Cooking – Fryed House

How to Begin a Happy, Bubbly Sourdough Starter

In my last post on sourdough starter, Old-Fashioned Sourdough: The Backbone of Our Kitchen, we talked about all of the benefits to beginning and caring for your own sourdough starter, which can be used over and over again to bake many different goods – from loaves of breads to sweet pastries.

In this post, you’ll learn how to begin your own sourdough starter, how to take care of it by feeding and discarding it, and how to put some of that discard to use in many different ways.

Remember, a sourdough starter is “an active colony of wild yeast and good bacteria cultivated by combining flour and water and allowing it to ferment.” Your environment is crucial to the success (and flavor) of your starter. Once you begin your starter, you’re basically taking part in an ongoing science experiment that will never end unless you choose to do so. Temperature and humidity are obviously different depending on where you’re located, and you’ll have to pay attention to these details.

Sourdough ferments most successfully in warmer conditions. The colder the environment, the slower your starter will grow. If you keep your home cooler than 68 degrees Fahrenheit, I suggest finding a smaller, warmer spot to keep your starter. Conditions can vary so widely that it can take up to three or four weeks for your starter to be ready for baking.

Another thing that you need to note is that the key to a successful starter is to watch for a consistently dramatic rise in volume – doubling between 1 and 4 hours after feeding. This could be just 7 days or less, depending on how often you feed it.

This may seem strange, but each time you feed your starter, you’ll be “discarding” up to half of it. Thankfully there are plenty of recipes out there to put that discard to good use, so if you invest in a few glass tupperware containers, you can easily store it in the fridge for future uses. Don’t forget to label each one with the date it was stored on, so you don’t lose track of how old it is. I’ve seen many starter recipes calling for half of the starter to be discarded each time but personally I’ve discarded a little less, like 2 cups per feeding, and have had the same success. You’ll just have to experiment to see what works best in your environment.

Why do we have to discard some of it every time? I know it seems wasteful, especially if you don’t feel like baking with the discard all of the time. The technique that’s worked consistently for me is to feed my starter twice a day, but I only discard some before the first feeding. I’ll let her double for about 4 to 6 hours, and then I’ll feed her again without discarding any.

That being said, if you don’t discard some of your starter at some point, you’ll eventually end up with a very large amount of it. Keeping the volume down offers the yeast more “food” to eat each time you feed it. You might consider gifting some of your discard to a friend as a beginner starter for them. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to explain to them how to care for and use it!

Since you’ll be feeding your starter a simple combination of flour and water, you’ll want to keep fresh spring water on hand and choose a higher quality flour than your average white all-purpose flour. My favorite flour brand is King Arthur and I keep their whole wheat, organic rye, and all-purpose bread flour in my pantry at all times.

Oscar’s Bakery Sourdough Starter Jar Kit

There are many different sourdough starter kits on Amazon that make the process a little more convenient to follow and observe, but my favorite is the Sourdough Starter Jar Kit from Oscar’s Bakery. It’s got the most perfect wide mouth for easy access, comes with chalkboard labels and an attachable thermometer to keep track of the temperature. It also comes with an app to make the process even easier.

I began my sourdough starter with whole wheat flour in a large Anchor Hocking Batter Bowl before I had a fancy jar, so feel free to do the same. I used whole wheat because the wild yeast that offers sourdough starter its life is more likely to exist in the environment of whole-grain flour rather than in all-purpose flour.

I’ve broken this recipe down according to each day leading up to 14 days, which is generally how long it takes for the perfect fermentation in your starter.

Day One

Make sure your jar is clean and dry. In your jar, add 1/4 cup plus 2 teaspoons of flour and 3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon of spring water. Stir until a paste forms, then cover loosely with a lid or clean kitchen towel and place in a warm spot in your home. (Mine does just fine tucked away on the counter.) You’ve just begun your starter!

Day Two – Seven

Feed your starter once a day. Remove half of the starter from the jar and discard. Replace it with 2 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon of flour and 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons of water. Stir well and store in a warm spot in your home.

By Day Seven, you should see some sign of activity in the form of bubbling, smelling fermented (slightly sweet, sour, or alcoholic), and even doubling in volume after feeding (generally within 4 to 6 hours).
If you notice any mold, strange coloring, or no activity at all by this point, do not continue feeding. Discard all of the starter, clean the jar well, and start over with Day One.

Day Eight – Fourteen

Feed your starter twice a day. In the morning and then in the evening, remover half of the starter and replace it with 2 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon of flour and 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons of water. Stir well and store in a warm place. By Day Fourteen, your starter should be ready to bake with!

Remember

You can bake a variety of goods with the discard from your starter, as long as it doesn’t smell of alcohol. Pinterest is filled with amazing sourdough discard recipes – muffins, pretzels, crackers, loaf cakes, biscuits, pancakes, and much more.

In fact, I made this Glazed Sourdough Lemon Loaf Cake using my own sourdough starter and this recipe that I found on Pinterest and my kids demolished it in minutes!

Some starters are ready to bake with by Day Seven. For a powerful starter that’s ready for all baking projects, add an extra seven days of double feedings.
Don’t forget that sourdough is just as unique as we are and results may vary.

If you haven’t begun your own starter yet, I hope this post gives you the courage to try. Creating and nurturing your sourdough can bring so much magic into your kitchen, as well as many health and wellness benefits to you and your loved ones.

Find us on Instagram @FryedHouse and share your own sourdough journey with us! Thank you for reading.

Continental Bread: A Recipe from Better Days

Hello all! Our next post was supposed to be all about sourdough starter and how to begin your own, but we’ve been incredibly busy the last few weeks teaching cooking classes at our favorite local spice shop – The International Pantry. (Don’t fret, that post is still coming!)

If you’re a Norman or Oklahoma City native, you’ve probably heard of this amazing little shop that carries something special for every type of food lover out there – whether you’re just cooking at home for your family or are a seasoned chef or baker. Any tea lovers out there? They’ve got like three aisles filled with every tea you can imagine, and some that you’d never know you need.

The menu for last night’s class was delicious: Roasted Butternut Squash Soup, Garlic Herb-Crusted Pork Loin with a side of Swiss Chard and Sweet Potato Hash, and fluffy Ricotta Jam Thumbprint cookies for dessert. (The cookies were originally supposed to be made with Mascarpone, but you learn to work with what you’ve got.)

The day before the class, I decided that we needed a bread to go with the soup and figured it’d be a good time to use my favorite bread recipe thus far: French and Italian-Style Continental Bread loaves. These loaves are similar to French baguettes except slightly thicker, with just as much crunchy crust on the outside. They take about five hours of prep time but are very minimal when it comes to “kneading”. Most of that time is spent on proofing and letting the loaves rise, which is a combined three to four hours minimum.

I had no idea the bread would be so popular during our class. Two of our guests literally argued over the last slice, and I thought, “That’s how you know it’s good.” When the class was over, I had a line of guests wanting the recipe for the bread. I was happy to share it with them, but the only copy that I have is on a yellowed page, secured in a rusted three-ring binder from 1955 bearing the title – The Illustrated Treasury of Cooking. We found this vintage gem of a cookbook in an antique shop in Sulphur Springs, Oklahoma during an overnight trip to celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary.

How magical it is to bring this dormant recipe back to life and share it with our friends and community. Like many things that age well, this recipe is consistent and infallible, as long as you hold onto your patience. If you start trying to rush the process, your bread won’t turn out the way you want it. Make sure that you have all of the time you need before you begin and follow each step carefully. You will not be disappointed.

Continental Bread Recipe

(Preparation Time: 5 Hours – 2 Loaves)
Ingredients:
– 1 1/2 cups milk, scalded
– 1 package dry active yeast (or 2 teaspoons)
– 1/4 cup lukewarm water (no hotter than 100 degrees)
– 1 1/2 tablespoons butter, margarine, or shortening (room temp)
– 1 tablespoon sugar
– 4 cups sifted white flour (or bread flour)
– 2 teaspoons salt
– 1/2 tablespoon sugar
For egg wash:
– 1 egg white
– 1 tablespoon water

Instructions:
1. Using a small saucepan on the stove, bring the milk to a simmer then turn off heat and transfer milk to a glass bowl and allow it to cool to no more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. (Any hotter than that could kill your yeast so give it the time it needs to cool and check its temperature before using.)

2. In a small bowl, soften yeast in the lukewarm water (Remember, no hotter than 100 degrees.) Add 1 tablespoon of sugar and mix thoroughly. Give the mixture a few minutes to become frothy, then add your butter or shortening and cooled milk and mix well.

3. Sift into a large mixing bowl the flour, salt, and sugar. Make a hole in the center of the dry ingredients, pour in the yeast mixture and stir thoroughly.

(Side note: The recipe doesn’t specify whether to use an electric mixer or not, but I didn’t have any success using one and wouldn’t suggest it.
I began mixing the dough with a wooden spoon until it was shaggy, then used my hands to gently knead the rest of the dry bits in. You don’t want to over knead it, so it takes less than five minutes to fully combine everything.)

4. Cover the bowl with a clean damp cloth and set it in a warm, not hot, place to rise for about 2 hours. Your dough should double in size.

5. Sprinkle your counter or bread board lightly with flour. Spray a cookie sheet with cooking oil or rub with shortening.

6. Punch down the dough. Turn it out onto the board and cut the dough into two equal parts. Form and roll each piece into a long loaf. Cut diagonal slits across the top of each loaf, about 1/2 to 1″ apart. Place the pan in a warm, not hot place and let the loaves rise to slightly more than double in bulk.

7. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and place a shallow pan of hot water on the bottom rack of the oven.

8. Bake the loaves 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 degrees and continue baking 30 minutes longer. Remove the pan from the oven 5 minutes before the bread is finished baking and brush the loaves with the egg wash (1 egg white and 1 tablespoon of water beaten together). Return the pan to the oven and bake 5 minutes longer.

9. Allow loaves to cool for 10 minutes or more before slicing. (Allow them to cool completely before wrapping or storing them.)

I hope you find success with this recipe and wish you all of the patience to follow through with it. The results are more than worth it, especially with a really good butter. If you’ve been a part of any of our past cooking classes, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We’ve truly enjoyed working with, and feeding, every one of you.

Follow us on Instagram @FryedHouse and tag us in your baking and cooking endeavors! We’d love to see what you’re creating.

Old-Fashioned Sourdough: The Backbone of Our Kitchen

The entire time I’ve been married to my husband, (who is a trained chef), and since we were dating, he’s told me that he hates baking and it’s “not his thing”. This has always been ironically funny to me, as he’s baked plenty of dishes and desserts that have plucked at the heart strings of my stomach many times.

When COVID hit and everyone was learning how to bake bread at home, I invested in a sewing machine and taught myself how to embroider and sew. It was such a wonderful challenge and once I’d learned everything I needed to, I thought, what’s next?

Cooking at home has been a vital skill, with and without the interference of illness, because I’m home almost all of the time with three children, and they eat a lot and quite often. Even though my husband is a chef, he works full-time to support us, and I actually do a majority of the cooking at home.

I’m completely fine with that though. I’ve come pretty far in the culinary world in the last eight years just from constantly searching for new recipes to feed our family. The only thing that I hadn’t really learned was basic bread. We buy at least two loaves of sandwich bread a week. When I stand in the bread aisle at the store, my stomach feels sick at the thought of all of the waste. Shelves of bread that will simply be thrown out because they weren’t purchased in time.

Why hadn’t I thought about baking my own? I’ve had a love affair with every freshly baked bread I’ve ever encountered, so why was I intimidated by the thought of baking my own? My husband and I share a love for sourdough, and I decided to start there.

My first sourdough starter, Mother Aughra – Made with King Arthur Bread Flour & Spring Water

I learned how to create my first sourdough starter on August 31st. Because it’s technically a living thing that eats flour and water, and because the book that I learned from referred to this starter as “the mother”, I named her Aughra after the magical crone character from The Dark Crystal. What can I say, we’re a family of nerds.

I’ve spent the last month learning how to care for and use this sourdough starter and it’s become more than just a hobby. I wish that I had taken on the challenge of baking bread a long time ago. It’s such an all-consuming, tedious process that feels like a direct connection to Earth herself.

I was overly confident when I first started and thought I could get around the 4-week mark that all of the books were saying was the point of actual sourdough “tanginess”. I was definitely wrong. Aughra finally reached her true form of sourdough just two days ago, exactly a month to the day.

Every time you feed your starter, you’re supposed to discard half of it before you feed it. If she’s healthy and well, she’ll double in size within four to six hours of each feeding, which results in quite a bit of excess dough that can be used for everything from crackers to biscuits and bread. This led to my discovery of a wide variety of goodies to bake.

In the last month, I’ve made a Glazed Sourdough Lemon Loaf Cake that was to die for. I’ve made golden brown Sourdough Brioche Rolls that were delicious as chicken salad sandwiches as well as basic ham and cheese. I’ve baked multiple Sourdough Discard Sandwich Loaves which were incredible toasted as grilled cheese with homemade tomato soup. One of my all-time favorites was the Sourdough Chocolate Cream Rolls, dark and milk chocolates spread and rolled into whole wheat dough and baked in a bath of heavy cream inside of a cast iron pan. They. Were. Incredible.

Each new baked good that I’ve taken on has brought me a different, joyful experience shared with all of the people in my life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the isolation of quarantine had become so normal that I hadn’t even known I was isolating myself long after was necessary. I still wonder how many of us became deeply introverted hermits during that time. I know my own kids are struggling with leaving that life behind.

Baking brought me back to the community, and in a sense, back to myself. Not only has it been a way for me to nourish my family, lower grocery costs, help where I can with commercial waste, and connect with the Earth again, but it’s offered me a bridge back to the person I was before global quarantine numbed me to society.

And, it turns out, there are some surprising health benefits that come with baking and eating your own sourdough bread. Here are just a few benefits:

Sourdough bread functions as a “prebiotic”, which means that the fiber in the bread helps feed the “good” bacteria in your intestines. These bacteria are important for maintaining a healthy digestive system.

Sourdough is also lower in gluten than other forms of bread.

Sourdough is packed with nutrients, healthy carbs, protein, fiber and vitamins such as folate and iron. Not only can it improve digestion, but it can also lower chronic disease risk and promote healthy aging.

As you can see, there are an enormous number of benefits that come with caring for your own sourdough starter – emotionally, physically, and financially – and it’s surprisingly easy to start your own.

Our next post will cover everything you need to know to begin your own, so stay tuned!