Interviews E07 Tom Cucuzza of The Sourdough Journey: Bulk Fermentation & Starter Health

Hi, friends.

Welcome back to the Saving Bread podcast.

Today, I am talking with Tom Kakuza, the baker and educator behind the sourdough journey.

Tom has spent years approaching sourdough through experimentation.

He documents his bakes, changes variables, tracks temperature and percentage rise.

He studies starter behavior and and uses all of that information to better understand what is actually happening inside of the dough.

So today we get into some of my favorite subjects.

We talk about starter strength and acidity, what peak actually means, how to judge the end of bulk fermentation, what happens to fermentation after you divide and shape your dough, Gluten development, refrigerator temperature, pH, and why no single number or test should replace learning how to observe what is in front of you.

One of the ideas I loved most from this conversation is Tom's explanation that all of this science isn't really about chasing numbers.

It's about giving himself more opportunities to create the bread that he wants to make.

This is a very detailed one and I think there's a lot here for both newer and experienced bakers.

I also wanted to let you know that towards the end of the conversation, we talk about pH, which is something that we've not covered quite yet in our lessons episodes.

It's very brief at the end, but I just wanted to give you a little bit of context.

The higher the pH, the younger the dough, the earlier you are in bulk fermentation.

And as the pH starts to come down closer to four, the later you are in fermentation.

So when we talk about something that's a higher ph that's usually earlier in bulk fermentation or right after a feed and as the ph begins to drop that's when the starter is starting to peak and become hungry or your dough might be ready to divide or go into the refrigerator as the ph starts to get lower and lower and get closer to ph4 Don't get too caught up on the numbers.

Just think about it in context of younger or more mature dough early in bulk fermentation or later in bulk fermentation.

And I promise you, probably within the next two lessons episodes, we'll get much further into pH.

But I think, again, whether you're a brand new baker or you've been baking for many, many years, you will really enjoy this conversation because we go down paths.

quite a few really interesting rabbit holes so without further ado here's my conversation with tom kakuza of the sourdough journey i'm ali white and this is saving bread so Okay, first of all, hi.