It's been over a year since I started brewing my own sourdough starter from flour and water and I've been looking into the other side of sourdough breads.
It's part of my family history. Our foremothers would go to the rebbetsin every week and buy "yeast" to use in making their challah.
Almost surely what they bought was a cup of "sourdough" starter. They spent Thursday building it into sour, and Friday they would mix in the eggs, sugar, and salt, and some additional flour, to make the four braided golden fragrant loaves used on Sabbath.
Screech. Challah is sweet to the point of being more like cake than bread. How could ambrosia come from sourdough?
So I started googling and this is what I found.
http://www.thejoykitchen.com/ingredients-techniques/sourdough-or-levain-debunking-myths-and-mysteries-harnessing-wild-yeast
Notice that she slaps down the idea of putting fruit in her levain. This was one of my frustrations with some of the sourdough websites I found at first; they wanted you to use pineapple juice. Not very sustainable for the East Coast near Washington D.C. Nevertheless, Jewish classics (Mishnah Orlah 2:4) discuss putting cut-up apple into your dough to make it rise. But our fore-mothers didn't do that, and there's nothing like it in challah recipes.
Now, you might not think sugar is very sustainable but in Eastern Europe, they were stuck-in to sugar beets. Sholem Aleichem made Lazar Brodsky famous as the "sugar king", and all his sugar came from beets. The same is true for Yona Zaitsev who built the brick factory where Mendel Beilis worked.
The rebbetsin's starter most likely was made with white flour, and the rebbetsin ploughed the money into buying more of the expensive white flour needed to make it. For daily bread, my foremothers probably used rye flour which was cheaper and brewed faster, since rye has more natural sugar than wheat even if it has less gluten. I mean, try some of Catoctin Creek's Star-K kosher rye whiskey and notice the sweet little kick at the end of the swallow.
I think there are two things you have to remember about making sweet breads with levain.
The first one is, make a sponge. When you use commercial yeast, you generally only make a sponge for lower-gluten flours like whole wheat. With levain, you make a sponge for "Frisco style" white bread. It cures overnight. This is instead of doing a three-stage build as with the sour you use in pumpernickel and rye.
Second, you have to be patient with the dough that you make from the sponge. Keep it warm and out of drafts for at least four hours. Challah gets put down to rise three times, an hour each, even though it has all that sugar in it.
And then you use the sugar or honey called for in the sweet bread recipe, like here.
https://thebakersguide.com/kaiser-roll-recipe
I liked this page.
https://thebakersguide.com/windowpane-test
It's for French bread and French bread needs lots of kneading, stretching, even slamming. YMMV for other types like Italian -- which always has sugar in it anyway.
This is a recipe recommended on one of the other sites. While it's labeled Amish, it's really a lot like Italian bread made with your "mother of all breads". Notice that it uses an overnight sponge and then it rises a whole 'nother day or night.
https://www.friendshipbreadkitchen.com/rustic-sourdough-afb/
Most websites will tell you that if your bread really does taste sour, you've done something wrong like not letting the starter mature or not feeding it at regular times when you're brewing it. I agree. But if you call it levain you sound snooty to most people, so just keep it to yourself and smile when people say "this is the greatest bread I ever ate."
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