I've made some changes to my basic sourdough recipe - the first loaves I made a couple of weeks ago had a shorter, room-temp bulk fermentation, all AP flour, and the towels the dough rose in were dusted with AP. This time, I used 500 g bread flour to 200 g AP flour, a 16-hr cold bulk fermentation, and made the switch to rice flour for my proofing towels/bowls. The crust is everything I wanted - deep color, fully blistered, and crackly even 24 hours post-bake. I think I liked the texture of the crumb more with AP flour though, particularly when it comes to soaking up butters and oils. Next time I think I'll keep the fermentation and rice floured towels, and ease back to a majority AP flour dough. I think that might get me closer to where I want to be, but in the meantime, progress!
I'm excited to start documenting my bread experiments - after several months of sad, yeasted sandwich loaves and gummy no-knead yeast breads, I finally got a metric scale and promptly saw a sharp uptick in the quality of my bread. I adapted Max Bernstein's Crusty White Bread recipe by giving it the sourdough treatment - multiple folds over several hours, and a long bulk ferment in the fridge to develop the flavor. I got by pretty well with that for another 6 months or so, but this month I finally got up the will to make a sourdough starter using KAF instructions. It took closer to two weeks to really get active, since it's finally starting to get colder up in the Northeast.
I know it's not as deeply flavored or complex as a more mature starter, but the first loaf I made (see below) with a 2-week old starter seemed like a great starting point! I tasted it the day it was baked and the day after, and it's ridiculous how much the flavor improved after letting the finished load rest for a day.
Now that I have a good starting point for working with sourdough, I want to start messing around with more creative flavors. Maybe a cheddar loaf with the seasoning blend from Stella Parks' cheddar biscuits?
