Fermenting Outside the Box

Welcome back to this third installment in my essay series about fermentation – and what it has to offer you…

A quick note first: These essays are currently rather long (even by my standards 😀 ), which is mainly due to the Hands-On Homework sections. I’ve considered to move them into separate posts, but to me they are an integral part of this series. Besides, their length will drop over time, when all the practical details, e.g. which water to use, have been explained at least once.

I’ve thus decided to keep everything together in one post for now. The homework sections are always clearly labelled, and you can thus use the search function of your browser to hop straight down to the instructions if you want to look things up later.

And now, on we go! 🙂

In the last essay, we looked at the rear end of a duck fermentation from a scientific angle. Although, admittedly, we didn’t go very deep – just deep enough to carve out two essential hurdles (which I then promptly invited you to consider in other areas of your life).

We also got a sourdough starter going. Or rather, I hope you did! 😀

(If not, I sincerely hope you will consider doing so now. Unless you can’t eat bread at all and are thus going to sit out this homework, I promise it will be worth it!)

But while the scientific view on fermentation raised some interesting issues (oxygen or not? what different kinds of fermentation are there? and are always the same kinds of critters involved?, to name just few), it didn’t give us a big picture understanding of what fermentation is. Last time, we inspected a lot of trees – but didn’t make time to contemplate the forest.

So today, I will attempt to answer the question “What is fermentation?” on another level, a level which is at once more practical and just as abstract in its own right…

As I pointed out last time, in order to understand the concept of frementation, we first need to decide what is even covered by this term. So in today’s approach, let’s work our way from the bottom up: We’re going to start with some things we call “fermentation” and have a closer look at them to figure out what this thing called fermentation even is – and what happens when it happens.

We have already established that sauerkraut is a fermented goodie. Let’s use it for a very first attempt to clarify the term “fermentation”, then, by listing some specifics of sauerkraut:

In order to get sauerkraut, we start with cabbage heads and slice them. The sliced cabbage is then pressed into a kraut pot or other fermentation vessel, together with salt. The vessel is “sealed” – not quite airtight, but in a manner which allows gases to get out, but not to get in.

(And from what we could smell during our little foray down into my basement, there are indeed some gases coming out – strangely smelling gases, that is! 😉 )

Finally, when we lift the lid again after a few weeks, just like magic… there is kraut inside.

Peeking inside, it still looks like sliced cabbage somehow, but then not quite – a little bit more brownish and more wilted. It still smells like sliced cabbage somehow, but not quite – a bit less of the typical cabbage smell, and somehow more sour and, well, different. And it still tastes a bit like cabbage somehow, but not quite (less crispy, for starters), and also more sour than before.

Hm. So in a first approximation, we could deduce that fermentation transforms sliced and crushed cruciferous plant matter plus no air plus salt into smelly air plus wilted, brownish and more sour sliced matter, in the span of a few weeks.

But quite obviously, this description does not cover all of the things we call fermentation, not even remotely!

(Just try to imagine how “wine” would look like if all fermentation worked like this: wilted, brownish strips of what used to be a plant floating around in a cabbagey-smelling, sour and salted liquid… Thanks, but I think I’ll pass! 😀 )

We can conclude, then, that one example clearly isn’t enough to deduce a general pattern. 😉

Thankfully, we also have a second example at hand to draw upon: the sourdough starter which is, hopefully, happily bubbling away in your kitchen by now!

In order to produce this starter, you combined flour with water to a somewhat runny dough, left it out in the open for a few days, adding more flour and water each day. There were bubbles emerging at some point, and likely also some strange smells during the process. And the end result was a slightly sour-smelling and sour-tasting runny dough.

Hm. It seems there are some distinct differences between sauerkraut and sourdough starter, doesn’t it?

First, there was no salt anywhere in sight this time, and no crushing of the dough involved. And while for the kraut, all the matter is pressed into the pot right at the beginning, for your sourdough starter you kept adding matter each day.

Also, as I already hinted at last time, there is this pesky issue of oxygen vs. no oxygen – it clearly matters, but the issue doesn’t seem to be quite as simple as we might have thought from looking at my kraut pot. And of course, this time we didn’t use any leafy plant matter at all, cruciferous or not – and we most certainly didn’t do any slicing! 😀

On the other hand, there are some interesting similarities between the process of kraut-making and the process of sourdough starter-making:

In both cases, we start with some kind of initial matter, sliced cabbage on the one hand, and a runny dough from flour and water on the other.

Both things take a certain while.

In both cases, the environment clearly matters – otherwise I would hardly have given instructions on temperature etc.

Both fermentations produce gases, and distinctly smelling ones at that.

In both examples, the end product is sourer than the initial matter was.

And, maybe most importantly: Both are processes during which something (cabbage or a “dough”) is transformed into something, well, not different altogether, but distinctly different.

Or, to sum things up:

Fermentation is a transformational process which, under suitable conditions, transforms an initial matter into a ferment and gases. The consistency, smell and taste of the resulting ferment usually differ from those of the initial matter. In particular, the ferment becomes more sour.

There – not bad as a first attempt, it it? 🙂

While this isn’t quite a “formula”, it describes an underlying pattern which is general enough to cover the various core cases of fermentation, and specific enough to let us distinguish fermentation from other kinds of processes and transformations (like boiling pasta).

It’s not quite perfect yet, granted. But based on just the two examples we have worked with so far, it’s actually quite good!

Re-reading our new description of fermentation, though, some further questions raise their curious heads…

For example, if fermentation is a transformational process – what then, exactly, is being transformed during this process?

Also, certain things appear seemingly out of thin air during fermentation (or rather, as smelly air 😉 ). But where do the smells and the acidity come from? And are there also things which disappear?

Why does the process of fermentation take a certain amount of time? Who, or what, causes or starts this process? And what stops it?

These are all very good questions – and we’ll get into all of them in more detail in the upcoming essays. Before we wrap things up for today (and I hand out your homework), though, let’s take a step back and consider what it is we’ve done today.

In today’s essay, we’ve dissected two different kinds of fermentation (sauerkraut and sourdough starter), and have then compared and contrasted our findings for both against each other.

Our goal was to identify some kind of general rule or underlying pattern which describes what fermentation is. And we have been quite successful in this endeavour, methinks!

But looking at these two examples again, with as unprejudiced an eye as possible… how did we even know we could lump both of them together into one category?

I mean, sure, we all know that both are kinds of fermentation, right?

But leaving this kind of “established knowledge” aside – why and how would you determine that sauerkraut and bread are two different expressions of the same underlying pattern?

We assume this because we “know” it. But simply going by personal everyday experience, the two processes are actually quite different, as we have (tongue in cheek) seen above.

And just to be clear, I’m not trying to annihilate scientific knowledge here and fling us back into the stone age! But if we leave the scientific level aside and focus on your own, everyday, hands-on experience, determining whether sauerkraut and your sourdough starter are two instances of the same underlying process isn’t quite as simple, is it?

(Interestingly enough, our ancestors, without our scientific tools and insights, indeed seem to have treated different kinds of fermentation as different things – but we’ll get to this in a later essay.)

On the other hand, the ability to group both processes under the same broad umbrella gives us certain advantages: We can name things more clearly, for example.

We can also compare and contrast them, in order to work out the underlying processes and structures, but also to see more clearly the outliers and exceptions.

We can think about other instances of this pattern in the same terms.

And, as we talked about at length at last time, by working out the underlying “prototypical” process, we can better explore the borderline cases and the questionable ones.

So all of this seems to be rather helpful, doesn’t it? And in fact, part of it is what us humans do on a regular basis: Lumping different things into the same categorie is one of the most essential skills little kids have in order to make sense of the world, as evidenced by that cute phase when every four-legged animal is a “doggie”.

But there is more going on here…

What we did above wasn’t just based on the (very powerful) human skill of categorization. Putting things into neat categories means to assign them labels – is vinegar a ferment or not, for example?

instead, we also applied another human skill which is at least as powerful: The skill of identifying patterns.

By comparing and contrasting sourdough and kraut, we figured out an underlying pattern – a general “rule” of how the process of fermentation works.

(Or rather, how it usually works. Of course, life is rarely black and white, and the universe loves to tease us with exceptions! Somebody up there must be having a lot of fun watching us humans try to press everything into neat little boxes…)

These two very basic human skills, categorization and pattern-finding, are indeed very powerful, and very deeply wired in us.

This has its advantages and its drawbacks. 😉

As probably won’t surprise you, for today’s essay I’m not so much interested in the cases where we apply these skills well, productively and to our advantage. Instead, let’s have a quick look at the occasions when applying (or not applying) these basic human skills gets us into trouble of some kind…

As I said above, categorization and pattern-finding are very powerful human skills. So powerful, in fact, that it can be hard to switch them off.

Or, in straightforward terms:

We’re prone to pack things into neat little boxes, whether they all fit into this same box or not.

And we’re prone to see patterns and general rules, whether there are any or not.

Oftentimes, these things happen unconsciously, i.e. we aren’t even aware of them. And in fact, becoming aware of them can take some major effort!

For example, whenever somebody new comes into our lives, like a new boss or coworker, we (subconsciously) expect them to do certain things, or to think certain thoughts, etc – based on prior experiences with other people (and ourselves! 😉 ), which have led us to build certain categories in our minds, and to establish, search for and expect certain patterns.

To a certain degree, this is extremely helpful. I don’t think I need to point out, though, that it can also be extremely unhelpful on some occasions.

The clearer we become on our own internal categories and on the patterns we have established or expect, the easier it will be for us to apply them productively where they help, and to put them aside where they hinder.

There is another issue at play here, though – a bit less obvious, and a bit harder to deal with in ourselves, too:

It’s a bit cliché, but imagine the person who has gone through their umpteenth major breakup or divorce and just can’t see that they are always re-enacting the very same pattern, in all of their relationships (while it’s perfectly obvious to everybody around them).

What happens in this case is not that said person puts people or situations into unwarranted categories (although they might do this, too!). It’s also not that said person applies general rules and patterns where they don’t fit (although, again, they might also do this!).

Nope, it’s that they fail to see a pattern where one actually exists.

And this, alas, can be the hardest of these fallacies to catch…

You can become aware of your own wrong or unproductive categorizations, and of the instances when you apply rules and see patterns where you’d be better off without.

Granted, it requires a certain level of introspection, some rigorous self-examination and, most of all, honesty with yourself – and it will most certainly not always be easy.

But seeing a connection which you haven’t seen before, a pattern (of behavior, for example) or a shared category which you have missed so far… this requires all of the aforementioned, plus some creativity and the ability to step back and perceive a situation from a higher level.

(At least if you want to achieve it on purpose, and not just by accident…)

Thankfully, while as fallible humans our categorization and pattern identification (and application!) skills will never be perfect, we can get a long ways to applying them more productively.

And, lo and behold, it’s not even very hard – it simply takes a bit of practice and reflection. (Of course, as you well know, simple ain’t the same as easy!)

With these thoughts, my part of today’s work is almost done, while yours is about to start… 😉

Before I wrap up today’s essay and tell you what we’re going to talk about next time, then, here is your homework for today:

Inner Fermentation Homework

During the next two weeks, whenever there is a situation in your life which is giving you some kind of trouble or grief, which is annyoing, infuriating, shameful, painful, or what have you, do your best to answer the following questions:

1. Figure out which categories you are applying in this situation.

   For example, are you lumping different people into the same big group? Or are you (consciously or not) putting this situation into the same category as another situation you encountered earlier?

2. Figure out which underlying patterns you expect to see.

   For example, have you repeatedly made the experience that once people say or do X, they will then also say or do Y, and you are now expecting just this pattern to play out in the current situation, too?

3. Figure out which patterns you are enacting in this situation.

   This is a bit trickier… But to the best of your ability, figure out which patterns you tend to follow. For example, if somebody does something specific, are you prone to feel some specific emotions, or think some specific thoughts? Or if somebody acts a certain way, will you usually react in a very distinct pattern yourself?

4. Figure out which categories you could put things or people in, but haven’t yet.

   This might require some reflection. Which other labels could you put on the situation as a whole which you wouldn’t usually consider using? And on the different people involved (yes, including yourself)?

5. Try to find at least one underlying pattern or general “rule” which would also be a decent fit for this situation.

   In order to do this, it helps to contemplate questions like: Can what is happening be described in other terms as well? Are there other, completely unrelated situation, occurences, etc which are in some ways comparable (even if it’s not in all ways)? If you absolutely can’t come up with anything, nature can be a good source of inspiration here.

6. And finally, ask yourself the question: Is what is going on here a process – and is it a transformational one?

   If so, what/who is being transformed, by what/whom, and how?

There you have it… The more often you apply these questions to your life, the more you will profit from them.

And most importantly: Have fun with them! 🙂

Hands-On Fermentation Homework: Sourdough Bread

In today’s Hands-On Homework, you’re going to ferment something which isn’t just “edible” – instead, it’s tasty, delicious, and divinely-smelling: your very own sourdough bread!

(If you haven’t gotten started with your sourdough starter yet, please hightail it back to the last essay, and get started immediately. Seriously. You can thank me later!)

Now, quite a few people treat sourdough as a (highly complex) science. Which, I suppose, says more about them than about sourdough. 😉

A lot of other people are afraid to work with sourdough because they think it’s rocket science.

Well, let me just say that both groups are making life a lot more complicated than it has to be…

One of my goals for this essay series is to excite you about fermenting things yourself (if you shouldn’t be excited yet, that is). And another goal is to make fermentation for you as simple as possible – which, of course, will increase the chance that a. you’ll actually do it, and b. you’ll get excited about it! 😀

So for today’s Hands-On Homework, we’re not going to attempt any rocket science. We won’t attempt to get the measurements right to a T. We won’t worry about hitting just the right percentage of water in the starter or the dough. We won’t sweat it about getting the temperature and the time for your dough to rise just right.

We’ll simply create a common sense no-frills sourdough, and bake a tasty bread with it. That’s it – but if you’ve never experienced a fresh sourdough bread, you’ll be in for a treat…

Stuff you need

What you’ll need for a divinely smelling and heavenly tasting fresh sourdough bread is

• some of your starter,
• flour,
• water (as explained in the last homework),
• some salt,
• optional: a dash of olive oil,
• optional: tasty additions (see below),
• a baking pan/loaf pan,
• and some fat for greasing it.

Flour

A pure rye bread is not to everybody’s taste, and the consistency of the dough can be difficult. A mixed-flour bread is a lot easier (both on your digestion and in handling) and more yummy. Thus what you will need today is some more rye flour and also some wheat or spelt flour.

Flour comes in different types, from whole-grain to very “white” and refined, depending on how it is milled (and which parts are included in milling). To add to the fun, there seems to be a general rule of humankind that each country on earth needs to come up with its own flour type classes and its own labels for them…

So instead of listing umpteen potentially appropriate flour types for various countries, let me give you the general idea (in case you don’t already know these things):

Generally speaking, the very fine (and refined) flour is great for cakes etc, but (on its own) won’t give your bread a nice, bread-like consistency. Whole-grain flour is possible for bread, of course, but an all whole-grain bread is coarser and not as fine as most breads are. That’s to say, you can use whole-grain flour if you want, but you don’t have to.

Classical “bread flours” are usually the medium types, i.e. in between the refined and the whole-grain.

(All of this has to do with the amount of protein and other components in the different flour types, depending on how they are milled, treated, and which parts of the grain had been included in milling in the first place.

If this tickles your interest, go ye forth and research it for yourself. I promised you “no rocket science”, and thus we’ll leave it at this… 😉 )

If you’ve baked bread before and know what kinds of flours you like, go for them. If you aren’t sure, my recommendation is to use bread flour (aka one of the medium types) of both rye and wheat/spelt for your bread. If bread types of flour aren’t available, try all-purpose flour, or a mixture of an all-/purpose or (if necessary) a refined flour type with some whole-grain flour.

One final note: Going forward, you will also need more rye flour to feed your remaining starter. You can either use whole-grain or bread type rye flour for feeding, whatever you happen to have at hand. Since some of the starter will consistute part of your bread (albeit not the largest part, but still), it makes sense to feed it with the type of rye flour you’re baking with anyway.

Salt

For salting your bread, any kind of salt will do, whatever you usually use for cooking or baking. If you want to go all fancy, you can certainly use himalaya salt or sea salt or whatnot, but any plain supermarket salt will work just as well.

Optional Additions

We like to add a generous dash of olive oil to our bread dough (say, a tablespoon or so), but that’s up to you – the recipe will work with or without it.

What’s also up to you is any other additions you might fancy:

Any seeds or nuts, for example, like walnut, sesame or pumpkin seeds, poppy seeds, linseed, chopped cashews, etc.

Or herbs, fresh or dried. Rosemary is one of my favourites, but beware! A pinch too much, and it can quickly become too overwhelming. Oregany or thyme are also nice, or any other herbs you might fancy. (Very delicate herbs will suffer from the heat, though.)

Other possible and very tasty additions are caraway seeds. Or roasted onions. Or… well, get creative! 😀

Pro tip: Try a potatoe bread. Peel a couple of medium-sized cooked potatoes, and turn them into mash. We use a German spaetzle press for this purpose, but since you will most likely not have one at home, mash the potatoes with whatever suitable tool you happen to have at hand. Then stir the mash into the dough in Stage 2 – but be aware that your potatoe bread will rise faster than usual!

Baking pan and fat

You’re going to need a pan to bake the bread in this recipe, as the dough is too liquid to keep its form on its own. Any longish metal baking pan or loaf pan is fine, although the shape doesn’t really matter much – you can certainly bake a round bread instead if that’s the shape your form has.

The loaf pans we usually use have a volume of roughly 2 to 2.5 litres. If your pan should be a good size smaller or larger, you’ll need to adjust the amounts below accordingly.

Before filling in the dough, you will need to grease your baking pan. For this, you can use any fat you want.

Instructions

Baking a great and tasty sourdough bread is super-simple and not much work at all. All it requires is a bit of time and patience, and some common sense. And once you get the hang of the timing and the consistencies, it’s a breeze.

The whole process happens in two stages:

First, you mix some starter with some more (rye) flour and water to create a pre-dough. The purpose of the pre-dough is to increase the amount of fermentation critters, and to activate them some more.

Once they are all hyped up, so to speak, you can then put a part of this pre-dough back into your starter, and use the rest in the second stage for the actual dough. This final dough will also contain the salt and additions, plus more flour (now potentially also wheat or spelt) and water.

The reason we put some of the pre-dough back into the starter is to a. increase the amount of starter you have at hand (although you could also achieve this by feeding more, of course), and b. to get some of the activated and ready-to-work fermentation critters which have developed in the pre-dough on your kitchen counter back into your starter, to keep it from going shale in the fridge over time.

Technically speaking, you could keep just enough starter for the next bread, use it all in the pre-dough, and then save just enough of the pre-dough as starter for the next bread before you prepare the main dough.

The drawback of this is, of course, that if you should forget to save some of the pre-dough as starter, your starter culture is gone… (which would, of course, never ever happen to me!! 😀 )

So to be on the safe side, we always keep some starter in the fridge, and only use part of it for the pre-dough – and I strongly recommend you do the same. 😉

Before we start with the actual instructions, a note to the sourdough bread pros among you:

When I said I would keep this recipe dead simple, I meant it. You will notice that there is no feeding the starter in advance, and no making sure your starter is all bubbly and at its most activated (although you can of course do this if you want!). If I’d produce bread on a commercial scale, I’d certainly do this to standardize the process – just as I’d use other forms of standardizaion, like ensuring the same water content at all times etc.

But for simple home purposes, a not-previously activated starter will work just as well – we bake great bread this way all the time. It will simply take a bit longer for your pre-dough to rise. But since we don’t have to do anything besides letting it sit a bit longer and do its thing, that’s fine with me – whereas the extra step of activating it in advance would keep me and maybe also some of my readers from actually baking bread in some weeks, so…

Ok, then, let’s get to work.

Stage 1: Pre-dough

Mix the following things in a bowl:

• 210 grams of your starter
• 270 grams of rye flour
• 360 grams of water

Now, these are weird numbers, I know. 😉 If I remember correctly, we picked them up from some bread recipe we used to use for a while, and they stuck with us. And since they work, and never change a running system etc…

There is no need to take these measurements to extremes, though – if you end up with 200 grams of starter, 250 or 300 grams of rye flour, and 350 or 380 grams of water, your bread will end up perfectly fine, too. Please don’t let the perfect be an enemy of your delicious home-made sourdough bread! 🙂

This pre-dough should be soft enough for you to stir it with a spoon. Simply stir all ingredients together well in a larger bowl (you’ll add things later in stage 2), cover with a towel, and just let it rest in your kitchen or any other convenient place.

Your pre-dough now needs to rise. This process will take several hours, and can take up to half a day or more. How fast it rises depends on the temperature and on how active your starter is at any given time (or, in other words, on when you last fed it). With an active (= fed a day in advance) starter and a warm room, things will move a lot quicker than with a sleepy starter and a cool room.

In any case, you will visibly see your pre-dough rise – i.e, it will expand, and you will also see small bubbles on the surface, or small “holes” in the surface where bubbles had risen up and popped.

Once it’s visibly expanded and bubbling, you’re good to move on to stage 2. (My experience is that rushing at this stage won’t do you any good, as it will only delay stage 2 all the more…)

If you shold be out of the house for a few hours or the day, don’t worry about it. Just put the pre-dough someplace a bit cooler, and let it do its stuff. Worst case, the rise will stop, and it will deflate again a bit. It’s still an active pre-dough, though, and can be used just as well.

(We oftentimes start the pre-dough in the morning, and the plan is to make the dough at some point in the afternoon, and to bake the bread in the evening. But sometimes stuff happens, we forget about it, etc, and only realize late at night that we’ve still got a pre-dough sitting around. In these cases, it’s usually already well into deflating. There’s absolutely no need to throw it away, though: We simply put the bowl with the pre-dough into a cooler room overnight and proceed as usual in the morning.

Sourdough bread really is very simple and very forgiving, and there is no need to turn it into an exact science – or into a challenge!)

So please don’t worry about catching the perfect moment! Worst case, your final dough will either rise a bit slower (if the pre-dough wasn’t quite as far yet), or the bread will end up being a tad more “soured” (if you left the pre-dough for too long) – I promise it will taste just as amazing, though!

Stage 2: Dough

Once the pre-dough has risen, put some of it back into the jar with your starter. Then (but only afterwards!) add the following things to your dough:

• 120 grams of rye flour
• 280 grams of wheat or spelt flour
• 20 grams of salt
• optional: generous dash of olive oil
• optional: any other additions
• water as necessary (see below)

(It should be about 400 grams of flour altogether. We like our bread heavy on rye, but if you want less rye in your bread, adjust the amounts accordingly.)

Stir everything together with a wooden spoon, and add water as necessary. The dough should not be runny, but hard enough so you can just about stir it (it does require a bit of insistence on your end). On the other hand, it should be soft enough to not be crumbly.

A bit more water, or a bit less, won’t make or break your bread – more will make it more moist, less will make it less moist (duh!). But since no two loaves are ever the same anyway with this method, and we don’t attempt them to be, this is fine.

Once everything is stirred together well, scrape all of the dough into your pre-greased loaf pan. Cover with the towel again, and let the dough rise.

This will usually take less time than for the pre-dough, and sometimes considerably less time (depending on how sluggish your starter was at the start). If things don’t seem to be moving at all, put the covered pan into your oven at 30 degrees Celsius (about 85 Fahrenheit, or whatever the lowest setting of your oven is). Even an oven light and a closed oven door will do wonders here!

(Yes, you could do the same with the pre-dough if you wanted to speed up stage 1… 😉 )

The dough should start to rise above the pan (depending on the amount of dough, of course, and on the size of the pan) before you proceed to the next stage (baking).

At this second “dough” stage, timing matters somewhat more than at the pre-dough stage:

If you don’t let the dough rise enough, your final bread will be denser and not as fluffy. If you let the dough rise for too long, it will attempt to leave the pan and take over the world. And if you let it rise even longer, it will begin to deflate again, and the bread will again be more dense and not as fluffy.

There is still a copious window of time for getting things right, though, i.e. you don’t need to manically check your bread every two minutes. But if you should e.g. be out of the house for a while, it’s best to put the pan into a cooler place, to make the dough rise slower and give you more of a chance to catch things within the right window.

Baking

Once your dough has risen, pre-heat your oven to 250 degrees Celsius (about 480 degrees Fahrenheit) using upper and lower heat. Yes, that’s hot. 😉 If your oven doesn’t do quite as much, use the highest temperature it has.

At the same time, put a grid into the oven at about middle height (or a bit lower in a smaller oven). Fill a small baking dish or other heat-proof dish with some water, and put it on the grid, to one side of the oven. (You want to create some steam, as it will give you a nicer bread crust.)

When the oven is all heated up, slide in the bread within its pan (!) next to the water dish, and set a timer to 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, reduce the heat to 175 degrees Celsius (about 350 Fahrenheit), and set the timer to another 20 minutes.

Once the timer beeps again, take the bread out of the oven, and then out of the pan. (Depending on the stickiness of the pan and the quality of your greasing, you might have to give the pan a good shake to loosen the bread!)

Put the bread back into the oven (onto the grid, i.e. without the pan). The water dish should still be in there. Re-set your timer once again, this time to 15-20 minutes. (Depending on your oven, and on how crisp you want your bread crust.)

That’s it. 🙂

Oh, and once you pull it out, try not to dig in right away… 😉

Caring For Your Starter

We keep our starter in the fridge at all times, and if possible I’d recommend you do the same for simplicity’s sake (in hot summers or hot climates, a starter left outside might go bad on you otherwise). If your fridge isn’t an option, put your starter into a cool place.

Since we usually bake bread at least once a week, we’ve established the simple rythm of feeding our starter whenever we prepare a pre-dough anyway. If you bake less often, make sure you don’t forget to feed your starter in the interim!

Once a week should be fine, although a well-established starter will tolerate not being fed for longer on occasion, e.g. if you should be away from home.

Since we usually bake bread which includes rye, we keep ours as a rye starter and feed it with rye flour, accordingly. If you wanted a wheat or spelt starter instead, you could achieve this by feeding with wheat or spelt from now on.

I’ve already covered putting some of your pre-dough back into the starter further above, before you add all the other things (especially the salt!) into the dough.

Important: Even if you are only following this homework for the sake of these essays, and you don’t plan to ever bake a sourdough bread ever again, do not throw away your starter just yet! We will still need it a couple more times. In this case, please continue to feed it about once a week for now.

Conclusions and Outlook

Next time, we’re going to take yet another step back, and answer a rather fundamental question: Why?

That is, why do we even ferment things in the first place? And, of at least as much interest: Why do I spend several months’ worth of essays (and the corresponding working hours on my end) on this topic?

Until then, I hope you will enjoy this week’s homework – both the inner one and the hands-on one (and most importantly its results)! 🙂

The next essay will go up on on Sunday, March 15th. And as usual, I’m looking forward to your thoughts, questions and comments below! 🙂

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Image: Oli Zubenko on Unsplash