A few weeks ago, I sent away to a little company in Washington state — GEM Cultures.
Yesterday the postman rang and there was the little box on my porch, containing (hooray!) a couple of ice packs an instruction booklet, and a little vial of live, active rye-flour sourdough starter.
I fed it carefully that evening, and again this morning, and then, after some fretting about how to proceed, I decided to bake the first loaf of bread by simply substituting some of the sourdough batter for some of the water and flour in my "normal" loaf. In other words, I still put the same amount of jarred yeast and sugar into it.
Gorgeous!
It didn't taste particularly sour, or particularly sweet. It was just a wonderfully-textured sandwich bread, with none of the crumbliness that often characterizes my bread machine breads. Here is my recipe.
- 1 cup fresh whole-wheat starter batter
- 1/2 cup water (boiled to remove chlorine)
- 2 and 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 egg
- 1 Tbsp molasses
- 1 Tbsp honey
- 2 Tbsp coconut oil
- 2 Tbsp dry milk
- 2 scant tsp salt
- 1 Tbsp gluten
- 1 and 1/2 tsp bread machine yeast
… baked using the 20-minute extended rise option.
The loaf seemed to rise pretty high; I think next time I might remove the jarred yeast and sugar, which I'm told will produce a denser, sourer loaf. I'm curious about the difference. I also need to experiment to determine whether it's necessary to boil Minneapolis tapwater first, as the instructions told me was necessary to keep some municipal tapwater from killing the culture.
After setting aside two portions to use next time, I had enough starter left to make a batch of waffle batter. Will report on that tomorrow morning.
bearing blog 