I am having trouble with consistancey of my doughs, especially pizza dough.  I stopped using bread flour because my dough was getting too tough to stretch and was very resilient.  I have been using the same recipe for 5 years, and the past two i have had to change the recipe twice.  I went from all bread flour to all ap flour, way too wet.  then i went to 50/50 ap/tipo('OO'), and increased the oil to soften the dough a bit.  This recipe came out great, then the other day I had to add an additional 2.5# of flour, mind you the base recipe calls for 7#.  I cannot figure out what is going wrong.  Any help is appreciated.

I've got a 100% starter bubbling nicely now, and I want to bake bread tomorrow morning. Thanks to the great advice I've received here, I plan to try feeding strong flour to the starter (done) and a smaller inoculation, 10% instead of 20%, and folding in the bowl to try to avoid a super-sticky unmanageable dough. I know I should do one variable at a time, but right now life's too short.

Anyway, there's no way I can do this without retardation at some point. Bill Wraith's spreadsheet tells me that at 30C, the temperature in my kitchen, my bulk ferment will take 4.4 hours and the proof about 1.5 hours. At 4C, the temperature in my refrigerator, bulk would take 115 hours and proof 41.

I've read lots of threads here, and there seems to be a consensus that retarding the shaped loaves and baking from cold, or cool, is often a good option. To be honest, that would suit me as I can get on with the baking first thing in the morning.

I was wondering, should I allow the shaped loaves any time at room temperature before I put them in the fridge?

No idea how long it will take them to cool fully from 30C to 4C, but my thought was it could easily be as long as an hour or so, in which case the activity during cooling would get me a long way towards the predicted 1.5 hours needed.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks

Jeremy

This past weekend, I was looking for a sourdough formula that sounded interesting and just couldn't find one that tickled my fancy.  So, I decided to free-lance a formula of my own.  I had about 320 grams of well-fed levain that I pulled out of the refrigerator before leaving for church on Sunday.  On returning home, I found it to be warmed up and at peak expansion.  

Since I wanted to be able to use the bread for sandwiches, I determined to make a pair of batards and guesstimated that a pre-bake dough weight of about 750 grams each should work nicely.  Having had a run of whole grain breads recently, I was ready for a change of pace but still wanted something flavorful.  After consideration, I built a 70% hydration dough with 5% rye, 10% whole wheat and 85% bread flour.  At the last minute, I chucked in 30 grams of flaxseed meal because, well, because it was there and it seemed like a good idea.  

The water, levain, flours, and meal were treated to a 30 minute autolyse.  Then I did a double round of stretch and fold, after which the dough went back into the bowl to ferment.  I did 3 more stretch and folds at 40 minute intervals, only remembering after the second one that I hadn't added any salt.  (That should have been a clue.)  I slurried a tablespoon each of water and sea salt and worked that into the dough.  After the dough was nearly doubled, I turned it out on the counter, divided it in two approximately equal pieces, pre-shaped it and let it rest for about 10 minutes.  After the rest, I finished shaping the loaves into fat batards and set them to rise in a parchment paper couche.

When the batards were still a little short of doubling, I preheated the oven to 450 dF with a baking stone and a steam pan in place.  When the oven reached temperature, I poured boiling water in the steam pan, slashed the loaves (still need more practice with that) and loaded them onto the stone.  After turning the oven temperature down to 400 dF, I set the timer for 25 minutes.  A few minutes later, I came back to see how the oven spring was working (very nicely, thank you) and it hit me that I was seeing all of my levain/starter baking.  I had not remembered to reserve a piece for storage!  I've avoided making that bone-head move for almost 4 years, but it finally caught up with me.  At that point, there was nothing to do but swallow hard and let the bread finish baking.  When the timer sounded, I checked the internal temperature of the bread and the thermometer went to 210 dF very quickly, indicating that the bread was fully baked.

The bread, thankfully, turned out very well.  No single flavor stands out, but the levain, the rye, the wheat, and the flaxseed meal all meld for a very satisfying taste.  Here's how it looks:

On this particular loaf, the slash at each end of the loaf opened beautifully, allowing the crumb to expand fully.  The center slash, however, must not have been deep enough, because it didn't open very much.  As a result, the loaf has sort of a Bactrian camel appearance with humps at either end and a dip in the middle.  

All I have to do to duplicate this is get a new starter going and try again in 4 years ...

Paul

Hi everyone, 

    I'm fairly new at this, and don't have many recipes to share as yet.  I'm still working through the basics- I'm one of those ppl who like to master the foundations before getting fancy.

So currently I'm working on mastering pizza crust... like this guy :Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe  .  Although I'm not brave enough to cut the safety interlock off my oven's cleaning cycle lol. 

    I rather think I'm going to go with the dual baking stone concept to make a mini intense convection oven inside my conventional electric oven.  Looking on craigslist, I was able to spot some Pampered C's baking stones for sale cheap... though I have not gotten them yet. And I need a pizza peel... ah, the challenge of low-to-no budget baking...

    One thing I found very interesting is Mr. Varasano's description of what he terms "poolish"... he reccomends starting with a commercial (mail-order) sourdough Italian culture.  Has anyone here had experience in this area?  Has anyone in my area come up with a sourdough culture they would share a cup of?  I'm not sure of what would germinate in my kitchen, but pretty sure it woud be something odd.  I'm in Baltimore, MD btw.

thanks in advance!

I thought I would introduce myself here, having been lurking, occasionally commenting and learning more than I thought was possible. (Most notably, sourdough pancakes. Wow!)

I've been baking bread almost since I can remember -- my mother used to make an amazingly sloppy wholemeal loaf that received no kneading and generally ended up brick like; I forget what it was called. Most of my baking was based on Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and Bernard Clayton Jr's The Complete Book of Breads (with a hatred for volume measures every time I used it).

Sourdough called to me about 20 years ago, maybe less, when the food writer of the Independent newspaper, Jeremy Round, published a sourdough recipe that contained a mistake. Several people wrote to complain and the paper published a correction. I thought, if it is that important, I ought to try it. And I did. Round, who is tragically under-represented on the internet, died in 1991, and he was still alive when I made my sourdough, so it is at least 19 years old. The same one. We've been through some ups and downs, my sourdough and me, including a relocation from Somerset, England to Rome in Italy.

Round's approach was very simple. You made a starter, made some bread with it (as I recall 18 oz flour to 12 oz water) removing 8 oz of the dough after the first rise and kept it in the fridge to use as next time's starter. No feeding in between. And that suited me fine until this past summer, when my dough became horribly, horribly sticky.

That's when I came here first, and discovered that the problem was almost certainly a combination of too high a temperature, too weak a flour and too long a fermentation.

Since then I've gradually worked on each of the variables, feeding the starter, working with percentages, and am now once again making reasonable bread.

But the dough is still impossibly sticky, even at 60%. I've read about stretch and fold, and French folds, and watched the videos, but I still cannot handle the dough without it sticking to my hands, the steel work surface, everything. I've got a batch rising now, but I really think this is going to be the last time I try to do without kneading, and enough flour to stop things sticking. I cannot believe that people go out to 65% and 70% dough. Mine wouold be a sticky, structureless, freeform mess.

Is there any way I can manage this sticky dough?

At the moment I stretch it and fold it with the help of a scraper, but it is impossible to shape and I end up just plopping it into tins to prove. I shudder what to think would happen if I tried a loaf in a banneton.

I already have a blog, where my I chronicle my baking;, and I see no point in duplicating all that here. So my second question is:

Is it acceptable to just post links here to my personal blog?

Thanks for listening.

Jeremy

Now that I have made a few decent loaves of SD in a row using Reinhart's Basic Sourdough formula, I have been eager to experiment.  However, I thought I'd start simply by doing a white flour comparison so things wouldn't get too out of hand for a beginner like me!  I doubled the recipe to make four loaves and used my usual KAF Organic AP for two and Shipton Mill Traditional Organic All Purpose, which I picked up during our trip to England in June, for the other two loaves.  I used exactly the same procedures for all of the loaves, even down to the amount of water.  They all came out tasting very good, though the Shipton Mill flour definitely soaked up more water and had a tighter crumb.  It also produced a milder tasting, slightly sweeter loaf.

My makeshift batard rising couche: jars of peanut butter supported by rolled up towels and covered by a disposable plastic tablecloth draped over cooling racks.  Here, one loaf is covered and one isn't.

KAF AP on the left and the ever so slightly smaller Shipton Mill AP on the right.  Not much difference on the outside!

KAF AP crumb on the left and Shipton Mill AP crumb on the right.  I'm not a great photographer (to say the least!) but I think you can see the larger holes of the KAF loaf.

I don't know if anyone else here at TFL has had a lot of experience with Shipton Mill flour, but I got it since it is what Richard Bertinet uses... and we were in England anyway... and I wanted to see the mill...  If I lived in England within say, 50 miles or so of Shipton Mill, I'd probably make the trip to buy their flour.  However, since I live in the USA I wouldn't say it's worth trying to special order or anything.

Summer

I'm sure that this question must already have been answered many times on this forum, but I can't seem to find it.  If it's easier, please just point me in the right direction! :)

I've been working with my wild yeast sourdough starter for a few months now, and I just love it.  I would now like to try my hand at using it in recipes that call for commercial yeast -- a sort of substitution.  Partly for frugality, partly for fun, and partly for health (so far so good in my immediate family, but diabetes has hit some of my older relatives and so the discussions posted here about sourdough & blood sugar have got me thinking.)

I'm just not sure how to go about it.  I assume that at some point I would need to calculate in baker's percentages the weight of flour and water in my starter and subtract that and the yeast from the commercial yeast recipe.  But what about other ingredients from that recipe -- when should they be added?  Do I first create a firm starter from my sourdough culture and once that has doubled, do the math and add in the other ingredients, before the first rise (of the recipe)?  Also, other than the lengthened rise times, is there anything else that I should be taking into account?

Thanks!

Karen

Here's a recent translation I made of Auerman's Borodinsky recipe, in case it's of use or interest to anyone. You can find the original at https://www.slashtmp.iu.edu/public/download.php?FILE=feldstei/95081siBxp8

Auerman's Borodinsky Recipe
For a loaf weighing between .5 and 1 kg:

Ingredients
Rye flour (95% extraction)--------80
Wheat flour (85% extraction)------15
Red rye malt---------------------- 5
Salt------------------------------ 1
Yeast----------------------------- 0.1
Sugar----------------------------- 6
Syrup----------------------------- 4
Vegetable oil--------------------- 0.05
Coriander------------------------- 0.5
Potato flour---------------------- 0.2
Total----------------------------111.85

3-Stage Process: Scald-Sponge-Dough

1. Scald
Rye flour--------------25 kg
Malt------------------- 5
Coriander-------------- 0.5
Water---------------65-68 liters
Preparation of scald: mix malt and coriander into 7-8 liters of cold water, add flour, mix and pour in 55-60 liters of boiling water, mixing constantly. In 2-2.5 hours mix the scald again for several minutes and cool to 35 C.

2. Sponge:
Scald--------------------All
Sour-------------------  15-17 kg
Yeast--------------------    0.1 kg
Thoroughly mix the sour into the cooled scald and then let it ferment
for around 4 hours. Note: older, mature dough is used as the sour. Or the following mixture can be made:

Mature dough------------------ 5 kg
Rye flour--------------------- 5 kg
Water------------------------5-7 kg
This sour should ferment for around 5 hours at 27-29 C.
(Translator's note: the sour has a hydration of 100-140.)

3. Dough
Sponge------------------------All
Salt-------------------------  1 kg
Sugar------------------------  6 kg
Syrup------------------------  4 kg
Rye flour (95 extraction)-----55 kg
Wheat flour (85 extraction)---15 kg

Dough temperature should be 30 C and after 10-30 minutes it can be formed into loaves. Loaves are elongated and smoothed with wet hands, then placed on boards that have been sprinkled with flour and left to stand for 15-20 minutes.

After standing and before going into the oven, the loaves are coated with a wheat flour and water mixture and sprinkled with coriander. The loaves are first put in a 320-350 C. oven for 4-6 minutes and are finished up at 240-250 C. The surface is made shiny by coating with a starch mixture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aside from the use of a tiny amount of yeast, which I just omit, two things bother me about this recipe:

1. One quarter of the flour is put into the scald (zavarka). Others (e.g. Royter) only use 16% or less. What is optimal?

2. After forming the loaves, they are put into the oven after only 20 minutes. That sounds like too short a time.

Ron

I have done some amount of research on the subject of how Sourdough breads affect persons with Diabetes. As a person afflicted by this disease, I take it seriously and while I'm not a very good follower of my Dr's orders, I do make efforts in certain areas to control my sugar levels. My own experience was that my blood sugar went and stayed down when I ate breads risen with a natural yeast. That isn't to say the same will happen to you but I wouldn't bet against it.

I was directed to a set of scientific papers done in Europe by some prominent scientists at a University concerning this subject. The short story is that they made 8 loaves of bread. 2 each of 4 types. In each type the bread was risen by commercial or natural (sd) yeast. Otherwise the breads were identical. The testing was done to determine the glycemic load of each bread on a healthy person. The results are remarkable. It shouldn't be a surprise that our bodies digest natural products more easily than commercial pretenders.

Here is the link to the paper I refer to.

Eric

I have been working on my SD starter on and off for over a year now, but only decided to treat it with the respect that it deserves about a month and a half ago.  I began to diligently feed my 100% hydration starter every time that it needed feeding, which was about two to three times a day depending on my ratio of starter to flour and water (tips I got from bwraith's great blog entry).  I really paid attention to it's rise and fall rather than the amount of time it had been sitting on the counter, thanks to advice from ehanner, dmsnyder, and so many others who advocate not being a slave to the clock!  The results were well worth changing my careless ways.  I made the Basic Sourdough Bread from TBBA, which I took to a potluck supper.  People wanted to know, "What bakery around here sells loaves like that?"  It was so nice to see people enjoy the end result of my hard work and research.  Hopefully as my "feel" gets better I won't have to suffer through as many "pancakes" on the way to one great loaf!

Still working on my scoring.

Thank you so much folks at TFL!

Summer