100% sourdough

Hi

Here my first go at an all sourdough loaf. No commercial yeast to be seen. I baked this loaf using the San Francisco Sourdough Loaf recipe from Peter Reinhart Artisan Bread Everyday book. This is my first go at a just soughtdough recipe and I am quite happy with the results. I think then time I wont use a loaf pan and try a boule shape or batard shape. Please have a look and let me know what you think. Cheers

Loaf:

Crust CloseUp Crust

Crumb:

I have also submitted this post to YeastSpotting : http://www.wildyeastblog.com/category/yeastspotting/

Pierre Nury’s Rustic Light Rye or Who Stole My Bubbles

Now I think it’s time to roll up my sleeves and dive into this rustic Bougnat from Daniel Leader’s Local Breads. This is another bread from the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France award winner Pierre Nury who hails from the Auvergne region of France. The only characteristics of this bread that actually resembles a French style, is the stiff levain that is used — and, of course, its award winner baker!   All the other nuances I have gotten accustomed to in making French bread, the tight shaping, timing of the rises, scoring of the loaves… have been thrown out the window.

I have to admit to being a little intimidated when reading the description of this French rustic rye, a loaf that looks quite a bit like Italian ciabatta…especially the author’s caveat that “the high proportion of water in this dough makes it difficult to knead by hand.”  But I was not going to let a little wet dough scare me off.  It actually felt good to get loose, and play with some slack dough! While things are being turned upside down with this recipe, I might as well throw something else into the mix (no pun intended) and continue my experimentation with the autolyse process.  Until now I have not been adding the levain to the initial mix of the flour and water. After reading Teresa’s second experiment in the autolyse process, I thought it could only give the dough a better structure, stronger development and maybe make it easier to incorporate the stiff levain into such wet dough. The hand mixing was a little sloppy to start…but after a short time the dough developed into a silky, smooth wet dough…and passed the window pane test with flying colors.  The rest of the process went along smoothly with no other real predicaments… so after a couple of folds and a rise, it went into the regenerator for its long, slow overnight ferment.

The next day I was eager to see what became of the dough… but I thought I’d give it the full twelve hours before I looked in.  So, the hour approached, the timer went off for the moment of truth and I opened the refrigerator; I could not believe my eyes! The once little boule…had more than quadrupled in size, had reached the top of the bowl and was filled with lots of big gas bubbles. I gently turned out the dough, divided it and slipped it into the hot steamy oven. I really thought I had hit this one on the head!  But this was not to be the case. The bread had a great creamy crumb, a subtle, slightly sour rye taste, a chewy crumb with a nice mouth feel and crackling crust … but where were those “long glossy tunnels” described by the author?  I am not really sure what happened to all the gas pocket so evident when I turned it out…was the gluten structure not developed enough?…was it over proofed?… was it the Type 130 rye flour that I used?…. or maybe the Type 65 with its gluten additive was not strong enough to hold the gas?  I have a sneaking suspicion that it was the coarse, heavy rye flour might have cut the glutens and causing the “long glossy tunnels” to collapse.  The jury is still out on this one.

If you made it through to the end of this post…congratulations and thanks for reading!  Now…seriously…Do you have any ideas on who stole my bubbles?  Please leave me a comment. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

To see more pictures and recipe come to Weekendloafer.com

Thanks.....Captain Batard

The Auvergne Crown or Couronne shaped loaf, typically made from yeasted white bread dough, can be seen in almost every boulangerie throughout France. When I go to my local boulangerie it is displayed on the rack in the typical round shape along with an epi cut. What separates this Auvergne Crown from all the others is the use of the traditional firm French sourdough, levain, and a long slow rise that gives the wheat time to develop its full potential.  Although this is a simple white dough, this thick crusted bread has an unexpected flavor and quality.  I found the best way to eat this is to just tear off a piece…it exposes a crumb that is riddled with many different sized holes....

To read the full post come and visit Weekendloafer.com 

Hamelman’s Vermont Sourdough is one of my favorite recipes. It is so consistent in both flavor and texture. It’s hard to mess up this formula. It’s still pretty warm in Tallahassee, FL so paying attention to the Desired Dough Temperature (DDT) is important. Following Hamelman’s instructions I needed chilly water.

Desired Dough Temperature           76

Multiplication Factor                         4

Total Temperature Factor                304

Minus Flour Temperature                71

Minus Room Temperature               78

Minus Pre-ferment Temperature     75

Minus Friction Factor                       26

Water Temperature                          54

I started the levain build yesterday at 6:30 p.m. and started the dough at 7:30 a.m. today. I created a timing chart to help me along the way.

The finished batards...

Sometimes you have to back up to move forward.   I have tried to make 100% whole durum bread a couple times and couldn't achieve a good density or crumb structure even if I was happy with other things.    I found myself decidedly confused by the durum - did it want a long ferment so that the dough could develop without a lot of manipulation, or did it need a short ferment because it develops much faster than regular wheat doughs?    I decided to back up in the percent of durum and then move forward stepwise to see what I could learn.   So last night and today, I made a sourdough boule with 40% whole durum flour.    Even though I was only at 40% I tried to use the gentle methods that durum seems to need, so I mixed everything by hand, stretched and folded in the bowl with my hands, and generally did whatever I could not to frighten the durum.    I also retarded overnight for convenience sake.    Hydration is 68%.   Prefermented flour is 23%.   I used my regular wheat with 5% rye starter.   Here are some pictures of the result:

Next up:  60% whole durum boule. 

Last year, I built a WFO platform and hearth,  and a dome out of sandy dirt that I dug up from a pile in my yard.   I had hoped (and convinced myself) that there was enough clay in the dirt to make the dome hold together.   That was not the case.   The dome slowly crumbled over the course of the summer.   I patched it up and patched it up again and finally wrote it off in the fall.    Amazingly the platform survived intact through a very difficult winter.   This summer I decided to build a new dome using real instead of imagined clay.    So I bought fire clay from a potter's supply and with help from my husband mixed up 600 pounds or so of clay, sand and water and built a new dome.   Then my husband, who finally took pity on me taking on a project like this with no building skills whatsoever, decided to make me a good door.   He built an offset with the leftover clay/sand mix which perfectly fit a door made of thick plywood.   This morning after waiting forever for the oven to dry, it was time.   I fired it up (and up and up and up) and finally loaded it with a loaf of bread.   After 30 minutes, I checked it, and the loaf was pale, so I closed the door and let it bake for 15 more minutes.    

The loaf was still pale, but I checked the interior temperature and it was 210degF.    Then I paced around in the yard pulling weeds and thinking this over, and finally figured out that the door was so carefully fit that no steam was escaping from the oven at all (I didn't add steam but there is plenty of moisture in the dough) and the crust simply hadn't baked even though the bread had.   By that time I had opened the door so much that the heat was way down, so I took the loaf inside and baked it for 15 minutes at 450 to brown it up.    I certainly didn't have this problem last year, when the door was just a piece of plywood leaned up against the opening with plenty of room for steam (and heat) to leak out.   Fixing this isn't as easy as you would think - the door is fit so tightly (and the bottom beveled so that it's flush with the hearth) that you can't just move it over a bit.   Undoubtedly a precision venting system is now on the drawing board.

But anyhow, the bread.   I decided to go back to yeast water, since I didn't think I had much chance for success today, given that i was just getting to know the oven.   I continued reducing both the hydration of the yeast water based starter and decreasing yeast water as a percentage of total water.   I also interpreted an earlier post by Andy (on enzyme issues in high ash content flour bread) pointed out to me by Juergen Krauss and added salt with the first mix instead of autolyzing.  All this seemed to get the enzyme problems I've been having with yeast water doughs under control.   But perhaps not completely so, as you can see below.   But (as seems to be a feature of yeast water) this is a delicious bread and more successful than I expected under the circumstances. 

So I wanted to make a batch of Black Canyon sourdough last night, to repay my neighbor for the 2 lbs of fresh-caught cod he gave us. No mise en place. Pretty distracted after work etc. But in I plunged, only to come up about 1.5 C short of All-Purpose flour. Doh! So I used a combo of spelt, oat and White Whole Wheat bread flour from Whole Foods. It took about 45-50 minutes of vigorous kneading by hand to get any structure and windowpane. Roughly, in baker's math, it's about 66% hydration. Used my starter, which has been pretty reliable. Now, it's been proofing for 12 hours, and looks ok. I'll give it another hour or so before I bake. This should be interesting. 

I'm a product of the great depression and saw many ways of saving money.  Mother Nature supplied most of what we needed on the farm.  One winter the sourdough died.  Dad took us to see Grandma and get a share of her starter.  It was brought home on a hot water bottle and wrapped in a sweater lest it get too cold and die.

That was in 1938 and as far as I know it is still going strong.  I'm starting my own sourdough now.  I have been retired over 20 years and been baking just as a hobby.  Hope the sourdough is as good as mother made. 

[crossposted with much more detail from my own blahblahblah, yeastvillage.com]

A naturally leavened sourdough spelt is therefore HEALTHY (kinda!) and GOOD FOR YOU (mostly!) but most importantly it is EASY and AWESOME. 

My baking life is more of an after school special, which means that most breads don’t fit into my schedule unless I’m willing to be forgiving.  Sourdoughs especially require a long rise and need to be thrown in the oven right away to avoid the overfermentation/vinegar flavor.  This loaf proofed and doubled neatly overnight but lived in the fridge for the next 12 hours until I could get it into the oven.  It had an acid flavor that was just this side of a little overpowering to the nuanced grains (worked fine for me, cooking genius that assumes balsamic vinegar cures all ailments).

Really, what are you waiting for damn guy?

Recipe, lifted neatly from Breadtopia (instructions are my own, paraphrased for those who can’t manage the attention span necessary to watch a really nice video on the Internet [jerks])

530 grams (about 5 cups well fluffed up) whole spelt flour
350 grams (~1+1/2 cups) water
10 grams (1+1/2 tsp) salt
3 Tbs honey or sugar or 2 Tbs agave
1/4 cup sourdough starter

Disolve honey and starter in warm water and mix salt and spelt together.  Gradually add spelt+salt to water.  Cover and allow to autolyse for one hour (dough will be very wet).  Proceed with a series of three or four stretch and folds at fifteen minute intervals and allow to rise covered with saran until doubled in a container with a rounded bottom (depending on how active your starter is, may take anywhere from 4-6 hours).

Prepare oven for hearth baking.  Carefully move dough to baking sheet, cloche or clay bread crock (a more structured baking environment will allow for a prettier loaf).  Mist lightly with water and add seeds; or just proceed with slashing the loaf.

Bake at 450 for about 45 minutes until darkly browned.  Use your preferred method of steaming on the outset.  Allow to cool for at least an hour before cutting.

Bake at 450 for 45 minutes or until internal temp is 195-200.

I finally purchased Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread. I have been resisting buying another cookbook but the constant references to Bread wore me down. I am now a convert. I took a few days to read the book and found myself saying “I didn’t know that” and “Wow” many times.

I decided to start with the Vermont Sourdough recipe, but since I live in Tallahassee, my levain is southern.  I created a sourdough (levain) culture in January and it is maintaining very well.  I am thrilled with the bread results - the flavor and texture is great. I also made a semolina loaf that is pictured with the two batards. The scoring on the front batard was too shallow. Even though I am fairly experienced with artisanal bread making, scoring still intimidates me.  I hold my breath and slash with minimal confidence.

Back to Hamelman’s book – if you are holding back because you don’t need another bread book, buy it anyway. I have learned about dough temperature, mixing times, and preshaping to name a few things. Because I live in Florida, my kitchen is always warm. I didn’t know I need to start with chilled water to get a proper dough temp (there’s a formula!). The book is written for professional bakers and home bakers and is very helpful for people who want to improve their bread baking skills and end product.

Here are my pictures. And thanks to everyone for being my bread baking neighbors. I value your friendship and willingness to share your bread baking journey.     ~Marie