The natural yeasts from the leaves combined with flour and water sat in a jar, requiring daily ‘feeding’ with flour and water, and after a few days, turned into a bubbling jar of sweet-smelling goo.
I used that to make something called a biga — the Italian name for a flour, water and starter mixture. From there I moved onto creating my first loaf. It wasn’t pretty. It tasted like sourdough but had the light and airy texture of a hockey puck. Popeye would have needed several tins of spinach to hack off a slice for breakfast. Nonetheless, it felt an achievement and I duly shared pics on social media.
I baked three more hockey pucks and nearly gave up on the whole thing. It turns out that sourdough is a bit needy. Like the emotional mess of the bread world.
If you don’t look after the starter, feeding it with flour and water, daily, it will die, losing any raising power and gaining mouth-puckering sour-ness that even the most dedicated carbophile would balk at.
I also struggled with the waste as large amounts of it are discarded as you go along. When flour is hard to source, the very idea of chucking out even a teaspoonful was anathema.
So I moved from Jim’s very helpful starter tips to another book I discovered on my shelves – Fermented, by Charlotte Pike. I’d received that when judging a Guild of Food Writer’s annual award. It’s a lovely book and had equally helpful pointers for new sourdough bakers.
She favours the French levain (over Jim’s Italian biga) but I assume this is purely semantics. Over a few weeks, I mixed up several — excitement building each time the paste grew bubbly and active — but never got round to using them.
Last weekend, I finally forced myself to push through and turned the levain into a batch of sourdough Saj – Middle Eastern flatbreads. Topped with olive oil, za’atar and a sprinkling of sea salt, they were a huge success. I froze them and we heated them each day for lunch. Winner. By this stage I was on a journey that wasn’t going to stop until I’d mastered a proper, airy loaf.
The SAJ flatbreads had shown how much of a rise my starter was creating — almost as high as my weekly challah dough, which is getting better every week (a whole other megillah).
The tipping point came after I’d happened upon a really helpful series of posts by the lovely Nicole Freeman on her The Kids Kitchen Facebook page. Glued to my screen one Thursday evening, it felt like bread porn, as I chain-watched her vlogs. Nicole talked me through the stages from growing the starter, to baking my loaf. I was hooked.
She advised using the discard as it’s called, for pancakes. True, they were sourdough-flavoured — which my children hate — but that was easily disguised with a shmear of chocolate spread, and they went down a treat, and my guilt assuaged. I also used some in a banana bread. Not sure what purpose it served in there, but Team Prever noshed that up too. Nicole advised donating the starter to friends. (But is that the bready equivalent of one of those awful chain letters? If you do not bake a sourdough loaf one of your legs will fall off…
I resolved this week to nail this.
And I have. I mixed up yet another levain, but used half the flour and water, to avoid the waste. It duly started bubbling, and a day later, I mixed it with the other ingredients required for Charlotte’s regular sourdough recipe.
You have to leave it for way longer than yeast-risen bread. It’s far stickier – impossible to knead and extremely hard to move around. It attaches itself to everything it comes into contact with, and, like some 1950’s American horror movie (think The Blob) oozes over any surface you place it on.
Without the fancy baker’s kit (which I’m not buying for now) it’s impossible to know if that would have improved this. I had to prove my loaf in a retro Pyrex dish. The blog refused to vacate the dish when I wanted to bake it — and was far too loose to be contained on a baking sheet. I attempted to tip it out and it spread (and kept on spreading) like a pot of my daughter’s lurid slime.
So I lifted it – thankfully on a sheet of baking parchment — into a heavy lidded pot and baked it in that. It was huge and airy. My hopes were high.
Fifty minutes later, I opened the pot. It had worked!! I have never been so excited about a bake, but I’ve never worked so hard to get it right.
For now it’s notch in my wooden spoon. Not sure how many more I’ll be making. I really do get the attraction, and it’s delicious, but for me, even in lockdown, life’s too short to be baking sourdough regularly.
