A week ago, and with a certain amount of frustration, I stashed a very promising looking sourdough starter in the refrigerator, knowing I didn’t have a plausible baking day for another seven days.  Despite having lots going on, those seven days have been torture, in their way.  I’ve not looked forward to a day off quite so much for a very long time!

On Tuesday morning, in preparation for today’s much longed-for baking day, I ‘rescued’ my jar of starter from the fridge.  It had ‘fallen’ back from it’s bubbly heights and seemed more like a pot of goo than a bubbly ferment.  But I’d been expecting this.  I gave it a couple of teaspoons of fresh flour just for a small snack, something to munch on while it warmed back up to room temperature, and went to work.  Some promising bubbles greeted me on my return, so Tuesday night it got a proper feeding.  This had the expected – but gratifying! – result of a decent doubling in size by Wednesday evening.  Pleased that the starter seemed nice and active, I constructed my ‘overnight sponge’ on Wednesday night.

The recipe for my first sourdough loaf is a slightly modified version of one of the sourdoughs in ‘River Cottage Handbook No.3 – Bread’ by Daniel Stevens (ISBN 978-0-7475-9533-5) which has been staring at me accusingly from between it’s very beautiful covers since it first moved onto my kitchen book-shelf a couple of years ago.

My sponge consisted of the following parts –

• A ladle-full of my (wholemeal) starter
• 325ml of warm water (a mix of cold tap water and some hot from the kettle)
• 250g of locally stoneground strong white bread flour

These are mixed by hand in the bowl, covered loosely with cling film, and left to ferment overnight.  This morning, after I couldn’t bear to stay in bed any longer out of curiosity for how my bread was going, I was met with this – a lovely bubbly bowl of promising things!

I put the coffee machine on for my essential morning brew.  So distracted was I by my marvellous bubbly sponge, the jug was half-way full of pale brown water before I realised I’d forgotten to add any ground coffee!

The sponge, when I stirred it and then poured it off into a second bowl, was an amazing ‘stringy’ consistency, more like melted cheese than anything I’ve encountered in bread-making before – I assume in some way from the alchemy of the microorganisms within it.

To the sponge, then, I added –

• A further 300g of strong white bread flour
• 7g of salt [Edit, 15/7/2012 – I now use about half this amount of salt, with no ill effect]
• A ‘glug’ of olive oil

After mixing the sponge, flour and salt roughly by hand, I put the lot into my (rather lightweight!) stand mixer, dough hooks fitted, and started it going.  It certainly gave the dough (and itself!) a heck of a work-out.  After a couple of minutes I added a good glug of olive oil and left it to work for about ten minutes.  I was told to expect quite a wet dough and certainly this was tricky to handle, sticky and rather ill-manered!  I don’t have a dough scraper so I was rather grateful for the mechanical assistance – though I’m not sure how many batches of sourdough my stand mixer has in it, it seemed to find it quite an effort!

After kneading, I formed it into a rough round and oiled the bowl before setting the dough in it to rest for the first time.  Before this first resting period it looks like this, and after a couple of hours, to be honest, it looked just the same, if possibly *slightly* bigger in the bowl.

Flour your surface, and then turn out the bowl of dough – squash it out into a rough rectangle with your fingers, and then ‘knead’ it gently back into a tight round before returning it to the oiled bowl for another hour or so. Put the bowl somewhere warm, but not hot – on a cool day, the oven with the light (but no heat!) on makes a good resting environment.  You’re going to repeat this process of resting, flattening and re-forming your ball a couple of times during the day.

A couple of hours before my planned baking time, I turned the dough out for the last time.  It’s springier, silkier and lighter, with some noticeable bubbles now when you handle it. Form it into a round again but this time, rather than returning it to an oiled bowl, it would rather be in a proving basket.

I don’t have one of those, so I used a mixing bowl lined with a clean tea-towel which I’d dusted generously with rye flour.  I had very little faith that this was going to result in anything other than a disappointing sticky mess when the dough adhered to the cloth, but I’m a good girl and do as I’m told. Covered loosely with a piece of cling film, I left this patiently for another three hours.

I’d read all sorts of advice about the critical baking process – involving dutch ovens (I don’t own one), squirty-bottles of water (likewise!) for steam creation, and even things that look a bit like chicken bricks to approximate a traditional wood-fired oven.  I went with what I actually had – a round black stoneware baking dish for the bread, and a stainless steel roaster to hold some water in the bottom of the oven.  I heated it up to it’s maximum temperature (230C on the dial – 20 below what was recommended) and pre-heated the stoneware dish.  Once it was all up to temperature, and after adding a kettle-full of boiling water to the roaster in the bottom of the oven, I tried to gently turn out the floured dough onto the baking dish.  It seemed like a bit of a disaster, to be honest – ending up rather crumpled and misshapen.  I cut a cross-hatched pattern crudely into the top, and reassuring myself it was all about the flavour, bundled it back into the blasting hot oven.

I couldn’t tear myself away from it, and ended up sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor peering through the oven door as a miracle started to happen.  First the crumpled side seemed to stretch itself back into shape, and then, I’ll be damned if it didn’t start to rise!  Ten minutes into baking and I turned the oven down to 190.  The amazing rising act continued – first, it stretched its way languorously into the slashes, stretching them nicely across the surface.  And then, it started to climb vertically upwards, lifting its edges off the baking tray.  I’ve never seen a loaf perform an act like it – I can only assume it’s the result of the clever changes to the gluten that result from the extended rising and proving time.  It was like something out of the Incredible Hulk.

After 40 minutes the crust was a lovely warm mid-brown colour, but the bottom was still a bit soggy.  I took it off the baking dish and returned it to the oven upside down for another 10 minutes.  Hubby came home to find me stood expectantly in the kitchen.  After that, I couldn’t wait any longer, and pulled it out of the oven.  The smell of baking bread that filled the kitchen – and the house – was quite amazing.

An hour later, we slice and sample it.  I genuinely wasn’t expecting anything this good from my first effort.  There are some lovely big holes in the dough, the crust is amazingly crisp but very thin – and retains a remarkable elasticity.

The texture of the bread is springy and extremely satisfying.  There is a definite, recognisable, but not overwhelming ‘sourdough’ flavour.  I *adore* it.  The whole process – from starting the sponge to eating the loaf – took about 24 hours, and I don’t regret one of them.  The actual ‘working’ time today was about an hour and a half, and left plenty of time for popping to the shops, taking the dog for a walk, and so on.

The bar for ‘good bread’ has just shot skywards in our household, and I suspect things may never be quite the same again.

Read all the posts in the Sourdough Saga >>

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I’ve wanted a sourdough starter for ever so long – for as long as I’ve known and understood the sourdough process, I think.  Traditionally baked sourdough is *the* great bread, by definition, in my opinion.  With its wonderful texture and complex richness of flavour, it leaves the industrial ‘Chorleywood Process’ sliced white loaf so far behind that they’re hardly recognisable as the same animal.

So when I saw that one of my favourite food bloggers, The Rowdy Chowgirl, had brewed herself up a starter recently, it made my mind up.  I was going to do it, and I was going to do it NOW.  Well, just as soon as I tracked down a bag of rye flour, anyway.  And a couple of weekends ago, after following several different lines of reading and research, I got down to business.  ‘What’s that?’ asked Hubby, as he wandered into the kitchen to see me stirring a bowl of what could only be described as goo.  ‘A sourdough starter,’ I replied.  He thought about it for a moment.  ‘You realise you’re going to have to take that thing on holiday with you, don’t you?’  I tried to reassure him that I’d read about stashing it in the refrigerator for a period of time if necessary.  He seemed unconvinced.

I broadly used the directions from The Fresh Loaf, except that I don’t have US-type measuring cups, and there’s nothing called AP flour on the shelves in the UK.  So I guessed a bit at quantities and used stoneground bread flour for the day 2 and subsequent additions.  I also used my tap water rather than the mineral or filtered water suggested – mostly on the basis that it’s nice tasting water without an obvious chlorine hit, and I brew with it regularly without adulterating it in any way, so I went ahead and assumed there wasn’t anything in it greatly damaging to yeasty beasties.

My starter was a thick batter-like consistency.  Thicker the first day when it was rye flour, and then it thinned down a bit with subsequent additions.  I used a 1l kilner jar I had lying around, with the gasket removed so that it wasn’t a sealed container, which I thought was a reasonable match for ‘cover loosely’.  I put it to rest the first day in the boiler cupboard, which is a coupe of degrees warmer than the rest of the kitchen.

After 24 hours, nothing much had happened, much as I expected.  I made the first additions with plain flour, and stashed it back in the cupboard.   It smelt… well, not exactly unpleasant, but definitely an ‘off’ smell, if you know what I mean.  But, forewarned by lots of other sourdough devotees, I plugged gamely on.

24 hours after that, it had gone mental, doubled in size, and all bubbly and awesome.  I was convinced I’d cracked it.  I even named it, Gordon.  Because, you know, ‘Gordon’s Alive!?’  Anyway, as we all know, pride comes before a fall.

I discarded half the mix and added more flour and water as instructed (well, kinda).  Made my mark on the side of the container as instructed, and left it a few degrees colder in the kitchen this time.

After another day had passed, the mix had risen a little in the jar, but only about 1/3rd and nothing like the doubling that the instructions called on me to wait for.  So, I was patient.  Another 24 hours on and no further progress, I mixed in a few teaspoons of rye flour to help things along.  Still nothing more than a few scanty bubbles breaking surface.

48 hours after adding the rye flour ‘booster’, I opened the jar and got a distinctly ‘musty’ damp sort of smell.  On closer inspection the batter on the sides of the jar had started growing what was unmistakably black mould.  Downhearted, I chucked the whole lot in the bin, disassembled the kilner jar and stuck that in the dishwasher.  What I’d hoped was going to be a weekend of experimental baking lost, sadly, though given the hot spell of weather that was probably no bad thing!

Some really kind feedback from @mannafromdevon, a baker on twitter, suggested that it might have been worth  trying to rescue the ‘good stuff’ from underneath, and carrying on with feeding, but it was too late for sourdough-1, condemned to the rubbish.  But their other advice, ‘Don’t Give Up’, stuck, and I’ve already started sourdough-2, which seems, so far, to be continuing in the tradition of acting as if it’s also read the sourdough primers, and wants no truck with them.

The thing that struck me most reading around the subject is that there seemed to be as many specific processes for getting a sourdough starter going as there are people who have written on the subject.  There were even (remarkably concise!) directions on the back of my bag of rye flour!  In my day job, when there are as many different ‘expert’ opinions on a subject as you can find ‘experts’ to ask, it’s usually a sign that there’s no one really good answer, just a lot of different approaches, many of which work most of the time…   Wish me luck, I’m not giving up until I get there!  This may take some time…

Next – Sourdough Saga: Episode 2 – keep calm and carry on?

Read all the posts in the Sourdough Saga >>

Read more from the Country Skills blog >>