I have experimented with trying to get good sourdough. Commentary and
correction of terminolgy will be appreciated. I hope I do not ramble too
much. In order to compare results, I have only attempted bread with Gold
Medal Bread flour.

1. Feeding and storage.

The La Brea Bakery book suggests very frequent feeding. That is not really
practical for me because I only bake a bread every two or three days.

I use all of the starter when I bake a bread. I take the starter out of the
refigerator and warm it in the microwave oven without cooking it. What
remains sticking to my plastic container is used to generate new starter. I
add a cup of warm water to my starter container and a cup of bread flour and
stir a bit. I let it sit out for about 12 hours overnight, I put it into the
refrigerator while the microflora is still eating the flour. This practice,
I believe, helps the dough (Is that called sponge?) rise more rapidly. In
the morning, the bread is already partly risen.

2. Preparing the dough.

Using the procedure above, I sprinkle about 1 TBS of sugar onto the starter
to aid the rise. I also sprinkle about 1/2 tsp salt in. I have found by
experiment that I need to add about 2-1/3 cups of bread flour to get decent
dough. I also throw in other seeds and cracked wheat. Some vegetable oil
helps lubricate the kneading action.

I do notice that the dough ball starts out being rather stiff and powdery.
As the kneading continues, I get a decent dough ball spinning on the blade.
What I do not understand is why further kneading can make the dough much to
sticky. That is, it seems like I have too little water at the start and too
much at the end. Any suggestions to help will be appreciated. As a practical
solution, I just stop the kneading before that portion of the cycle is
complete.

I take the dough and place it into a ceramic bread pan moistened with spray
oil. Then I play the part of a crazed killer and stab the dough randomly at
least 50 times with a fork. This prevents a gas dome from building up in the
dough during an extended rise. It also gives a pleasing surface texture. I
guess this is the equivalent of slashing.

3. Completion of the rise and baking.

Typically, the bread has not risen enough overnight. It is fairly cool in
the house this time of the year. As the weather warms up, this may change. I
warm up the oven to about 105°F and place the dough in it. I turn the oven
light. Unfortunately, my Profile GE range has not made it easy to let bread
be risen. After an hour or so, the bread appears to be ready for baking. I
do so. The results have been excellent.


I think that refreshing the starter the way I do makes it much more vigorous
that using a couple of tablespoons each time I bake a loaf. Moreover, by not
letting all the flour get consumed before placing th starter back into the
refrigerator means that yeast fermentation does not have to star at a low
level and then build up. Moreover, each batch of starter is much like the
next one.

Bill