As I was waiting tor the next round of coil folding my dough the other day, I got to thinking about my bread baking journey that started one freezing morning upstate New York forty some years ago. And about all the stepping stones and leaps that took me to where I am now by making things a little or a lot easier for me. Of those I would rank among the top three, not necessarily in this order, the Ank, retarding, and easy sourdough management. The first two are common enough, but sourdough management is something I had been struggling with for a long time.
I hate waste, so creating sourdough discard went so much against the grain that I knew I couldn’t do it. Yes, you can make flatbreads and what not with the discard, but it is still just recycling waste, rather than avoiding it. Littler by little, by experimenting and taking lots of tiny steps, I have developed my method, incredibly easy, requiring no space in the refrigerator and free of waste. I had tried Dabrownman's NFNM starter, but it didn’t quite do it for me, I am not going to go into details, because it is a great way to maintain starter, just not for me.
I thought I would share my experience here, perhaps it will help somebody else as well.
This is what I do:
I keep only 5-10 grams of whole rye 100% hydration starter in one of those tiny one-ounce glass jam jars I saved up from breakfast at some hotel years ago (did a lot of these in my time). Some creams, lotions, potions, and tonics come in similar jars as well. It will keep in the refrigerator fine for a couple of weeks easy. I went as long as 17 days once, with no noticeable decline in performance. It will probably go much longer, I just never had the opportunity to try.
With about 1-3 grams of this starter, I build the levain for whatever bread I am going to bake. My everyday bread is a variant of a multigrain SF (“Tartine”) type sourdough with some 30-50% of any of the following: whole wheat, whole emmer, whole spelt, whole einkorn, whole rye, kernels, seeds, nuts, etc., etc. But I also bake at least 5 -10 other breads, on a fairly regular basis.
With these 1 – 3 grams of starter I can build any levain I want, by feeding it in two stages with whichever flour I feel like feeding it. In the first stage, I will first feed a tiny amount (1 – 3 grams) of my refrigerated starter in a proportion I want (I usually use 1:6:6 starter:flour:water, this gives me good strength, flavor, and good timing), then use this to build the amount of levain I need. The rest (we are talking about something on the order of 5 grams) I will just toss into my dough, it will make no difference, the amount is tiny and there is no waste. If my levain is whole rye, I will take 5 grams of it to replace the starter in the tiny jar. I usually always build rye lavein at least once in every two weeks, so my starter gets replaced regularly.
So, for my multigrain SF sourdough type bread I will take 2.5 g of refrigerated starter, mix it in the evening with 15 g each of rye flour and water and let it rise until the morning. In the morning, I will take all of my freshly risen starter and build the levain adding to it about 165 g each of flour and water. This will be ready in the afternoon, when I am ready to fire up the old Ank. I end up with about 350 g of levain, enough for three loaves. I will then do most of my bulk fermentation in the refrigerator, shape my loaves the following day, do most of the proofing also in the refrigerator and then I will bake my loaves one by one two or three days apart early in the morning and a week will have gone by before I have to start thinking about what to bake next.
In a nutshell:
· 5 g of starter is being kept in the fridge
· Take 2.5 g, build about 30+ g of refreshed starter
· Take that and build about 350 g of levain
· Keep 5 g of the levain in the fridge for the next time, toss the rest of old started from the fridge along with the levain into the dough.
I have built a small Excel worksheet (above left) that calculates the exact amounts of starter, flour, and water for each of the two builds, based on the amount of levain/starter called for in the recipe and the preferred ratios; if anybody were interested, I will gladly share it along with basic directions, but above on right is all the code, just retype it into your excel (formulas are for column E, if using other column substitute your actual column letter for "E" in my formulas above) and voila, you'll have it, red cells are where you type in what you want and the black cells will yield the weights needed for each stage.