Spelt Saisons

Since the end of the summer, I've made a series of spelt saisons, each with a different combination of saccharomyces strains, and each intended for a different treatment post-fermentation.  I've written here before about the fact that I like to keep unmalted grains around for both baking and brewing.  Pictured below is the lunch I ate while writing this post mid-brewday: the bread was based on a recipe from Chad Robertson's Tartine Book No. 3 for a loaf that included spelt flour and sprouted spelt grains (see here for the process).  The beer was an earlier attempt at a bitter spelt saison.

Speaking of the Tartine book, I made one change to my process this time round, based on some of the techniques used in baking.  Robertson includes a number of recipes for breads that include a sort of adjunct porridge, much like the kind we make when we do a cereal mash, and he mentions in passing that this can be made in advance and kept in the fridge until needed.  Copying this, I've started doing my cereal mashes a day or two before brew day.  As well as saving me some time on the day itself, this means that the porridge is already made by the time I start my step-mashes, which means that the spelt is in the mash for the protein rest at 131°F, whereas before I added the porridge after this step to bring the mash up to saccharification temperatures.  I'm hoping that including the spelt at this earlier stage will lead to an improvement in head retention.

Each recipe was basically the same: a 70/30 split of base malt and unmalted spelt, with the majority of the base malt being pilsner, in some cases supplemented by 5-10% of either Golden Promise or Vienna to see if I noticed and liked the differences these made.  Each beer came in with an O.G. somewhere between 1.042 and 1.044, and each was hopped quite aggressively to around 38 IBUs, although since I used EKG in all cases but one the bitterness should be a bit softer than the numbers might suggest.

This is actually one of the things I'm looking to test here.  My original idea was to dial-in a recipe for a bitter, hoppy saison, with the spelt providing some of the additional mouthfeel needed to balance and round out the bite from the hops.  But some of these beers will be sitting for quite a while before I can package them (simply because I'm running out of heavy bottles, and have a quite a few batches I'd like to condition to 3+ volumes), so I expect that bitterness to soften a bit with age.  I'm inclined to think, without any real evidence I suppose, that the the tannins provided by large doses of low AA hops help beers age gracefully.  I certainly think it provides a different quality of bitterness to small doses of high AA hops.

I'm planning to blend two of these beers with a small amount of pale sour left over from this Autumn's blending session, and I also backed down a little bit, but not by much, on the bitterness of these beers.  Brewing lore has it that sourness and bitterness shouldn't mix, but I have to say I'm not convinced of that: some lambics seem to me to be characterized by a sort of earthy bitterness, as are some well-regarded saisons like BFM √225.  I suspect its more a matter of the character of the bitterness, and the way it balances with any acidity.  

I've included descriptions of the various beers, along with their post-fermentation treatments, in a list below.  Some will be dry-hopped, some are under-going a secondary fermentation by various brettanomyces blends, and it will be some of these beers that I go on to blend with a pale sour for a bit of acidity.  One batch, which was fermented by a blend of Wyeast 3726 and a saccharomyces strain that a fellow brewer isolated from a bottle of Hill Farmstead, has been turned into a sort of small solera, which I may keep going for a few pulls if I like the results.

Spelt Saison 1: Clean

Yeast Strain(s):  Yeast Bay Saison Blend II
Grist: Pilsner, Vienna, Unmalted Spelt.
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: This beer will be kept 'clean', besides anything it picks up from my saison equipment.  When I transferred it to secondary I noticed that the gravity was still relatively high, at 1.010, even though most of the yeast had dropped out of suspension.  In an effort to bring it down a few more points, I added some of the still-fermenting wort from Spelt Saison 4, hoping that the saccharomyces strains from that fermentation would attenuate it further.

Spelt Saison 2: Brettanomyces and Dry-Hops

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3726
Grist: Pilsner, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: Wyeast Brett C added to secondary.  Once secondary fermentation is complete, this will probably get a light dry-hop with Styrian Goldings before packaging.

Spelt Saison 3: Brettanomyces and Coupage

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3726
Grist: Pilsner, Golden Promise, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: Yeast Bay Lochristi Blend added to secondary. Once secondary fermentation is complete, this beer will be blended with a small amount of sour beer leftover from the blending session from my pale soleras.  Compare with Spelt Saison 4 below.

Spelt Saison 4: Brettanomyces and Coupage

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3724, Wyeast 3726
Grist: Pilsner, Vienna, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: Crystal
Post-fermentation treatment: Yeast Bay Beersel Blend added to secondary.  Once secondary fermentation is complete, this beer will be blended with a small amount of sour beer leftover from the blending session from my pale soleras.  Compare with Spelt Saison 3 above.

Spelt Saison 5: Solera and Dry-Hop

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3726, HF isolate
Grist: Pilsner, Vienna, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: Blended with two gallons of aged-hop saison.  This was a beer I brewed about twelve months ago.  The original was four gallons of saison cut with one gallon of mixed-fermentation pale sour.  I racked three gallons of the old beer onto about 15g of Crystal dry-hops, and then racked this batch onto the remaining two gallons of aged beer.  In a few months I'll either take off another three gallons for dry-hopping, and add a further three gallons back, or simply dry-hop and package the whole five gallons.

Bread and Beer: Buckwheat

As I've mentioned before on this blog, one reason I like using unmalted grains in my beer is that I can find other uses for them around the kitchen, particularly when it comes to baking bread.  I've been using buckwheat a lot recently, both in baking and brewing, so I thought I'd follow up on my earlier post on spelt and combine some tasting notes for a couple of buckwheat saisons with pictures of how I use buckwheat groats in baking.

Buckwheat seems to have at least some history in brewing.  G. Lacambre mentions it in his 1851 book on brewing in Europe. (Yvan de Baets cites this book in his essay on the history of saison, but its contains very little about historical farmhouse beers, as Lacambre was more interested in the 'fancy' beers brewed by commercial brewers.  There are some interesting sections on Lambic though.)  Anyway Lacambre doesn't seem to think much of buckwheat as a source of fermentables.  He says its used rarely (occasionally in some parts of Germany, less commonly in Belgium), though it does contain a decent amount of starchy matter and is often fairly cheap.  He even describes his own experience with it: a small amount gave the beer a distinctive and disagreeable bitter flavour, prevented the beer from clarifying, converted poorly and caused problems because it became gummy in the mash.  Hardly a glowing recommendation!

Some contemporary brewers might be interested in using buckwheat because it doesn't contain gluten, but I was first drawn to it because I was curious about whether brettanomyces would convert its relatively high levels of caprylic acid into the ester ethyl caprylate.  Caprylic acid is not something you want much of in beer (it apparently tastes 'goaty'), but ethy caprylate is described in Wild Brews as "Waxy, Wine, Floral, Fruity, Pineapple, Apricot, Banana, Pear, Brandy".   Perhaps using larger amounts of buckwheat in a mixed fermentation might encourage the formation of these esters?

I've described how I use buckwheat in brewing in earlier posts: I crush the groats in my mill, boil them into a thick and goopy porridge, then add them into the main mash for the saccharification rest.  One thing I haven't stressed enough in earlier posts is that buckwheat is an absolute nightmare to lauter (as Lacambre warned us!).  I'm doing Brew in a Bag, which usually means I can get away with very gummy mashes using rye or wheat without too much difficulty, but buckwheat is a complete nuisance.  It forms a sort of gummy layer on the bottom of the bag, which means it just won't drain when you lift it out (or at any rate, drains very slowly).  This makes the bag difficult to maneuver (since it extra heavy with all the hot wort) and means it takes a long time to get enough wort from the grain.

In baking, buckwheat is much easier to use.  There are a number of ways you can incorporate unmalted grains into bread (including by making a porridge in a process that is basically identical to a cereal mash), but the method I use most frequently involves sprouting the grains and then folding them into the dough.  Buckwheat groats are particularly easy to use in this way: they only require a brief soak (about twenty minutes, where something like spelt needs four to six hours), after which I drain them, put them in a mason jar with a breathable seal (a coffee filter and a rubber band usually), give them a good shake so that there is plenty of oxygen in the mix, and then leave them till they start to sprout.  You can help them along by shaking once a day and maybe soaking and rinsing them again, but buckwheat groats sprout so quickly its usually not necessary.

Once they're just beginning to sprout, they're ready for use in bread.  I fold them into a wholewheat version of the Tartine loaf about an hour into the first rise (you need to do a few folds to develop the gluten first, as the sprouted groats will cut through it if added too early).  You can also grind up a small handful of the groats and use them to coat the top of the loaf.  They add a nice sweetness, along with a bit of texture, to the final bread.

Back to beer again, I've only ever used buckwheat in saisons.  I've brewed four versions of essentially the same beer now: a pale saison using up to 30% buckwheat.  In every case I've cut the fermented beer with some proportion of aged sour beer.  The very first version used a few litres from a lambic-style beer, but the three subsequent ones all used pulls from my Roeselare solera.   All of them have had flavours reminiscent of the description of ethyl caprylate above, though of course its difficult to say for certain whether this is because of the buckwheat and brettanomyces, or because of the saison yeasts and fruity hops (all versions have had late additions of Amarillo).  I've included tasting notes for two of these beers below.  I packaged the third version just before I left for England, and combined the fourth version (fermented with a different blend of yeasts) with the pale sour so that it can undergo a secondary fermentation while I'm away. The most recent batch was fermented with oak cubes in the primary, and I'm curious to see how these add to the overall flavour profile.

Buckwheat Saison I

This is the first version of the beer: I blended about 10 litres of saison with 2 litres of lambic-style sour, and added some Trimbach Pinot Gris as well.  Its about nine months old at this point, and has been in the bottle since the end of January.  You can read some earlier tasting notes here.

Appearance:  Pale and slightly hazy yellow colour.  Soft, foamy, meringue-like head with great retention.

Smell: Lemons and limes, followed by a hint of tropical fruit. Slightly floral edge as well, but more like dried flowers (almost reminds me of my Grandma's potpourri).

Taste:  Lemony acidity up front, but only moderate.  White wine comes across in the finish.  The strange waxy flavour is gone, or at least blended seamlessly with the rest so that its no longer offensive.

Mouthfeel: Crisp, with good carbonation, but the wine in the finish gives it a slight vinous character.  Nice balance of dryness with mouthfeel that I'm aiming for in using these unmalted adjuncts.

Drinkability & Notes: I'm very happy with how this one is tasting right now, and I'll probably start drinking the majority of the batch as soon as I get back from England, setting aside a few bottles to see how it continues developing.  This has all the elements I'm looking for in my saisons: its tart, fruity, refreshing, but with some complexity and structure as well.

Buckwheat Saison II

This is the second version of the beer, and the first that was blended with a pull from my Roeselare solera.  The idea with this and subsequent versions was to increase my overall yield by brewing four gallons of clean saison (about the most my system can handle) and then blending them with one gallon of aged sour.  This works well, and I plan to continue using this system as I keep brewing these beers.

Appearance:  Same as the first version.  Head retention on these beers is pretty solid.

Smell:  Lemons, yellow stone fruit, and hay.  Reminiscent of a younger version of the first version, but without the strange 'soapy' edge that I think came from the white wine.  Slight funk underneath it.

Taste:  Tart and lemony at the start, then again a more generic fruitiness with some floral honeyish elements.

Mouthfeel: Crisp and dry.

Drinkability & Notes: This one is still a bit sharp and angular, but hopefully with a bit more time in the bottle the edges will soften and become more rounded.  Still a very promising beer, and one of my favourite saisons.  Luckily I have more of this batch so I can check in on it more regularly.

Bread and Beer: Spelt

Whole Grain Loaf with Sprouted Spelt

Brewing and baking complement each other in various ways: key to both is an understanding of the logic behind your process, the stages of fermentation in the product, and the ways in which modification in the former can shape the latter and change the flavour profile of whatever it is you are making.   The most recent Tartine Book by baker Chad Robertson contains an extended digression comparing the fermentation cycle of lambics with the much shorter cycle of naturally risen breads:

"Lambic brewers are conducting a symphony of natural processes, acting as both catalysts and shepherds in an attempt to achieve the desired outcome. The notion that the pattern has a specific sequence was a revelation; there was surely something valuable in this discovery related to bread. Lambic beers typically go through at least five distinct phases of fermentation. Unlike more common styles of beer where the flavor character is mostly determined by the types of grain and hops used, lambic’s complex character is shaped in large part by the wild fermentation, which changes with seasonal temperature fluctuations among other things. The origins of the lambic process and the way our bread was taking shape were closely related. Over time, the concept of sequential phases of fermentation would illuminate parts of my bread-baking process that had been invisible before.
...
Tartine bread goes through a process closer to a 24-hour cycle than the 24-month cycle of lambic beer. With bread I am working with fewer dominant types of wild microorganisms than the extraordinarily diverse process that produces lambic. But as much as I try to control the process on the one hand, letting the wild fermentation go through very active phases to develop depths of flavor is key to my approach. Minimal manipulation in the early stages—to allow maximum expression and transformation wrought by the microflora—is always the goal."

But there is also a more mundane overlap between baking and brewing in the ingredients its useful to have on hand.  Since I don't have a flour mill, in my case this is limited to raw grains that I can crush for brewing, or use whole or coarsely chopped in baking: things like spelt, rye, buckwheat, etc.  I confess I enjoy the thought that I can use these grains to make either beer or bread: it fits with the no doubt romanticized picture of traditional farmhouse ales, brewed with whatever grains were on hand, all of which might also be put to various other uses around the farm.

Whole spelt can be used in a variety of ways in bread, but it must first be rehydrated one way or another.  This achieves two important goals: softening the grain so that it won't be too tough in the final bread, but also beginning some enzyme activity (similar to what goes on in the mash) that make various minerals nutritionally available and begins breaking down starches into sugars.  One way to achieve this is by making a "soaker", hydrating coarsely ground grains in water overnight.  I've tried this a few times, but more recently I've been germinating the grains first by briefly hydrating them, the leaving them to sprout for a day or two (this is the process that is initiated and then halted in malting grains).  One final technique, which I haven't tried, involves basically mashing the grains or boiling them into a gelatinized porridge, then using this as part of the dough for the final bread.  This last method is closest to how we use these grains in beer.

I've used raw spelt three or four times when brewing, usually as a substitute for wheat malt in saisons and farmhouse beers.  I don't know if I could pick out differences between the two in separate beers, but I have noticed that spelt seems to improve the perception of body without being quite as silky as oats---something that can be useful when you're trying to make beers that are dry but not too thin or astringent.  The spelt saison I brewed with The Yeast Bay's saison blend remains one of my favourite home brews, and I recently added dry hops to another bitter, hoppy saison brewed with spelt which was also tasting very promising.

When using raw spelt in small quantities  (less that 5% of the grist), I usually just mash it along with everything else, though perhaps taking the time to change the gap on my Corona mill and give it a finer crush (raw grains are often difficult to mill).  When using a higher proportion, I now do a cereal mash with the spelt and a small amount of base malt. As I understand it, spelt should gelatinize at mash temperatures, making a cereal mash unnecessary; but the one time I tried to skip this step, my efficiency dipped considerably.  It may be that crushing the spelt more finely (or using rolled or even malted spelt) would have facilitated gelatinization, so that more of the starch was converted and my efficiency remained the same.  However since its raw spelt I use in baking, and the cereal mash isn't too much extra work, this is the process I've settled on.

Cereal Mash

You can find good accounts of the science behind cereal mashing online; my process is fairly simple.  I draw out a quart or two of water from my main kettle, add the crushed spelt along with a handful of base malt, and heat it to around 150°F; I hold it here for about 10 minutes, then bring the mixture to a boil, stirring it regularly for anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes, until I have a thick and gloopy porridge.  This then goes back into my main kettle, which by this point is on its way up to strike-in temperatures.  I add the rest of the grist, and mash as normal.

I'll post tasting notes and recipe for my most recent spelt saison in a few weeks when its bottled and carbonated.  In the meantime, with the weekend coming up, I'm finally back to brewing again!

Beer Food: Limburger Sandwich

Here’s one for fans of funkier flavours: classic, working-class beer food that’s now probably an acquired taste.  Limburger starts off as a crumbly, salty cheese a lot like feta, but as it ages bacteria on its rind turn it into a pungent and creamy soft cheese.    The smell can be a bit of a shock if you’re not prepared for it: body odour, cheesy feet, that sort of thing. But the taste is actually fairly mild, at least at around 5 months which is when I prefer it.  After that it gets more savoury and tangy and can be a bit much for some people.

I didn’t know what I was buying the first time I picked some up: it was on sale, and I vaguely recalled hearing about it in some connection with beer.  Here’s what Wikipedia told me when I got home:

“In the early 20th century, Limburger sandwiches became a popular lunch for working people due to their affordability and nutritious qualities. They were frequently accompanied with a glass of beer.”

Apparently the sandwiches are traditionally made on dark rye bread.  I’ve never baked anything quite that dark, so when I’ve had these sandwiches in the past few months I’ve used slightly lighter rye breads.  One is Nancy Silverton’s Normandy Rye---something I started making to use up a bad batch of dry cider (pictured at start of post).  The other is a 20% rye loaf from the new Tartine Bread book (pictured right).

Besides slices of Limburger, the filling I use consists of sweet vidalia onions and spicy brown mustard, which play really well with the creamy cheese.  Other people include pickles, anchovies, and similar flavours. Finish it off with a glass of Table Beer I, and you have the perfect brew day lunch!

Next thing I want to try: boterham met plattekaas en radijzen and gueuze.

Bread

As I've said before, the first fermented food I ever made was bread, and I still bake 2-4 times a week.  In this post I'll document the loaf I make most frequently: Chad Robertson's Tartine Country Loaf.  I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of this is!  Even if someone could somehow make the bread based on this post, there are much more informative resources out there (including the Tartine Book).  I suppose, as with the brew day post, I'm just detailing my own process.

 

The Tartine Basic Country Bread is fairly easy to make, especially once you're comfortable handling wet dough.  What's more, the process is easy to incorporate into your schedule, and the results are consistently excellent.  Even when I mess this bread up (and I have, many times) its still delicious.

 

 

As I said in my earlier post, I keep this starter in the fridge until I bake.  On the first day of making a new dough, I take the it out of the fridge, allow it to warm up, and discard all but a tablespoon.  I then feed it with 100g of mixed flour (50g whole wheat, 50g bread) and filtered tap water.  I do not measure the temperature of the tap water, but if it's cold I try to make sure its on the warmer side, and in summer I make sure it is cool.

 

Since we're both graduate students, and live near our campus, one of us is usually home to feed the starter around midday at least once or twice a week.  In about six hours, it is bubbly and has risen to almost twice its previous volume.  When it's cold, I let it rise in the oven with the light on, which keeps it around 80°F; when its hot, I sometimes keep it in my fermentation chamber.  The same happens with the dough as it rises. (Obviously you have to be careful with any clean beers fermenting in there, since the dough is teeming with lactobacillus and wild yeast!)

 

Our basic recipe is very easy to remember: 350g water, 450g bread flour, 50g wholewheat flour, 100g starter; 10g salt, 25g water.  I usually add the water first, then mix in the starter so that the yeast is evenly distributed.  Then I add the flour, mix it all together roughly until is forms a ball, and leave it to autolyse on the counter for between 20 and 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes is up, the flour is fully hydrated and the dough is relaxed and slightly smooth.  At this point I add the salt and 25g of water, incorporating it into the dough by squeezing it through my fingers.  When most of it has been absorbed, I transfer to a translucent plastic container, and let the bulk fermentation begin.

 

At first, I stretch and fold the dough every twenty minutes to develop the gluten.  This replaces kneading, and is an easier way to handle wet doughs like this.  You can definitely knead dough like this by hand, and I often do with some other breads I make less frequently: but the technique for wetter dough can be loud, and my downstairs neighbour has complained about the noise a few times!

 

After about two hours of this (i.e. six stretches and folds), I leave the dough to rise untouched for another two or three hours.  By the end it is soft, smooth, and slightly billowy, but certainly not doubled in size.  Unfortunately I started to remove the dough pictured here before remembering to take a photo, so it looks slightly deflated; but you can get some sense of how much the volume has increased.

 

Next I give it a rough shape and allow it to rest on the bench for twenty minutes.  If the dough has over-fermented, especially in the summer, it can be difficult to handle at this point, so I have to add a lot of flour.  But in general I keep bench flour to a minimum, and use my bench scraper to handle and shape the dough.  I'm fairly good at this now, but I think I still handle it too much: ideally you'd shape it in as few moves as possible.  If I handle it too much, I often drive air bubbles up to the surface, deflating the bread and potentially creating large air pockets in the final loaf.

 

After the bench rest, the dough gets a final shaping and is inverted into a cloth-lined wicker basket.  Chad Robertson tells you to put it in the fridge at this point, but (following Nancy Silverton) I like to give it another hour to rise in the basket before retarding fermentation.  Part of my thinking here is that home fridges tend to be a lot cooler than the fridges that bakers use, so I want to let the yeast restart the final fermentation before slowing them in the fridge.  After an hour is up, I layer some plastic wrap on top of the dough, place the basket in a food-grade plastic bag, and leave it in the fridge over night.

 

Next morning, as soon as I wake up, I put my combo cooker in the oven and set the heat to 500°F.  While the oven heats, I take the dough out of the fridge and dust what will be the bottom of the loaf with some rice flour.  After twenty minutes, I pull the smaller part of the combo cooker out of the oven and invert the dough from the basket directly onto it.  It took some practice to get this right, but now I usually avoid hitting the sides (the trick is to go in further than you think you need to).  At this point I score the top of the dough with a make-shift lame (i.e. a razor blade attached to a stick), place it in the oven, and put the top of the combo cooker back on. This is one of the big improvements I made after reading Chad Yakobson's book.  The cooker traps steam from the dough around the baking loaf, which keeps the outside moist and allows the loaf to increase in volume rapidly as fermentation gases and steam expand in the first half of the bake.  It also ensures a shiny, crisp crust, as the starches gelatinize in the moist hot environment.  If you are baking on a stone (which I still do with loaves that won't fit in the cooker), you can get a similar effect by pitching water into a hot saucepan in the bottom of the oven, creating plenty of steam.

 

The heat is turned down to 450°F, and the loaf bakes for twenty minutes.  At this point, I come back and take the top off the combo cooker, releasing a billow of steam.  The dough has risen, opening up a seam where I scored it.  This Tartine bread expands dramatically in the oven, and the scores turn it to deep, pronounced "ears".  In other breads, this would be a fault; Nancy Silverton identifies it as a sign that the bread is under-fermented, and encourages you to let the bread warm to room temperature before baking.  Yakobson has you bake it straight from the fridge, which increases the oven spring since the dough takes slightly longer to reach temperatures that kill the yeast, prolonging the burst of fermentation activity when the dough first hits the oven. He scores a rough square on top of the bread, resulting in a crown on top of the finished loaf; I prefer a rough C shape, which opens along one side but keeps the spirals from my basket in place.  Anyway, after removing the lid I leave it for another 28 minutes for a total baking time of 48 minutes.  Then I take it out of the oven and head to work while the bread crackles and cools on a wire rack.

 

Its essential to let it cool at least an hour or so: the bread is still baking when it comes out of the oven, and it will be too soft and moist if you cut into it right away.  The first warm slice will be wonderful, but unless you're going to devour it all its really not worth it.  In fact, I've found that the longer I leave it at this point, the longer the loaf stays fresh once I cut into it.  This is particularly true of the crust, which can otherwise go from crisp to leathery in as little as 20 hours.

As you can see below, the bread has an open crumb with some holes; you can imitate the large, gaping holes in the Tartine photographs by making a wetter dough and letting it ferment longer: I prefer this crumb because its better for sandwiches.

Sourdough Starters

Nancy and Chad

I baked bread occasionally before I moved to the US, but I started in earnest about five years ago when I bought a copy of Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice and some friends gave me baking stone as a birthday present.  I made many recipes from that book over the next few years, gradually gaining a better understanding of the process and becoming more comfortable manipulating and fermenting the dough.  I bought Tartine Bread on the suggestion of a friend, and although I have some criticisms of the book as a whole, the techniques laid out in the core chapter improved my bread tremendously.  But I think I learnt the most from picking up Nancy Silverton's book.  Even though it can be frustrating in many ways (people complain that the recipes weren't sufficiently adapted for home bakers), I think any intermediate to advanced baker could pick up a lot from reading it through carefully and trying to bake her breads.

 

Most bread I bake these days is leavened by a sourdough starter. I have two that I bake with fairly regularly: Chad, which I keep at 100% hydration (i.e. with an equal amount of water and flour) and feed with a 50/50 blend of bread and wholewheat flour; and Nancy, which I keep at 140% hydration (i.e. with 40% more water than flour) and feed solely with bread flour. Both starters are named after the bakers whose recipes I use them in: Chad Robertson from Tartine and Nancy Silverton, formerly from La Brea. 

 

In fact, Chad has a bit of a history.  It is the son of Peter, the first starter I made using the instructions in Peter Reinhart's book.  As I remember, it involved a series of feedings and discards over about a week, with some pineapple juice added at the start, probably to lower the pH and increase available sugars. 

 

I baked with Peter a few times, never with any great success (the starter was fine, I just wasn't a good baker then), and eventually gave some to a friend who kept it going and transformed it into the Tartine starter, passing on discards to several other bakers along the way.  It makes me happy to think that several people in Chicago are using off-shoots of that original starter.  Meanwhile I neglected and eventually threw out Peter. A couple of months later, when I started baking again, I got some back from my friend and it was at that point that she recommended the Tartine book.  I picked up a copy of the book, christened my new starter Chad, and kept it at the same proportions my friend had it at. 

 

I was very happy with the Tartine loaf, and its still the bread I bake most frequently (I'll have a separate post up about it shortly).  But as my interest in baking continued to grow, I wanted to try some other kinds of dough, so I picked up a book that had been recommended to me by a professional baker some time ago: Nancy Silverton's Breads of La Brea Bakery.  Rather than converting Chad to her proportions, I decided to make a new starter with her instructions.  This involved harvesting yeast from the skins of grapes, by immersing the fruit in the mixed flour and water using a cheesecloth bag.  Silverton's process is famously wasteful, require large amounts of flour and regular feedings and discards.  I don't know that I would recommend it, but Nancy made some lovely bread when I first started using it.  It may be pure suggestion, but the starter and bread both seemed to have an almost wine-like aroma to them.

 

These days I use Chad more than Nancy, but I keep Chad in the fridge between bakes, where as Nancy lives out on the counter.  This is partly because I have been trying to bring Nancy back from a 6+ month neglect.  It worked to some extent---the starter is active again---but I haven't had time to get back to a regular cycle of feedings and bakes yet, so it is not at its best.  What's more, with the starter out on the counter its much more important to feed it regularly so that the bacterial population doesn't get out of control, and I often forget or simply don't have time to do this.

 

Chad lives in the fridge, but I pull it out to bake with at least 2 or 3 times a week.  As a result it remains very active, and I don't need to feed it more than once before baking.  At any rate, I like the bread it produces and it rises without difficulty.  I've been wondering lately if I couldn't improve it further by taking Chad out of the fridge and feeding it regularly on the counter.

 

I should say a little bit about the differences between the starters.  My understanding here is fairly limited, but here's what I know.  Drier starters like Chad (100% hydration---so not that dry!) tend to end up with a higher proportion of acetic acid than lactic acid; the drier condition also favour yeast over bacteria, so the resulting bread is often less tangy and sour.  This is especially true of the Tartine loaf, which uses a relatively small proportion of young starter.  Wetter starters like Nancy favour the growth of lactobacillus and other souring bacteria, and often produce a higher proportion of lactic acid.  This is actually a smoother, more pleasant tasting acid than acetic (for brewers, its the difference between a crisp sour berlinerweisse, and a vinegary one), and perhaps accounts for the wine-like aromas I associate with Nancy.  The resulting bread is often more tangy and sour, both because of the higher bacterial population of the starter and because you tend to use more of it to leaven the dough since the yeast numbers are lower (at least, I think that's why---you can find out more about these things by finding posts from Debra Wink on The Fresh Loaf).

 

Since conditions in wetter starters tend to favour bacteria, you have to keep up with regular feedings to keep their numbers in check, especially if baking in a hotter climate.  The initial feeding favours yeast slightly over bacteria, so by feeding regularly you give the yeast an advantage.  This is very important if you are trying to rescue a starter that has been neglected or just become too sour over time.  Regular feedings and discards will help to change the population back to something that will produce a pleasant loaf.

One more note on high hydration starters: they make excellent pancake batter!  The resulting pancakes are fluffy, light, and tangy. Nancy Silverton includes a recipe in her book for use with her starter: 2.2 lbs starter, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, 2 eggs. 2 tbsp maple syrup; whisk together and cook.  Easy.  But I'm sure you could make also use a 100% hydration starter if you added more liquid to the batter (although the resulting pancakes might be less tangy).