It has been a couple of months since I had written this very much annoyed post about the sourdough mafia and how every trad-wife on the country side seems to be baking bread in their white gown looking how happy they are providing for their family.
As expect my social media feed haunted me a couple of weeks of what I should do and what kind of beginner book I should buy from someone and then it also stopped again.
Summer came, life went outside and it was only until it started to to get a bit more darker in the morning and evenings and when the bakery in town was always out of bread again when I thought... 'hey I should get this bread baking thing going somewhere. Maybe now is the time'
But unattractive as it was again to start with the whole thing, I let some AI help me to actually go for it and add some steps in versus watching 1000 shorts and stories about people who claim this is 'the' truth.
It works for them maybe...But I need something that works for me and my schedule.
Starting the starter
I ended up taking the effort of making a sourdough starter because this seemed like a 2 week investment of a tiny thing to do and once it is there....it is there and can live in the fridge.
Use the rubber band from any kind of mail piece or bush of veggies to see how much it had risen
What I did was mix flour and water in equal amounts together. Now I did this with really small amounts, because I had the idea that this would turn out into a disaster and I hate wasting all kinds of stuff. So I took the literally most cheap flour from the supermarket and just started with 10 grams flour and 10 grams water.
(I'm sorry guys I am European I use metric system with actual numbers that tell me stuff. Cups are a mystery to me with 1 3/4 cup. What does this even mean?)
The next day the mix of 20 grams in total I added 20 grams of water and 20 grams of flour again. Yes this amount is more than the starting amount and a total of 60 grams.
All of a sudden there was this bubbly reaction at the end of the day and it had risen like crazy!
Apparently this is a normal reaction on this day 2 or 3 and it means that stuff is starting to work. Since it had risen so much (no the amount of grams doesn't get bigger, just the volume in there) the next day I threw some out because my cup isn't so big and added equal amounts of water and flour again to the part that was still left over.
I just did this for a couple of days. Honestly, I didn't pay full attention to how much I threw out every time. It was just a couple of spoons of tossing out to create some space and then refilling this with water and flour again.
Every day there more bubbles would start to develop from the bottom on which were good signs of that the life was starting to form.
The making of the starter took me 11 days with 4 minutes of effort every morning. Now that this thing is alive I can keep it in my fridge and just use some whenever I need a bit of it.
Baking Bread
It was time to actually try and make some bread for the first time using this starter. Again, I just made a tiny bread with it because this was still experimental phase and I really don't like to toss everything out that didn't work out.
I mixed 50 grams of starter in 150 ml of luke water and added 250 grams of flour and 5 grams of salt. These amounts were based on nothing specific, just about the average that people are using so I just wanted to start from there.
Now this is the part where the sourdough maffia tells you to first autolyze whatever that may mean and do all kinds of stretch and fold and use terms like bulk fermentation and slap and folds and whatever folds every 30 minutes.
Or...you can just leave the dough 6 hours like Gemini tells you and when it starts to get bubbly then make a ball out of it.
Then this is the part where the sourdough maffia tells you to do all kind of folding and rolling in edges and paint a rainbow on there and put this is a bannaton or rising basket which costs way to much of course
Or... you can make it into a ball and dump it back into the container it just came from, putting on some flour for the non stick.
So I put the ball back into the original container and put it in the fridge overnight.
In the morning it was time to back and the ball went into a big container in the oven at 240 degrees. Yes, the pan was pre heated when the oven was pre heating, but not as long as everyone tells you do. It took about 10-15 minutes or so to pre heat?
The dough ball was put in the oven with the lid on for keeping the steam in and after 20 minutes on 240 degrees we took the lid off. It look risen and nicely cracked already and then it was time for 20 minutes without the lid on the same temperature.
And true....240 degrees is a lot of degrees and the lid that you take off is daaaaamn hot. The hands here in the house can confirm that the lid was burning hot :((
But...! This mini loaf of bread came out just fine actually! The taste was perfect sour-wise and salt-wise and the texture was also nice and bubbly inside. I was super happy with the result!
There was a bit of starter left over that was able to grow and be able to use for next time and I think I am getting the bigger picture.
Now honestly...I skipped a 100 steps and everything still turned out just fine. Who are we all kidding guys with all of this nonsense?
Baking bread isn't that difficult and we shouldn't make such a big fuss out of it.