Sourdough Troubleshooting Guide
Don’t panic, you didn’t wake up in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic-era bread panic. Believe it or not, you can bake sourdough bread at home without existential dread hanging over your head. Quite the opposite: once you get the hang of it, baking sourdough bread becomes fun and rewarding, and despite what homemade bread haters say, it actually tastes better than store-bought bread.
You may have noticed that I didn’t say it was easy.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of variables for something made from such a small number of ingredients, especially when you’re starting completely from scratch. This guide will help you troubleshoot what is potentially the most difficult part of the sourdough bread making process: natural yeast starter. Whether you’re making your first attempt or you’ve already baked a few too-dense loaves and can’t figure out what went wrong, let me help you.
The biggest challenge when making sourdough bread
Beyond sourdough, there is an even broader world in bread baking that includes types of flour, yeast, and additives. Although preparing the appetizer seems like the first hurdle, it is actually the most difficult of all.
Unlike industrial yeast, natural yeast starter takes time to become active . Active yeast means there are a lot of gas bubbles, and it’s these bubbles that make your bread tall and spongy. During fermentation, your yeast increases gas production and develops a delicious tangy flavor. Oh, and you’ll have to figure out how to catch your own invisible yeast. Now you understand why the biggest challenge when making sourdough bread is getting started.
Sometimes the only answer is patience. But sometimes things go wrong. Here are the tips I look for when preparing an appetizer, and possible answers to problems you may encounter while doing so.
Making a strong starter
Wild sourdough starter is made from flour, water and wild yeast. What is wild yeast? Yeast that refuses to be tamed. It turns out that just as bacteria exist everywhere, yeast spores float around everywhere. You just need to catch some in the water and flour mixture. On paper it’s pretty simple: I have a recipe that seems simple enough.
A kitchen scale is essential when baking bread, so I highly recommend purchasing one. (You can find them for under $15 .)
A simple sourdough snack recipe
Ingredients:
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4 ounces cold water
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2 ounces high gluten bread flour
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2 ounces organic rye flour (I use Bob’s Red Mill stone ground dark rye )
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¼ to ½ teaspoon raw honey
1. Add equal parts (by weight) of room temperature water and whole grain or rye flour to a wide bowl. If desired, you can add a portion of high-gluten white bread flour (as I do in this recipe – I’ll explain the process in the Troubleshooting section below). I also add about half a teaspoon of raw honey. It’s not necessary, but that’s what I was taught. (It keeps working, so I keep doing it.)
2. Stir everything until there are no dry spots left. Your wild yeast bait is ready. Leave the bowl uncovered in the kitchen for an hour or two. It’s okay if it dries out a little around the edges. Wild yeast floating in the air will be attracted to whole wheat or rye and get stuck there.
3. Once the yeast has caught the yeast, stir the paste again, transfer the starter to a jar or tall cup and cover it with plastic wrap or a lid. Do not make the lid completely sealed. (If all goes well, the yeast will start to produce gas and you’ll need to let it out.) Use a piece of duct tape (I like to write the date and time on it) or a rubber band around the container to mark the height of the paste so you can see how it’s rising later. , or take a photo of it so you can return to them. Leave the starter at room temperature for 72 hours.
Signs Your Sourdough Is Starting Properly
This is the annoying part—or the exciting part, depending on your personality. Wild yeast is invisible and you won’t be able to tell if you’ve caught enough of it for about 48 hours, but there are signs you can look for that will tell you everything is going according to plan.
After 24 hours: The paste will look like it has fallen loosely into the container and is not as hard as before. The jar will look a little fuller, but you won’t see much rise or many bubbles (if any).
After 48 hours: The starter should have a lot of small bubbles and the top layer should look a little foamy. It will increase in size by about 50–100%.
After 64-72 hours: The starter should be fully active, foamy, and approximately three times its original size. It should look alive and smell sour. It’s quite unpleasant, but it’s a good sign.
What to do if the starter does not start
If you don’t see any of these signs after 48 hours (except maybe a foul odor and a layer of slimy liquid forming), and your flour and water paste hasn’t started to bubble at all within 72 hours, then you haven’t caught enough. wild yeast. Throw away this paste and start again. Use the tips below to make sure you catch enough wild yeast the next time you try.
Problem: My starter never had any bubbles.
Use the right ingredients. Don’t skip whole grain or rye wheat flour. They have more nutrients that promote yeast growth, so it makes sense to use one of those. All-purpose flour, even baking flour, and especially bleached flour, lacks some nutritional components. Don’t worry, you can convert your starter to white flour when you feed it, so don’t feel like you have to bake rye or whole grain bread with your starter. This doesn’t mean that white flour won’t work as a starter, but if you’re having trouble, using a different flour may speed up the yeast’s development.
Try adding honey if you missed it. It doesn’t take long, but raw organic honey can promote yeast development. It has its own region of microorganisms and can give the wild yeast something to snack on.
Collect natural yeast using grape or onion skins. There are other sources of wild yeast besides the ones that float in the air. Yeast coats the outside of many different foods, including grapes and onions. Once you’ve mixed the water, flour and honey, add unwashed grapes or a strip of onion paper (the dry outer layers of any onion) to the paste. Cover it completely and leave it there for the first 24 hours, then remove the grapes or onions and discard. Continue to let the starter sit for another 48 hours and look for signs of life as described above.
Use a bowl to collect the yeast. Perhaps you only need a small change. In the instructions above, I advise mixing the starter in a wide bowl and leaving it at room temperature to allow the yeast to come together. Make sure you don’t skip this step and put the paste directly into a jar or other container with high sides and a small mouth, which will make it harder to catch the yeast. If your kitchen isn’t particularly windy, you may be blocking airflow. The wide bowl allows a lot of airborne wild yeast to flow through the paste and get stuck.
Problem: My starter was bubbling but not growing much.
Substitute a serving of high-gluten white bread flour. In my recipe above, I replace the high gluten flour with two ounces of rye flour to make the gluten network stronger. Rye and whole grain flours are sometimes stone ground, so there’s a chance that the texture is too coarse to hold the air bubbles that yeast creates.
If you only use rye flour or whole wheat flour, you may see air bubbles foaming up but not rising much. This means your starter is alive, but there is no mesh to catch the bubbles. In this case, use high gluten flour the next time you feed the starter. Stir the starter thoroughly to form a gluten network and let the starter sit for another 24 hours. You should see a big difference in height.
If you’re making sourdough from scratch, use my recipe above, which replaces half the total flour with high-gluten flour and leaves the other half as rye or whole wheat.
How to feed your starter
If you have a starter with a lot of bubbles, you can use it all at once or age it. I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about keeping a starter alive for years or decades, sometimes longer. The key to keeping the starter or mother alive for a long time is to feed her daily so she doesn’t die.
The Right Ratio to Feed Your Sourdough Mother
To feed the starter, you will need to mix its total weight with flour and water. This means that if your starter weighs 10 ounces, you’ll add five ounces of water and five ounces of high-gluten flour for a total of 10 ounces of “food.” Then you will have 20 ounces of starter.
You can see this amount quickly get out of hand if you simply double your starting amount every day for three days. Most people choose to feed half and discard the other half, so the weight stays the same but the flavor deepens. However, if you plan to make eight boules of sourdough starter next week, you may need a large amount of sourdough starter, so you may want to avoid throwing it out right away. Whatever amount you ultimately need, you need the same amount of starter and new foods each time you feed him.
Steps for making sourdough starter
1. Use a kitchen scale to know how much weight you need to add. Measure the required amount of starter into a bowl. The other half of the starter is discarded. Throw it away or make something out of it right away. (More on this in a moment.)
2. Add equal parts water and high gluten flour to a mixing bowl. Again, if you are using eight ounces of starter, add equal parts water and flour to the bowl—that is, four ounces of each, for a total of eight ounces. Mix thoroughly to ensure no dry spots remain.
3. Place back into the jar and close the lid. Leave it at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours before feeding or using it again.
Using sourdough
Instead of throwing away half the starter, you can use it to make something else. While it is at the peak of its bubble production (its effectiveness decreases if it needs to be fed again), it can be used in a bread recipe, pancake recipe, cookies, pancakes, crumpets or crackers – anything you can think of. .
When you’re ready to really use your starter, whether it’s just a little bit or the whole amount, you need to time it for maximum efficiency. This will happen approximately 12 to 24 hours after the last feeding. After caring for your starter for a couple of days, you will begin to understand when this window opens and closes. It is at the peak of its growth before deflating, actively producing the most bubbles before wearing out. During this time, you will get maximum performance from your starter.
If you’re still intimidated by a 100% sourdough starter recipe, remember that it can also be used as a flavor enhancer for recipes with instant yeast. For speed, look for recipes that include both starter and commercial yeast, like this one from King Arthur Baking .
If there’s one thing you should take away from this troubleshooting guide, it’s that there are a lot of variables in caring for your sourdough starter, and it’s okay if you don’t get it right the first time. Be patient, don’t give up and don’t forget to feed mom.