Jen asked me to drop by and clarify the bread technique, so here's the details.
I keep a sourdough starter in a quart mason jar on the counter at room temp. I try to at least double this in size every day to keep it active, which can get to be a whole lot of starter very fast if you don't use it at least every other day to bake bread or make pancakes or something. If you aren't baking very often it can always be kept in the fridge and fed less aggressively.
For making 2-3 three loaves of the no-knead sandwich bread, I like to use 3-4 cups of very active starter. I usually only reserve a drop or two of the starter in the mason jar, this is because occasionally increasing the sourdough starter 10x will select for organisms that colonize new flour rapidly, this will give your bread and pancakes more loft.
I don't measure hardly anything anymore because I have done this so many times. I find that to make delicious 100% whole wheat bread, I like to have the saturation ratio close to 100%. This means equal weights of flour and water. I don't usually weigh my ingredients because I know what 80-100% saturation looks and feels like. Its still relatively liquid, but if your culture is active
enough it will still develop elasticity and be able to actually rise.
So I pour my starter in a big bowl in the morning and add a bunch of flour and water to bulk it up, keeping it a little on the wetter side so that I can add more flour later. Then I let it sit until lunch.
At lunch time I add 1-2
tsp of salt, and the remainder of the flour, and then let it sit until the end of the workday.
At 5 pm I preheat the
oven with the glass bread pans in it, and or, pour the dough into the steel bread pans to rise until the oven is preheated.
bake for 40-60 minutes. Presto. about 10 minutes of active work.
cheers.
7
-Art Donnelly
