THE SECOND WEEK FOR YOUR DESEM (NO YEAST BREAD)If you have been following along through our last few posts, we are following the process of making no yeast or desem bread. You can check our last few posts so see what we have done so far in the first week. At the second week, your desem is a teenager, so to say. It is developing rapidly---young and strong, but not quite what it will become. You can help it to it's full potential by giving it new food every day and keeping it at a steady cool temperature: the leavening organisms will multiply and predominate more and more. Daily feeding and kneading also prevent the maturing starter dough from becoming alcoholic, which would reduce its leavening power. Basically we are going to feed it with more flour and water. Assuming that you will want to use your desem to make bread again at the end of the week, how much flour and water should you add each day? The desem you're starting out with contains one cup of flour, and you'll always want to keep that much desem in the storage place. You need a desem containing 3 cups of flour for one (two loaf) batch of bread, so measure 3 cups of whole wheat flour and put it near your desem. Use 1/3 of that flour for each day's feeding until the last day, when you can use the remaining cup of so. Each time you feed it, soften the desem in water measuring somewhat less than half the amount of flour you'll add, then adjust the dough's consistency by adding a little more flour or water. Knead the whole newly fed desem about 10 min., until it begins to be sticky. Set it in it's storage container and keep it in a cool place. On the last day, the day before you bake, divide the desem. Three-fourths will be the starter for the next day's bread (3 cups of flour in it) and one-fourth of it (1 cup of flour) will be set aside as your "mother starter" for future bakings. Store both of them at 65 degrees F. overnight. To make the bread, you follow the same recipe we gave in the last post. This time the bread should have even more flavour and rise even higher than the one made with the one week desem. Now, about the desem itself: if your starter is making bread that is as light and fresh-tasting as you want, start storing it according to the instructions below under Caring for a Mature Desem. If you want to develop more leavening power than it has right now, give it another week on the same schedule as the one you have just completed, If you aren't sure whether your two-week-old desem is what it should be, here are a few things to look for. Marks of a Mature Desem: If your desem has been nurtured under the best conditions, it will probably be able to ripen it's dough in 4 hours the first time you make the regular desem bread in the next post. Watch the condition of the desem itself. When you open its container on the baking day, the first whiff may be alcoholic but that evaporates quickly. The fragrance is not sour but wonderful and pleasantly cidery. Ripe desem looks a little like beige cottage cheese inside. Just as the dough ripens, desem ripens too in it's own way. In a ripe desem the gluten is completely digested by micro-organisms, so when you soften it in water, it disintegrates completely. You can see this when you mix up the bread dough. If you try the same thing with an ordinary dough, or with unripe desem, white starch will wash into the water leaving the rubbery, insoluble gluten in your hand. As the desem gains in power, it will ripen more quickly, gradually coming to the stage where it is at it's best, about 12 to 14 hours after it has been fed; this seems to be the tempo that gives it it's greatest leavening power as well as it's best flavour. Storing the Mature Desem: If you have a dependable cool place, and will be very regular in your care, the desem will thrive kept unrefrigerated. The temperature should be steady at between 50 F to 55 F. degrees. If you are going to be baking every day, this would be the ideal arrangement. But for most people it is a lot more convenient to store the desem in the refrigerator. In it's first few days in the cold the desem does lose some of it's strength and the dough for the next baking may require a little extra rising time to ripen. But the desem adapts quickly to refrigerated storage and needs only the usual 4 hour fermentation form then on, Feeding Your Mature Desem: From now on, feed the desem about 12 hours before you plan to mix up the dough for baking. The desem does have to be fed twice a week, minimum, to keep it's leavening power, whether or not you bake bread with it. Our next post will give you the basic No Yeast Desem Bread Recipe and teach you how to feed the desem to match your baking schedule. |
