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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The Great Sourdough Bake-Off: Which Starter to Keep and Which to Toss?

Okay, so I've been making sourdough bread for a couple of months now.  That makes me a raw newbie to sourdough, though not to baking yeast bread. I'm loving it, as is probably obvious from the title of this blog. The bread isn't always the prettiest, but it's yummy - it tastes wonderful and different and is very forgiving to my almost random method of baking.  Learning a new way of handling the dough is a fun challenge - one might even call it a compulsion.  And my whole family (I live in a hotbed of food sensitivities) seems to be enjoying the digestive benefits of sourdough bread.  But there's a problem.


See, I'm being overtaken by starters.  I've been maintaining five starters on the windowsill for weeks now, with twice daily feedings (except one, which I'm continually trying and failing to revive), and at least four in the fridge.  My pocketbook is suffering, I'm losing sleep, flour coats all the kitchen surfaces, and there's bread bursting out of my freezer, all over my countertop, and out of our one measly bread box.  In short, I need to trim my starters down to one...maybe two.

Thus the bake-off.  Yesterday I baked four small loaves, each using a different starter.  The idea was to compare the four loaves in terms of taste, texture, crumb, crust, holes, color, etc.  The starter that yielded the best bread would win; the others would lose their place of honor in the windowsill pantry, and maybe meet a worse fate.  Even the starter that smelled of apple cider would see no mercy if it didn't perform to specs.

As a control, I used the same recipe for each loaf of bread:

  • 2 tablespoons starter
  • 3/4 teaspoons salt
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1.5 cups bread flour

Unfortunately, the experiment was flawed at the outset.  For one thing, each starter used a different flour - one used King Arthur whole wheat, another Hodgson Mill whole wheat graham flour, another Lentz spelt flour, and the last one Hodgson Mill white whole wheat.  (My fifth sourdough starter was a white starter that was tossed right before the contest.  My white flour starters seem to be cursed somehow.)

To add to the confusion, there were two different hydrations of starter - thin and thick.  I say "thin" and "thick" because I am one of those undisciplined sourdough bakers who does not measure very much, so I couldn't tell you if my starter is 166% hydration, 100% hydration, 50% hydration, or 5000% hydration.   I suspect that if my life depended on it, I couldn't bring myself to feed the little beasties by weight, volume, or any other methodical approach.  I just whisk in some water and flour and let my eyes and nose do the thinking.

So all I know is I have two less wet starters and two more wet starters.  If you look closely, you can tell the loaves made with the lower hydration starter.  They're plumper.  The loaf on the left in the first picture and the one on the right in the second picture had thicker starters and, because I didn't adjust the proportion of flour and water accordingly, yielded a lower hydration dough and so performed with better oven spring.  I was surprised that the difference was so noticeable.  In baking, I focus on the feel and look of the dough itself and hadn't paid much attention to starter hydration before.

Anyway, I baked the loaves in two batches, so another problem was two loaves had an extra half hour of proofing time.  So my attempt at a controlled experiment was seriously flawed, as each loaf turned out to be a control for all the others.  In other words, there was no control at all!

Still, all four taste testers noticed some interesting differences in the loaves.  Unfortunately, the only thing we could agree on was that the thinner hydration loaves were more sour.  Depending on which tester you asked, the same loaf would be deemed to have "a sweeter nuance," "a bland taste," "a bitter aftertaste," "a cruder crust," "a delightful crust," and the like.  My husband cleared his palate throughout with his favorite tea, and the whole thing had a connoisseurs'-wine-tasting-party feel to it.

As for me, they all tasted pretty much the same to my unsophisticated palate, except for the bland loaf that tasted like musty blankets (the one made with the spelt starter, which seems to perform better with actual spelt flour than with white bread flour).

In all, we ended up with four different favorites, and some nice snacky French sourdough bread for two days.

Did I trim down my starters?  That, after all, was the aim of this venture.  Well, in a way.  I threw the spelt and graham flour starter in the fridge for a spell of punishment for being bland and too bitter in aftertaste (well, actually because I'm running out of spelt and graham flour), while the white whole wheat and King Arthur whole wheat starters enjoy being pampered twice daily in the pantry windowsill for now because, well, just because.

The experiment is made even more irrelevant by the fact that, because of my complete lack of discipline, I can't even remember for sure which starters came from wild caught yeast and which from my very first starter born of conventional active dry yeast.  Two of them I know are wild, but I'm not even sure if they were spawned off each other or separately.  But it satisfied the rare methodical urge in me and made me feel like for once there was a purpose to my baking beyond feeding my family in my whimsical what-shall-I-do-with-all-this-blinking-starter fashion.

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