When Colin brought up the idea of making sourdough from scratch, I encouraged him wholeheartedly. Conveniently it coincided with the purchase of my new camera, so I was able to get some good pictures even though most of the action happened in the evenings.
The recipe he used comes from Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman.
I didn't really know how sourdough happened, so the process was fascinating to me. The culture is started with rye flour mixed with water. That's it.
Here's what it looks like on Day One. It's very thick and very dark (from the rye flour):
When starting a new sourdough culture, you have to "feed" it twice a day for a week. What this means is that twice a day you remove half of the culture (it grows a LOT every day!) and add more flour (all purpose flour after Day One) and water.
It bubbles and grows and becomes paler and thinner. It also smells really bad for the first few days. It doesn't start to smell like bread until Day 5 or so.
After you've spent a week creating your culture, you can finally make bread. This is a much longer process than we anticipated. First you have to "build" your culture. That's where you take a little bit of the culture (1 oz for two loaves of bread) and make into a bigger amount by adding flour and water. Then you have to let it sit for 12 hours to make sure you have enough active yeast to leaven the whole batch. I just want to reemphasize here, because it took a little while for this to sink in for me: what we're doing here is making bread out of flour, water, and at the very end, a bit of salt. That's it. All of the yeast comes naturally from the interaction between the flour and air. It's really incredible.
So after you've built your culture, you add more flour and water until it starts to resemble bread dough. Knead, rise, etc. I wish I had taken a picture of the loaves before they went into the oven, because they kind of looked like oversized pancakes. They were about 6 or 7 inches in diameter and only about 2 1/2 inches tall. Halfway through their time in the oven something completely magic happened and they just exploded in height! We were all a bit nervous about what would happen, but it was really cool to watch. And then they came out of the oven and just looked beautiful:
Delicious, too. A success all-around.
The only catch to this story is that once you've got the culture you have to keep feeding it. Twice a day. From now until forever. So... we'll see how long that lasts.
