Sourdough Starter

During the last week I have been absorbed by one of the most ancient and primitive forms of foraging – namely the capturing of minute fungal, single-celled, micro-organisms that are otherwise known as wild yeast.

Joe Ortiz in The Village Baker puts it like this: “Yeast, as a separate ingredient, is extremely new in the history of food. The first bread baker had, in effect, to capture what the French boulanger calls levure sauvage, wild yeast. That primitive ferment of flour and water was the only starter used for bread in antiquity and it is what we know today as sourdough starter, or leaven.”

Last month, in Inishfood, we had the joy of watching baker Thibault Peigne at work in a remarkable pop-up bakery staged in the centre of Harry’s Restaurant in Donegal. The taste of Tibo’s bread, and the words he spoke about bakeries in Ireland, rekindled a desire to make bread, which is something I haven’t done properly, since before my children were born. You can’t mother a child and mother a sourdough starter in my experience, but now my children have grown up, and they enjoy good bread too.

Thankfully none of our family have exhibited the gluten intolerance that is so rampant in Ireland. We noted it down when Tibo said the Chorleywood system, so endemic in Irish breadmaking, needs flour with the maximum amount of gluten, and 95% of bread in Ireland is supplied by the plant bakeries who use this system.

Could this be the reason why we have become so intolerant of this basic food? Tibot, who trained in Germany, answered No. This was not the full story. In order to make bread digestible we need worry not so much about the gluten, but more about the fermentation. Fermentation is necessary in order for our own digestive systems to be able to break it down.

Modern bread uses fast fermentation. “In factory bread, time is your enemy” explains Tibo.



So, back home in Cork, I set about trying to understand what happens as flour ferments and make a sourdough starter from which to ferment bread that would give us a healthy, delicious loaf.

I was extremely lucky here to receive the help and on-line guidance of David Semple. David is the bakery teacher at the Belfast Cookery School. He kindly sent me his course notes, and he was there, all week, at the other end of a twitter DM, when things looked shaky or confusing.

To make the classic sourdough bread, two things need to be present to kick-start the dough. These are wild yeast and lactobacilli. The pair have a symbiotic relationship that provide structure and taste to the finished loaf. The two cultures feed on the sugars in the flour, and convert the carbohydrates through the action of naturally occurring enzymes. Baker Andrew Whitley puts it like this: “Sourdough is an object lesson in co-operation, with its various constituents depending on, and not competing with, each other.”

This mixture of wild yeast and bacteria feast away on the sugars in the flour, breaking down the starches and producing, in the process, carbon dioxide. This gas becomes trapped in the strands of gluten and causes the dough to rise. The acid-producing, acid-tolerant bacteria, meanwhile, gives the dough flavour. And flavour also comes from alcohol, another byproduct of the chemical process. Meanwhile, the time it takes is what gives the bread texture. Joe Ortiz: “A piece of crusty pan ordinaire may be a spoon for your soup, but a slice of pain de campagne is like a plate.”

Here is David Semple’s recipe for a Sourdough Starter

1 cup strong white bread flour or rye flour
2 ½ cups Irish farm Apple Juice

Day 1- Whisk together to form a smooth thick batter; pour into a large plastic container or a ceramic pot with lid. Leave in a warm place away from direct heat for a day. (Do not put in a glass container that has fitted lid, as it has been known to explode)

Day 2 – The mix should have bubbles formed on top and have a slightly sour home brew sort of smell, give it a quick whisk and feed it with 1 cup of flour and 2 cups of water. Give it a whisk and leave aside again.

Day 3- Pour away ½ the mix and feed again, as above: the only reason to bin half the mix is that you will not have the space to grow such a big beast.

Day 4- Feed again as for day two and then leave for two days.

Day 6- by now your mix should be very active and have a slight fizzy taste to the tongue. It's time to start to make a loaf but I hope you’re not hungry because it takes a while, but it will all be worth it. You will need to continue to feed it about once a week, or less if you keep it in the fridge.

I followed this to the letter, and had a wonderful bubbling starter after five days. At one stage, I thought it wasn’t happening, and I put the starter in the car, which this week was the warmest place I could find. The little bit of gentle warmth did the trick, and the bubbles came.

Note: use a large container, and be prepared to dispose of extra starter. There will always be friends to take this from you, however, and this community spirit is very much in accordance with making sourdough. David, who is battling a brain tumour right now, suggests that with every bit of sourdough starter you hand out to your community, a donation could be made to a cancer organisation such as Brainwave, which seems more than appropriate.