Ask Allie!

Ask Allie is our food-related advice column, where you can ask all your fermenting, cooking, baking, and pantry-related questions to get digestible answers! No question about food is off limits!

Most of you will receive an emailed reply prior to your question hitting the blog, since I frequently think you need a more immediate answer. You should anticipate 1-2 weeks between submitting your question and its appearance on blog. Although emailed replies normally take between 1-3 days, it can take up to a week.

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I bought the Ancient Einkorn sourdough started from you via Amazon a couple of months ago.  I have treated it well since activation.

I cannot seem to make a “nice’ loaf.  Every loaf is flat and dense, even after allowing it to rise as much as 10 hours.  I am making two slashes in the top prior to baking to allow room to spread. I am using bread flour.  

I do not know what else to do.

Can you aim me to a resource that could offer insight into what I am doing wrong, please. Thank you.

— Charles

More data from our email exchange:

My wife, a fine cook, suggested I find a recipe that added yeast to the dough along with the starter.  So I tried that.

 I mixed 3 ½ cups of all-purpose flour with 1 tsp non-iodized salt, 1/2 cup of sourdough starter, ¾ cup lukewarm tap water and 1 tsp of rapid rise yeast (freshly purchase yesterday).  The starter had been fed a few hours earlier and was very bubbly.

 I mixed the ingredients together well until it formed a nice dough.  I left it in its bowl and covered it with plastic wrap and put it in an oven set to “bread proof” (which is 100 degrees, which I have tested and it is accurate).  I left it there for four hours, checking it occasionally.  It rose slowly, about doubling over the four hours.

I took it out of the oven.  I reformed it into a ball, as it had flattened some and spread out.  I put it back in the already 100 degree over for two more hours.  At that point it had risen some, but not as much as I would normally expect. So I let it sit in there for another hour.  It had risen some, but not really enough.

 I decided to heat the oven to 425 (as King Arthur four recipes states) and cook it.  It took 15 minutes of so for the oven to come to temp.  Then I lightly greased the cookie sheet, cut two slits in the top of the loaf, misted it with water, and lightly floured the loaf on top.

 When the oven was hot, It went back in to cook for 40-45 minutes (the recipe stated 45 minutes at 425 degrees).  The result was a bit like a tasteless cracker without the crispness.

I’m going with dropping the heat. Even the most thermophilic bacteria in a sourdough culture won’t want hotter than 90ish (the yeasts in sourdough prefer even cooler temperatures), so this must be the problem. Try 80F instead. SD really prefers to be in the 75-85 range, so to me it sounds like your heat is just too high for the culture to rise properly. We get used to 100F being fine when we’re using commercial yeast, but it’s too hot for sourdough. 

 Here’s a very basic recipe we have published in our blog, if you want to try it out, too.

 For me a 7 hour rise time is very short, since I often do multi-day loaves. While I do like longer rises for better flavor development, that doesn’t even begin to fit into most people’s schedules. In this case, though, this is all about the heat being too high.

I live in upstate New York. Will the yogurt culture need faster shipping than standard for the culture to survive? Thank you!

— Robert

No, not at all. Back when Sabrina and I were still trading cultures with people all over the world, we were in groups where there were whole photo albums dedicated to showing off cultures that did lengthy journeys (10 months, I think, was the max, and was kombucha) and almost all cultures survived it. Even with the slower postal service we’re seeing these days, it’ll still be fine. She recently sent me some of the cultures we were about to start selling (she’s in CA, I’m in TX) and even with the outrageous heat waves we had going on in Houston and the fires in California, everything activated fine (I check my mail once per week, on average).

Can I make Activia yogurt at home? Bifidobacterium animalis lactis DN-173 010/CNCM I-2494

— Charlie

I don’t see why not. Any store bought yogurt with live, active cultures can be recultured.