My preference is toast sourdough bread half this dark; very lightly, barely toasted. It's dense and it gets overly crunchy while its flavor is excellent.
It beats everything.
Including the bread marked sourdough that you buy.
Here's why.
A nearby baker who produces sourdough products showed me his sourdough starter. It was a container of regular starter at near zero activity such as stored cold between feedings. A slimy gross looking substance.
"So you add this to your dough as flavoring?"
"Yes."
Their bread is regular bread with sourdough starter added to it for faint flavor with none of the attention that genuine sourdough bakers give it, none of the care, none of the attention to handling. Simply put, they do not know what bread made exclusively from natural starter is. The starter is not the leaven. They don't bring their starter to full on bubbling activity and use it at its tippy top most fierce peak. It flavor is not developed. Its acidity is not fermented over days. The dough is not altered peculiarly, the result is regular bread.
It's like they didn't even read any books.
Nor did they have an uncle to show them.
This is not fermented, the fast version, so not at all acidic, and even this partial sourdough kicks their sourdough's butt.
I'm not bragging. I'm explaining.
I just recently ate commercial sourdough at a party (for me) where two people bought commercial sourdough bread and for all intents and purposes that bread was regular bread and I could not detect even a trace of sourdough culture. I have no idea what the company did to it, added a chemical flavoring most likely and went on baking bread their mechanical way. Both had none of the aftertaste that every lingering molecule of sourdough starter leaves in your mouth. It is not authentic and I do not know why it is accepted when right here is the real thing and it would take minor changes having to do with time as ingredient to provide the real deal.
That's the thing; it's a deal.
The deal is based on trust. And with commercial sourdough that trust is abused. Because they know the buyer doesn't know what to expect in authentic sourdough bread. So they're given ersatz instead.
And that makes my niece smarter about bread than all of her peers. Having made it herself now she cannot be duped by a bad deal through abused trust. She'll be all, "What? Call this product of yours anything that you like but it isn't sourdough bread."
