Bread, sourdough (not mythology)

Hailing as I do from the San Francisco Bay Area, it's my continuous dream to be a sourdough bread king. The characteristic tang of a San Francisco sourdough slice-- preferably one from Colombo bakery, in the green, "extra-sour, late-bake" sleeve, jolts me back to hungry days of scarfing Dad's chili or Mom's unmatched spaghetti sauce on chilly, foggy evenings.

I am always in the market for a little nostalgia. So a few weeks ago I joined the Yahoo sourdough group and asked around for someone local who might spare me some starter.

I found a generous, good-hearted, and extremely articulate benefactor in Bill Snider, owner of Simple Kneads bakery in Greensboro, NC. I'm sorry it's impossible to taste bread virtually, because Bill's sourdough is San Fran worthy and instantly addictive.

Bill gave me a lump of his starter, and I carried it home reverently while munching on a sourdough batard that made it to my front door only in my stomach.

Sourdough is a living organism-- a colony of yeast, in fact, that stays alive as long as you feed it flour and water. Bill likens sourdough to a low-maintenance pet: not much work, a lot of benefit. You can tell sourdough is alive because after you feed it, it bubbles up and expands, evidence of the yeast eating flour sugar and creating gas. If you use it correctly, sourdough eliminates the need for baker's yeast in a bread recipe, and imparts superior character to the bread's crumb, and that special tang.

Today we are having a bake sale at church, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to follow the recipe Bill gave for a basic sourdough loaf.

The photos show the results, which were positive overall. The crust was not as brown as I'd like, but my oven browns the bottoms of food faster than tops, so I couldn't leave the bread in as long as I wanted.

The crust was good and thick, however, perhaps as a result of misting the loaves with water from a sprayer before baking.

The crumb was dense, but with acceptable air pockets. Not bad-- similar to San Francisco's Boudin bakery crumb, which was good for the ham sandwiches they made, if I could afford them, while temping downtown over the summer or the holidays. Colombo's was like Bill's: airy, crackly-crusted, feathery crumb.

Taste: no discernible sour tang. Basic white French bread, even a little sweet and salty. Similar in taste to Colombo "sweet" red sleeve.

Fun? Baking takes time, patience and focus. I aspire even to Bill's description of me to one of his employees as a "hobby baker." But I'll keep at it.

Technical notes below, for anyone interested:

• The dough was very sticky to start, but at Bill's suggestion I resisted the temptation to add a lot of flour. I did add enough to make the dough workable. I wrestled pretty hard with it to get it developed. Later, once the yeast in the starter did its job, the dough silked nicely.


• The dough never puffed really high as normal yeast breads do for me. It didn't matter. The bread tasted good anyway. 


• This was the first dough I ever made without baker's yeast. It worked!


• The bread proofed overnight in a cool environment and when I slit the tops, the outer skin on the dough was pretty rigid. But the tops of the loaves bloomed and made nice patterns. 

Last look (you can see the bottom of a loaf, how it browned darker than the top):

Comments

[Alex]

Mmmm, I grew up in San Francisco and never knew how lucky I was to have access to the fresh sourdough bread available just about anywhere in the city. Even after I departed the Navy in San Diego and settled in Orange County, I still had ready access to a good day-old loaf with little effort.

Now I'm all the way across the country (not very far from your friend in Greensboro) and Sourdough is second on the list of "Things I Wish I could have Brought With Me," right behind In-n-Out burger.

[DF]

My then wife and I used to bring an empty suitcase when we visited SF, and filled it with sourdough bread (and other SF-only delicacies) which we sliced, bagged, and put into the freezer. Nowadays there is LaBrea French bread in the supermarket, which is not bad, and Trader Joe's has come here, where we used to buy the cheap, excellent wine, dried cranberries, polenta, and other things we couldn't get here.

[Fred]

Did I understand you to say the bread wasn't very sour?
Fred
Browns Summit

[kenda travis]

I need to buy sour dough