How often do you feed your sourdough? (Some thoughts about sourdough in the social media world)
The aim of this article is to defend the real meaning of sourdough, not to offend.
“It’s important to feed it every day. If you skip a day it will be okay, but not any longer than that”, says Beoreg to Lois handing over the sourdough starter, she must “keep alive, play it music and learn to bake with”. (From Sourdough – A Novel by Robin Sloane, a highly entertaining read!)
This is miles away from the conversation of the ‘social media sourdough community’ with varying degrees from the sometimes gibberisch to the obsessive. If you google ‘How often should you feed your sourdough starter?’ the advice is from once a day to once a week, once every two weeks, two feedings a day at 12-hour intervals to specific ratios from 1:1:1, the minimum feeding to 1:3:3 (give your starter 30 grams of flour and 30 grams of water resulting in 70 grams of total starter) the most common even up to 1:5:5.
Compared to today’s world of sourdough baking, my sourdough world as a young boy was quite a simple one. Growing up in Germany in the 50s in a small village with two grain mills and two bakeries and being told by our parents that eating “Schwarzbrot macht die Wangen rot” (“eating brown bread gives you rosy cheeks”) I am naturally immune to the sourdough hype and I confess highly biased when it comes to sourdough bread.
Bread culture is based on fermentation
Bread is ingrained in German culture and every traditional bakery, the oldest bakery in Germany still trading was founded in 1573, has its own ‘secret’ sourdough recipe. Sourdough fermentation is the foundation of German bread making and even as baker’s yeast became popular for all other types of breads at the end of the 19th century sourdough continued to be used for rye breads. At the beginning of the 20th Century rye bread was common throughout Europe, but only Germany and Eastern European countries kept the tradition of rye. The distinctive trait of dark rye bread is the production with leaven in a multistage process.
Rye grain and sourdough
I learned that to ‘unlock’ all the nutrients from rye grain it needs to undergo a long fermentation with sourdough , that develops natural lactic acid bacteria and yeast. Yeast alone is not enough to fully release the rye nutrients and flavour.
Rye flour contains less gluten than wheat, which is why rye bread is denser and doesn’t rise as high as wheat bread. This is where sourdough comes into the picture. The long fermentation process (anything from 12 – 48 hours) promotes the acidification of the dough, which allows the dough to rise properly and to obtain a good crumbly structure, leading to a much longer shelf life and the unique tangy flavour
Of all grains rye has the highest content of dietary fiber. In addition, rye is rich in minerals, vitamins and other micronutrients, which are located mainly in the outer layers of the grain, which is why whole grain breads (‘Vollkornbrot’) are very popular. Research shows sourdough breads cause fewer spikes in blood sugar, improve absorption of minerals
The dilution of the meaning of sourdough
Working with sourdough is very different than working with yeast dough. Apart from flour, water, starter and salt, sourdough needs time. This is probably the reason that baking with sourdough became “a thing” during the pandemic, when everybody had time. At present the real meaning of sourdough (four basic ingredients plus time) has often been diluted in such a way, that all there is left is the “fashion of sourdough”, culminating in menu descriptions like “scrambled egg on sourdough”, when in fact you get a slice of white bread, that has many more ingredients, prominent amongst them white wheaten flour and yeast. Using baker’s yeast to produce a loaf of sourdough bread is like doping the starter, thus reducing time and increasing profit. I am not against bread produced with yeast, I enjoy it, what I don’t enjoy is the inflationary use of the word sourdough without any real meaning. Just read the label or ask your bakery what is in the bread and you will see.
Baking tradition in Ireland
JP McMahon, the Galway chef and writer, makes an interesting observation in his ‘Irish Cook Book’: “Most of us, over the age of 30 at least, will have memories of our mothers and grandmothers making soda bread,” he writes, “yet I was wrong to think that we have always been making soda bread. Soda bread only came to Ireland in the second half of the 19th century. Before that we had a great variety of bread, all based on the sourdough method. Fermenting wild yeasts was never a problem in Ireland.”
20 loaves and a sourdough starter
When we arrived in our campervan in 1985 to settle in Ireland we brought along twenty loaves of rye sourdough, a big jar with a sourdough starter, 25 kilos of rye grain and a hand operated grain mill (the legendary Green Diamant, the grain mill for a lifetime) and more or less from day one we did bake our bread daily. The recipe we used at the time is still much the same we use today, nearly 40 years later. And yes we still bake our 100 per cent organic whole meal rye bread, albeit using an electrical grain mill, an electrical dough mixer and electrical bread baking oven.
Baking at Neantog
We always start the process early in the morning, mixing freshly milled flour with water and our starter. In the evening (about 12 hours later) we add more flour, water, salt and traditional spices like caraway and coriander, sometimes we add also seeds. We let it ferment for an hour or so, knock it back and fill the dough into tins and let ferment again until it has risen sufficiently. Then we bake at an initial temperature of 250° C for 15 mins, reduce the temperature to 180° C and bake for another 50 mins or so.
We bake a monthly supply and freeze the loaves, therefore our starter will be kept in the fridge for up to four weeks. Coming back to our initial question: How often do you feed your sourdough? We take the starter out of the fridge and refresh over a two day period, feeding the starter with freshly milled flour and water.
Our recipe for making a starter and baking sourdough bread is in “Neantog Cookbook – Gaby’s favourite recipes” now in its 7th edition and available at neantog.com/shop