Imagine. You are a yeast cell. Along with trillions of other cells, thousands of species, as well as bacteria organisms also varying in the thousands, you are all suddenly dislodged from your happy warm and damp environs by a hot Santa Ana wind. You are switched automatically into emergency mode in which your contents shrink inward tightly into four discrete segments and a protective shell forms rapidly around yourself as you are lifted higher into the freezing cold atmosphere. This will get rough. You are buffeted brutally clear across the ranges of mountains in Nevada and in Utah, lifted higher and colder until suddenly you dip slightly while sailing the valleys of Western Colorado. You are skirted across the Western slope and then forced further downward by pressure as you sail through a constriction of layers of swiftly moving air formed by high pressure, losing still more altitude, by wind not by weight, quickly skimming the Morison foothills, flying right over the landscape contours, buffeted by gusts, and wending through pockets of multi mini climate areas like a high-speed pinball, and then suddenly you find yourself shoved directly into a slurry of warm water with the food of wheat flour and a touch of refined sugar, quick carbohydrates, like a fast-food station, oddly sitting there invitingly on Chip Ahoy's balcony bench.
Heaven.
You must take advantage of this fresh opportunity, it is programed into you to do so. The warm liquid erodes the protection provided by your own material, and the four portions of yourself burst forth like chickens hatching, which immediately use the food present to bud copies. The copies bud further copies until chains of clones are formed. Finally portions of clone formations encounter corresponding portions of similar chains that are not portions of yourself and you procreate by means of your alternate diploid duplicating ability by combining duplications of your combined selves, as you continue to bud chains of clones. You are nothing if not brilliant survivalists.
This is a thin slurry of flour and water with a trace of sugar. I never did it this way before. Usually I make a slurry about as thick as pancake batter, but this time I didn't. It's hot outside, and I didn't want to have to keep adding water every few hours. The bowl was set outside on a balcony bench.
The next day the water stank quite strongly. I could have used it at that point, but for some reason I wanted to keep on collecting yeast. It dried as expected so I added water. Twice, over a period of three days. Finally I brought it inside.
I did not use all the slurry. I did not protect the slurry with cheesecloth while collecting and there were tiny specks of debris also blown in. I couldn't pick them all out. I used only two tablespoons of the stinky slurry and two tablespoons of fresh filtered water. Then fed the refreshed slurry with a scant one level tablespoon of flour.
And this is the problem: flour also has yeast attached to it. Yeast is on the grain that is milled. Producers do not irradiate grain or milled flour so those organisms are still there. It is possible to begin a culture directly from the flour or from the grain without bothering with a collection slurry. If the slurry is stinky as this slurry is, then it is fairly certain the new organisms within the slurry vastly outnumber the organisms carried on the flour (and on your skin, and in your kitchen air). But since I used only two tablespoons of stinky slurry, I cut down that number of collected organisms considerably. These new airborne organisms will compete for available resources with flour-carried organisms and I am not certain which ones will win.
The second thing is, I am not providing heat to cultivate the culture. They must procede at room temperature. For that reason the process was protracted by days, but weaning them from heat was avoided.
The starter was neglected for full half-days. It was watered and fed. It formed a few bubbles. Watered and fed. Few bubbles. Watered and fed. Few bubbles. Reduced, to keep the sample small. Watered and fed. few bubbles. It wasn't doing much of anything at all for three days. For this reason I lost confidence that it was the airborne organisms that produced the few bubbles that arose in the refreshed slurry. The amount of time on the counter without heat was the same amount of time that would take flour to form bubbles without an inoculation of balcony bench stinky slurry.
Each addition of water and flour doubles the mass.
Then again, another doubling. I stopped photographing the feedings because so little was apparent. At three days I questioned the whole effort. I began to believe the collected organisms were having no affect at all, that this culture would be from the flour alone.
Finally, an amount of bubbling that indicated the culture was breeding.
The thickened refreshed slurry is really sticky when the bubbles are knocked back.
One last addition of water to double the liquid portion.
Now, enough flour to form an actual dough, not just a slurry, along with salt which will both flavor the bread and buffer the yeast activity. Isn't that a shame? All that trouble to get the yeast colonies going strongly and then purposefully slow them down by adding salt which they can barely tolerate.
I misjudged here. I made the dough ball too stiff. I calculated in my mind that the dough ball would produce CO2 and alcohol as a byproduct, the alcohol tending to loosen the dough.
The yeast activity will retard in cold storage. But it takes awhile for something so much like insulation to actually chill, so there will be further activity in the refrigerator, even though salt is retarding activity and so is the cold. This is what I misjudged. The dough did not loosen as much as I anticipated. The dough ball is small compared to most of my sourdough batches so it chilled more quickly than usual.
The various species of yeast cause air bubbles in the dough. The species of bacteria impart various flavors that combine with the alcohol produced by the yeast along with an acidification of the dough. All of that together comprise the characteristics of the baked bread that are unique to each geographic location. Mind, if the yeast in the flour won the resource war with the stinky slurry, then the geographic location will be the mix of locations that were the sources of the blended grains. Only a boutique mill would make flour from single-source grain.
Three days in cold storage allows the bacteria to breed within the dough while the yeast cells sleep. They're light sleepers. When finally removed I can tell this will be a dense heavy bread. It's more dry than I prefer, but I resist adding moisture.
Turned out onto the work surface and stretched. This is where moisture could be added by spraying the stretched dough or by carrying moisture over on wet hands. I do this all the time, but for some reason I decided not to do it today.
Had I held off on salt so that it wouldn't buffer the dough during cold storage, then now would be the time to sprinkle it onto the stretched dough.
The loaf is formed, but it will flatten as it rests before being placed in the oven.
The dough rests while the oven reaches temperature. A clay cloche is heated inside the oven chamber. The oven and the cloche will become as hot as the oven will go.
DRAMA !
I find it convenient to cover the dough with an upturned storage bin while the oven and cloche heat up. The unsuspecting yeast cells and bacterial organisms know not the fate that awaits them. They're happy as clams in miniature even though they are living with salt. They probably think that they have all eternity to carry on as they do, if they think anything at all. I almost feel sorry for them and a little bit sinister, for about .00001 of a second.
The loaf is stretched slightly one last time as it is lifted into the rocket-hot cloche and then covered, a veritable oven within an oven. The moisture inside the dough is contained by the cloche which keeps the dough surface sufficiently elastic and allows the air pockets trapped inside the dough to expand as they heat and the dough to stretch as those air pockets expand, and to be kept sufficiently wet until full expansion is achieved and then quickly wicked out by the hot porous clay. The hot clay cloche assures that the form of the loaf sets hard at the peak of expansion without the chance of collapsing.
Twenty-five minutes of high-heat torture and most of the organisms are dead.
The lid of the cloche is removed and the bottom with the loaf returned to the oven to brown.
We baker-types look for three-tone coloration in our artisan loaves, pale tan, light brown, and nearly burnt highly caramelized black edges.
ARTS !
The crumb of this loaf is dense, the crust is exceedingly chewy. The flavor is extraordinarily sourdough and quite strong. You can never buy sourdough this powerful. Period. The bread is amazing. I do not think children would like this at all. People with dentures would be stymied.
I did not reserve a portion of raw dough because I can initiate another starter any time I wish and I'm a little bit tired of babying them all the time.
It is not the best bread for sandwiches, way too heavy for that, nonetheless, that is how I will have it today.
I almost forgot. If you are interested in more photos and descriptions of various types of sourdough bread, you can use Blogger's search feature up there in the corner ↖ . It will produce the dozens of posts that I wrote on this subject.
