JOINING THE SOURDOUGH HYPE! – STARTERS

Hello, Folks! Hope you guys been doing well, safe, and healthy J

Now I’m going to share about Sourdough Bread, which has been a huge trend everywhere these days. For those who have no idea what Sourdough bread is, it's actually a kind of European bread, made using the natural yeast developed from a 'starter' - which I will share in this post. The 'Starter' basically is made by combining flour and water and let it ferment whilst 'feeding it' for several days until the natural yeast formed, developed, and matured (usually the process takes a week).

The 'Starter' contributes to the sour / acidic bread flavor, making this bread unique. Having a slice of it - either toasted or not, with butter / jam / anything... Goodness! :9 If I manage to peak your curiosity, you should go ahead to buy one and try it by yourself. Hehe... 

I have watched several videos about the making of it from Youtube - check on Joshua Weissman's and Food52's - and it’s really interesting, but I have never been intrigued to try until 2 weeks ago. Due to COVID-19, it’s been quiet in my workplace and that had led us to have more time for me and my chef to work on new recipes testings.

My chef started the Sourdough Bread testing first. He and his friend had been working on it for 2 or 3 times, but sadly nothing turned out good. The dough that they made would always end up super runny and couldn’t be shaped at all. Intrigued, me and Audrey – my pastry staff finally decided to jump in to the testing. 

Audrey has more experiences in bread making, so we discussed about the starters that we wanted to try and after checking flours that we had, we decided to go for 2 kinds:

1. SHOOKY – consists of : 75 gr Light Rye Meal, 75 gr Whole Wheat Flour, and 100 gr Water
2. CASSIE – consists of : 100 gr Tapioca / Cassava Flour and 150 gr Water

The texture of SHOOKY was like a thick, slightly watery paste, while CASSIE was a very dense, thick paste. I was amazed with the texture of CASSIE as I mixed it, since it was the very first time working with Tapioca Flour (LOL!) We thought of adding more water to CASSIE, but decided to give it a try. Those were how we started our sourdough starters, marked on Tuesday, 7^th April 2020.

We planned to process the starter for a week from that day, taking out and feeding the starters each day during the process.

1^st Day – Wednesday, 8^th April 2020

Small bubbles started to form in the bottom part of SHOOKY, but nothing was formed at all in CASSIE. We assumed it was due to the dense texture and the lack of gluten in Tapioca Flour, so the development of the bubble might be slower in CASSIE compared to SHOOKY.

For SHOOKY, we decided to stick with this formula of taking out and feeding:

Take out the starter: 100 gr

Feed the starter: 50 gr Whole Wheat Flour + 50 gr Water

For CASSIE, we did the same amount of take out and feeding, but we still used Tapioca Flour for the feeding.

2^nd Day – Thursday, 9^th April 2020

SHOOKY kept developing small bubbles and at the moment, the faint acidic perfume started to develop as well. 

SHOOKY - Look at those bubbles!

On the other hand, CASSIE still didn’t show any significant change. Although we could see small bubbles started to form in the bottom part, but the texture was still very dense. We decided to stick with the same formula for SHOOKY, while for CASSIE we took out 50 gr and fed it only with 50 gr water to loosen the texture.

3^rd Day – Friday, 10^th April 2020

The progress went well for SHOOKY, but for CASSIE… suddenly it turned watery on top! D: We were super shocked and thought it was failed, but Audrey came up with the idea to take out 50 gr of the water and fed CASSIE only with the Bread Flour (High Protein). At this stage, though, the faint acidic perfume started to develop in CASSIE.

4^th Day – Saturday, 11^th April 2020

SHOOKY developed stronger acidic, alcohol-y perfume by now and the smell was really pleasant – there was a hint of sweetness in it. The yeast development went really well so far. As for CASSIE, luckily it was not watery anymore and the texture now was decent – thick slurry-ish kind of texture. We also could see small bubbles were more visible in the bottom part this time. Yay, we managed to save CASSIE!

By this day, we decided to start feeding CASSIE with the mixture of 35 gr Bread Flour + 15 gr Water + a pinch of sugar. With bread flour, since we assumed that the lack of Gluten in CASSIE made it really slow in developing the natural yeast. We also added a pinch of sugar with the consideration that sugar is yeast’s food – who knows that might work :P

5^th Day – Sunday, 12^th April 2020

It worked for CASSIE! By now, not only the bubbles were more visible in the bottom part, but also on the surface! Stronger acidic perfume also started to develop in CASSIE. Yay! We continued feeding CASSIE with the previous day’s formula.

6^th Day – Monday, 13^th April 2020

SHOOKY’s perfume, by now, resembled the perfume of apple. 

SHOOKY

CASSIE’s yeast development progressed really fast. More bubbles, stronger acidic perfume as well – in CASSIE, the perfume had a hint of savoriness and not as strong as SHOOKY.

CASSIE - Saved and now very well-developed :D

7^th Day – Tuesday, 14^th April 2020

Finally today marked a week from the start of our sourdough starter making. Looking from the good progressed of both starters, we were sure that by now, the starter was ready to use for making the bread. 

That's all about the starters. Gonna get ourselves ready into the most exciting and awaited part - making the bread! OMG, super excited!