substance. The oxygen weak bonds with the hydrogen atoms allow rapid exchange, allowing new chemical bonds to form or dissipate almost at light speed. We can’t grasp it, can’t take a picture of a water molecule. We can basically just observe how water diffuses flower pollen in a still glass of water (a famous Einstein experiment). Water allows chemical reactions to take place and is a great conducting medium. At the microscopic level, liquid water is a huge electrical storm that allows stuff to happen inside it. Regardless of the content — good or bad — can there be a movie without a film? Would you drink digital water? So in this chemo‑electric party of about 300 ml of the best water you can provide, live two types of families — the yeast and the bacteria families. We provide these two families what they need and they will live longer than you. If you call that life, of course. Running to the office 9 to 5, no future, wife upset, kids hate yo— OH… sorry, I was supposed to blog about the yeast. The two families just need food and water. They prefer whole grain, so the flour mixture I feed my mother with (fun, right? love you mom…) includes at least 33% whole rye flour for the sourness and to really give the families what they need until the next feed. I then play with the remaining 67% flour — splitting it between T80, T65 and T55. If you’re making heavy rye breads, go ahead and feed the mother with 70% whole rye and 30% T65 (for the sugar side of their miserable life). If you’re deep down the rabbit hole, make a mother for each kind of bread line you want (wheat, whole wheat, and nothing but rye). So you have your fantastic preferably lukewarm water. You have your artisan flour mixture. You have an old mother. You have the right tools and jar. What else is important? My humble knowledge of microbiology taught me that life has its rhythm, and the best conditions allow repetitive best results. A sourdough is a micro‑universe full of some really tough cells. They are hungry. They haven’t been fed for days. You relax them with lukewarm water. Now you feed them. MARK THE WATER MIXTURE LEVEL — using a rubber band is the cleanest way. The temperature is just right. The food is plentiful. They begin to multiply. Representatives of both families start to propagate at an exponential rate. The temperature is a perfect 23°C. The container is large and holds the accumulating gases with ease — but not forever. Make sure to take the lid off and release pressure every two hours. There will be a point where all the available food is gone. At that point, the yeast and bacteria stop dividing, start eating each other — yes, it goes sour. The alcohol level rises and the mother loses her vital energy. WE WANT TO CATCH THE MOTHER BEFORE SHE PEAKS. The best time to use a fed mother is when it passes about 66% of its known volume increase. (You should test it and create an estimation for best results.) When we “catch” the sourdough at the right timing, the yeast and bacteria multiply at an optimal rate. Now that it’s reaching its peak, we pour about 90% of the mother into the bread batch — preferably into an autoleased fresh dough. Perfect for our two families. They already know what to do. It’s a fermenting dough and no longer a sourdough mother. We have decimated the mother. It’s all over… but no. Look. Out of the residue around the jar and a bit on the bottom, a tiny amount of sourdough accumulates like the T‑1000. We close it in a clean jar. This is my new mother. It holds the genetic properties of the other mother, traveling endlessly on the timeline. After Paris I was a new man. I knew what I was doing, made notes, made progress. I got a 10‑year‑old starter and kept it for a few more years until I had to move to the Netherlands. They say you can ask any baker for some starter and they shouldn’t refuse. Let me know how it played out for you.