Denver sourdough bread

The following is a photo essay on sourdough bread.  

I darn near forfeited my Denver sourdough, and that would have been a serious bummer because it's one of my favorite cultures.

Collected over a few freezing days a few winters ago, the surviving organisms are cold enured. When the finished dough is put into the refrigerator to cold-proof, the yeast portion is supposed to arrest, but because it was collected in the winter, and because the organisms from that collection survived and thrived when cultured, the coldness of the refrigerator doesn't even phase it. It continues to grow more than double in size while nearly freezing in there, instead of arresting, and this is a bit of a problem. It does this even though the refrigerator is much colder than a cold-proof should be. I don't care. It's delightful and it's fascinating. This cold proof of a few days retardation is intended to give the bacterial portion of the culture time to catch up to the yeast portion of the culture, cause the dough to ferment much as beer ferments. It changes the dough, the organisms digest the complex sugars which produces carbon dioxide and alcohol, leaves an acidic tang, changes the texture, and adds much much more character to the crumb and to the chew of the final baked loaf.

These are the differences between breads produced from natural yeast cultures, so-called sourdoughs, and the foam type Wonder Bread™ that we're familiar with for making sandwiches. Commercial bread is produced from a single organism of yeast selected for its incredible reproductive proclivity and its outstanding gas production, and no bacteria at all. It makes bread fast. We don't want that.

Last week, I darn near lost mah starter! I forgot to reserve a portion and I was this -->| |<-- close to baking the last of it. In the very last moment before sticking those loaves into the oven I realized I forgot. I used the bench scrapper to nick off a tablespoon worth of dough from both of the last two shaped loaves all ready to go. Had I baked them, my culture would have been lost, and I'd have to start all over -- a minor catastrophe of sorts. Those two tablespoons saved me the trouble of recollecting. The rescued dough was exponentially doubled in mass in eight hour increments, which itself is rather fast for sourdough, and takes a bit of devotion and reliability on the part of the baker. * buffs nails on shirt * You can see how within a few days, I'm back in business with a huge pile of dough threatening to take over the entire refrigerator. 

 

Incidentally, this same thing happened to Le Brea Bakery, Los Angeles. A disgruntled employee took the entire reserved starter for the day, and in a fit, dumped it in its entirety into the street. Mua ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa, he laughed sinisterly. Ewwww, that's bad. Another employee, the hero of the story, raced out into the street, whipped out his spoon, and pulled a few tablespoons full from the abused mass. From that, the bakery inoculated a larger batch and resumed production, a bit delayed but otherwise unfazed. And the moral of the story is ... um ... well, I don't know what the moral of the story is but there's one in there somewhere.

Four hours later. The dough is still cold to the touch. It has failed to achieve room temperature but hasn't failed to rise significantly.

The batch is divided into four sections. They're basically even but the photograph shows them foreshortened.  The batch will be baked two loaves at a time. Small loaves, they bake for 30 minutes covered, then an additional 10 minutes uncovered at the highest heat my oven will go. We like to live dangerously.

Streeeeeetch to the East. This really is East when you're standing at the side of the table and considering the table to be a map, but then the table is oriented such that it's actually being stretched to North, but that's all irrelevant. The idea is to pull the dough outward in four opposite directions, folding the stretched portion back onto itself to create a stack of folds.

Repeat the same stretching and folding over motion in the opposite direction.

Reorient the dough pile of folds to stretch in the unstretched directions.

Doesn't that make perfect sense? You end up with an exceedingly but gently stretched pile of four folds that has lost its squareness because dough is like that.  You never really get perfect squares. 

Now fluff it up into a puffy bunch, and by cupping your hands, stretch the surface down around the sides. Pretend you're a professional and that you know what you're doing. The idea is to get a smooth skin of dough on the top, but not entirely because we want some trace of carefree rustic roughness here, of the sort that's so impossible to achieve.

Slash and burn.  I mean, bake.