Call me Ishmael.........Testing sourdough!

On 3rd of May, I started my adventure with natural yeast, also known as sourdough or mother dough.

I must say that in the past I had tried to experiment with this type of leavening but, perhaps because of the short time available to me and for the little attention I paid to the phases of preparation, I had abandoned all after a few days.

This time, I made ​​an effort and after finding the right information on how to produce the first mixture from which would have gone with my sourdough (SOLID), I started my experience in this addictive field.

The first step was to decide with which flour produce the sourdough. Then, after deciding to use organic wheat flour type "0", I have also chose to use honey as starter.

Past experiences have taught me that during the first few refreshments, when the surplus that is obtained is still very acidic, a lot of flour is "wasted". So I decided to start with a low dosage: 50 g flour, 50 g of water and a half teaspoon of honey.

Waited the canonical 48 hours, keeping the mixture in a jar covered by a towel at room temperature I made ​​the first real refreshment. 

Next time I used 50 g of the previous mixture, 50 g of flour "0" and 25 g of water. 

By continuing to refresh every 24 hours in this way, for 7 days, I got a sourdough that doubled in about 2/3 hours.

At this point, since the acidity of the sourdough was decreased, I began to use the surplus that I had at every refresh, to do some simple bread like Arabic or breadsticks. Continuing with the daily refreshment for another ten days.

All this required a lot of patience, because every day I had to find time to freshen up the sourdough, knead the bread sticks or the Arabic bread, which fortunately, after a night of leavening I could cook the next morning . At such moments I remembered why I left in the previous attempts.

 

But this time I was determined to finish what I started. After this phase lasting about ten days, achieved a fair degree of maturity and stability of my sourdough, I was able to increase the time between each refreshments.

Now it is about 3 months that I refresh every 4/5 days keeping the sourdough in the refrigerator in an airtight jar. One month after I had started, although I do not consider my sourdough ready to be used to make bread, I began to make new experiments with the "SURPLUS". After a few kilograms of breadsticks and Arabic bread, I tried to do a more challenging bread, even if called "simple bread with surplus of sourdough". With my usual habit to change the recipes that I find, I turned the "simple bread" in "BREAD IN BOX WITH SOURDOUGH SURPLUS"!

The result was nothing short of excellent, even for the flour mix that I used (einkorn-kamut-spelled-rye).

I think that now my sourdough is definitely ready to bake.

For the record, since the tradition of all the home-baker is to give a name to your sourdough. I decided to call my "ISHMAEL" in reference to the character narrating the famous book Moby Dick by Herman Melville.