Tips
• There is no getting away from it: Sourdough is a messy affair, with dough that wants to stick to everything in sight, including the bowls, the spatulas, your clothes, and your arms. Before you begin, have all your equipment and ingredients carefully organized: measure out all the flours, have a clean container ready for your starter and a dough scraper handy. Be sure to dust your bowl or your linen-lined basket (banneton) with plenty of flour. Your hands get very sticky when making bread, so the more you organize in advance, the better! I clean up immediately after preparing the dough, making sure nothing has time to dry too much. I also reserve a sponge just for cleaning up, since it usually gets matted with bits of dough.
• Be sure to keep your starter pure: nothing but water and flour. If your last loaf did not rise as you want, boost the yeast content by adding 1 teaspoon active dry yeast when adding water to the starter, until it is lively and bubbling. (As an insurance policy, I often add a touch of yeast to the dough when I thaw a batch of frozen starter.)
• Your first several loaves may not rise very much. Do not be discouraged—just forge on ahead! At the beginning, you may need to adjust the rising time, from 6 hours to anywhere up to 24 hours, depending on your schedule and the vitality of the starter. The more bread you make, the more active your starter will become, shortening the rising time and resulting in lighter bread.
• I have found that I can keep my starters virtually forever. While there are reportedly ancient sourdough starters floating around the world, passed down from generation to generation, one of my bread professors told me: “It doesn’t matter if your starter is a thousand years old, or you made it yesterday. Your starter doesn’t know how old it is!” When I am baking bread almost daily, as I do in Provence, I keep the starter on the counter, in a securely covered bowl, at room temperature. If I am not going to make bread for several days, I refrigerate it in a covered container. If I am not going to make bread for several weeks, I freeze the starter in a covered container, then thaw it in the refrigerator.
• We consume a good deal of mozzarella in our house, and since I hate to discard any food product that might be of use, I reserve the liquid that comes in the package of mozzarella. The liquid should be used within 1 day or frozen in an airtight container for up to 1 month. Its faintly lactic (think of the aroma of yogurt) flavor adds a special touch to the final loaf. Combine it with water to make the 3 cups (750 ml) liquid needed for a loaf, but do not use 100 percent mozzarella liquid—I found that it creates a rather funky-tasting bread!