May 1st, 2020

Lazy Teenager Sourdough

I learned to make sourdough bread in about 1990, as part of my 4-H heritage baking course. It was fun and somewhat odd and impressed people, especially my parents who were the main consumers of anything I baked, and I’m mainly in the baking game for praise, so I kept at it. When we finished the course, the leader gave us some of her starter, which she had gotten when she married in the 1960s. I put in the freezer for long stretches when I was away at university but kept that starter alive for nearly 30 years until I murdered it through carelessness last fall and had to get a new one from a friend.

I’ve been startled both by how popular sourdough baking has become and how hard the modern-day version of it looks. I mainly use my old 4-H recipes and a Sunset Bread book from the 1970s that fell apart and I kept only the sourdough pages–when I read about what other people are up to with sourdough, I think, well, maybe that’s the right way and I could be doing more, but then I follow the links they post and get overwhelmed with doing something every day just to maintain the starter–you don’t even necessarily get any bread. And so many steps that might fail and ways to feel bad, and potentially end up with bad bread or even NO BREAD.

Look, I’m not saying you won’t have nicer starter, and nicer bread than mine if you do all those extra steps–you well might, and I have no way of leaving the house to taste-test anything right now. And the one luxury of the pandemic is time, so if you want to absorb your extra time with sourdough efforts, that seems worthwhile. BUT this is already a somewhat fussy bread-sport, and if you’re looking to keep it as part of your life post-pandemic, I recommend trying to trim down the effort to something a lazy teenager could manage. Since I once was such a teenager, here are some tips on the absolute least you can do for sourdough and still have nice–maybe not the nicest, but nice–bread.

  1. Healthy, active starter can go in the fridge for weeks at a time. Sometimes longer, but not necessarily longer–you should check up on it and give it a stir from time to time (not doing that is how I killed mine last fall). It can go in the freezer for months. Cold makes it dormant, not dead.
  2. To activate dormant starter, just put it out at room temperature for 24 hours and then do your feeding process (I’m just not going to weigh in on that–I’ve seen such disparate things on the internet. Everyone feed their starter as they wish.)
  3. If you are having trouble getting starter activated, or bread to rise, because your kitchen is cool, put it in the OFF oven (with a sign if you are forgetful or your housemates are untrustworthy) and a pan of hot water on the rack underneath. Change out the water as it cools or whenever you remember.
  4. Never ever heat starter–that is what kills it, or rather, cooks it (this happened once on Brooklyn 99 when Gina put starter near a space heater–it was exciting to have a sourdough plot line!)
  5. Starter should be fully activated before you attempt to bake with it–like, bubbles and smells yeasty. But you don’t need to get too scientific about exactly how activated.
  6. Recipes where sourdough is the only leaven (rising agent) pretty much all require two rises–one longish one for the sponge (starter plus a couple other ingredients, essentially a bowl of goo) and one shortish one for the finished loaf or rolls before they bake. Recipes with more rises may be more delicious–I have no idea–but you certainly don’t have to do more than two. When there’s another leaven like baking powder or soda or even yeast (I saw such a recipe, I swear!), the rises may be different or it may even be a “quick bread,” which means it rises during baking only and the sourdough is just for flavour. Some of these are quite nice and a good way to use up starter when you don’t have a tonne of time–don’t be snobby!
  7. Except for timing, you can’t really adjust recipes. Rise times will depend on the temperature and airborne yeast in your kitchen, and bake times will depend on the quirks of your oven, but otherwise baking is chemistry and you just need to follow the formula. People have tried to adjust sugar or salt in bread recipes at their peril–it’s not necessarily going to wind up sugary or salty, it’s just going in there and reacting. Even different fat contents in milk will have different effects–don’t mess with it. Good bread recipes will tell you how to adjust if you want whole-wheat bread, etc., because it’s not 1:1 on the flour. If the recipe contains ingredients you don’t have or don’t want to use, just find another recipe rather than fiddle with it. (Obviously, there are very expert bread-makers who know how to adjust the recipes, and sometimes you’ll just get lucky, but unless you really know what you’re doing, most of the time, messing with the recipe will mess up the bread.)
  8. Use the right size pan or loaves or buns or whatever (whatever the recipe says) and watch the oven like a hawk. Like, check 2/3 of the way through the baking just to see–this is all too much work to see it get burnt right at the end.

There, the sum of my sourdough expertise–it’s honestly not very much but has allowed me to cruise through many years of bread-making with much pleasure and little stress. I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, because it’s not like I think I know so much–more that I don’t think anyone needs to know so much. Sourdough was originally the bread of Alaskan gold miners–not really known for the culinary skills. They carried it on the dogsleds and then, when they got to camp–they baked. Sounds sort of nice, really….

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