It’s been a while since I wrote about bread, and the reason is simple: I haven’t overcome the grief of starving Doug and Duke¹ to death!

However, I’m trying to give parenting another go with Dusty Springfelt², so I thought it’d be a good time to write about the last loaf of bread I made prior to taking a break. In doing so, I hope to highlight the areas that I want to focus on next.

The Starter

Having had great success with the rye loaves, I decided to take it up a notch and try baking a country loaf, which is made with wheat flour. The recipe I was following from the e5 bakehouse suggested the use of a wheat levain, but as I only had a rye starter, I decided to feed it wheat flour for 5 days prior to baking. The outcome was a starter that was more liquid, as is shown in the images below.

This looked a bit strange to me, but I trusted the stench emanating from the culture… and the baking process began!

Baking

My loaf turned out quite flat, though it was really tasty in my view³.

At the time I wasn’t sure what went wrong, but having read more about baking, I now understand that it was likely an issue with over proofing. During the fermentation process, the population of bacteria increases over time, and at a certain threshold, they start breaking down the gluten⁴ in the flour, causing much of the trapped air to escape!

When I made this, I was following a baking schedule and just left the dough to ferment overnight. Next time, I’ll try to do it at a time when I can monitor the growth to make sure it doesn’t over ferment.

Further, my sourdough starter may not actually have been optimal for making a country loaf. It turns out that watery starters (as opposed to stiff ones) favor the growth of the bacteria over the yeast, which explains the strong flavor of the final product. It could therefore be that the baking schedule I was following simply required a starter that didn’t have as much bacterial activity as mine did.

I now also have a pH meter which I’m excited to use. This will help me understand the state that my sourdough is in prior to baking,

1. My first and second sourdough starters ↩︎
2. Spelt so because I’m using spelt flour to make the starter ↩︎
3. I personally enjoy the tang in my bread ↩︎
4. Naturally, this means that the gluten content of this type of bread is much lower than that of normal loaf ↩︎