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.
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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