Beginner Recipe - ideas
Hi all
I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good beginner recipe for me. I've had a few attempts now, some were great, others not so much. I think I'm attempting to run a little before I can walk trying high hydration doughs before I've got the basics down.
I have a starter that is 50% rye, 50% strong white flour. This will be at 100% hydration at the point of baking. This has been in the fridge all week, so I will activate some of it this evening to make a levain that I will make over the next 24 hours. I think the problem with my last loaf was that I used too much levain and it overproofed for this reason, so some help on the amount of this I need for the loaf would be helpful.
My ingredients are:
Extra strong Canadian white flour (around 15% protein)
Strong wholemeal flour
I would like a light, white feeling loaf with some wholemeal in to make it healthier. Can anyone suggest a good easy recipe I can use with these ingredients, with an easy to manage hydration level?
One is Hamelman's "Vermont Sourdough ". I'm sure you can find it online somewhere but it's from his book "bread".
The other is this one... https://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/sourdough-pain-naturel/
Both lovely!
You've got a levain build too. The whole recipe has a step-by-step guide.
Enjoy.
http://www.homecookingadventure.com/recipes/easy-sourdough-bread-vermont-bread
Great, thank you so much. I will give the Vermont Sourdough a try tomorrow. If I were to replace the rye with a strong wholemeal flour, would you recommend changing anything else in the recipe?
and you can do a straight swap. Hamelman actually does this very same recipe with wholemeal instead of rye as well in the book.
I look forward to seeing the results.
Thank you for recommending this recipe, it was really easy to do and the results are definitely the best I've had yet.
Great oven spring and crumb. Must taste delicious. You've got a good recipe here. Well two recipes really. You can use whole-wheat or whole rye. Try whole rye next time and see which you prefer.
Enjoy!
recommendations, you might want to have a look at a couple of others that I've had a lot of success with:
One from Trevor J Wilson who posts here as well as on his own blog:
http://www.breadwerx.com/how-to-get-open-crumb-from-stiff-dough-video/
And the other is just the base formula that can be tweaked in many, many ways but always uses the same base of 1-2-3 (1 part starter, 2 parts water, 3 parts flour, 2% salt) listed as a "challenge" by Lazy Loafer:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/48829/challenge-123-bread
If you are a fan of rye breads, then this base formula from Mini Oven has worked perfectly for me each time:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/15736/mini039s-favorite-rye-ratio
One thing to be watchful of with any of the recipe recommendations is to either control all of the temperatures to match those of the recipe writer, or to know to watch the dough and not the clock. A fair number of the bakers posting recipe blogs or writing books seem to be at or near sea level in a high humidity area and keep a "comfortable" room temperature of 78-82 degrees (since they are apparently either made of money or don't have a menopausal woman around the house). If you, like me, keep the house closer to 68-72 and are considerably higher than sea level in an arid area --- well, let's just say that the timing is massively different than most recipes take in to account!
Remember to have fun, and that no matter what a loaf may look like, it still will be a more flavourful and healthy bread than those you can buy at the grocery store... Happy baking!
Many thanks for the advice, I will definitely give those recipes a try next. I'm really enjoying the process, i know it will take many years to perfect, which is one of the things I enjoy about it.
My room is much colder than many of the recipes recommend, although we're having a bit of a heatwave in London at the moment which may have been why my bread was more successful this time.
Hope you're enjoying this fine weather. Make some sandwiches with that fine sourdough and go have a picnic.
I definitely will do, it's absolutely beautiful today. So nice to see the sun again. Enjoy it while it lasts!
If the former, I suggest you consider starting out by using commercial yeast. It's not impossible to begin with SD, but doing so introduces a factor that's quite variable and thus can be tricky to learn, the activity level / readiness of your starter, which basically isn't a concern with yeast unless it has expired.
If the latter, I suggest a 1 2 3 loaf, which is 1 part starter, 2 parts water and 3 parts flour, all by weight. Use a flour or combination that you're already familiar with. As above, this is meant to afford you a more user-friendly learning curve than you'd get by dealing with more unknowns at once.