dmsnyder's blog

My quest for “Old-Style” San Francisco Sourdough bread: A tasty digression

October, 2016

This trial builds on what I learned from my first two trials. It is a bit of a detour in that I have made some changes that, I hope, result in a bread more to my current taste, even though it deviates from the breads of the old style in having higher hydration and whole grain flours.

Colombo, Parisian, Larraburu. These bakeries produced the bread that made “San Francisco Sourdough” unarguably the most iconic bread produced in America. They are all gone now, and while San Francisco is still (again?) home to some amazingly delicious sourdough breads, the only place to get that old-style San Francisco Sourdough bread is at the Tadich Grill restaurant. Theirs is especially made by Boudin Bakery and is not available anywhere else.

This weekend, I wanted to make a rye bread to go with smoked fish, and, since I was refreshing my rye sour anyway, I also made a pain au levain with a rye starter. The rye is another Berliner Landsbrot (thank you Stan Ginsberg). The Pain au levain is a formula posted quite a while back by Hansjoakim. Formulas for both are available on TFL.

We like hummus and generally buy it "homemade" at a neighborhood Armenian deli. We also buy the pita bread they sell, which is made locally but not in the deli. It's sold in plastic bags, six to a bag. It's not terrible. 

I recently checked an Israeli cookbook out of the library. It had a recipe for pita, not the first I had seen, but the book made a big deal about the superiority of fresh-baked pita over the kind I had been buying. So I made a batch.

Nothing new and exciting baking here this week, except my wife's French Plum Crisp. I baked a couple of my go to breads. My version of Forkish's Pain de Campagne, very different from his, actually. I do use his baking procedure, although it's really Chad Robertson's. Oh, well. It makes really good, crusty bread.

A relatively new TFL member recently asked how to make a sourdough bread. His description of the desired characteristics brought to mind a bread we made in the San Francisco Baking Institute Artisan II Workshop on sourdough baking. It was a decidedly French-style pain au levain with minimal acidic acid tanginess but a creamy, sweet complex flavor. It was the preferred bread of the SFBI faculty. The special features of this white bread were a liquid levain fed every 12 hours that made up about 30% of the total flour in the final dough.

Wifely complement of the week: "What do you call this bread … so I know how to ask you to make it again?" Well, I couldn’t think of what to call it. I have made it before … sort of. It is based on Forkish’s “Pain de Campagne” from FWSY, except with a different flour mix, no commercial yeast and a different fermentation schedule. I’ve generally called such breads “in the spirt of …” whatever my starting point was.

Anyway, it is awfully good bread - very moist, wheaty and only mildly sour.

Hansjoakim's Pain au Levain with Rye Sour

June 3, 2016

Hansjoakim contributed this formula to TFL a bit more than two years ago. (Sourdough bread and fyrstekake) It was added to my “to bake list” right away. Well, I am finally getting around to baking it, since I had extra ripe rye sour looking for a meaningful role, and I was in the mood to try something new.

Two of my favorite breads

David Snyder

30 May, 2016

Last weekend's bakes were two of my favorite breads.  One is Hamelman's Pain au Levain with Whole Wheat Flour. I have blogged on my bakes of this delicious bread several times over several years.

Whole Wheat Sourdough

5/21/2016

This bread is a first trial of a mostly whole wheat sourdough bread leavened with my standard liquid levain rather than the one prescribed by Forkish or Hamelman, or Suas for their versions of a pain au levain with a high percentage of whole grains.