April 20, 2015 - 6:03pm
A country Sourdough loaf in your KitchenAid mixer... Mostly.
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A country Sourdough loaf in your KitchenAid mixer... Mostly.
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The Fresh Loaf
A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.
Looks great!
Rich
If you're going to make this in a KA or Hobart mixer with a spiral dough hook, the mixer will knead the dough just fine, sparing you the need for manual kneading.
I found a large plastic bowl made of translucent/clear plastic and made by "Glad". It makes an excellent dome for covering proofing dough -- no need for expendable cling film. I also have a heat lamp shining through this bowl and a thermostat to regulate the proofing temperature.
There is a video on line in which Julia Child shows you how to make French bread. It was made in 1971 and Julia, the queen of kitchen cool, obtains her cling film from an electric cling-film dispensing machine. Ah, the '70s.
You're right...
You're right... I could let the KA mixer do the entire kneading process and just do the final shaping myself.
However as I described above the mixer is doing all of my kneading in the 10 minutes at speed 4. The reason for me doing the stretch and folds with a 20 minute autolyse between each Is to give the dough time to bench rise and to develop it to be ready for the tension pulls and final shaping. In that hour and a half the dough will rise by about 50%.
That will give you a nice tight boule with little blisters on it when I put it into the banneton. It will rise more in the banneton in the refrigerator overnight. The tight final shaping and the delayed fermentation will give me a better tasting finished product, great oven spring and nice ears.
Some steps are best done by hand... In my humble opinion.
I personally use a shower cap over my mixing bowl and my banneton instead of cling wrap. I use a clear Pyrex bowl over the dough when I bench rest it. I don't use much cling wrap.
I live in Hermosa Beach, Ca where the temperature is usually ideal for proofing/fermenting dough. I just leave it at room temperature most of the time. I've made 90% hydration Ciabatta bread in less than 4 hours before... Including the baking time.
I currently have a KA 610 and had one of the smaller tilt stand mixers before moving up. KA manual is pretty explicit about not going past speed 2 for bread kneading otherwise you risk damage to the gear assembly. My old 4.5 tilt stand would get really hot trying to do sourdough after just two minutes. The 610 barely breaks a sweat.
I have the 5qt Classic model with 325 watts of power. You can't listen to everything the Manual says. They are trying to limit their warranty obligations. If you tell them you ran your mixer on speed 6 with 1000 grams of dough in it for 25 minutes. They would not honor your warranty.
I have done exactly that for 2 years mixing 100's of loaves of Ciabatta, Sourdough and Brioche bread. I work it so hard that I have to hold my arm over the top of it to keep it from walking off of the counter top. My hand gets hot just touching the casing over the motor. It has never caused a problem for me.
and it really strained at speed 2 with 1300g of dough. I was only mixing for about 3 minutes IIRC and it really got hot. Since I was getting serious about bread baking I moved up to the 610. As long as you don't hear any issues with gear slippage or overheating you should be OK. I've certainly found that with the 610 there is no need to go past speed 2 to get adequate gluten development. I've been baking from Hamelman and the longest that I've run the mixer is for 3 1/2 minutes since the rest of the development is done via folding if that's what the recipe calls for.
Alan
" I've been baking from Hamelman and the longest that I've run the mixer is for 3 1/2 minutes since the rest of the development is done via folding if that's what the recipe calls for."
I don't follow famous baker's recipes. All sourdough recipes are about the same with slight changes in flour, water, starter and salt percentages, very slight. The sourdough game is ALL about technique!
You can learn all of those famous baker's technique's for free on YouTube. You can learn the baker's percentage system and compose your own recipes.
Slap and folds and/or stretch and folds are great ways to develop your dough but there are other effect ways to develop the gluten structure of your dough. I use both my mixer and my hands.
For 90% hydration Ciabatta I let the mixer do all of the work.
I read in some hard-to-find KA documentation that you don't want to go below speed 2. There is an internal fan in the motor and at speed 1 the fan doesn't move enough air to ventilate the motor properly.