The Fresh Loaf

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Sourdough bread made easy (wheat and spelt)

Heikjo's picture
Heikjo

Sourdough bread made easy (wheat and spelt)

Baking with sourdough can be daunting and it takes some effort to get into. You can make wonderful loaves with advanced techniques involving thermometers, special temperature controlled boxes, handling the dough properly etc. I want to dedicate this entry to easy sourdough baking.

With yeast and the normal way of baking bread, you buy the ingredients, mix, knead, let rest, proof and bake. All done within a few hours. When it comes to sourdough bread you first have to spend weeks making your own starter (if you don't buy a live one), then the development of the dough can take days, or at least many hours.

As a beginner, I can imagine these first steps being the final steps as well and ending the possible adventure prematurely. But if you do get starter going and is ready to bake, the Internet can be helpful as well as frustrating. There are a lot of great bakers in forums like these and they make fantastic loaves, but many of the recipes also involve a lot of time and care for the dough. Autolyse, leavening 1, 2, 3, bulk fermentation, pre-shape, shape, proof etc. All of them has their value, but for beginners, a bread that you spend a day making and need to attend to multiple times during that period, can be overwhelming. It certainly was for me.

However, I came across some recipes that are fairly simple and that I think are great entry level recipes for baking with sourdough. In those first days and weeks, the important thing is to bake, use the starter, refresh it, increase it, get to know the process. It's not that difficult once you try it.

Here are the two standard recipes I now use. I can't spend hours every day making the more advanced loaves, which is why I love these recipes. They are simple, efficient, doesn't require a lot of work and taste good. They are also easier to experiment with and testing how you can change the bread. By making the same bread, but altering the fermentation hours, temperatures, handling, ingredients etc., you get a better understanding of how things work and can perfect the recipe. There are many variables from the baker's environment to yours that can affect the outcome, even if you do exactly what the recipe says. Type of flour, temperatures, humidity, starter, handling, oven etc.

Spelt: I use a lot of spelt due to IBS and the first spelt recipe I tried was this one: Whole Spelt Sourdough Bread by Eric Rusch over at breadtopia.com. This bread you mix and do some stretch and fold in the evening, then bake in the morning. Or from morning to evening. Very easy and the videos help you understand the techniques used. The comment section below has also got a lot of useful information. This is my go-to recipe for 100% spelt bread.

Came out a bit flat. I'm still learning how to handle a spelt dough. The trick on handling seems to be handling it carefully, just using stretch and folds and not being too hard on it after bulk fermentation. I see some variety in the amount of starter used, which I want to experiment with myself. Temperatures, hours of fermentation, handling, it all impacts the final result. In this post, Gordon mentions he uses 30% starter, while the recipe from Breadtopia uses a very small amount (11% with my starter). My first ever bread was 100% spelt (20/80 whole/white) that rose pretty well, but it was made using the wheat recipe below.

Wheat: Living with four others at the moment and experimenting with wheat in my own diet, I wanted to make some wheat bread. After a bit of research, I came across the Buckfastleigh Sourdough by Gordon (drogon) at TFL. A detailed recipe with pictures that should allow anyone to make a quick and easy sourdough wheat bread. When I get it right, this bread is soft, a bit chewy and really tasteful.

These two are fresh of the day, made using the recipe above. Easy and tasty.

Get baking!

Comments

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

be made in a day - no worries..

I'm pretty sure you can make any SD bread in one day of you already have the levain ready to go by getting it ready the night before.  Many of us do jump through hoops to make better bread if we have the time required to do it,  but it certainly isn't necessary.  The techniques don't change at all either.  You still have to develop the gluten somehow with a mixer,  old fashioned kneading, slap and folds, stretch and folds or, like I do, a combo of slap and stretch and folds. (you could skip this with a no knead recipe but that just takes longer since time is what develops the gluten instead)

You still have to do a bulk ferment, shape and final proof before baking.  So the steps and methods are the same.  What changes is all the wait and retard times if you want to use them to make more flavor.  Longer means better flavor - that is all it does besides making the baking process last much longer to fit a particular bakers scheduler:-)

This week i was out of town so could't start sprouting the grain for my normal Friday bake on Monday.  But I could have used store bough sprouted grain flour if I had it.  I got home last night and ground a mic if whole grains that took about 5 minutes and then sifted them to get the bran out to feed to the levain first which took 5 minutes.  Instead of a 3 stage levain build with a following 24-36 hour retard.... I just did a 2 stage build of bran first and the rest of the high extraction multigrain flour 2nd and left the levain out overnight to ripen.  Early this morning I autolysed the dough flours and water, with the salt sprinkled on top, for a half and hour  instead of my normal 1 - 2 hours.  I did my normal gluten development and bulk ferment and it went into the rice floured proofing basket at 11 30 AM.  I could have baked it off this afternoon for a 1 day SD bake (if the levain is ready) but decided to retard the shaped loaf for 21 hours instead and will bake it off tomorrow korning.   So if you skip the wait times for various retards and autolyse then you are down to a 1 day bake.  

I suppose that I could have started the levain build early this morning and put it outside in the AZ 84 F  heat and been using it in 4- 6 hours and still bake the bread tonight too.  

It is always good to remember that there is process to make good bread, of just about any kind, from 1-5 days depending on how much time you have.  All you have to do is dump the unnecessary wait times and retards.  It is always better to have 1 day home made SD bread than anything you can buy at the store! 

Loved the post and happy baking 

ryebreadasap's picture
ryebreadasap

I am waiting to see stretch and fold videos hopefully soon. 

I am feeling exactly as you describe,  so overwhelming to begin , so much information overload.    I am trying to understand the math .

Heijko with your spelt  loaf how do you add your starter? Do you feed the starter amd then use it after it grows? Do you discard some and then only use a tiny amount to add the other ingredients to? I need to watch the video next time I go to library.    You say you read about some people use more   starterand this recipe is a tiny amount- I also want to understand what this means. 

  i am wondering when a recipe says so many grams starter what does it actually mean. I think it depends on the activity strength it has and how its kept . or is it straight forward that as long as its grown from the last feeding you just weigh it? & then feed the mother starter again?

Its so good to see yours looks so delicious. I hope to bake soon like you.

 

Heikjo's picture
Heikjo

I would not recommend using a blender or mixer to mix spelt dough. To achieve best results, it is recommended to knead and work the dough as little as possible. This is where the stretch and fold technique comes into play. It is kind of an alternative to kneading a dough and it also works for other types of flour. A blender or mixer puts a lot of force onto the dough.

There are lots of stretch and fold videos out there. Check out the one on Breadtopia, or just google "stretch and fold" on Youtube and you should find it.

In these easy breads, I don't do much to the starter. I take whatever I need straight from the fridge and add up what I took. If the recipe calls for 150g of starter, I take 150g from my starter in the fridge, then add 80g water and 80g flour, mix well, leave on the counter for an hour, then back into the fridge. How much you keep at all times is simply a matter of how much you use.

What I mean about using more and less, is that in the recipes, the amount of starter varies. In Breadtopia's recipe, he uses 1/4 cup of starter, which is around 60-70g for me. Another recipe I found on Youtube also uses 1/4 cup. In some recipes I've found in here, they use 150g of starter. All these recipes use around 500g total of flour.

Regarding strength of the starter, I haven't read up too much on that topic. I know there are recipes that prepare the starter more thoroughly before making a bread, but in these recipes I wanted to keep it simple. I didn't see it mentioned in the recipes that they did anything special with the starter. I will look more into those kind of recipes at some other point and post my results here.