cuba libre

they say the yeast in a sourdough culture that is removed from its original location and brought to another locale will be eventually replaced by yeast found in that new locale. i suppose by now - after almost five months of growing, the yeast in my nigella starter should have changed from commercial yeast to the strains found in my home...

for the same reason that only 'local' yeast will grow in any starter, sourdough breads are often named after the place they are made, like 'san francisco sourdough', or 'vermont sourdough'.

today i finished making a bread using only my nigella starter as leavening. the recipe calls is 'vermont sourdough', but it should be more correctly called 'tiong bahru sourdough'. previously when i made nigella sourdough loaves, her recipe called for additional commercial yeast to be added into the final dough. this helps it rise faster, but at the same time imparts that commercial yeast smell.

this time, i'm using a jeffrey hamelman recipe. it uses the leavening action of solely the starter that goes into the dough. of course, i don't have a starter made based on hamelman's recipe, but i took a chance and used nigella's starter, since i thought the hydration wouldn't be affected by that much. (anyway, only a tiny amount of starter is used to make a levain build first, then incorporated into the final dough.)
this is the liquid levain build, which involves a little of the starter mixed with water and flour. the idea is to make it 12 hours before making the final dough, and just let the yeast inside grow and multiply until bubbly and capable of leavening an entire loaf.
this is the final dough, made after an autolyse phase. it was just slightly sticky, but i left it to rise and gave it a few folds.
because there's no commercial yeast involved, it took a longer time for the pure sourdough loaf to rise and proof before baking. normal straight doughs take at most four hours from mixing to baking, but this one took about 18 hours in total.
the bread came out very nice. it's similar to the sourdough bread bowl from swensen's: the crust is somewhat chewy, and the crumb is stretchy. the colour isn't quite right, though, because for sourdough breads, the surface crust should be lighter than the crust in the scoring, like thus. and there's no yeasty smell in the bread! my nose is a bit blocked though, so i can't smell if there is that sour tang in the bread.

and the big bang theory is quite funny to watch.