I started making sourdough bread five years ago when yeast wasn’t readily available in grocery stores (during the pandemic). At that time I learned to make a basic loaf and somehow made it work in ways that I can’t repeat now. I had a rhythm going that kept the starter alive, and could make some really good cinnamon buns. I don’t know what I was doing.

After a while, when the world was less fraught, and I could buy sourdough bread and/or yeast I got careless, and killed my starter not once, but twice. When it turns pink and smells like some stinky cheese, this is not a good thing. But the experience caused me to reflect on what the problem was with my cooking. Of course, problem number 1 was that I didn’t write down what I was doing. This intertwines with my general tendency to experiment slightly when I’m cooking. Maybe I don’t have an ingredient. Maybe I have to stop using milk because I have an allergic grandchild. One of those conditions is temporary and the other is fairly long term. In both cases there’s some drift in the ingredients and amounts. The key is that without a recipe I can’t “drift” back. I get farther and farther out of line.

The bread in this particular moment became so tough, even when I wasn’t killing the starter, that I didn’t really want to make more, and of course that spoiled the rhythm of bread-making. Rhythm is all important for keeping sourdough starter in good shape AND rhythm is also very important when the baker is reaching a certain age. Time passes very swiftly and it is easy to lose track over a week or two. Oh, wait. I didn’t make bread last week. There goes my starter again.

So the third time I got starter I really put effort into having a clear recipe and program for what I was doing. Here’s what I came up with.
Remove starter from the refrigerator, weigh it, and then divide it in half. (I measured the weight of the bowls I’m using for this long ago. Just sayin’.) It’s about 400 grams total so now I have two bowls of 200 grams each.
*Add to each bowl
100 grams of all purpose flour
100 grams of water
*Stir both with a clean fork, and cover.
*Leave on the counter until bubbly. (This might be overnight or not. Depends on when I took the stuff out of the refrigerator.) **Note
*Return the first bowl to the refrigerator still covered. (I probably actually wait too long to refrigerate my continuing starter.)
*Pour second bowl into Kitchen Aide
*Add
3 cups of flour
1 cup of water
1 1/2 teaspoons of salt
3 tablespoons of butter OR oil
*Mix for five minutes while I grease two 8×4 inch bread pans.
*Divide the dough in half, roughly, shape gently and place in pans.
*Allow to rise until doubled.
*Bake at 375º for about 20 minutes. Use a thermometer to check for internal temperature above 195º.
*Remove from oven. Turn out on a baking rack to cool.

Running through this procedure gave me pretty good bread and allowed me to experiment in tiny ways. Then, when I wanted to use things like spelt flour or Sonoran wheat flour I had a firm place to start.

Speciality wheat flours are often VERY thirsty. That 3/1 ratio of flour to water is all wrong for these newer flours. They need more water and they need time to think about the extra water.

*Add to EMPTY mixing bowl
2 cups of Hard red or Hard white wheat flour
1 cup of white all purpose flour
1 1/3 cups of water
*Mix and let sit for fifteen minutes. ****Note
*Add sourdough from ‘second bowl’ and mix.
*Add butter or oil. Mix. (For some reason nearly all recipes recommend adding butter/oil and salt later in the mixing process… )
*Add salt. Mix for at least 6-8 minutes while you grease pans (using coconut oil if necessary to avoid butter for milk allergies… Avocado oil does NOT work.)
*As above, rise till doubled, cook around 375º to 400º for around twenty minutes.

I have a secret suspicion that my oven runs hot, so I use a thermometer to check the innards of the loaf. Around 190º it is still going to be gummy inside… Too far above 205v and the bread will be dry.

VOCABULARY: Levain and autolyse

** I learned that this process actually has a name. It’s called making a levain, and can get very fancy. If I just used half of my bubbly starter and cooked right away, that would be different, but somehow my brain couldn’t sort out when to feed the starter under those circumstances. That’s why I do what I do. But I’m glad that I didn’t read about levains initially. The recipes call for using about 15 or 20 grams of starter… not the 200 I’m using. I’d be back to the problem of feeding the starter on some schedule.

On the other hand, when I started reading the fancy levain recipes they suggested tailoring the levain to your recipe and what I came up with is this. I use white all purpose unbleached flour for my starter, but I could use whole wheat flour in the levain. That would mean that the sourdough creatures would be more attuned to the whole wheat later in the bread-making process. Experimentation is indicated.

****The fancy word for this is autolyse, which means mix flour and water and let it rest. Real autolysing goes for a longer period of time, 30 minutes to several hours, but I’d forget what I was doing in that period of time.