I love my Panasonic Breadmaker, and use it weekly, usually for a wholewheat loaf, using my own home-milled flour.
This particular machine has settings for sourdough, but when you look into it, it is really a sourdough style loaf, using commercial yeast to imitate sourdough. It’s nice enough, but not the real stuff.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a sourdough starter from Hobbs House Bakery. I’ve fed it, and used it for pancakes, but hadn’t tried making bread with it. I was planning to roll my sleeves up, and do a loaf by hand, but it didn’t happen, so I thought I’d give it a try by machine.
I knew the sourdough setting wouldn’t do the job, so I did the following:
- Fed the starter and left it on the counter for 24 hours.
- Made up a dough using the starter, flour and water, using various suggestions I had read.
- Set the machine to Dough, and process it. Leave it 10 hours and do so again.
- Then set the machine to Sourdough on the maximum time it would let me (about 7 hours)
As I usually do when bread-making with home milled wholewheat flour, I added some extra gluten.
This morning it smelled great. When it finished, it was less impressive.
Although it tasted nice.
I am not sure if it simply didn’t rise, or if there was too little gluten to hold it. I suspect the first, but I am going to try again with more added gluten.
If that doesn’t work, I may resort to making sourfaux. Use the sourdough starter, for the taste and texture, but add a little commercial yeast to help the rise in the machine.
I’m not proud. I will only be adding the yeast to the loaf, not to the original starter, so it is not as if I am corrupting a good thing. And that yeast will be added for the final step only, so the original sourdough will have a chance to develop the distinctive taste.
As for this loaf, I think I am going to slice it thin and turn it into crispbreads in the air fryer.
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