Cooking: December 2006 Archives

Today I made a loaf of sourdough bead with the leftovers from feeding the culture. You get a awful lot of spent batter when you feed a culture for a number of cycles. Usually, these go down the drain. But I pored off a cup of the active culture and used it in a rather simple recipe to make bread.

I used the wet kneading process where you 1) only add 75% of the flour and the other ingredients 2) autolyze for 20 minutes 3) knead for 6 minutes 4) add the rest of the flour while still kneading. It proofed for 5 hours. And it didn't rise all that much (maybe doubled in size).

Pictures and more after the cut...

During the now weekly feeding ritual, my forgetful mistake became a fortuitous surprise. I use a wide-mouth quart-sized canning jar to hold my Camaldoli sourdough culture. Usually, I pour out enough culture to leave 1 cup left in the jar. I then add a cup of flour and 3/4 cup of water, stir it up, and put it back into the warm oven. Today, I made some bread. So I didn't pour anything out before adding flour and water. I took a cup of the culture for my bread but still had a lot left. Mistakenly, I poured out the refreshed mixture down to one cup. Sigh. Oh well, I thought, I'll just let the culture do its thing with less than normal. Two cups is overkill anyways.

I check back and was surprised to find out that the culture had more than doubled in volume! It went from 1 11/16" to 4 1/2" for a 2.769 times increase. The lowest line is the starting level. You can see the beginnings of a hooch forming. The second line is the level of the foam. And the top line was the maximum height that was reached.

If I would have left it at its normal level, it would have surely overflowed all over the oven again.

Although I haven't been continually blogging about my pizzas, I still have been chugging along. Can you chug pizzas? Err, never mind.

I have got most of the variables working together in some sort of harmony -- at least a sort of non-discordance. But I believe that my dough is wetter than I would like. So my next step is to try a dryer dough. The recipe that I am using has a baker's percentage of 62% (345 grams of water and 555 grams of flour). I recalculated the ratio to 58%. But there was an unknown in the pizza recipe that was bugging me. It called for 48 grams of sourdough starter. And I have no idea what the percentage of water is to the flour in my sourdough culture. Since I started a new sourdough starter (an Italian Camaldoli culture), I have been adding exact amounts of flour and water. For each feeding, I add 165 grams of water (3/4 of a cup) and 120 grams of flour (1 cup). This results in a percentage of 137.5%. So, in my recipe, when I add 100 grams of culture to the flour, water, and salt, I now know the exact amount of water and flour. I calculated that I needed to add 99 more grams of flour to get the final percentage down to 58%.

Pizza pictures after the cut...

... sourdough babies. Its time for a change. I am trying a new sourdough culture out. Just to see how different it is in yeast action and taste. So I went to and bought the Italian sourdoughs. There were two that came and I resurrected the Camaldoli culture.

The picture is a day after sitting in my oven with the light on (it keeps the temperature around 90 degrees). This is the third feeding (there was enough culture to go into two wide-mouth canning jars). It is interesting how there is are three, very clearly separated layers. That is the first time that I have seen that before.

A couple of days later, it is now looking very homogeneous. And it is pretty active. A three-fourths full container overflowed all over the bottom of my oven. Fun, fun.