I am trying to get better about
posting my blog every week, it does get difficult at times as I am still in DC
for the next 9 weeks or so before returning for good to the homestead. Some of you have noticed there is more posts
lately about things like baking, particularly sour dough bread baking rather than
farming/planting/livestock stuff. That
is because that is something I can work on in DC while I wait, and it is skills
that will transfer. I have been working
on sourdough bread lately as it is a cultured food, similar to cheese’s and yogurts
(which I want to also work on) so it allows me get some of the basics down to
dealing with live cultures and further reduces the need for commercial yeasts.
The plan for this weekend was to make
a loaf of sourdough sandwich bread as well as a sour dough king cake. I even bragged about doing it on Facebook
before the fact. Admittedly after last week’s
success on the artesian sour dough bread I was probably a little too cocky with
my sour dough skills, make that a whole lot to cocky! Can you say double fail? My sandwich loaf was a brick, literally, you
could have very legitimately used it as a weapon and both the King Cake and the
Sandwich loaf put a capital S on Sourdough.
Granted some people really like that sour taste but it was a little much
for my taste buds. The sourness actually
worked pretty well with the king cake with sugar and cinnamon (Sweet and sour!)
but with the cream cheese it left something
to be desired in my opinion. But it is
not all bad news, I learned a lot, the least of which was the reminder, that
sometimes, we fail. As fails go however,
this one at least not epic. It was edible
for the most part.
So where did I go wrong? Yes, I will put myself on blast here so hopefully
someone learns from my mistakes. First,
I let my starter mature to long after feeding it. Generally, the longer you let your sourdough
starter set and the closer it gets to “peaking” (expanding as much as it can
before shrinking) the more sour your bread will become. Some who like it really
sour will actually let it go beyond its peak, as I said I am not a huge fan of
it being this sour. In this case I just
let it set longer because I was waiting for it to froth up a little more and
lost tract of time.
That was one issue but probably not
the biggest one, the biggest one was I let it over bulk ferment (over
rise). This definitely happened on the
bread loaf, when I looked up what went wrong after the fact, my dough had every
characteristic of being over fermented (sticky, will not hold shape, looked more like goo than dough and was
starting to get liquid forming at the top).
 |
| You can see the liquid forming around the edge, a clear sign of over fermenting your dough |
Basically, the yeast ate all the food it could from the starch. It is that digestion process that releases carbon dioxide which causes the bread to rise. Without
that, I had a very dense bread loaf. Once I punched the dough down, releasing
the built-up gas, the yeast could not produce any more due to lack of food. While the King Cake did
not have the same visible signs due to it being a different kind of dough (no
water, used eggs and sour cream as the liquids) the result was much the same, a very dense cake. I did kind of guess I had over
fermented it when the dough did not “Proof” (re-rise) very
much after being punched down but at that point it is too late to stop you just
must hope for the best! The bread and
King cake did have a little rise in the oven but still resulted in a very dense
sour tasting product.
The
prime factor that probably contributed to my over fermenting was placing the
dough on top on my stove while I was curing cast iron pans in the stove. Heat causes the fermentation process to speed
up and cooling (like in the fridge) causes it to slow down. I did not think about how much heat would
leach out of the top of the stove and the result was that the dough fermented
much faster then was typical for sour dough. I did not check on it early in the
fermentation cycle, so I did not catch it when it expanded. The giving extra time waiting for the dough to proof after over fermenting
probably contributed to the sour taste as it gave the lactic acid time to build up (what gives it the sour taste). The
other contributing factor to the failure was that I was trying to do too much at one time, trying
to bake two new items at the same time so I did not pay as much attention to either
one, failed to respect the task. As I said earlier, I got too cocky from an early success. Lesson learned.
I now
realize more then ever what people mean when they say sourdough baking is very
much an art rather then a science.
Unlike commercial yeast, do you not know exactly how much yeast is n
your bread when making sour dough, there is just so many factors involved
between temperature, how long it matures, how much hydration is in the mix, not
to mention the exact make up of the flour you are using. This weekend taught me to respect the sour dough!
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