Sourdough Bread Starter

[Jimmy Orkin]

I am attempting to make a controlled Sourdough bread starter. I took home a expired Berliner Weisse yeast blend from the club meeting at NTHBS Tuesday. I just mixed 3/4 cup all purpose flour, teaspoon of DME, RO water and the contents of the yeast blend into a bowl and stirred it up, covered with plastic wrap. My hope is in a couple of days I have a sourdough starter going. Then I will try making sourdough bread.

More as I know it.

[James Smith]

Interested in your results. I bought a San Francisco starter off Amazon a while ago and have made several loaves and keep it fed. Have found the trick to developing the lacto is to let it cold ferment for 24-72 hours. Even then, I don’t get enough of it.

[Jimmy Orkin]

An update on my sourdough experiment.

I fed the starter a few times then grew up some extra to make some bread.

I made a sticky dough with bread flour, about 3 cups of flour. I put the dough in the refrigerator for 3 days. Punched it down once a day.

On the third day I form two loaves. I did not kneed them. The dough was sticky.

No sourness. Some interesting flavor in the bread I assume from the Hefe yeast in the blend. The dough was slow to rise.

So from this experiment, I am saying that I did not make sourdough.

I wonder:

I wonder if I let it rest at room temp for 3 day, what would happen. Probably have to punch it down a lot. Not sure if there would be any food left for the yeast to do the final rise after 3 days. I think other stuff in the dough might make it rot.

I wonder if I could use the Philly sour yeast.

[James Smith]

As you know, the sour in sourdough is from lacto production, not the yeast. You said you used Berliner Weisse yeast. There is usually a longer process to creating a starter than just a few days if you do not have a sample from an existing established starter. I figured the lacto in the yeast blend you used might have produced better results, but I have no baseline. I have two starters; one was created by me from the yeast in the air here, and the other is an authentic San Fran sourdough culture. Obviously, the San Fran culture has yielded better results, but even letting it cold ferment in the fridge for a couple of days doesn't give it that truly authentic taste, though it does have a tartness for sure. I am interested in further developing consistency, but time hasn't allowed it. There was a couple of months where I made a loaf every couple weeks, but haven't in a while. I digress....

The recipe I currently use calls for a 12-hour to overnight rise at room temp, then a 8-12 hour minimum cold ferment. That can and probably should go longer though, and you do not need to punch down the dough during cold ferment. This is actually a bad thing because you are overworking the dough/gluten and it will stop rising as much. Hence, the sluggish/low rise.

If your purpose is to make sourdough with beer yeast, keep experimenting. If you really want to make sourdough bread, I am happy to provide you a sample of my San Fran starter that you can grow up yourself and use. It does not go bad in the fridge...you just have to feed it occasionally.

Here is the recipe I've been using. I cut it in half for only one loaf BTW. https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipe ... ead-recipe Video here: https://youtu.be/UL6ogX38NcY

[Jimmy Orkin]

Smitty,

My goal was to bread that was sour. My hope was that the Lactobacillus in the blend was still viable and the the hefe yeast in the blend would make an interesting yeast flavor. But sour was is goal.

I think I want to get some SF starter from you and use the recipe you posted as a baseline. The starter I have going from the Berliner blend may not be useful, just part of the experiment.

I also got some packages of just Lactobacillus to play with.

Let's see where all this goes.