This is the third in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. I’d like to imagine I was running science experiments in making bread on my kids, but really all I was trying to do was eat some toast.
I’m not sure what it was like in other parts of the world, but during the COVID-19 pandemic Australia suffered a bunch of shortages — toilet paper, flour, and yeast were among those things stores simply didn’t have any stock of. Luckily we’d only just done a costco shop so were ok for toilet paper and flour, but we were definitely getting low on yeast. The obvious answer is a sour dough starter, but I’d never done that thing before.
In the end my answer was to cheat and use this recipe. However, I found the instructions unclear, so here’s what I ended up doing:
Starting off
- 2 cups of warm water
- 2 teaspoons of dry yeast
- 2 cups of bakers flour
Mix these three items together in a plastic container with enough space for the mix to double in size. Place in a warm place (on the bench on top of the dish washer was our answer), and cover with cloth secured with a rubber band.
Feeding
Once a day you should feed your starter with 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of warm water. Stir throughly.
Reducing size
The recipe online says to feed for five days, but the size of my starter was getting out of hand by a couple of days, so I started baking at that point. I’ll describe the baking process in a later post. The early loaves definitely weren’t as good as the more recent ones, but they were still edible.
Hybernation
Once the starter is going, you feed daily and probably need to bake daily to keep the starters size under control. That obviously doesn’t work so great if you can’t eat an entire loaf of bread a day. You can hybernate the starter by putting it in the fridge, which means you only need to feed it once a week.
To wake a hybernated starter up, take it out of the fridge and feed it. I do this at 8am. That means I can then start the loaf for baking at about noon, and the starter can either go back in the fridge until next time or stay on the bench being fed daily.
I have noticed that sometimes the starter comes out of the fridge with a layer of dark water on top. Its worked out ok for us to just ignore that and stir it into the mix as part of the feeding process. Hopefully we wont die.