Mastering Sourdough Starters And Leavens

By The Artisan Bakery School

Mastering Sourdough Starters & Leavens

From mystery to mastery.

This is a highly-focused, practical guide to the do’s, don’ts and desirables of making, managing and baking with sourdough cultures.
We also offer recipes as to how to make and maintain your sourdough culture and how to use it for making various breads.
In addition you will find practical time saving recipes as to how to save time and fit your baking effortlessly in your busy life.
Find out how to make one batch of dough and bake from it throughout the week.
Or, discover our overnight 5 minutes hands-on recipe where you mix, prove overnight and bake a lovely sourdough loaf.
Or, how to make super easy 'mix and bake' sourdough soda bread.
And if you never knew what to do with excess starter or leaven we offer you a great sourdough pancake recipe.

Do you know what a healthy starter looks like?
Do you know how much starter to seed your leaven with?
Can you judge peak fitness of your leaven?
Do you know how young, mature and old leaven affects your bread?
Can you handle the time and temperature ‘levers’?
Do you know how to choose the best flour for feeding your happy colonies?

This book empowers you to:

Understand the difference between fridge starter and room temperature leaven
Make starter from scratch
Make distinction between young, mature and old fridge starter
Understand and maintain your fridge starter to an optimal level
Make your leaven from your starter
Make distinction between young, mature and old leaven
Understand and maintain your leaven for maximum lift to your bread
Troubleshoot problems
Measure your progress from amateur to amazing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dragan Matijevic
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463614839

The Artisan Bakery School

Dragan Matijevic“My fascination with breadmaking was born of necessity in the mid seventies, when I first arrived in this country. The bread in England then was, and still largely is, fast to produce and chemically induced. No wonder that today we have such a huge number of people suffering from bread allergies.Coming from a macho culture, barely able to fry an egg, I was forced to learn how to bake a decent loaf, just to survive.But my really passionate quest for the perfect loaf began later on in my life. Wanting to learn absolutely everything about what makes dough work, I picked up tips from master bakers everywhere, as well as trying one thousand and one ways of making bread.The answer was to ditch everything but the essentials (good flour, clean water, salt and yeast) and give it all plenty of time.Today, to make my perfect loaf, I prefer to use heritage flours (or gluten free flour), coupled with the time-honoured method of long fermentation, which makes delicious and beautiful breads that are also good for health.I use mainly sourdough retardation method because it is dead easy (15 minutes hands on) and produces the best tasting loaves. My dough takes between 12 and 144 hours to develop and each loaf is carefully hand-crafted. That’s why I call my loaves ‘artisan’.My greatest pleasure is when people come to us saying that they can eat bread again, because properly fermented dough is easy to digest. Or our students telling us that after the course with us they have never bought another loaf of bread again!”Apart from baking Dragan does magic shows for all ages and writes books for children.Penny WilliamsPenny was fortunate enough to have a mother and two grandmothers who were all great cooks, and happy to have their kids in the kitchen. The teaching came almost by osmosis.As a three-year old Penny remembers coming in from the garden to poke a curious, muddy finger into a mesmerising pillow of white dough rising in a bowl and squeaking with guilty alarm at the grubby dent she had made. To her astonishment, the dent disappeared, just as her laughing mother said it would. Penny’s lifelong passion for creating good food made it natural for her to bake bread, but it wasn’t until she met Dragan that she really developed those skills.The Rise of Real Bread Conference in 2009 was her first encounter with the artisan bakers, millers, farmers, scientists, ecologists, writers and activists that are fighting for a better loaf on Britain’s tables. It was a watershed moment.Penny says “We can only change the way people bake and think about bread one person at a time. But if we do it often enough, for long enough, we will contribute to positive change. That’s our reason for being.But the most fun part of The Artisan Bakery School is running the weekend courses. It’s all about making people feel at home, preparing something special for them at every meal, gathering round the table, or round the fire, enjoying a glass of wine and telling stories after dinner. You wouldn’t believe how many amazing tales our bakers have to tell!”Apart from being a baker Penny is a professional copywriter and an author of a number of fictional books, both for children and adults.

Book preview

Mastering Sourdough Starters And Leavens

Bake Effortless Sourdough Bread with Lively Starters and Leavens

By Dragan Matijevic, Penny Williams

The Artisan Bakery School

All contents copyright © Penny Williams and Dragan Matijevic 2020

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Published by Pendragan Publishing

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This book cannot be copied, reprinted or redistributed for sale by any mechanical, electronic or other means. The design, photographs and text remain the properties of the authors.

The information contained in this text has been verified and documented as carefully as possible. The authors cannot be held liable for the use of its contents. Readers should exercise every possible precaution if they choose, solely at their own risk, to put any of the content into practice.

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Smashwords Edition - ISBN - 978046614839

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Pendragan Publishing

Old Home Cottage

Sparkwell

Plymouth PL7 5DQ

United Kingdom

First Edition 2020

Table of Contents

Mastering Sourdough Starters And Leavens

Introduction

Yeasts and Bacteria

Fermentation

A Note On Pre-ferments

Magic of Sourdough

What is Starter and What is Leaven?

Starter - Natural Culture That Lives in the Fridge

Smile - it's only flour and water!

Now Make Your Starter

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Morning

Day 5

When is Starter Ready to Use?

Transforming Your Starter

Maintaining The Starter

Fridge Method of Maintaining Your Starter.

Food And Drink For Starters

Starter Fitness Test

Leaven - Natural Culture Ready To Make Bread

What Leaven Does To Your Dough

The Leaven Control Levers

How To Turn Starter Into Leaven

Flour

Time & Temperature

Taste

Leaven Texture, Strength & Activity

Useful tips

Four Leaven Recipes

Starter & Leaven Troubleshooting

Recipes

Sourdough Pancakes

Lavash

Sourdough Soda Bread

Effortless Overnight White

Sourdough White in Three Steps

Airy Brown in Three Steps

Effortless Five Day Bread

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

DAY 4 and Day 5

Artisan Bread Goals

How to Make Bread With Holes

Keep Notes

Online Courses by The Artisan Bakery School

About The Artisan Bakery School

Contact Us

About Dragan

About Penny

Introduction

This book springs from our best-selling, online video course, Mastering Sourdough Starters & Leavens. We have written it to make this information accessible to as many bakers and would-be bakers as possible. We already have almost ten thousand students around the world, from the Australian outback to the mountains of Alaska, and even on the Sub-Antarctic islands, all united in a quest to perfect their sourdough bread, and we hope that you will join them.

Your own sourdough bread-making adventure starts quite literally with your starter culture. Your breads, and your satisfaction in making them, depend on how healthy and active that starter is.This is why it is of utmost importance to understand your starter culture fully, how to read its stages, how to maintain it, how to keep it at peak performance and how to use it to the maximum benefit.

The recipes in this book are not only geared to making the best use of your starters and leavens, but also to helping you optimise your sourdough baking schedule. Let's face it, if your baking process takes up too much of your time, you will be reluctant to do it. On the other hand, if it only takes a few minutes of your time hands-on, you will be excited to do it. Our recipe selection is designed to help you make really lovely sourdough breads with minimum effort.

Note that while starter cultures may be more or less solid, this book only deals with liquid starters and leavens, with a 50:50 ratio of water and flour.

Here is what we will cover in this book:

The difference between a starter culture and a leaven.

How to build a starter from scratch: the practical instructions.

How to make a leaven from your starter.

Understanding the various stages and states of your starters and leavens.

Signs of healthy starters and leavens, and symptoms of unhealthy ones.

Feed formulas and recipes for starters and leavens.

How young, mature and old starters affect your leavens.

How young, mature and old leaven affects your bread.

Mastering the four leaven ‘levers’.

Vital tips and troubleshooting information.

Recipes for really effortless sourdough breads.

How to make holey breads.

Learning from your own experience

This is what we are aiming for:

Healthy starter and leaven!

Leading to breads like these...

And this is what we are aiming to avoid:

More or less dead starter

Mouldy starter

Runny leaven

Flat bread

Yeasts and Bacteria