Oatmeal sourdough bread recipe | A wonderful daily bread | Foodgeek (2024)

FAQs

Can you use oatmeal for sourdough starter? ›

Method. To establish the oat sourdough, we started with 20g of a flour based sourdough, fed the previous day. To this 20g starter, 90g of oats and 190g of water was added. The starter was then fermented overnight.

The secret to sourdough is simple: water. The more water you add to your dough will affect how open the crumb (bigger holes and softer texture) will be once it's baked.

You can feed your sourdough starter with any flour you like, as long as it provides the starches the wild yeast in your sourdough starter need to convert to Co2 to rise your dough. The flour you choose should always be unbleached flour.

You'll find I use honey in many of my recipes. I love to use it in my no-knead 100% whole wheat sourdough bread because it makes it much softer and less dense than it would be without it. Subbing it in recipes that call for sugar is not usually as simple as a one-to-one sub, though.

The best flour blend for creating a new sourdough starter is 50% whole-meal flour (whole wheat or whole rye) and 50% bread flour or all-purpose flour. I recommend a 50/50 mix of whole wheat flour and bread flour.

After a few days, your daily 1/4 cup flour and water won't be enough to sustain your entire jar of starter, and your starter will be slow and sluggish, not much better than discard itself. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on what you want to bake with it.

Sourdough bread's fiber, potassium, phosphorus, and sodium content all support a heart-healthy diet. The soluble fiber found in sourdough bread binds to dietary cholesterol in the small intestine, helping pass this fat through the system instead of absorbing it.

There are two main acids produced in a sourdough culture: lactic acid and acetic acid. Acetic acid, or vinegar, is the acid that gives sourdough much of its tang. Giving acetic acid-producing organisms optimal conditions to thrive and multiply will produce a more tangy finished product.

May support gut health

Although the beneficial microbes in the starter tend to be lost during the baking process, the fibre and plant compounds, called polyphenols, become more bio-available. These act as an important fuel source for our gut microbes, which explains why sourdough is a gut-friendly choice.

The colony of wild yeast and bacteria inside your starter jar are fairly resilient, however, like most living things, they can be overfed. When you overfeed a sourdough starter you dilute the natural population of yeast and bacteria, making your sourdough culture weak and inactive.

What is the best flour mix to feed sourdough starter? ›

All-purpose flour works great for feeding starter, but adding a little whole grain flour can help give it a boost if needed.

Quicker rise

Sourdough starter made with whole wheat flour ferments much more rapidly than white flour. This is because the wild yeasts respond more vigorously to having all the parts of the wheat berry present, happily consuming the flour and water much more quickly.

Does olive oil make dough softer? Yes - adding olive oil to sourdough bread will result in a softer crust and crumb. The oil as a lipid coats the flour and inhibits the gluten network resulting in a softer, tighter crumb and softer crust. This can be a desirable outcome if you do not like tough, chewy sourdough crusts.

It makes the bread lighter and fluffier. The reason for that is the fat in the yolk that inhibits gluten formation just as any other fat would. This results in a looser dough that can expand and puff up more.

Longer fermentation

As your dough proofs, the good bacteria eats up sugars and starches in the flour. This decreases the sweet undertone and creates a more sour undertone. The longer you ferment, the more starches and sugars the bacteria eats, and the more sour your bread will be.

300g traditional rolled oats. 600g water. 2 teaspoons of sourdough starter. Mix everything in a bowl and leave it to ferment at room temperature, just as you would any other sourdough starter.

Kombucha. Since it also contains yeasts as well as bacteria, kombucha can be utilized to start a sourdough starter or ferment your grains.

Add some of the enzyme phytase to the mixture if you can (see tsp 2 in soaking your oats)- note, there is no need to do this if you added sourdough starter/discard as your starter culture. Secure the lid and leave in a dark but warm area to ferment for 1-5 days.

Keep feeding your sourdough starter twice daily. Instead of feeding with ground-up flour, feed with leftover oatmeal or whatever else other cooked grain you have. Add the cooked grain and water and mix into the starter. It will probably be a little chunky, but that's okay.