Sourdough

With all this weather, especially wind and rain, now is a good time to collect airborne organisms for sourdough starter. Your flour slurry already has its own and can go by itself, but now it can have atmospheric organisms delivered right to it directly shoved in and in very larger number.

The bread will be leavened and flavored and it properties affected by the living organisms of the area. It will be powerful.

But here is the thing about sourdough that books and magazines and internet articles do not tell you outright. Sourdough bread baking works on the principal of continuous production. The sourdough starter is kept at full activity bubbling away hard as it can in cycles. The starter is fed every eight hours or else every twelve, keeping  close a schedule as possible. 

Right off the bat you are dedicated to this dough. You cannot stop. Some bakers call this loose wet sponge the mother, Adam last name unknown the baker in Kitchen Confidential who made the most amazing bread calls it the bitch. Anthony Bourdain's description of Adam and of the bread is one of the more interesting incidents in his book. The point of the episode was knowing your workers. Knowing when something is wrong with them. 

The useful thing I learned from that is Adam tossed soggy mushrooms and bruised fruit and the like into his sourdough starter. And nobody can match Adam's bread. 

It is best suited for bakeries. The yeast that is spread out in dough and on implements that sit in water, attach to dry flour, carried in the air and goes all over the place, and collects, as say, a cheese cellar does.  On your clothes, on your arms, in your hair, everything. 

The starter with its complexity of organisms will flavor the dough on its own if baked right away, and it is good,  people notice a definite difference, but it is days of fermentation that intensifies sourdough flavor.  To do that the dough is chilled and slowed down.  After all that trouble getting organisms to go at top maximum activity and keep them that way, now they're commanded to slow. 

For three days. 

Who does that? 

Bakeries do. Or they should but most don't bother. It is not practical for the home baker. It just isn't. Unless the home baker makes a lot of bread. 

After fermentation of however many days the baker decides, the dough is expected to jump back to life again. And it does. In reverse, encouraged with heat of a warm room.  The baker controls this with temperature, first warmth to keep the starter active, slam on the brakes with coolness for the dough, then accelerate with warmth of room temperature or more by the stove that is warming the whole room. 

Meanwhile the starter is being fed,  and concurrently new bread dough is being prepared for the chiller.  Three cycles being maintained. The starter, the bread dough going into the chiller, loaves being baked three days later. 

Sounds like fun, eh? 

Another way is cheat on all this and use regular yeast the regular way and add a bit of this chilled and inactive starter for flavor. 

The trouble with that is the starter is inactive, most organisms inside it dead, the flour inside it completely exhausted and inert. To get it active again would take a few days of feeding. It changes the new dough's texture and affects the operation of its commercial yeast, turns the new dough into a substance that feels like clay, the dough becomes inelastic and does not bake properly. It is inert and insalubrious to the dough. 

But man, does it taste good.

They looked promising but they're horrible buns. Too bad. They are delicious, though. A bit tough to eat. And when you do, you go, "dammit, this is good." You just don't ever taste this. Not ever. A bottom of one of these would go very well with an egg, as Benedict, or with a sauce. Something to loosen it up. 

See, you can get your minds off your government forming policy that is determined by the most cynical and malevolent minds available and having all that litigated by ineluctably sinking to the lowest and  stupidest and most politicized court in all the entire land disputing the first and second definitions of "state" when used interchangeably in the same document. Yes, Assholes, we all know what you mean, but that is not what you said.