Starters for Pain au Levain with mixed starters

While making this bread, I realized that temperature might matter a lot more with my sourdough's than I thought before. I have always simply waited for my starter, Arnold, to raise the dough in his own time. This does create problems though, and unpredictability. Mr. Hamelman has a section in his book Bread about this.  He goes quite in depth about why you should be concerned about temperature, and exactly how to give your dough the exact temperature you need.  He has at least converted my thinking to the possibility that it would be nice to have the sour dough ready to bake when I planned to!

Now I am not as sold on having the exact temp correct, but I have been thinking of using my Excalibur dehydrator which has a dough setting on it.  We can be rather cold here during the winter, and even though it's April we had snow just yesterday.  This might help me to have consistent proofing temps for those times it is cold.

The trouble is that it is rather large, in my small kitchen.  I do use it for other things though, and so last night I pulled it in from storage (translation Andy lugged it in for me, he is so awesome!) and cleaned it up.  I did notice that it has heat settings from 85* F to 145* F.  It is equipped with a fan, and the directions say to use the 110* setting with a bowl of water for moisture inside the unit.  This seems to high to me, so I will have to research that a little bit more.  Thinking the 85*F setting would make more sense.

This is a slideshow of my second attempt at this bread, from Hamelman's book...  Click the link to continue reading!

Hamelman's Pain au Levain with mixed starters

I was introduced to rye breads when I was very young, not sure if it was due to my Norwegian heritage or simply that my family just loves rye bread.  I love the taste of caraway seeds in my rye bread, and was a little bit disappointed when I noticed this bread didn't have them in it.  I fixed this pretty quickly though, by simply adding them to the dough!  I know it wasn't in the recipe, but I do have to eat it.  The other reason I did this was because I had just threw together a loaf of my sourdough bread, made with 75% Winter White Wheat and 25% rye flour.  This sourdough loaf did a bulk rise of 4 1/2 hours, and the same time to proof.  My husband and I both enjoyed it very much and hoped that this recipe would come out with such great flavor too.  Here's a picture of my version of sourdough rye...

I started Hamelman's recipe, from "Bread".  Pain au Levain with mixed starters the day I made the loave above.

First I will share with you my starters...

Feeding sourdough

If you position your mouse pointer over the bottom of the picture you can control the slide show and move through it a little bit slower. You can also click on the center of the slideshow and it will take you to picasa web albums where you can cycle through them one at a time.

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