The first step to baking a sourdough bread is the make Levain or sourdough starter.
The process of making the levain is not totally unlike the process of making the dosa batter. In making the Dosa batter, one grinds the rice and lentils into pancake like batter, and holds it overnight to ferment and become sour. The sourness of the batter comes from the natural wild yeast that exist on grains of rice (rice being carbohydrate, naturally attract yeast). In making levain, we first mix the wheat flour with sufficient water to get a pancake batter like consistency in a large plastic yogurt container. I could keep this overnight and it would probably ferment on its own. But I have tried this in the past and have not succeeded in getting a good fermentation going (in fact it smelled horrible!). I suspect that this is because we have a dog in the house, and the normal flora of the home is probably different from the normal flora of a typical home. So, to get the right strain of yeast, I decided to add a little bit of Fleishman's baking yeast to the batter. Here are the measurements:
1 cup wheat flour (Apna Bazar brand)
1.5 cup filtered water
1/4 tea spoon Fleishmann's baking yeast
Temperature: 27 degrees centigrade (approx 80 degrees F)
We will see what happens tomorrow! Hopefully I will have some pictures to share.
Post hoc - I repeated the steps everyday for three more days (without adding any additional yeast of course) but this sourdough bread baking exercise turned out to be a disaster. The Apna Bazar four is entirely unsuitable for baking a regular loaf of bread, and the bread turned out to be quite flat albeit tangy sour in taste.
Lesson learned - Indian wheat flours are not suitable for baking western style bread. Its whole wheat bread that perhaps does not have the amount of gluten required/needed to make the bread rise and become soft.
