Sourdough success! Adapted recipe for Tartine sourdough bread.
I am somewhat new to sourdough baking and spent the first month or so working on my starter. When I eventually felt that my starter had become active enough to start baking I perused recipes and watched videos and filled my head with everyone else's sourdough expertise. I have made many breads which were okay and tasted good but I felt my dough was too wet as it didn't hold its shape and the crumb was a little gummy. So I started reading through many sourdough blog posts and decided to tweak the recipe I have been using.
Recipe:
Starter:
50/50 blend of AP white flour/rye flour with 100% hydration.
Bread:
100 g active sourdough starter
450 g all purpose white flour
50 g whole wheat flour
300 g warm filtered water
10 g kosher salt
25 g warm filtered water
Mix 100 grams starter with 300 grams warm filtered water until starter is thoroughly incorporated into the water. Add 450 grams AP white flour and 50 grams whole wheat flour into the bowl. Mix ingredients together with hands until you have a uniform but ragged blob. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a towel and let rest for up to 60 minutes (autolyse).
Mix 10 grams of salt with 25 grams of warm filtered water and pour into the bowl. Mix everything together with your hands by squeezing and folding until the dough is smooth and uniform.
Cover the bowl again and let sit for 30-60 minutes. Then wet your hand and turn the dough by pulling from bottom and stretching and then folding on top of itself. Do this in a 4-quadrant manner once. Let rest 30-60 minutes and repeat process 6 times. It takes about 4-5 hours (bulk fermentation).
Carefully pull out the dough onto a lightly floured surface (AP white flour) being careful not to break strands of gluten. Flour your hands and shape dough into a mound and cover for 20 minutes (bench rest).
Fold the dough over itself by stretching and folding in 4 quadrants and pull along table to tighten folds and create a smooth dome. Do this several times and each time smooth a little flour over the surface.
Flour a banneton with or without a linen liner with mix of rice flour and AP white and place dough in the basket and cover for final proofing. Proof for 1 hour.
Heat oven to 500 degrees with cast iron pot and lid in the oven. Then remove pot and place dough in and score the surface with sharp knife or razor. Reduce heat to 450 degrees. Place pot with lid on into over and bake for 30-45 minutes. Remove lid and bake for further 10-20 minutes until crust is a nice deep brown color.
Remove from pot and cool on wire rack. Do not cut into it until totally cooled down as baking process still continues.
Comments
dough. Love teh crusty crust too! Tartine would have been much wetter for sure but this one would be much easier to handle and those big holes have no flavor at all:-)
As a side note, autolyse is flour and water only - no salt, no levian, no yeast. The idea is to fully hydrate the flour and activate the amylase enzymes in the flour which start working on the starch to break it down into sugars and he protease is awakened to start breaking the gluten protein chains too. Once you add a leaven then it is fermenting. Salt sucks up water and competes with the flour for it and why it too is omitted.
The ony time the levain would be used is if it is large and much of the water is in the levain so the flour would not properly hydrate without it - but then it isn't an auolyse anymore either because the levain is in the mix.
Well done and happy baking
Thanks for your advice! So how long do you autolyse and when and how much starter and salt do you use?
The more whole grain the longer. I try to sift ut all the bran hard bits and feed that to the levain so it is wettest the longest and the acid can soften the bran so it doesnlt cut the gluten strands. For white flour I use an hour for autolyse and for whole grain up to 4 hours. Some folks autolyse theor whole grains for longer but if I do I put it in the fridge so the protease doesn't go wild.
Starter for me depnds on the temoerture and how long I plan to retard the shaped dough. Here in AZ it is ho tin the summer but cool in the kitchen in the winter. I could retard for 8 - 24 hours depending on my schedule and how sour I want the read to be. So the hoter the less levain and the longer the less levain. In the summer for a 16 hour retard I would not be over 10% pre-fermented flour and in the winter I would use up to 20%.
Less retard time then more levain could be used. More levain always means faster at what ever temperature and faster means less flavor. Those are the trade offs Lucy thinks about when crafting a formula.
Happy baking
You are doing really well as a novice sourdough baker! It is hard to come up with a method that works for you and produces the results you want. You will find that you are going to continue tweaking this method until you learn to watch the dough and not the clock. This took me months and months to learn. Well done! That loaf looks delicious!
It is delicious and my husband and son will testify to that - I hope they leave me a slice to eat with lunch! I'm loving the learning process and welcome all advice!
We're both sourdough novices. Tartine is a pretty tough challenging bake. Do not give up and good luck! For the autolyse, I have tried AP flour and water for 16 hours without ill-effects, just a sweeter flavor.
I'm thoroughly enjoying my baking experiences and making little tweaks all the time with improving results! For my most recent bake I added a tablespoon of starter to 75 grams AP flour and 75 grams water and left on counter for 12 hours. I got a nice light crumb and good oven spring. See my most recent blog post for photo.