It turns out that when I first started making sourdough bread, I wasn't actually doing it with sourdough starter, I was doing it with pâte fermentée. It's a similar concept, just slightly different composition.

When I first started making sourdough, it was out of necessity. I'd already been making my own bread for close to two years when the pandemic hit. Then COVID-19 happened and we were all in lockdown and -- once they'd finished buying up all the toilet paper -- suddenly everyone decided that they were gonna start making bread. The yeast was all gone. The flour was all gone. Even the odd-ball, specialty flours were sold out. Baking soda? Nope. Baking powder? Nada. Any sort of ground grain and anything that you could conceivably use to leaven it had been bought up. Even -- much to my annoyance -- the big, industrial half-kilo bricks of instant yeast.

Now, I didn't care about the flour being all gone. I had a 10-kg bag of wheat berries and a grain mill at home. I could quite happily grind my own flour. But I needed something to make it rise!

In the end, I decided to use my last teaspoon of commercial yeast to make some bagels. And then, when making them, I held back one bagel's worth of dough and stashed it in a jar in the fridge.

A day or two later, I added that little dough lump to some fresh dough to make some pan loaves... and held back a fist-sized piece of dough and kept it in the fridge.

I kept doing that for a while. Eventually, I started going longer than a couple of days between batches of bread. And I started offering my pet dough lump feedings of flour and water in between to keep it going.

Somewhere along the line I started reading up on sourdough and learing about starters and how to maintain and bake with them. And slowly my pet dough lump transitioned into something more like a traditional, wet (100% hydration) sourdough starter.

I'd never actually heard the term "pâte fermentée" until a couple days ago. But, looking at it, it was traditionally pretty much exactly what I started with: a lump of dough held back from the previous day's bread and used to help condition and leaven the fresh dough. It's generally stiffer (lower hydration) than sourdough starter and, unlike starter, contains salt.

Sometime I should try to read up more on all the different bread leaveners: starter, mother dough, pâte fermentée, poolish, biga, sponge, rewena bug... Not sure what others there are. For all I know, some of those could even be different names for the same thing! But it would be interesting to learn about all of them and compare notes. For now though, here's what I've got for pâte fermentée...

Pâte Fermentée

Slightly adapted from King Arthur Baking

Ingredients

• 210g hard (strong/high grade/bread) white flour
• ~1/16 tsp. instant yeast
• 1/2 tsp. coarse sea salt
• 140g water

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients and mix well.
2. Cover and allow to ferment at room temperature for 8-14 hours.
3. If not using right away, cover and store in the fridge until ready to use (up to 4 days).