Basic White Variation with San Francisco Starter

I am still using the San Francisco Starter after I brought it out of it’s sleep from my refrigerator. The sour is somewhat more pronounced but not yet up to potential. I think sour sourdoughs like to have an active starter with the refreshment not being a huge amount of the starter. In other words don’t dump out most of your starter and refresh it with a lot of water/flour and expect it to be sour and if you have refrigerated your starter or reconstituted it from a dry state, expect it to take a little while to build up it’s sour producing bacteria.

This batch of dough was a higher hydration than the last one and it was a bit harder to handle. My recipe was a variation of the White Basic:

3 cups starter

3 cups water

2 Tablespoons oil

4 teaspoons salt

1 Tablespoon Malt Syrup

2 Tablespoons cornmeal

1/4 cup Rye flour

9.5 cups Bread flour

The yeast is very vigorous in the starter which was refreshed about 18 hours before using. The bulk fermentation took only 3.5 hours, which is too fast for a good sour.

bulk fermentation

I divided the dough into three pieces which were all about one ounce shy of being two pounds.

Here they are roughly shaped and resting before their final shaping:

resting for shaping

I put them in the refrigerator overnight and gave them 2 hours to proof. Here are all three loaves:

three loaves

They all came out wonderful with a nice holey crumb.

Here are some closeups:

closeups

more closeups

closeups

Here is the crumb:

crumb

We will see if the sour is more pronounced as time goes by. I know the Northwest Sourdough would make a nice sour if I used it right now, but it has been active and used for quite a while without being refrigerated like the San Francisco starter.

northwestsourdough

Teresa L Greenway - Sourdough bread baker, author, teacher, entrepreneur. Join my baking classes at: https://tinyurl.com/nbe3ejd

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