Dr. Mel's Sourdough Series - Why Sourdough?

Welcome, my friends! I am going to attempt to cover as many of the questions folks have when considering baking sourdough bread. In this series, we will cover how to do this with 100% freshly milled flour. Truth is, fresh milled flour IS different from bagged flour. It's got all kinds of vitamins, minerals and polyphenols for healthy and delicious whole grains AND it is a lot thirstier than flour from the store. Come along with me - I've been thinking about how to share this journey for quite some time and the time is now.

Why Sourdough?

Sourdough bread is more easily digestible than yeast bread, touting better blood sugar levels and other health benefits. However, my main reason for hopping on the sourdough train and never jumping off is the FLAVOR!

Comparing Sourdough and Yeast Bread

Bread is a mixture of flour, water and salt. Those three ingredients mixed together can make what you may think of as crackers, or a flatbread. The bible calls that unleavened bread. When we add leavening, picture it eating the natural sugars in the flour, and exhaling carbon dioxide into your dough. It creates the pockets of air creating a much lighter and fluffier end product known as bread! This process is called fermentation.

Types of Leavening

We can leaven, or rise, our dough in several different ways. The most common options are yeast, baking powder, or sourdough starter. The longer it takes for our bread to rise, the more complex the flavors will be - and this is true when using yeast or sourdough starter as the leavening.

Yeast

Most common is with yeast. Most folks will buy active dry yeast or instant yeast at the store. It will eat those natural sugars, exhale gasses that raise the bread (and quite quickly), to create light, fluffy bread. Yeast is typically used at 1 - 3% of the flour used in your recipe. So if you have a bread made with 500 grams of flour, yeast would be 5 - 15 grams. Use more yeast for a faster rise and less yeast for a slower one. We can mimic the flavor of sourdough with yeast by using even less yeast than 1%, such as what pizzerias tend to do with their dough.

Baking Powder

Baking powder can be used to leaven bread, which you may recognize as naan bread or Irish Soda bread. There isn't any actual fermentation going on in this process. It's a chemical type of leavening. We won't cover the details of this one today. Typically, we would use 1 teaspoon of baking powder per cup of flour (125 grams).

Sourdough Starter

Sourdough starter is created by mixing flour and water together, and letting it ferment. The flour has natural microbes in it (bacteria and yeast), that when fully established and strong, will rise your bread through fermentation - just like yeast. Sourdough starter is often used at a rate of 10 - 30% of the flour. If your bread uses 500 grams of flour, you might use 50 - 150 grams of sourdough starter.

Timing

Baking powder is by far your fastest option. Simply mix your flour, water and salt with some baking powder and bake it - and you've got a bread that is ready to eat when you need a really fast win. Naan bread is made by mixing these things together, along with some yogurt, to make a flavorful flat bread.

The next fastest option is yeast. Yeast can usually rise your bread anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or so. Pizzerias use the tiniest amount of yeast for a dough that could take all day to rise. Even slower if they put it in the fridge, which slows down fermentation (the rise).

Sourdough bread is usually the slowest option, and can take anywhere from 4 hours to days to ferment and rise the bread dough. That seems like it would be a deterrent, but I assure you it is well worth the wait when it comes to flavor and those health benefits discussed above. As with the yeast bread, using the fridge will slow that down even more, creating even stronger flavor and boosted health benefits.

The Rise

With baking powder, your bread will rise while it is baking. The heat is going to activate the baking powder to do it's job and rise your bread. It will only happen during the bake, so it's a once and done kind of thing. There is no actual fermentation going on, so all the natural sugars in your flour remain. So just keep that in mind if blood sugar levels are something you are watching.

Active dry and instant yeast are pretty cool, and they will often allow your bread to do multiple rises before losing their rising power. This is why we can forget about our bread, letting it rise too much, punch it down and shape it again, and let it rise - sometimes 3 times instead of the typical 2 rises.

Sourdough is different. It is doing more than just leavening your bread as the good bacteria and yeasts feed on the flour. They are also breaking down proteins like gluten in your bread, so if you let it rise too long it will eventually lose it's rising power. This is why it's important to pay attention to your bread, and get a feel for what it looks and acts like throughout the process. Don't worry! I'll walk you through it.

Next Up

In Part 2 of Dr. Mel's Sourdough Series, we cover creating and feeding your sourdough starter, along with the two main types of sourdough starter. After all, you cannot make sourdough bread without a starter.