Sourdough Bread - An Allegory and a Recipe

Try finding that at Panera

I named this blog "Polymath Politics" for a reason. A polymath is somebody who's interested in, and good at, several unrelated things. I can't claim to be good at all of my interests, but I definitely aspire to be. Politics aren't for everyone, so I thought I'd begin to leaven the blog with some baking articles.

Get it? 

Leaven?

Baking?



Ok, if you're still with me after that, let's talk about the path from flour and water to the loaf above.

Humble Beginnings

I've wanted to make my own sourdough starter for a couple of years, but my frequent work travel prevented me from doing it. While easy, sourdough starters require basically daily tending. Now that I'm traveling less, this seemed like the perfect time to get going.

I began, like with most things in the kitchen, with Serious Eats. They're my favorite source for basically all recipes, and their baking columnist had a follow-along guide to sourdough. 

Everything in that guide sounded easy - just mix in 1 oz of flour and water each day, and wait for the microbacterial magic to happen. I followed the guide precisely, and measured everything on a good kitchen scale. I mixed when directed, and I left it alone when appropriate. After about a week, I convinced myself that it was time to bake! Feast your eyes on this:

Don't worry, it looked less impressive in person.

That wan loaf was the product of a week's tending. It, obviously, failed to rise either prior to baking or in the oven. The texture of this bread approximated a dense pretzel, and it tasted of failure. 

What Went Wrong?

I realized that this was a classic case of confirmation bias: I was eager to bake with my starter, and I convinced myself that my jar looked like the pictures in the guide. The few bubbles I saw should have been a warning, but instead I saw them as exactly what I needed.

I determined that I'd been methodically killing my starter with each feeding. Palm Beach County, like many municipalities, treats its tap water with chloramine. This is a stronger, less volatile version of chlorine, and it is extremely successful at destroying microbes. As I was attempting to grow microbes, this was less than ideal. 

Scrumptious.

I never had to deal with additives like this when I lived in Maryland, as our house had a well. Even carbon filters won't remove chloramine (due to its non-volatility), so I switched over to spring water here. 

Success!

With my optimism renewed, I again decided to bake with the starter. A quick spin in the stand mixer, some room-temperature proofing, and and overnight rise gave me...this:

Your yeast is weak, dough.

Turns out that even the bubbles in my starter picture above were insufficient. As discussed in Serious Eats' guide, sourdough starter will only work when the bubbles are actively rising up in the jar, and a too-full jar threatens to spill over onto your counter. Mine wasn't there yet, so it still didn't rise. I learned from my past mistakes, and spiked this loaf with commercial yeast (just bloom a packet in some water and sugar, and knead it into the dough). That gave me some rough success, similar to bread I've made previously:

  

This bread was fine, but not really what I was after. It was still pretty dense, and the flavor was only adequate. Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread is far superior to what this one came out like.

You'll note that I baked my bread in a pot (a dutch oven, technically). This is key. Recipes will tell you to prep a baking stone or a sheet pan, but that's BS. You'll get much better results from a dutch oven, as its lid traps steam during the initial stage of baking (sometimes I even throw in a bit of extra water to produce more steam). This helps lead to better rising, and it does...magic...with the crust. Don't really know what's up with that, but the texture comes out better. Either way, if a dutch oven is an option, always use it.

After this attempt, all I did was wait longer for more success. A few more days of feeding and stirring gave a vigorous starter that rose aggressively. I've also found that my dough tends to come together more quickly, when kneading, with the sourdough starter than with instant yeast. I'm not sure why that would be the case, but it's been a consistent observation. Here's a shot of the hole structure in some recent sourdough bread, and another of the finished product:

The Serious Eats guide has some sourdough bread recipes, and I also quite like this one from the Wild Yeast Blog. For most of these recipes, I still fall back on the baking technique advocated by Jim Lahey, with the dutch oven. 

On Unintended Consequences and Critical Thinking

I promised an allegory, and here it is. My encounter with chloramine seems emblematic of the choices encountered by politicians. Treating municipal water with this chemical likely makes sense for many reasons: it keeps the water clean, prevents us from getting sick, and must have other benefits over straight chlorine. It's a subject too arcane for most constituents to care about or fluently discuss. Still, it has important implications for narrow interest groups. While the water here is perfectly fine for most uses, it was wholly inadequate for my mission.

This was an easy one to troubleshoot - the sourdough starter only has two ingredients, and I can't have mixed them together so incorrectly as to have utterly failed. Still, it's a good reminder to actually assess the situation in front of you (rather than optimistically hoping that everything is ok. "Look, there's a bubble!"), and reexamine the causes of deviation from expected results. 

There's more baking coverage to come. Hopefully this offshoot is a welcome addition to the blog.