You may have noticed that over the last few months articles and videos I have been posting up refer to ways by which we could be able to preserve food without electricity, with no fridge. This is something that our parents did know, at least of those of us that are over 50 years old, but has been forgotten from the seventies on. Let me clear out that I believe it was good for our parents to receive the gifts of the technological progress. Through these articles all I try to do is bring this lost knowledge back, for I think that electric power shall become very expensive over the next months, and we might have to make do without it, either by choice or because of harsh weather conditions etc. On the other hand, traditional knowledge of our ancestry should not be sacrificed all together in favor of modern convenience.
Today we shall give once more the recipe for making our own sourdough and how to preserve it without using up electricity. Measurements are given in spoonfuls instead of grams so that we are trained to reasoning and living without the aid of electricity.
There are a lot of ways to make sourdough; we can use the juice of onion, aquafaba, basil from the Holy Cross Service and more.
Here we shall present the simplest way using just water and flour.
Ingredients:
Flour and water
We shall need a bowl with lid or a large jar. Take care to leave the lid open because of fermentation taking place. Broad bowls are easier to wash that glass jars after the whole procedure is finished.
1st day.
We put 4 – 6 tablespoonfuls of flour in our container and water enough to form a mush. Our water should be warm enough to allow us keep our little finger in to the count of 10 (37 C). If the water is cold fungi will not develop, if too warm, they perish. We cover the container loosely, and put a blanket or other warm cloth over it, or simply leave it in a warm place.
2nd day.
If bubbles have begun to appear, it is a sign that our mixture is being activated. We add some flour to our mush (6 – 7 tablespoonfuls) and, if needed to keep the consistency of the first day, perhaps a little water.
3rd day
We proceed as on the previous day. By adding flour to the mixture, we provide food for the yeast: if it is not fed, our yeast will starve and our effort will go to waste. Now our mush is thicker.
4th day
We repeat day 3. Our sourdough has swollen and looks spongy. We add another 6 – 7 spoonfuls and water as needed, now our mixture is even thicker.
5th day
On this day, our sourdough should be swollen, look spongy and its surface should be humped. This means it is ready to be used.
There is a chance that our sourdough is not ready on the 5th day, so we shall have to feed it again. Maybe we have to do the same for another couple of days after that. It all depends on the temperature; the warmer it is the faster the procedure.
Kudos to you for your progress on the way to self-sufficiency. I have met people who still kept sourdough started by their grandmother. You too can keep it alive and regale your friends or make of it a wedding present for your own children.
Making the “mother”
Our sourdough is ready for us to make our bread. In the past people used to bake every week, so they had a living sourdough handy as it was often needed. Today, as we do not bake so often, we can keep our sourdough in the fridge. But let us skip all the details, since we want to cut off electric amenities.
With the sourdough we just made, we can directly bake our bread. What we suggest is divide it in two. With the first half part we shall make our bread. As we knead it, and before we add oil and nuts, we shall take a handful, to be the “mother”, which we shall feed and keep alive and active to be used the next time.
Dry cakes of our sourdough
To the second half we shall now add some flour and form very thin cakes, as thin as we can, that we shall leave on some surface to dry out. When these cakes dry in a couple of days, depending on their thickness and the room temperature, we can store in a jar, and in this way we can have dry sourdough any time we want to bake bread etc. In the dry cakes, the fungi remain asleep and they shall wake up as soon as they are found in their ideal conditions of humidity and temperature.
How to reactivate dry sourdough
When we wish to bake, we take a few pieces of the dry sourdough, add a little lukewarm water and mix with the cakes to soften them, and in this way reactivate our sourdough. After about one hour, we shall add flour and make a mush which we shall leave in a warm place for one day. On the next day, we shall add more water and flour and let it rest for five hours.
After five or six hours we can use it to knead and bake what we want. Dry sourdough can be kept up to five years.
Feeding the sourdough: A deeply political act
Learning to make our own sourdough, feeding it and making bread is beneficial for our health, our economy, maybe our socialization even, and also promotes the sharing knowledge as well as bread, but at the same time constitutes a deeply political act. Aristotle had pointed out that man is a political animal. When I say ‘a political act’ I have in mind all thought and act that we perform in order to solve some question on a personal or collective level.
Sourdough, we should remember, is a fungus, a living organism that must be looked after and cared for if we wish it to go on existing.
The directions that follow do not have to do with grams, scales and refrigerator since our aim is to train ourselves in creating and feeding sourdough and baking bread in traditional ways. You might rediscover your own intuition as a measure, a spoon for the salt, a cup for the flour or even the palm of your hands –handfuls, as the old ones used to say.
Step 1. Take the sourdough
Step 2. Mix half the weight of the sourdough with equal quantity of lukewarm water and as much flour, making sure that it is at our room temperature until we obtain a thick gruel or soft dough. We cover and leave it in room temperature. If the temperature is good, the dough will develop fast, but if it is cold, it shall take longer. The volume of the dough must double, and for this reason we have to place it in a large enough bowl. Our dough must be fed once in a week or every ten days.
Step3. After six or seven hours our dough shall have doubled. In case it does not, we add a little water and flour, knead it soft and give it another five or six hours or overnight to rise.
Step 4. We take a part to make our bread, and the rest we form into a small loaf and put it in flour to save until the next time we need to make bread in a week to ten days. We may also dry it after forming it into small cakes, as per above. These cakes are to be kept in small bags of cloth or in glass jars, in a dark and cool place.