DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So I’m two batches into this new “San Francisco” sourdough culture and I’m overwhelmed with disappointment. The starter is very active, quickly leavening both my breads, but the finished loaves are every bit as bland as any other wild-yeasted dough I’ve made in the past year. In every other respect, both loaves are beautiful, but they’re lacking the specific intensity of flavor I’m looking for.

I will find the solution. But first, there is a conflict in the advice of experts.

Background: there are two acids in a sourdough bread that are largely responsible for its flavor. As Maggie Glezer writes in Artisan Baking Across America, quoting French microbiologist, cereal chemist, and bread expert Dr. Richard-Molard:

If only acetic acid is present, the bread will taste very sharp and vinegary, but if only lactic acid is present, the bread “will have no special taste,” because lactic acid is much milder and less discernable.

So, my problem is a lack of acetic acid in the dough. The question now is how to correct this shortfall. On this, the experts disagree. Glezer writes:

Temperatures in the range of 95° to 104°F and wet batterlike starters favor the Lactobacilli that excrete lactic acid. Temperatures around 68°F and stiff doughlike starters favor the Lactobacilli that excrete both acetic and lactic acids.

In sharp contrast, Peter Reinhart writes in Crust & Crumb:

The thicker sponge encourages more of the sweeter lactic acids… As a rule, lactic acid-producing prefer drier sponges and acetic acid (sour) producers like wetter, looser, more oxygen-rich sponges.

To be fair, different strains of yeasts and bacteria may all respond differently, so it’s possible that both these bakers are correct, as far as their own home cultures are concerned. Which leaves me hanging, I regret to say.

The phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” A familiar female voice.

“Yes, hello?”

“Hello?” the female voice repeats. It sounds like my mom. But why does she keep saying Hello?

With some impatience, I say, “Mom?!”

There’s a pause.

The female voice continues, but it isn’t quite as familiar any more, the way a few opening notes on the radio might sound like a song you remember, but five seconds later you realize, no, this isn’t even a song, it’s a cheese commercial. And the voice says, with a sort of alarmed but cautious in a responding-to-a-perceived-threat tone, “I think I have the wrong number.”

I laughed aloud. What a terrible shock for a woman, to call a wrong number and have someone address you as “Mom.”

The current issue of Nature reports a fantastic breakthrough in LCD manufacturing, which IBM will have in production by the end of the year, dropping prices on flat-screen LCD displays as well as improving their quality. The full article is here: Atomic-beam alignment of inorganic material for liquid-crystal displays.

This has huge implications for energy savings, too: LCD displays weigh less, and therefore cost less to ship. More importantly, they consume significantly less power to operate.

LCD displays are visually clearer (and don’t flicker) and do not emit radiation, so there are benefits to users’ health and eyesight too.

Within a few years everybody will be using these, without question. We’ll look at trinitron displays the way we currently regard black-and-white televisions or old ASCII terminals, like relics from the distant technological past.

(And a few years after that we’ll all be wearing personal display systems… and after that I guess we’ll all be fitted at birth with a video jack at the base of the skull, neurologically soldered directly to the visual cortex, as predicted by the early William Gibson novels.)

Microsoft has declared war on open-source software. I have to laugh.

I give away my software for free, so I guess I am now at war with Microsoft. Excuse me while I climb onto my roof to fire up that cauldron of oil.

According to Craig Mundie, senior VP at Microsoft, open-source software creates greater dangers of security risks. Mundie’s timing is poor… just yesterday, a major security flaw was discovered in Microsoft’s IIS webserver. In case you missed it, here’s a telling quote from CERT: “A vulnerability exists in Microsoft IIS 5.0 running on Windows 2000 that allows a remote intruder to run arbitrary code on the victim machine, allowing them to gain complete administrative control of the machine.”

In contrast, the last time anyone found a security bug in open-source webserver Apache (the most popular webserver software in the world) that was so severe that it allowed a third party “complete administrative control” of the machine was… actually, hmm, I don’t think that’s ever happened.

Last Fall I tossed my sourdough starter in favor of a fresh culture, made from scratch without raisins, in hopes that the new culture would create more-sour breads. I’ve now made dozens of loaves with the new culture, and I have to conclude that the experiment failed. My current breads are no more sour than last year’s, and no amount of adjustment of flour type, hydration, proofing and rising times, retarding, or malting makes any difference.

This is not to say my sourdough breads aren’t any good; they’re actually better than they’ve ever been, with great crunchy crusts and creamy interiors, thanks to a slow elaboration process, a brotform, oven steam, and my own special technique, a twist on autolyse that I’ll write about another time. But as good as the texture is, the flavor just isn’t sour.

The untested variable is the starter itself. I’m not sure whether the wild yeasts I’ve been using came from the local environment, or if they were introduced to the culture from the wholegrain flours I made it with… the experts tend to disagree on how an initial culture gets going. But it wasn’t working for me in any case, so I sent away for a culture that is guaranteed to be different, and guaranteed to be sour: the “original” San Francisco sourdough, as bred by Ed Wood of sourdo.com.

A packet of powdered, dried starter arrived in the mail last week, and I quickly rehydrated it and set it out to ferment. Mr. Wood provides a clever idea for building a proof box on the cheap, so I was able to easily establish a reliable 85 degree environment for the activation phase.

It was immediately apparent that this culture is A Lot Different than my ‘local’ starter. Whereas my starter is nearly odorless, this frothing slop exudes a staggering odor, capable of detection across the room. As my wife put it, “that stinks like cheese!” This is partly due to keeping the goo at 85 degrees, of course.

The first loaf goes into the oven tomorrow. I’m trying not to get my hopes too high, because everything I know about bread-baking indicates that the first batch is unlikely to be as strongly flavored as subsequent batches. Also, I suffered a brain-fart during the elaboration process and mixed in too much water, diluting the starter. But still… it’s exciting.