When you first work with sourdough, you might wonder how to use all that surplus sourdough you have. I was concerned about that too. I do not throw away any sourdough discard. So, I want to share my ways of dealing with it.
I use it to make a traditional Russian fermented bread beverage — Kvass. Most people use leftover bread for it. I thought that making this special sourdough discard bread would be a much better option for me. I have some sourdough discard after every feeding of my sourdough culture.
The simplest way to make this bread is to collect all the sourdough discard over the course of a few weeks. I use a large jar for it and keep it in the refrigerator.
When I have enough sourdough discard to make a loaf of bread, I take it out of the jar into a large bowl. I add some flour to it and make a dough. I knead the dough by hand. It is very easy to do. There are only two ingredients — sourdough and flour. The dough should not be very sticky. There are no particular requirements for the crust and crumb of this bread either.
I shape it into a loaf and put it in a floured basket. It stays in the basket for a few hours and rises a bit. The dough is rather heavy and the sourdough itself is not in a very active stage of its development. But it serves its purpose well.
After a few hours of fermentation, preheat the oven to 450 ° F (230 ° C) with ceramic tiles in it. Then I put this bread on parchment paper and slide it onto ceramic tiles. Most of the time I bake this bread before or after baking my regular bread. That way I do not use the oven for this bread only.
After baking, I let the bread cool down, cut it into pieces, and dried it in the residual heat of the stove. I had enough dried bread for three batches of kvass. Your bread does not have to be as large as mine. You may bake your bread for one batch of kvass to try it.
I put some dried bread into a large pot with boiling water. I let it simmer for a few minutes and turned the heat off. I let it brew and cool completely in this pot. Then I transferred the bread and water mixture into a large glass jar.
Then I added the active sourdough culture and mixed it well with the bread infusion. After that, I added a couple of tablespoons of molasses. It gives a beautiful color to kvass. Plus, it is excellent supplementary food for lactic acid bacteria.
Finally, I covered the jar with a plate and left it at room temperature overnight.
In the morning, it all looked like this…
The smell is fragrant and very bready. Not enough acidity yet. The first fermentation is not over.
The next photo shows my future kvass a few hours later.
By the evening, the kvass should be ready to get transferred to bottles.
Stay tuned for the next post.