It seems, at times, that there’s as many ways of making bread as there are stars in the sky. Unleavened flat breads such as injera that seem to have a closer relationship to pancakes than bread, more dough-based flatbreads such as naan, roti, tortillas and the like, yeastless “quick” breads such as cornbread, commercial yeast-risen breads, and the ever popular “wild yeast” or sourdough breads.
While I sometimes make bread with commercial yeast, I tend to lean towards sourdough. I enjoy the complexity of flavor and it is reportedly lower on the glycemic index as well. I certainly enjoy the challenge of making a bread that might take two, or even three, days to make.
Sourdough itself has many incarnations: liquid starters, firm starters, starters made with milk, some fed with sugar, others made simply of flour and water. I’ve tried to make sourdough starter several times in my life and, until this latest attempt, I never had any luck. Usually around day 3 or 4 I would end up with some uninvited beastie growing amidst my starter and coating it in white fuzz. I even gave up and purchased an already ripe starter, but then went back to square one upon finding that I wasn’t alone and that there was a new twist.
I initially found this twist while reading “Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor.” This was one of the first bread baking I purchased and it threw me whole heartedly into the process. The other was his book Peter Reinhart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread.” While both had instructions on how to get a starter going, it was “Whole Grain Breads” that referenced what is now the only way I suggest getting a starter going.
The method is known as “The Pineapple Juice Solution” and it was a microbiolgist-cum-baker by the name of Debra Wink that worked it all out. She goes into a great deal of detail about the chemistry and biology of it all over The Fresh Loaf. I must admit, after having seen her mentioned in such a highly-acclaimed baking book I was incredibly surprised to see her posting on a forum that I’d wandered into quite by happenstance and the blessing of Google.
This “Pineapple Juice Solution” is such a simplistic solution to a problem that had plagued me for years and prevented me from baking my own sourdough bread. Who would have thought that such a small thing as substituting a citrusy, acidic juice for the first two days of making your sourdough starter could have such incredibly different results? If you’ve had problems getting a basic flour and water sourdough starter going, by all means check it out.
On the other hand, you can do what I did and buy your starter from a bakery. If you can’t find one that will sell you a portion of theirs you can always buy one from King Arthur Flour. You can keep it on the counter and feed it daily, or even twice a day as some people recommend, or in the fridge and feed it only once a week once it’s ripe. Just remember that no matter how you acquire your starter, you need to at least double it with each feeding. That means if you are keeping a typical liquid starter you need to mix equal amounts by weight, not volume, of starter, flour and water.
I now keep two starters on hand. One is the pure white-flour fed starter that I purchased from a bakery. The other is a pure rye starter that I got going using the pineapple method. Both are happy, healthy and active and make good bread. I can’t help but feel a slight bit more proud, however, when I bake with the starter I started from scratch.
