Three weeks of sourdough. Got my starter from a baking class and named him Clint. After Clint Eastwood - full of potential!

The basic recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup starter

2 cups whole wheat bread flour

1 cup AP unbleached flour

2 t salt

1.25-1.5 cups water

Methods:

- Mix flours and water to form a shaggy dough. Autolyse - rest for 30 mins.

- Add starter and knead 8-10 minutes, till you get a windowpane.

- Add salt and rest.

- 3 stretch and folds at 20-30 minutes apart.

- Proof till double in size. Deflate and place seam side up a linen lined bowl or floured banneton.

- Then retard overnight in fridge.

- Next morning, set dough at room temp for 2-3 hours.

- Pre heat oven to 485. Plop bread into dutch oven, seam side down. Score and lower temperature to 450 or 440. Bake 35-35 minutes or till internal temperature is 210.

- Cool for an hour and slice.

Lessons so far.

1. Week 1: The loaf tastes terrific, but is a shining example of how not to fold and shape.

2. Week 2. Started paying attention to details: weighed EVERYTHING this week, checked temperature and in a rush of enthusiasm, made english muffins with excess starter.

3. Week 3. Best lookin' loaf yet! Big holey crumbs, perfect for dipping into some olive oil.

Lessons learnt:

1. Decided to be as empirical as possible but also not try to control EVERTHING. Must tell self to bake by feel as much as bake while following instructions.

2. This bread is great for sandwiches and for dipping. My next goal is to consistently reproduce them, and perhaps to try a celebration bread using the starter.

Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Susan’s Simple Sourdough with a few modifications

Combining several of Susan’s excellent recipes and techniques for a simple sourdough I’ve tried over the past few weeks, I made two large boules this morning with excellent results. 

I began by tripling the recipe for her small boule, and substituted rye for whole wheat (personal preference).  So my formula was:

128 g stiff San Francisco sourdough starter

548 g water

741 g All Trumps High Gluten Flour

64 g Hodson Mills Rye Flour

16 g salt

To this recipe I also added ¼ teaspoon of diastatic malt powder.  To be honest, I’m not sure why I added the diastatic malt, but I seem to remember it showing up in a recipe and thought I’d try it. 

This produced a little under 1500 g of dough, and I probably should have divided the dough into three loaves, but I opted on two large boules instead.

In a large bowl, I combined the starter with the flour, then added the diastatic malt and the water and autolysed for 60 minutes.  I then added the salt and did three stretch and folds in the bowl, spaced at 10 minute intervals.

At the end of that time, I lightly oiled my counter surface and did a full stretch and fold, which I repeated after 45 minutes.  After that I allowed the dough to double at room temperature (which took several hours) and then prepared the boules for the bannetons. I worked the dough by stretching and pulling the dough over the counter surface until I got a good tight skin, then placed the dough upside down in the bannetons, sealing any cracks that remained.

The two bannetons went into a large plastic bag, into which I blew a bit of air so that the plastic stayed well above the surface of the dough.  Retardation time was approximately 12 hours.

Next morning, I removed the boules and allowed the dough to rest on the counter for an hour.  I then began to preheat my oven, which I knew would take at least another hour.  By that time the dough was ready to score and load.

My baking stone went on the bottom third rack in the oven to make certain I had the height I needed for the covering bowls.

For a scoring pattern, I used two “nesting apostrophes” going in opposite direction from one another, one starting on the outside edge of the boule moving inward; the other starting in the center and moving outward in the opposite direction.

I used a large rimless cookie sheet with a sheet of parchment paper to load the boules, placing a stainless steel bowl over each. As you’ll see from the photos, I used my two Kitchen Aide mixing bowls, which I like because the handles make for easy removal.

I baked the boules covered at 500 for 30 minutes, then removed the cover and lowered the heat to 475 for another 20 minutes.  The boules stayed in the oven for an additional 5 minutes with the heat turned off, then removed to a cooling rack. 

I know the heat level might seem excessively high, but I think it’s because I use a one-inch cordelite baking stone, which absorbs a lot of heat.  Even though I pre-heat my oven for an hour, I still can’t seem to get the thermometer to read 500 degrees. 

The crust was a beautiful deep brown, something that till now has eluded me.  The crust was crackly and remained so as the bread cooled.  The crumb was perhaps not as open as I would have liked, but the texture was still tender and moist, and the flavor was exceptional, but not particularly sour.

SUSAN'S SIMPLE SOURDOUGH CHALLENGE - TAKE ONE

On October 4th, ehanner's blog presented Susan's Simple Small Sourdough Challenge. Ehanner's challenge was simple - make the bread!

Susan, justly famous for her "magic bowl" baking method and photos of perfectly round, scrumptious looking boules, has posted her recipe and approach several times. Here is Susan's recipe for one small boule: 12g firm starter, 175g water, 225g high gluten flour, 25g white whole wheat flour, 5g salt. Here's the Baker's Percentage...

SUSAN'S SIMPLE SOURDOUGH

I scaled the recipe up to make two loaves and baked them as batards, since we prefer this shape. Susan likes chewy bread but we do not, so I used unbleached bread flour rather than the high gluten bread flour Susan prefers. Whole grain flour was (home milled) hard red wheat. My sourdough starter is 100% hydration, so minor tweaks were made to the recipe.

The dough was definitely wetter than I am used to (my weekly sourdough bread is about 68% hydration with 20% whole grain). I followed her method for minimal kneading and periodic stretch-and-folds. The dough has a long bulk fermentation (at least 8 hours) and, after shaping, an overnight proof in the refrigerator. The risen dough gets a brief warm-up period, then into a pre-heated oven it goes.

Here's the risen dough, ready to be slashed and baked...

My batard was baked on a stone in a preheated oven, covered with the bottom of a turkey roaster for the first 13 minutes, uncovered for the rest of the bake. Here's what it looked like after the bake (hmmm, what's that weird shape?!)...
...Holy Major Oven Spring !!! - it's the end product of a frustrated oven spring. The loaf rose so much during the start of the bake it hit the top of my turkey roaster cover.

==========================================

HOLY MAJOR OVEN SPRING !!!

My turkey roaster bottom is 4-inches high and has low ridges on the inside...

...so my 22 ounces of baking dough hit the top and did it's best to keep on rising. Thus the flattened top and indentations, which you can see a little better in this photo (the right hand photo has blue lines added to emphasize the indentations)...

==========================================

So what if the loaf resembled Quasimodo? When sliced, who can tell? The taste was great - not too sour (we don't like really sour sourdough) with a nice open crumb. Here's the obligatory crumb shot...

It's been a while, but baking never stops. It's just finding time to post about it!

Here's a couple of loaves I made in the last few weeks.

First is my standard sourdough, which is 25% WW and 25% high protein flour. The crust is wonderfully crunchy and the crumb is tight and pillow soft.

(bit of a hole in the middle of the loaf, I was not paying attention whilst shaping the loaf!)

The second set of loaves are Reinhart's sandwich rye. These are 1250g loaves.

At some point I'd like to post my comparison of 0, 24, 48 and 72 hours cold fermentation. Interesting. But I am time poor at the moment.

This weekend I'm planning on some WW pita, seeded crackers and chocolate panettone (Susan from wildyeast). Looking forward to it :)

I posted this under Eric's SIMPLE SOURDOUGH CHALLANGE and here in my blog.

Two tries

Ok, here's what I did. Yesterday I made a loaf and baked it the same day. Today I baked a loaf I had mixed yesterday. I'm happy with both but want some improvement and I want to try some things a little differently.

Yesterday I used my starter that was made with AP flour. I consider my starter firm but it's not kneadable. I started at 7am, followed directions using the high gluten flour but 1/4 cup of oatmeal instead of the whole wheat. I wanted to see if I could make a loaf the same day with no refridgeration. I did the S & F's as instructed. It's cold in the kitchen, the dough was taking forever to rise so I moved it to a warmer spot on the oven. I finally baked it at 5:30pm. I was very surprised to see blisters on the crust because I thought that only came with time in the fridge. (Was my kitchen that cold??) Anyway, the crust was both crisp and chewy. Crisp on the outside with a chewy underside. The crumb was very open with nice shiny air holes and chewy. Holes are almost too big, I think. Taste was excellent fresh and this morning made very good toast with butter dripping on my front. I'm happy with the rise but I want the nice round boule with high shoulders. Try again.

The important things for me are:

Use high gluten flour if you like chewy

I did the S & F's in the bowl. Let the dough rise to double, turned it out on a lightly floured board and GENTLY did a S & F, pulling the dough out and folding it over itself, preshaped GENTLY, let rest, shaped GENTLY and it only took an hour to rise enough to bake.

I baked it under cover (in my hot le creuset) as written. Lately I've been turning the oven down from the 450ºF to 400ºF but not this time and I think it helped make the shiny holes and the crisp top crust.

SECOND LOAF

Yesterday when I mixed the first loaf I refreshed my starter with high gluten flour and it was ready for me to mix this second loaf at 4pm. I followed the recipe and was ready to put in fridge at 9pm last night. This morning at 7am I took it out. It was well risen so I turned the oven on at 7 and baked at 8am. I was trying for a nice round boule but used an oblong basket with linen that I folded up around the dough hoping to keep it round. Instead I ended up with a square loaf! The blistered crust is nice, the taste is great with a tiny bit of sour. Very chewy and if you don't like chewy I'd try using regular AP flour.

Getting the dough from my basket to the le cresuet and trying to slash was not easy so next time I'm going to turn the dough unto a cookie sheet and use the stainless steel cover. I know it will bake the same as the le creuset because I've done it before. The slashing was impossible once the dough was in the HOT pot so I just used scissors to cut some kind of pattern that didn't come out very pretty. Next time I'm going to do like hans and just turn the dough upside down and let the bread do its own thing.

Thanks Susan for all your hints and patience. Do you think your very firm starter makes a difference in the outcome? How do you get your dough to the baking surface from your colander? How do you get your boule to pop up so nice and round??

weavershouse