Easy Sourdough Starter

Sourdough starter or levain is a pain in the ass to maintain. The most basic process spans five days and wastes several pounds of flour. This is an acceptable price to pay, but do not continue to maintain the starter forever and ever amen. Yes, commercial and retail bakers do this, but they are baking tons of bread everyday. You're not. So follow my suggestions. Once you have a lively levain - I prefer to use this word - bake some bread following a reliable recipe for a basic white bread up to 50/50 APF and WW flour. I recommend the recipes in "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast" by Ken Forkish. Make sure you buy and use the recommended Cambro containers. 12 quart rounds for the dough. Use a 6 quart round for the levain. On the morning of the day you plan to mix your dough (the dough is baked the following day), Ken tells you to discard all but 100g of the active levain. Don't discard it. Put it in another 6 quart round. We can address this later. AFter adding 100g of WW flour and 400g of APF and 400g of H2O, you'll have approximately 1000g of levain ready to go. Theoretically, You can make four batches from this. Each of his pure levain recipes use 216 - 275g of levain. The amount depends on environmental factors. Let's assume you settle on 250g for each batch. Baking 4 batches that yield 8 boules is a big day of getting the dough ready and then a big tomorrow baking them two at a time. Oh yeah, make sure you have two large dutch ovens. No matter. We are going to pretend that you will do this. After you parcel out @250g of levain among the flour and salt in your 12 quart rounds, you will have a scraped empty, but not quite clean, 6 quart round. DO NOT CLEAN THIS! Sorry for the all caps. Leave it out and let it dry out, unlidded. Put it anywhere you like. Don't worry about its exposure to the air. The following day when you scrape out your risen doughs, DO NOT WASH THE 12 QUARTS! Let them dry as well. The next day or week, it doesn't really matter, use a plastic dough scraper and scrape out all the dried flaky dough and levain from their respective containers onto a large sheet of parchment. Funnel this into a Krups coffee grinder (that's clean and dry) and pulverize it. Put this powder in a jar and Voila!, you have dehydrated levain ready to go. You can work through the remaining levain you removed however you see fit. You could revive 50g at a time and back a batch over the next week until the levain tub is empty. Again, let this dry, then scrape, pulverize and add to your jar. I don't know how long this lasts but archaeologists find beer urns from thousands of years ago with dormant, but alive yeast. Now you don't have to discard and add to you levain every week or month to maintain a starter over the weeks, months or even year you don't feel like baking sourdough. I've had success reviving my powdered levain (really a mix of dehydrated active levain and dehydrated "old dough") two ways. First, I put a tsp into a 1 quart round, added equal parts water and flour and set it on my radiant floor under a sofa. The temp pushed 90 degrees. The following day, I didn't see much activity and I added more flour and water. My goal was to add amounts that got me up to around 600g total. Enough for two batches. That's my normal MO. Once you start process, making two batches is not much harder than making one. On day three, I saw clear activity and added more flour and water to get up to my 600g mark. Later that afternoon, the lid popped off and active levain was overflowing onto my tile floor. This shit was ready. I mixed the flour and salt, autolyzed it for 30 minutes added @ 280g of levain to each and mixed the dough. 5 hours later, I divided it and put it in baskets then put the baskets in plastic bags and into the fridge. Baked them first thing the next morning. The other method turned out kind of crazy. I made a 1500g batch that I planned to divide into (2) 750g loaves of sandwich bread.This time, I just added 3 tsp of my powdered levain to the recipe the way you'd add yeast. Mixed it and kept it cool. Around 60 degrees. It took 4 or 5 days to rise. Once it did, I divided it, put the doughs in loaf pans, covered with a towel and turned on my oven. I did the proof test after 1 hour and decided they were ready. I baked them and all went according to plan. However, this bread was so sour it tasted like vinegar. I first compared it to San Fran sour, but it's been a long time since I've had that. It was edible and even intriguing, but way too sour for me. I don't know if it was the amount I started with or the long time it took for the yeast to do its job. At 60 degrees, the bacterial growth may have outpaced the yeast growth.Once there was sufficient yeast growing, the dough rose, but that same dough included insane numbers of bacteria. I'll keep experimenting, but I think I need to activate a smaller amount using some water and dough at a warm temp. If I get quick activity doing it that way, I think the yeast will have gotten the upper hand. Then I'll bake bread with that and see what happens. Happy Baking! Blaise