How can I put the sour back into the sourdough?

February 3, 2008 11:07 AM

Slight tangent from this question: the sourdough rises on command and leavens the bread, texture is fine - but the sour is gone.

The best batch it ever made was on initial activation from the Ed Wood envelope somewhere over a year ago. Since then- not so much. In fact, not much at all.

Any advice on how to bring back that tangy feeling is what I'm looking for, and will be most grateful for same.

posted by IndigoJones to food & drink (10 comments total)

The sour taste is partly a result of the variety of yeast. After a while, local yeast will colonize and eventually take over your starter. You may have to order new yeast.
posted by dilettante at 11:20 AM on February 3

Which Ed Wood strain is it? The lactobacillus component is responsible for producing the tangy flavor of sourdough, but I wouldn't have thought that your yeast could survive without it, since it needs the acidic environment produced by the lactobacilli to protect it from other organisms.
posted by mumkin at 11:25 AM on February 3

Yeah, the problem with ordering the Ed Wood stuff is that local lactobacilli (not yeast) will take over in the starter and add their own special flavor. (Yes, local yeast will also colonize, but the taste mostly comes from other bacteria.) I'm not sure what starter you ordered, but if it was, say, the San Francisco one, and you don't live in the Bay area, it's unlikely that the L. SanFrancisci will continue to flavor your bread.

You can do several things to make a more sour bread. You can make sure that the lactobacilli are strong in your bread by the way that you refresh it. When you refresh for rising power, you typically refresh before the starter has fallen, when the yeast still have some activity left in them. If you let the starter sit past the time when it falls (it will recede in the bowl and there will be many small bubbles on the top, along with probably a bit of liquid) it will get more and more sour. You can easily taste this. What's happening is that the lactobacilli, which do better in a more acidic atmosphere, are reproducing while the yeasties are not. If you refresh through a week of these kinds of long refreshments you will favor reproduction by the lactobacilli and even when you go back to the kinds of shorter refreshments that you'll need for baking, you should have a better balance in the starter.

The other HUGE thing is how how you're using the starter. You don't say, but long rises are often necessary to get good flavor in sourdough bread. This can be achieved by retarding either the first or second rise. One option is to proceed with room temperature mixing and rising and then, after shaping the loaves, moving them to the fridge overnight, and taking them out for an hour or so before baking them off. You can play around with how long you leave the shaped loaves out of the fridge before you retard them. This gives more time for the little beasts to digest more of the starches. You also get some spectacular oven spring from a slightly colder loaf because cold dough can hold more gas than hot dough can. The important caveat is that if you proof in a banneton you probably have to use a linen liner so that the loaf doesn't stick to the willow after such a long time.

I hope all this helps, but the bottom line is that sourdough is a local food, which is one of the reasons its so cool. Ed Wood's idea is cool, but he should explain that you'll get maybe a loaf or two that's truly from the starter he sends, and then you'll start having your local beasts take over. Feel free to email me if you have any other questions, I spent quite a while experimenting with and reading about sourdough.
posted by OmieWise at 11:38 AM on February 3 [5 favorites]

Damn. mumkin is right; I type too fast and think too little. The local microorganisms will take over, I should have said. Yeast and lactobacilli both. There are different strains of lactobacilli and they give different tastes.
posted by dilettante at 11:40 AM on February 3

Sorry, this should read: You can make sure that the lactobacilli are strong in your bread starter by the way that you refresh it.
posted by OmieWise at 11:41 AM on February 3

Just want to reiterate what OW said about the rising time.

Eg, I can get a good leaven from my starter in a couple of hours, but it's hardly sour at all. I get real sourness from an overnight rise. Over 24 hours, and it's TOO sour.

Also, though it wasn't a conscious strategy, I refresh/feed much as OW suggests.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:36 PM on February 3

OW for the win. If you want a further explanation of the sourdough process, check out The Bread Builders. It's an amazing reference, even if you have no intention of building a brick oven. The first half of the book has an astonishingly thorough explanation of how natural leavens raise bread and the multitude of factors involved. One of the points he stresses is the importance of how you store and refresh your starter.
posted by clockwork at 1:49 PM on February 3

The Bread Builders is a great book.
posted by OmieWise at 7:41 PM on February 3

More on the process - I make bread using the no-knead method/recipe, substituting a quarter cup of sourdough for the yeast. And I do get the awesome/tangy sourdoughy tasting bread... so you may just need a longer rise and follow OmieWise suggestion and let the starter rest for longer between feedings...

But then, I live in San Francisco, so ymmv.
posted by Arthur Dent at 8:46 PM on February 3

Omiewise always for the win, both in this and in a running shoe question I posted earlier. All I need now is a Proust question.

For the record, I'm using the Italian strains, and although last night is normally pizza night, I'm changing the schedule, going the refrigerator route and seeing how it turns out tonight. (I find "too sour" to be a strange concept, but I suppose it's possible.)

Many thanks to all, most enlightening.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:37 AM on February 4