Sourdough Bread

Roopa

Along with the rest of the world, I’ve decided it’s a great time to bake bread. It keeps me busy when I’m not yelling at my parents to stay indoors. Sourdough has always been a daunting prospect with the whole keeping a starter alive and all. I don’t even own a houseplant! I also travelled constantly in my last job, so I wasn’t really around often enough to bother.

But now it’s a pandemic and I basically don’t leave my home, so it’s actually good to have something keeping me accountable. I may not always feed myself, but I will feed Catrina! Yes, I’ve gotten stir crazy enough to name my starter…

Anyways, bread!

I was semi thinking about sourdough, and then Chef Marco at the Vancouver Pastry Training Centre said he would be doing daily instructional posts to make a starter and bread. I decided it was clearly meant to be and joined along. The nice thing about sourdough is that it doesn’t require yeast (which is in short supply these days). I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but it was PHENOMENAL. I am still in awe of how delicious this bread was. I’ll be doing different flour blends over the coming weeks, but this was a combination of bread flour and all purpose flour (mostly because that’s what I have available to me right now).

The first 6 days were spent making the starter, and then the next three days were to make my first loaf of bread. I’ve made some charts (as well as a handwritten flowchart) to explain the process.

MAKING THE STARTER

I initially used bread flour and then switched over to all purpose flour (since I’m running low on bread flour). I also added 10% rye flour at each feeding as it has more wild yeast! I’m not sure if that’s more common in Germany, but it worked out beautifully.