Austrian Motherdough !!

This Austrian Starter has really proven itself. It has a naturally tangy flavor and I have been getting rave reviews about it. I have liked it so much myself, that I went ahead and made up a batch of motherdough at 80%.

Motherdough can be any starter you take and turn into a lower hydration dough and keep in the refrigerator for 3-5 days until it is fully ripe and bubbly.

After use, feed this motherdough with an 80 % hydration mixture of flour/water example: flour 10 oz/water 8 oz . If you want to figure the hydration, divide the weight of the water by the weight of the flour… 8/10 = 80 %. Here is how the fully ripened motherdough looked:

Here is how it looked after stirring down:

I mixed up the batch of Austrian Sourdough Bread at 60 % hydration for the dough and did the normal bulk fermentation, shaping, proofing and baking. Here is the outcome:

As you can see the color is vibrant and the crust is terrific looking . The taste is so incredibly good, as it is with all motherdough breads. Using the slow, cold ferment brings out the full flavor of the bread. Such bread is usually not very sour but instead is somewhat sweet and has such full flavor that it is hard to describe.

Actually to anyone who has not had their own home baked sourdough, no amount of describing could ever work. This bread actually was still tangy, it is that Austrian starter at work. It has a longer eight hour ferment than the average six hours of most starters (except the San Francisco which is even longer).

Because of the longer fermentation time, it lends itself very well to a motherdough recipe. The long ferment also brings out the crust blisters to their fullest. Don’t let anyone tell you that you cannot get these great bubbly, blistery kinds of crusts in a home oven, you can, I do, and my oven is a cheapy, old electric oven.

Here are some more pictures to make your mouth water: