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March 28th, 2010

steuard: (Default)
Sunday, March 28th, 2010 10:52 pm
I've been experimenting to increase the sour flavor in my homemade sourdough bread, but today's experiment went a bit awry and failed to rise at all. I felt surprisingly disappointed; I'm not sure if that was more because of all the wasted work, because I wouldn't get tasty bread, or because I'd sort of killed a pet.

My underlying mistake was to transfer too much water out of the main dough into the starter. Beginning from the basic sourdough recipe in The Bread Bible, I increased the fraction of starter and used a liquid starter (with a higher water:flour ratio). The main dough ended up exceedingly dry to compensate, and when I added the liquid starter the two didn't so much "blend" as "form a lumpy soup". It took a lot of mixing and kneading before that was even mostly fixed. I think the dough must have gotten quite warm in the process, and wild yeast can't handle temperatures above 100 degrees F. A few hours later, there was almost no sign of it rising at all.

That's how you learn, I guess. My plan for next week should work much better.
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