As you learn about baking with sourdough I need to get you to understand the process. A major aspect of this is in understanding your starter.
Why? well because every aspect of your bake is going to be impacted by your starter.
- The age of your starter, the acidity, the levels of yeast, and bacteria impacts not just the way your bread turns out, but also the nutritional value of your bakes.
- The temperature you refresh at impacts the balance of the microbes, and the quantity of the water, of the amount of stater you inoculate with.
- All this before you have even changed the flour!
Each experiment is a learning experience and will allow you to get to know a new flour or further understand the differences between flours. The race also gives you a very active, hands-on experience, and helps you connect to the rate of fermentation, how much hydration a flour can take and what happens with different inoculations, timings and temperatures.
Equipment
- Your starter.
- 2 clean jam jars ( no lids but a loose cover) For jam-jar race, you will need two identical jam jars – it is important that they are identical. I recycle empty Bon Maman jars, which have a capacity of 370g, but any jars with a capacity of more than 330g should be fine. The jars need to be clean and dry, without any residue of jam or whatever else was in them before. You also need a marker pen and some tape that you can write on, to label the jars.
- the flour needed specified in the task
Instructions
What you are going to do is make a visual comparison between two flours over time. You will need to be able to connect to the process during the day, observing what is going on and recording what you see.
In all the jam-jar race we observing, and recording the results
You should note:
- the consistency of the mixture
- the time it takes the mixture to reach a high point on the jam jar – I would expect a stoneground white flour to reach the top of the jar faster than the roller-milled, but this is not always the case
- the time at which the mixture starts to lose volume (drop); this and the previous observation give you a good indicator of how quickly the flour is going to respond
- the visual details of the structure of the mixture; this gives an indication of how the gluten is going to behave
Take a photo of your jars and add to the forum POST with your comments. ( Please try not to add your own post separate from the main one )
We will discuss the observed differences in the following weeks’s lives
When your jam-jar race is completed, you can discard the mixture and wash the jars. Alternatively, one of the best things you can do with the contents of the jars is make a 10-minute loaf – I try to make it the perfect amount to use.
Or save up the starter and use it in a rye recipe, or make sourdough pancakes.
