2015 – Project Sourdough Culture

Happy new year Doughies followers, wishing you all a happy 2015.

2014 has been a bit quiet on the sourdough front here at doughies owing to current life circumstance, with all our bread making equipment in local storage and life continuing in an oven-less static caravan whilst our house is built, and the wood fired oven in a unhappy deconstructed state awaiting revival.

The statistic monkeys here at WordPress dropped me a nice email titled “Your 2014 year in blogging.” Embarrassingly doughies only managed one post in 2014 (!) but surprisingly far from stagnant, the blog has been viewed 1700 times in 2014. And I credit the real bread “sourdough September” campaign for a particular fizzy September when the blog had a record 400 hits – most people perusing for an hour or more. Which says two things – there’s a lot of bread heads out there interested in sourdough; and also in the experience of others making sourdough or “doing” real bread (and all that that entails).

This got me thinking about what we can do and share in 2015 for all the bread heads and what can be started now (as opposed to tomorrow, which never arrives). An oven would be nice to bake some sourdough locally, but short term that’s off the cards.

I’m reading an alternative book at the moment by author Tim Ferriss entitled “the 4-hour work week”, which albeit a bit controversial has some good grains in there – one quote that grabbed me “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field” – (Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and Nobel prize winner). Well here at doughies, we’ve made quite a few mistakes in the narrow field of sourdough!

So we’re going to start 2015 by sharing some of that experience, we’re going to write up a guide of sorts on sourdough culture (something you don’t need an oven for!) and the experience we’ve learned which in days of old would have been commonplace (with every household / community having a sourdough culture).

Outline topics we’d like to cover include:-

• Starting a culture
  • Type of container
  • Wheat & Rye culture recipes
  • Stages of development
  • Hydration – stiff Vs liquid
• Maintaining / training a culture
  • Feeding regime
  • Feeding cheats
  • Feeding holidays
  • Insurance – freezing and drying
• Using a culture
  • Young vs Old – and its impact on sourness
  • How much % culture in the final dough
• Culture leftovers – things to do with it!
• Troubleshooting
  • Lack of feeding
  • Low and High temperature

Figure we’re compile it and make it available to buy as an informative e-book / hard-book for those wanting to quickly go from rookie to expert in the sourdough culture department.

ETA is an ambitious 3 months to ensure Focus (another Tim Ferris grain), and we’ll see about some cultural blogposts as we go, which should provide a vehicle for bread head input and ideas for inclusion.

Excited about this project. Project step one; re-stock the flour cupboard 🙂

Update – We’re now busy writing this guide all about sourdough starters. Click here to read more and pre-order sourdough starter – the guide