affection is a conviction

Last week I decided to give up on my current sourdough starter, which was smelling alarmingly vinegary and not rising much, and order a new one from King Arthur. The new starter arrived Sunday, with a "care and feeding" pamphlet that suggested I didn't need to give up on the old one after all, just feed it better. Anyway, I had already thrown out the old starter, so I've been following the feeding instructions meticulously: at every feeding, discard (or use) 2/3 of the starter, leaving 50 g, and add 50 g of flour and 50 g of water. And it does smell nice, and it's been puffing up nicely in the crock.

Last night's batch of bread wasn't exactly light and fluffy, but less dense than the previous two, and not bad considering I'm still trying to make it high-protein and low-carb (using 2 eggs, 1-1/2 cups of water, 1-1/2 cups of white bread flour, a cup of whole-wheat flour, 3/4 cup of wheat gluten, 1/4 cup of flaxseed meal, and 1/8 cup of quinoa). I had the oven at 150°F for a few hours while the bread rose on the stovetop, then put the bread into a soaked Romertopf in the oven, and set the thermostat to 475°F and the timer to 45 minutes. It came out a little dark, so maybe 450°F for 50 minutes next time. And the recipe in the pamphlet for pain au levain, using only sourdough starter and no commercial yeast, has you amplify the 50 g of starter to a levain for 12 hours before adding anything else, which I haven't been doing. The levain is not at a 1:1:1 ratio of starter:water:flour, but a stiffer 1:2.5:5. Try that next time.

Speaking of "stiffer", one of the bread-baking books I've worked with in the past follows a different model of sourdough, allegedly based on the practice of people traveling to California in covered wagons: rather than growing it semi-liquid in a crock, you make it much stiffer into a baseball, wrapped tightly in two layers of handkerchief, and at each feeding, discard the outer crust and use the soft, spongy inner part. Haven't done that in a number of years.

Of course, the Romertopf approach to baking -- starting with a cold oven, as you'll crack the Romertopf by putting it cold-and-wet into a hot oven -- is inconsistent with the way bread ovens have worked for 98% of human bread-baking history: build a fire in the oven, get the floor and walls good and hot, pull out the fire and ash and put the bread in to bake as the oven gradually cools down. I've done the latter too, both in a modern gas oven and in a wood-fired brick oven, and that's another knob to tweak.