Sourdough

Sourdough bread is great flavorful bread with a hint of sourness, as the name suggests, that makes use of the natural yeast that is present in the air and in the flour.

I like having some bread with *a lot* of butter in the morning along with other things. Despite all the constant jabber about low-carb, I find it very hard on busy days to quickly come up with some equally fortifying and easy on the wallet to replace it for breakfast. I've tried going without it, but I just get hungry. The combination of healthy carbs, protein and fats I find gives me both short term and long term lasting energy, well beyond lunch hour. What better way to have bread, than have your own home made bread? Even better, I was reading one study on sourdough benefits by Lappi et al (2010), and they found that feeding sourdough to subjects with metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance, compared with both white and regular whole wheat bread provided more digestible soluble proteins, as well as a significantly lower glucose level in the blood and lower serum insulin levels post-eating with time. That means it plays much less havoc with your blood sugar and insulin levels. They also found that whole wheat and white bread were very similar as far as glucose, insulin, and soluble protein levels were concerned.

I will not go into the extensive details and recipes for making your own sourdough, as I used the excellent instructions provided in this website for my bread recipe. However, she assumes you already have a starter culture, I used this website's instruction to make my starter. I also suggest adding a tablespoon of orange juice or pineapple juice to your starter mixture at the beginning, since a lower PH will encourage a faster growth of the yeast.

I'll admit my first loaf was not a shining success, and was a little flat. Mostly I believe due to the fact that my starter culture was being fed white flour while my bread was whole wheat. Also, I didn't wait long enough till my starter was good and strong.

My second try was much better. I had a good strong starter that was fed on whole wheat flour for a few days prior to baking. I also kneaded the bread well and followed the recipe linked above. You have to add some type of sweetner to whole wheat bread otherwise the bread will be bitter. I prefer to add 2 tablespoons of honey (adjust depending on your recipe size) to the dough, and it takes care of the bitterness without making the bread sweet. It passed the window pane test. This is where if you stretch the dough sideways and up, it should become thin enough that it's translucent without tearing. The result: really awesome bread. I still have to tinker and fine tune the recipe to my taste, but this one's a keeper! I plan to experiment with different types of oil for flavor and try adding some nuts to it.




My culture :) and second try: the bread was nicely raised, with lots of bubbles, and a lighter texture.