3 Simple Ingredients... Heavenly Sourdough
My new sourdough starter is much more active than Gary Creer’s ancient one. I do use it once or twice a week, so it gets frequent feedings, and it seems to take only 2-3 hours for the fed starter to be ready again, bubbling and smelling great, as opposed to taking overnight as my old one used to do. We must be blessed with some fairly frisky wild yeast in our neck of the woods.
Most aspects of cooking involve a degree of alchemy. You take base ingredients, you apply your cooking skills, and pretty soon a delicious meal is on the table. It seems particularly true for baking, where some butter, sugar, eggs and flour, maybe a bit of baking powder, can morph into a cake in not much more than an hour. But that’s nothing compared to the magic of sourdough bread.
My sister and I were discussing sourdough again (she had also made a new starter), and she mentioned a no-knead version of bread, baked in a Dutch oven - a heavy aluminium pot with a lid, the kind you use on a campfire to make stew.
Sourdough has been around for thousands of years. My sister gave me a starter about 40 years ago from a batch that was reputed to be over 100 years old by then, along with Gary Creer’s recipe for bread and pancakes. I kept it going for several decades (sourdough chocolate cake used to be my pièce de résistance). The bread I made was a wholewheat version which required about 20 minutes of robust kneading – it was satisfying when the dough finally had the desired satiny consistency, and the freshly baked bread was delicious – but it didn’t rise all that well and didn’t seem to age well either. To be honest, I don’t think I did that sourdough starter justice.
So now comes the magic. This bread has just three components - flour and water and a little salt. You stir together flour, a little salt, warm water and some sourdough starter until it clumps into a rough lumpy dough.
Well, when lockdown came along and the word ‘sourdough’ kept popping up, I found a method for making a starter from scratch on the King Arthur Flour website. It’s not difficult, and within 4 days I had a nicely bubbling starter, with a fruity-yeasty, almost beer-like bouquet. A sourdough starter is nothing more than flour and water which has fermented with the aid of naturally occurring wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria from the flour. It seems to me that such wild yeast is likely to vary from one place to the next – which was how I explained why San Francisco Sourdough bread was so much tastier than the variety I produced in Los Angeles.
You put it in a warm place (I use the oven with just the light on) and an hour later it has turned into a smooth, damp glop.
I used to think that there could hardly be a bread more delicious than San Francisco Sourdough - big round loaves with a crispy crust and a soft interior with an open texture and a delicious, slightly sour taste. I would not have left San Francisco Airport without picking up a loaf. It had to be the cool fog and sea breezes of the San Francisco bay that produced such a unique sourdough. 20
