Sourdough: how to refresh the dough 🆙

Once you enter the tunnel of the mother yeast, hardly comes out.

Yes, because the freedom to make natural bread yourself, to put your hands in the dough and to play with flavors, ingredients and textures, is healthy and gives immense satisfaction.

When we prepare the daily bread for ourselves, kneading in a few minutes and waiting after long hours of leavening to proceed to the baking, all we have to do is file the technique, add those Grandma's secrets and tricks that will make the alveoli even bigger, the pizza even more fragrant, the unforgettable brioches!

It all starts from refreshment of sourdough.

The importance of an artfully made pasta refreshment

It starts from sourdough refreshment, which is not at all trivial.

It being understood that everyone has found their own method to make sourdough from scratch, obtaining a more or less soft mass, at the time of refreshment some basic rules must be maintained. Here they are:

When using tools, and even your hands, it is always good to first give it a pass with water and baking soda, so as to "disinfect"all right.
The doses of the refreshment respect those of the weight of the sourdough to be refreshed: if 100 grams of sourdough are to be refreshed, take the same amount of flour and half the quantity ofwater.
The flour must be of the same type, always, from the very beginning. It mixes with other types of flour only when making the various recipes. There are those who use organic 00, and those of wheat or rye, depending on tastes and experiments or gluten intolerances. For purists, flour should always be sifted!
When refreshments are made, sourdough should not be placed in the refrigerator immediately, but it should be left in a jar covered with a cotton cloth moistened at room temperature for a period ranging from 2 to 4 hours.
The sourdough must be removed from the fridge at least an hour before using it or to have refreshments.
To keep the sourdough alive, a grandmother's trick is refresh it by adding a little honey to the water, thus the yeast "eats" and nourishes itself well, reinvigorating itself.
for storage in the fridge you have to use a airtight glass jar, not the plastic that makes it all ooze. Instead the latter is excellent for the fermentation process of the dough, even better if the container is not large but collected, so the yeast finds the strength to grow from the walls.
Be careful, if the sourdough swells and grows, it doesn't necessarily work well! On the contrary, it may be that you "fatten" without eating properly, so it loses its leavening power. Because of this pay attention to proportions, always weigh the flour and water.
A living pasta forms beautiful ones bubbles and has the characteristic smell of sour yeast; if you notice a loss of vitality of the pasta and a strange smell, then it is necessary to revitalize the pasta, refreshing it several times during the day, keeping the jar out of the fridge, in a warm environment.
For a successful bread dough, schedule the refreshments a couple of days in advance: for example, if you cool off on a Friday evening, put the yeast in the fridge and check its maturation. A sourdough is ripe when it triples its volume.