Beginner Sourdough: Does anything really matter?
By: Andrey Petrov
Tags: Quarantinelife, Baking, Sourdough

Time, Temperature, and Yeast

Any sourdough bread recipe will have a bunch of steps with specific timelines they recommend. Half hour to rest, a few hours to bulk ferment, another period to proof. The problem with most recipes is that they’re written for the author’s specific kitchen and starter.

We’ll stumble on professional baker in one end of the world heatedly debating another baker on the other side, both with thousands of loafs under their belt but they just can’t agree on The Correct Way To Make Sourdough! “I’ve always proofed mine for no more than 3 hours and it comes out perfect every time,” one will insist. “No way, you need to proof for minimum 5 hours, until a flock of pigeons fly by the window,” the other will protest.

While I’m just someone who read too many recipes and discussion boards on the topic, here are some of my notes on what I discovered truly matters:

Ambient Temperature

A cold kitchen will take a lot longer for a dough to rise than a warm kitchen. It can be the difference between a 3 hour bulk fermentation and an 8 hour. Or 10% sourdough starter and 30% sourdough starter. If we have a really warm kitchen, we can scale down the amount of starter we use to slow down the fermentation. A longer fermentation can yield a richer sour flavour, so we want that.

It will also take a lot longer for a new sourdough starter to mature in a cold kitchen, one week can become two weeks. It can help to create a warm space for the dough to rise more efficiently: An oven with the oven light on, or a warming mat typically used for seedlings. Be careful to not go too warm, the yeast starts to die at around 100F. 80–85F is the recommended range for a good efficient rise. Periodically checking the dough’s core temperature is a good way to control this variable better.

Starter and Yeast Activity

A less mature starter is less active, possibly not even ready to make bread with. If we used a low-protein flour for our starter, it can take longer to ramp up. When a starter is matured, it regularly doubles or triples in volume after a feeding. With consistent feedings, it gets a kind of metabolism where you can rely on it reaching peak activity at a specific time during the day. It can help to use the starter as it approaches its peak activity, especially if we’re working with a cold kitchen.

Watch out for the infamous starter false start: Around day 3 or 4, the starter will spike with massive growth and beginners will rejoice about how ready their starter is but it is for for nought: This happens because an adjacent bacteria took hold of the starter and consumed all of the nutrients until it burned itself out. With consistent feedings, the desired yeast sourced from our flour grains will ultimately prevail and develop a healthy cadence.

Time

Aside from changing the temperature, and the quantity and activity of our starter, we’ll need to adjust the timing of our steps. If the kitchen is cold, ferment and proof longer. If the yeast is not too active, extend our timeline even further. It can help a lot to learn what the quality of the dough should be at each step, to know whether to proceed to the next step or wait longer. There are various tests we can do, such as the floating test to see if the starter is ready to be used; the windowpane test to see if we have sufficient gluten development; the poke test to see if the dough is sufficiently proofed for baking. We’ll go more into it in the Steps section.