Sour Dough Bread

Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur.

The starter is the essential element of sourdough. This reference call for a full 14 days to raise a starter from scratch – nine to grow the culture and five to build it’s strength needed to bake bread. My starter here is 9 days old, and will being it’s routing feedings tomorrow.

Routine Feeding:

1 Cup Starter

1 Cup Cool Water

2 Cups Flour

baking is a juggling act. You want the inside and outside done at the same time. Temperature cooks the crust. Time cooks the crumb.

If the crust is too dark, reduce the temperature next time. (You can cover it with foil to slow further browning). If the crust is too light, increase the temperature. (You can kick up the oven temperature and put the loaves in to brown a bit as a recovery step.) A key element is in knowing what your oven temperature really is. Over the years, I’ve had lots of inaccurate ovens, so I always put an oven thermometer in the oven. Monitoring the oven may surprise you with how much, or little, time it takes to heat your oven, how far off your thermostat is, and how much variation there is in your oven temperature during your bake.

If the crumb is too done, bake the bread for a shorter period of time next time around (you can’t unbake bread). If the bread is underdone, leave it in longer.

The trick is the two are related. So, it may take a time or two to get the time and temperature to the point where both are done at the same time. In general, I try not to do the “put the bread in at 500 for 10 minutes and then reduce the temperature to 350″ sort of thing. It is a lot of trouble, and it causes delays between batches if you’re baking more than one batch. Juggling the time and temperature lets you almost always avoid that sort of thing.