About Sourdough Starters

About Sourdough Starters

Introducing "the family"

No it's not The Godfather part X111.... I have previously talked about how to make a starter - or, to use its old school name, the sourdough leaven. As the Bible says, a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Sounds powerful - so who exactly are these 'leaven' guys? 

The starter is a group of microscopic yeasts who live in a flour and water 'swamp' and multiply whenever they are fed. What do they eat? Flour. Plain, white organic, rye - whatever. They are basically the lactobacillis culture found in yoghurt and sauerkraut. They love the heat, so to slow them down they live in the fridge. 

The Swamp Thing 

When they get to room temp and are fed some more flour, they get all 'active' and start to breed like rabbits. This results in a spongy mixture, not unlike foamy pancake batter, that we add more flour to and make bread dough. They are highly effective critters, killing anything that stands in their way - including any bacteria that is not part of their family. So if you use a dirty spoon to mix them, they will 'kill' any contaminants. These critters are powerful - that's why they are so good for your tummy. And why yoghurt and other fermented foods are so good for you.

Sourdough Yeasties will attack anyone who's not "in the family"

They don't just attack contaminants - they eat all the 'bad' parts of a wheat grain. Research has proven that the wild, strong yeasties will eat up to 90 per cent of the gluten and phytic acid in wheat. Phytic acid cannot be digested by humans - it acts as a 'shield' around the wheat grain to prevent our tummies from digesting the good stuff in the wheat. The wild yeasts eat all this stuff up in a process known as 'predigestion'. 

Commercial bread is made with commercial yeasts, which are weaklings that work superfast and wouldn't have the time to 'predigest' the wheat, even if they had the strength to - which they don't, as they have been cross-bred and inbred for so long. The difference between sourdough leaven and commercial yeasts is much like the difference between a wild boar and a farm pig. Get the picture?

 Sourdough versus commercial yeasts - who would you pick in a gluten fight?

As for naming my starter - I haven't, but others before me have. Whether you give your yeast community a single name, like "Greg" or the name of a village, like "Tiny Yeast Town" is up to you. I just call them "my little guys".

Let's Bake Bread # 3 - The D'oh!

We are getting ever closer to putting our loaf in the oven. Onto the next stage.

Stage 2 -: Making the dough
Ingredients:
-Your ‘sponge’ mixture (which will be foamy by this stage)
-3 to 5 cups of organic rye bread mix (or half white flour, half rye flour) -½ cup gluten flour (particularly important if your flour is not ‘strong’. Don’t worry about the gluten – the sourdough process itself , known as ‘pre-digestion’ will digest all of the gluten so your bread will be yeast- and gluten-free but without the gluten it may not rise enough)
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses, or golden syrup or brown sugar (optional, but particularly tasty in rye bread)
-2T olive oil (optional)

Method:

1. Take your bowl of ‘sponge’. It should be at its foamiest stage for maximum bread-rising power. What you are about to do is ‘feed’ your starter by adding more flour, but you are making it into a dough, so it will be solid, not runny like when you normally ‘feed’ your starter. What will happen next is that your starter will spend the next few hours ‘eating’ the flour in the dough. It will eat the phytic acid surrounding the grain and the gluten in the flour. It will leave little holes in the bread where it has eaten the flour (this is why bread has that ‘holey’ look ) and will give off carbon dioxide (that yeasty smell).
   
2. To your bowl of starter add the salt, oil and molasses. Stir
   
3. Add 1 cup of rye/wheat flour and the gluten flour. Mix.
   
4. Keep adding flour in half cupfuls and stir. When it’s too stiff to stir, turn out onto floured board and pull together as a dough, adding more flour as needed.
   
5. Keep kneading the dough for about 10 minutes, making sure to add more flour whenever the dough becomes sticky. You will probably be adding more and more flour right up to the end of the kneading time. Unlike regular bread, sourdough bread is very wet and ‘thirsty’. Just when you think you’ve added enough flour and it’s dry and pliable, it suddenly becomes all wet again and you find you need to add more flour to knead it! DON’T WORRY – just keep on adding flour as long as it’s thirsty. Sourdough yeasts, unlike commercial yeasts, are alive and need their food!
   
6. After 10 to 15 minutes of hand kneading, you may be tired but you’ll have a smooth, not sticky ball of dough.
   
7. Place in a greased bowl, cover LOOSELY with cling film (this speeds up the rising process by keeping warmth in as long as you leave air gaps), and cover with a tea towel. Leave in a warm place to rise for 2 to 5 hours, until it has doubled – or tripled if it’s a warm day – in volume.
   

Stage 3 -: Proofing the dough
Proofing is the most important stage: This allows the ‘pre-digestion’ process to take place and for the healthful yeasts to digest all the bad parts of the flour. Very important stage! The longer it ages, the more the slight sour flavour is accentuated. You need around 15 hours ageing to deactivate the phytic acid.

1. You can tell the dough has not fully risen if you poke it gently and it springs back. When it has risen all it can, there will be a small indent left behind when you poke it with your finger.
   
2. When the dough has fully risen, punch the dough down gently. Flatten down into a big circle and let it rest 5 minutes.
   
3. The only tricky part – fold the edges of the dough into the centre and press with your fingertips to seal into a ball. Do not overwork dough. Shape by cupping our palms over the top of the ball and apply firm but gentle downward pressure. Stretch the surface of the dough down under to form a neat ball. Keep pulling and stretching downwards like this around 6 to 8 times, being careful not to tear the surface of the dough.
   
4. Turn dough over and pinch the seam to form a very tight seal.
   
5. Place in bowl and cover with several layers of plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator to age fro 8 to 24 hours, even up to 36 hours.

Next..... Putting the loaf in the oven!

Let's Bake Bread # 2 - The Sponge (No, not the Seinfeld Episode)

Now the moment you've all been waiting for, baking our first Sourdough loaf. This is beyond exciting, and can I say 'good on ya mate' to everyone who's stuck with me so far. You've done a beaut' job to get this far.

Aussie jingoisms aside, thanks for coming on this ride and here's to the success of your first loaf. Let's get started!

Part B
Baking Bread
This is such a satisfying process: you won’t believe what you can do with your own two hands!

Stage 1 -: Making the ‘sponge”
What on earth is a sponge? It’s basically a great big bowl of foamy starter and it’s the basis of a good loaf. It’s the first step in baking:

Ingredients:
-Your jar of starter from the fridge
-1 cup filtered warm water
-1 cup plain white organic flour
- Clean bowl (sterilise with boiling water at this early stage) and wooden spoon.

Above: Look closely, this fully active starter is really foamy and ready to bake bread!

Method

1. Remove your starter from the fridge and pour into clean bowl.
   
2. Add water and stir with wooden spoon till dissolved.
   
3. Add flour and mix. You want the consistency of very thick pancake batter. Add more flour or water to reach this consistency.
   
4. Cover LOOSELY with plastic wrap, leaving a bit of space on the sides for air and cover with a tea towel. I use the plastic wrap because in winter or cooler climates you want to keep the heat in and this really speeds up the process.
   
5. Leave in a warm place (sunroom, windowsill) for between 4 and 12 hours. It will begin to get a few bubbles in the first two hours, then more and more bubbles will form until it’s foamy. At this point it’s ready for the next stage…..

Note: sometimes I’ll age my sponge by leaving it out overnight, especially if it’s slow to bubble, like in winter. By morning it may have a layer of hooch so I’ll mix in half a cup of flour and leave it for another 3 or so hours till it bubbles a second time. This makes a stronger sponge, but it’s not really necessary unless your sponge is having trouble getting going.

To fast or not to fast?

After reading many studies, articles and blogs let me say there’s a lot out there about the benefits of fasting.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that not all fasts are the same.

Now this can be hard to believe because there are so many methods of fasting being promoted and they all claim to fix the same things – LDL cholesterol, IGF, blood glucose, brain cell growth etc. And indeed they all pretty much do, as far as current studies can reveal. It’s what they mess up that’s the question. 

There is a wide selection of fasts to choose from. Do I eat every 12 hours? One meal a day? Do I fast every other day? What about the 5:2 diet? Eat dinner only except weekends? Fast monthly, every three months? It’s enough to do your head in.

I want to make it simple. I’ve read nearly everything out there and I’m here to simplify it all. 

I would say that the biblical model of sporadic full fasting (either 24 hours monthly, or 3 days every 2-3 months) is the healthiest way to go.

The very popular paleo-evolutionary fasting (alternate day, intermittent, 20-hourly etc) known as intermittent fasting or IF, is the least healthy way to fast.

Regular fasting upsets hormones, circadian rhythms, cortisol and fertility. It makes you edgy and puts your body out of whack. But, perversely perhaps, it also fixes LDL cholesterol, IGF-1 and blood glucose, creates new brain cells and generally repairs the body.

“The effect of intermittent fasting on hormones and circadian rhythms is devastating. When one hormone-producing gland gets out of whack, you can bet that others will be negatively affected“ http://www.charlespoliquin.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/971/The_Pros_and_Cons_of_Intermittent_Fasting_.aspx

 

But if you still want to fast, you might be asking ‘do I have to choose one over the other? Fast or not fast?’ Not with Biblical-model sporadic fasting. 

The body can be seen as an engine. The purpose of fasting is to shut down the engine and then conduct repairs. IF is like constantly turning the engine on and off, on  and off, so the engine is constantly in a stretched state of stress. It may be being repaired but at the expense of its proper running, and soon the engine starts to go out of whack. Biblical fasting , on the other hand, only requires fasting every few months. So you turn the engine off, do the repairs, then turn the engine on again. As your rhythms are only out of whack for a few days, your system comes back on line and gets back to normal pretty quick.

That’s how God designed humans, to fast only sporadically. Thus we benefit from all of the repairs fasting enables our body to do to our cells, but we resume our normal eating patterns quickly after the fast and the body’s rhythms can return to normal and stay that way until he next fast in a few months’ time. It may not be the key to quick weight loss, but isn’t it better to be able to sleep regularly and get pregnant if you want? 

Intermittent fasting may be concomitant with fat loss but there are better ways to lose weight, ones which don’t affect your biorhythms permanently.

If you want to want quick weight loss, try the much healthier Vitality Diet (which I posted in the previous post) which is a version of the current CRON diet (calorie restriction with optimal nutrition). The Vitality diet was developed by Hauser over 80 years ago and is identical in many ways with today’s CRON diet, which comes in at 8000KJ per day, which is around 1000KJ under the recommended intake. 

The Vitality/CRON plan focuses on the maximum amount of nutrients for the least calories. We're not just talking the same amount of nutrients on less calories, I mean nearly twice your average daily nutrient intake for a few less kilojoules. That's why it creates such vitality, and not the false alertness and edginess that intermittent fasting creates.

Plus there's the weight loss benefits. Do the Vitality Diet for 10 days and you’ll lose about a pound a day. Then continue with a high-nutrient diet and occasional fasting and keep your protein at no more than 1g per kilo of bodyweight.

The CRON/Vitality diets also leads to lower IGF-1 and lower blood glucose. Patients also report slowed degeneration of organs, tissues and faculties (in balance tests CRONERS over 50 years of age tested as well as a 20 year old). The increase in nutrients plays a large part in this, not just the calorie restriction.

With intermittent fasting we are not focusing on high nutrients, instead constantly switching between fast and feast, which may give us most of the benefits of sporadic fasts but at the expense of our fertility (for women), hormones and biorhythms. 

Most people choose IF because they don’t have the willpower for 3-day fasts, but note that the UK program Eat, Fast, Live Longer pointed to research which promoted full but sporadic fasts over intermittent fasting. It may be harder, but it’s better for us. And really, some things are only worth doing if they’re hard. Trying to make fasting easy will just lead to upsets elsewhere in the system:

"And when you fast, don’t make it obvious, as the hypocrites do, for they try to look miserable and dishevelled so people will admire them for their fasting. I tell you the truth: that is the only reward they will ever get." Matthew 6:16