Seed Culture Part Four

Tags

Artisan Breads Everyday, Peter Reinhart, seed culture, sourdough bread, sourdough starter, wild yeast starter

Doin’ a happy dance right now!

Within hours it started to bubble and activate, so I kept it nicely tended and aerated, stirring it every few hours, no more than four times before morning when I came down, like Christmas morning, to find that the starter had doubled in sized!!

Perfection!!

doubly bubby!

magical!

So now what? More flour, more water and now we start to divide the precious little seed culture into parts. If you are nervous about moving forward and would rather not throw out half of the starter, put it in a separate bowl and just do this next part to each half of the starter. It’s like an insurance policy, so I did that, I housed one half in a 2C measuring cup and the other in a 4C measuring cup.

aerating...

Ingredients:

• 10-1/2 TBS whole wheat flour
• 2 TBS filtered or spring water
• 1/2 C of the part three seed culture (roughly half of the starter)

Measure out 1/2 C (4oz/113g) of the part three of the seed culture and discard, give away or put the other half in another bowl as a backup. Add the new ingredients to the 1/2C seed culture and mix it to form a soft dough. I found that combining the new ingredients separately and then kneading the new with the old worked the best for me.

Cover it with plastic wrap and leave it at room temperature until the culture becomes active. It should swell and double in size. It can take anywhere from 4-24 hours for the part four culture to become fully active. If there is still little sign of fermentation after 24 hours, leave it at room temerpature until it becomes very active, continuing to aerate it at least twice a day.

When the seed culture has grown and smells acidic (like apple cider vinegar, mine was vaguely so), then you can move on to converting your starter to a mother starter or keep it in the refrigerator for up to three days.

If you are working on a starter, leave a comment! Let’s chat! This is possibly one of the most rewarding and frustrating baking experiences I have had since starting this blog!

For those of you that are new to this bread baking portion of my blog, I am working my way from cover to cover of Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Everyday. Feel free to leave your link and join in the fun!

Seed Culture, Trial & Error – Part I & II

Tags

Artisan Breads Every Day, Peter Reinhart, pineapple juice, seed culture, sourdough starter, wild yeast starter

Starting over. Again.

After two days of aerating and tending, the seed culture grew mold.

Overnight!

see the mold?? on the fork?

This is the seed culture that I re-started after Mei & I went to London with filtered water since I had run-out of pineapple juice. I don’t know how that happened, we were regularly stirring it and I felt like the room temperature didn’t drastically fluctuate – at least not enough to cause this level of spoiling and mold to occur!

Actually, I make it sound pretty bad, but there was only a few spots of mold, that I picked out with the fork and stirred the whole thing up, which emitted a horrible, rank and putrid smell like Mei had eaten something that really didn’t agree with her and came out the other end. It was pretty awful. But I figured I would pick out the mold and try to keep cultivating it, maybe it’s supposed to smell that bad?? *shrugs* I don’t know!

starter with water just before tossing it out

So the next day, after it kept smelling like that and nothing changed in the appearance of the starter, I decided to toss it out. Plus the thought of using even a tiny drop of that starter in a loaf of bread made me want to throw up a little in my mouth. It was terrible.

Back to square one. This time, I had pineapple juice! So we mixed our 3-1/2 TBS of unbleached, whole wheat flour with 1/4 C of pineapple juice in our cleaned out glass measuring cup, covered it up and waited. The first 24 hours revealed some tiny bubbles at the surface, which beckoned for some more flour and pineapple juice, so we added an additional 3-1/2 TBS of unbleached whole wheat flour and 2 TBS of pineapple juice, stirred it up, covered it and sat back to wait. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t sit, staring at our covered measuring cup full of seed culture, but I have now moved into a position where I baby it. I found that the closet upstairs with the water heater was too warm, even with the door open, and just in front of the oven – which is the warmest spot downstairs isn’t quite warm enough (the oven isn’t ever on when I leave the culture in front of it), so I just move it around the kitchen as I am cooking to try to maintain a fairly stable temperature, and it seems to be working! Fingers crossed, we can move onto step four of growing our seed culture because we are tantalizingly close to being able to make our mother starter, when we get to see if the bread actually tastes sour or not, toes and legs crossed for that one.

Stay tuned!