This bread has been nothing but failure for me every step of the way. And when you are making sourdough bread there are a lot of steps. Sourdough bread is made by soaking flour with water at room temperature, which provides a growing medium for the wild yeast that is naturally present in your kitchen. You continue to add flour and water for several days until the dough rises, indicating that the yeast is working. This dough, called a starter, can then be kept in the refrigerator and refreshed whenever you wish to make sourdough bread. Along with the wild yeast, this starter is populated by various bacteria which produce the acids that give sourdough bread its distinctive flavor. A small amount of starter is used as the base for sourdough bread, providing both the sour flavor and the leavening power of the wild yeast.
Disclaimer: you probably have no interest in reading most of this. I'm writing it so that I can look back at it when I feel up to trying this again some day in the distant future. You probably want to skip down to the last paragraph or so and just read the part about how ridiculously bad this bread was. However, if you have made sourdough bread before and want to read the whole thing and tell me where my dumb mistakes are, that would be lovely.
I began my starter over a month ago. PR recommends using pineapple juice in place of water for the first two days of building the starter to prevent the growth of a particular strain of bacteria that can be problematic. The acidity of the pineapple juice provides a pH that is good for the wild yeast and bad for this particular bacteria. So on day 1 I mixed pineapple juice with flour, and on day 2 I added more pineapple juice and flour, as instructed. I was excited to see a slight rise on day 3, just as PR said there may be, and I discarded half of it and added water and more flour as directed. On day 4, when the sponge was supposed to have doubled, I saw no rise. PR said that was a possibility, and so I let it sit out for another day as instructed. But it still didn't rise. That day, day 5, I happened to be on the internet creating this blog when I stumbled upon the solution, blogged by PR himself. My starter had bacteria problems even in spite of the pineapple juice. So I aerated it as he instructed on his blog, and in the next day or so I saw the doubling I'd been looking for. I scooped my finished starter into a couple of glass jars and stuck them in the back of my fridge. I had been thinking and stressing about sourdough enough and I wanted to take a break from it for a couple of weeks. PR said the starter would be good in the fridge for at least 2 months, so no problem, right?
Last week, I pulled one of my jars of starter from the fridge and refreshed 1 cup of it with 4 cups of flour and 2 1/2 cups water, as instructed. I didn't get around to doing this until after supper, so I was a little alarmed when I realized it was supposed to sit at room temperature for 4-6 hours or until it was bubbly and foamy. Oops! When I was ready to go to bed, I took a look at it. It had bubbles on top; I wasn't really sure how foamy it was supposed to be, but I did know it was supposed to be refrigerated overnight, so I called it good and stuck it in the fridge. The next day, I measured out 2/3 cup of my refreshed starter, let it warm up on the counter for an hour, and added flour and a little water to make a dough. This was supposed to double in about 4 hours or so and then sit in the fridge overnight again. But it didn't double. In fact, it didn't rise at all. I left it out overnight, and it was the same size in the morning. So I threw it out, along with the refreshed starter.
I still had that second jar of old starter in the fridge, so this week I tried again. This time I made sure to allow enough time for my refreshed starter to bubble at room temperature. And again there were bubbles on the surface, but I was unsure about the foamy part. I decided to go ahead and use it, and I refrigerated it overnight. I made the next build of dough just as I had the week before, and again I saw no rise that day. Again I left it out overnight - might as well if I'm just going to throw it away, right? In the morning, I saw that it had doubled! Finally I was getting somewhere. I made the final dough that morning and left it to rise. After 3-4 hours it hadn't doubled, so I left it longer. After about 7 hours I decided it had been long enough. It had risen some . . . maybe it had doubled, I wasn't sure. I turned it out onto the counter, where I divided it in two, shaped loaves as best I could, and placed them on a parchment lined sheet pan. The dough was a strange consistency. It almost had a gooey-ness to it and had definitely lost much of the firmness it had when I finished kneading it 7 hours earlier. I decided that at this point I decided that I was all in. I was going to finish this bread and I was going to bake it. I popped that sheet pan in the fridge to retard overnight because PR says that will allow develop maximum flavor, and I figured this one would need all the help it could get. The next day, I let the sheet pan sit on the counter for 4 hours to bring my goo-dough to room temperature. My "loaves" were basically thick, shapeless puddles on the sheet pan.
J4 pleaded with me to just throw them away, but I didn't come this far and burn though that much flour for nothing, so help me. Those loaves were going to be baked. And baked they were. Amazingly enough, the loaves had a bit of oven spring, making them a tad less flat. The smell was right. I transferred them from oven to stovetop to cooling rack, marveling at the somewhat bizarre coloration of their tops. When I sliced into the first loaf at dinnertime, I discovered the texture to be very wrong. The crust was hard, which I would expect of a hearth bread, but the crumb inside almost had a gumminess to it. The flavor seemed fine, but the texture made it pretty much inedible and definitely my greatest bread failure of all time.
It may take me awhile to want to hazard sourdough again. Unfortunately, eight formulas in BBA are leavened with a wild yeast starter, so I can only put it off for so long.
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