It requires minimal kneading, and the total turn around is less than a couple of hours.
Of course for both recipes the problem is that they use yeast, which most houses don’t have. For many/most houses that have baking supplies they’re almost certain to have baking soda, so a soda bread presumably works better.
Yup; I'm hearing from government and media that food supply chains are fine, yet I can't seem to find rice or flour or yeast anywhere, for going on a week now. The people who answer phones at local stores don't seem to have any idea when more is coming in.
If the supply is there, you'd think it'd be straightforward to bring in a few dozen pallets of big (10-15kg) bags of rice and flour, 1 per customer, so that people can avoid coming to the store for the next month or so and avoid infecting themselves/others whilst shopping. I'm curious what the holdup is.
TFA recipe looks delicious. I wish I could try it.
Supply is normal, demand is up. My guess is that panic buying will dry up fairly soon.
Staff at the grocery store can find out when new stocks are coming in. The orders have already been placed, the trucks are already scheduled to arrive, and staff are scheduled to stock the shelves. It’s just a pain to answer questions from so many people.
Stores here (NYC area) had stockouts in bread earlier in the week. The stockouts are happening less, they’re less severe, they’re not lasting as long. Your experience will depend on where you live, exactly which store you go to, and what time you go to the store. My personal experience is that some stores will stockout much sooner than others, e.g., Trader Joes, maybe because the clientele is more prone to panic buying, maybe because of differences in stocking.
The catch here in NYC is that plenty of people just eat out and don’t know how to cook, don’t have food stocks, don’t have tools. Our household bakes bread anyway so we stock flour.
> Supply is normal, demand is up. My guess is that panic buying will dry up fairly soon.
I don't think there is any panic buying going on. Buying for 6-12 weeks for a household is a very rational and prudent thing to do during a declared national emergency for a pandemic with a doubling time of approximately 3-4 days so far.
Presuming that people buying enough to avoid the store for a month or two is "panic buying" is to invoke the term "panic" when there probably isn't any panic, which I think is a very harmful thing to do.
I normally have about 3 days worth of food at home, not 3 months. Other than Mormons, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who regularly planned for more than 1-2 weeks. By that standard, and using the definition given on Wikipedia, “panic buying” is absolutely accurate.
You're deliberately excluding the rest of his sentence. If things were normal, yes, buying 1-2 weeks of supplies would be fine. But they're obviously NOT normal. Stores/businesses are closing, supply is inconsistent, and wanting to limit unnecessary interactions make it prudent to plan for greater than your normal 1-2 weeks.
I wasn't passing judgement on whether it's a right or wrong or rational thing to do.
I'm saying that this literally is the definition of panic buying: buying significantly more than you normally would, because you fear that goods will be unavailable, or you will be unable to do your regular shopping in the future.
I think the term "panic buying" is a really bad term for it, then, if you can be entirely not-in-a-panic and fit the definition of "panic buying". It paints it as something it's decidedly not, and people who don't encounter the term very often are likely to make incorrect assumptions about it.
I did my "panic buying" in February, and there was no panic or urgency whatsoever involved.
Panic is uncontrollable fear. Fear is a normal emotion, especially in this situation. Panic would imply buying five years worth of toilet paper because someone told you trees would go extinct.
panic also explains fighting over toiletpaper. if you weren't panicking you'd simply wait until the toilet paper is restocked. there is enough evidence out there that people are panicking.
Words are often used in ways that are etymologically inappropriate. Although “panic buying” sounds like it should require panic, it doesn’t. Other examples of this phenomenon include “automobile” meaning something different from “self-driving” and the way “American” implies “not Mexican” even though Mexico is a country in the continent of America.
I think that household grocery demand will be permanently up - the switch to working from home, and having kids be home instead of school means that suddenly we're home much, much more than before and eating much more meals at home.
So lots of food supply that used to go to restaurants will now be going directly to homes - it does not affect producers much, but it's a very different distribution chain than what the restaurant purchasing uses/used.
It's worth noting that, with the exception of the fresh vegetables imported from somewhere warm, all of the food you're going to eat during this crisis was grown, harvested, processed and preserved last fall, and the current supply chain is just moving it from the warehouses and granaries to your door.
flour is still easy to find where I live, but yeast has completely run out.
I don't even understand why, if you buy a packet of 50g fresh yeast and use a couple grams a day it would last you a month, I think we need to educate people to have slow leavening!
If you have flour, and haven't had the chance before, this is the perfect time to get a sourdough starter going. And don't throw away the discard/leftover, it can be used as a base for all kinds of stuff, from pancakes to cupcakes!
Heat a some oil in the pan, roast some chopped up scallions and a little sesame seed and bake a sourdough pancake at medium heat from the discard. Delicious!
I do a "one tin" bread process (less cleaning after) - everything gets mixed and cooked in the bread tin, with some oil added last to stop it from sticking (and adds a nice tasty crust).
The process is (white or brown):
1. Fill tin half way without flour
2. Add some salt (to your taste)
3. A small layer of yeast on top (I experimented to find a few shakes of yeast is enough)
4. Pre-mix the dry mix
5. Mix with luke-warm (warm to the touch) water (keep adding water until everything is mixed)
6. Allow to rise for half hour
7. Glaze with oil to prevent sticking (all the way around)
8. Throw in an oven (from cold) at ~180 degrees
9. Wait 30-50 minutes (depending on the oven)
Experiments that have worked out well:
* Add a light dusting of salt to the outside
* Add seeds to the outside
* Bury lumps of cheese deep into the top of the bread
Benefits are:
* Great testing fresh bread (great having the butter melt into warm bread)
* Exercises your hands quite well
* Very cost effective + ingredients keep for a very long time
If you plan on keeping it (i.e. you don't eat it all at once) its best to leave it to cool before cutting it open. Even after it comes out the oven the dough in the middle continues to cook from the steam. If you cut into it too early the steam will be released leading to somewhat soggy bread.
Ha! Quite timely. I have a 4 day old sourdough starter that is starting to bubble nicely. If you have the patience and the flour, skip the yeast packet and start a sourdough starter. I've made sourdough in the past, and generally swear by using a spray bottle filled with water to gelatinize the crust during baking, but the dutch oven approach seems nice. I ran across it earlier tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJEHsvW2J6M
Is your starter four days old from dry/dormant? Or did you liven up a wet one? The reason I ask is my starter was purchased online and arrived as a sachet of powder. And it took at least a week if not more for it to be ready. While the thing was just beginning to activate it smelled like old socks and bad cheese with a whiff of cabbage to make things really revolting. Then one day...it smelled of bread. Even a bit buttery. And for the past six years it’s been going strong with the same mild breadth yeasty buttery smell.
Anyhow what I’m saying is that 4 days seems too soon to start using in my limited experience.
Apparently in the first days there are many bacteria fighting for territory and until the right ones win it’s gonna smell like death!
4 days from the start. Just flour and water. I didn't buy anything but the flour. I mixed them up, brought it outside for a bit to catch some wild bacteria and yeasts, and I've been stirring it periodically. I put it in the oven with the light on a few times to speed things up. Every day I add a bit more flour and water. It currently smells like yogurt and is full of small bubbles. I think it should be ready to use in another 2-3 days.
Yes, a new sourdough starter will go through several phases of strange and awful smells before it settles down to a consistent yummy sour yeastiness.
Personally I'd question whether its worth even bothering with a dry powder starter, I just make mine with flour (mix of rye and wheat) and filtered water. The yeast is either present in the flour or is picked up naturally from the air.
I've been taking a look at Google's search trends on occasion. The term "bread recipes" had a nice uptick after people started panic buying* flour and yeast:
I get my bread flour (which is gluten enriched) from a restaurant supply store. Seeing how restaurants are slowed now and not many folks know about these stores, it might be a good place to check out. Also, you don't need yeast if you just maintain a portion of the dough (a sourdough starter) in a small container in your refrigerator.
For those unfamiliar with baking, the shared recipe is pretty much the standard crusty white bread recipe, and one that has a great effort/payoff ratio. One thing to note is that unlike most cooking where you can just sort of eyeball quantities and get something good, baking bread is chemistry. You really want to have an accurate kitchen scale to get the ingredient proportions correct by weight.
baking bread is chemistry. You really want to have an accurate kitchen scale to get the ingredient proportions correct by weight.
Scales are definitely a good idea, but I don’t think the general point (“don’t mess with the recipe!”) is quite as true as people make out, at least for bread baking. You can vary the yeast, salt, fat etc a fair amount and still get decent results.
Getting the hydration level right (ratio between water and flour) is the key bit. Too dry (below about 60%, meaning 60:100 water:flour) and it won’t rise. Too wet and it’ll be difficult to work (70% and up is hard) and if you don’t work it properly it’ll be too weak and again won’t rise. The whole business of folding and resting is about working with higher hydration dough.
Dough is infinitely ... transformable. Mess with the recipe and you will get something else. It will probably still be quite edible but it won't be the loaf you signed up for.
I did this just the other day. I left out about 20% of the normal wheat flour, and added some whole wheat flour. You can't substitute it 1:1, so experiment a little until the dough feels right.
I've made this recipe many times, but I go by another[1] method, which is less wall-of-texty, but basically the same.
A good rule of thumb is "only replace some of the standard all purpose / bread flour". Swapping a cup or two out for oat or whole wheat or rye or whatever is usually fine; replacing it all tends to be trickier.
Whole wheat absorbs more water. So, I'd suggest adding 5-10% more of it for 100% whole wheat. It depends on the flour type. It's going to be less fluffy. Also consider mixing your flours. Start with 20-50% whole wheat.
Actually eye-balling works great, if you know what you are doing. Using recipes when flour brands and types, humidity, ovens, yeast, and ambient temperature are all over the place means that you pretty much have to adapt recipes to your context. It's not optional. Most recipes try to be idiot proof by managing risk for novice users. E.g. a 65% hydration dough is going to be easier to handle; packs of yeast come in pre-measured packs, etc. A real baker would use higher hydrations, not be using dried yeast, and generally work in large batches. Batch size matters because it's easier to nail the ratios and does not require gram level precision.
Especially proofing times in recipes are in my view complete horse shit because it depends on so many variables beyond your control that any time unit would probably have a very high margin of error. Making bread in the summer and in the winter with the same recipes is guaranteed to have very different outcomes unless you adapt. Over proofing is a thing. So, is under proofing. If you have a sourdough starter, it can be in a barely alive state or in a hyper active state. It's going to affect what it does to dough and how fast it does it. Slow is actually good because time == flavor. Put your dough in the fridge to build more flavor.
The reason scales and exact ratios are nice is that they provide repeatability of the same context; or at least some level of control over it. So if, you've baked a few breads the same way, you can start tweaking a few things. Add a bit more water. Proof a bit shorter/longer, etc. People talk a lot about hydration levels of their doughs. But if you are adding a 150 grams of some sourdough starter with unknown hydration, you are going to mess up the hydration percentage of your perfectly measured ingredients.
When you've done this a couple of times, you develop a sense of what the dough is supposed to feel like and ways to correct if it doesn't feel right. I did not actually use scales until half a year ago. I use them a lot now because it helps me nail things like hydration percentages and salt levels with less guesswork but I use measurements as a starting point and adapt by eyeballing.
I was getting fine results just eyeballing it. Shake in half a pack of flour, that would be about half a kilo. Pinch of salt (most recipes suggest 1.8% by weight), add some starter and about two thirds of a pint of water (I used an actual pint glass) and add water/flour until it feels right. Don't over think it. 60% hydration breads are going to be a bit dense but fine if you knead them well. 85% hydration levels are going to be a sticky mess and a PITA to handle. You need skills to handle that and an understanding of what you are doing. But if you do, the results can be spectacular. I rarely go over 70-75%.
incidently i just started baking bread last week because i live in an area where people don't eat bread much, so it's not common to find.
i had a recipe that put 350ml water to 500g flour. i used whole grain weat flour and the result was a very sticky dough. i added regular flour until it stopped being sticky.
the dough rose beautifully and baked nicely. (i burned it a bit at the top, but that could be scraped off)
today i made another. this time i only used the 500g whole grain flour and didn't add any regular flour but reduced the water, adding more water until it started getting sticky.
this dough didn't rise well. and the resulting bread was denser and had a slightly stronger taste of yeast.
from other comments i see that the stickyness is to be expected and will get better after the first rise. so my second try didn't rise because i didn't use enough water.
interestingly, i just realized thst the consistency of the second attempt is very close to black bread that i got in latvia.
Wholegrain flour doesn't produce as much gluten as bread flour, so it won't trap air as well (resulting in it being flatter). I doubt it was because you didn't have enough water -- in fact if you added water until it was sticky you probably added more water than you did for white flour (wholemeal absorbs much more water).
As an aside, for anyone confused why recipes online can have 70% hydration (when 50% hydration for your dough makes it much sticker than reasonable), it's because they mix wholemeal flour with bread flour and don't mention it in the recipe. I'd suggest adding wholemeal flour (but not much more than 30% of the total flour because too much reduces the amount of gluten you get and thus the structure is noticeably more cakey) because it really improves flavour.
well the first bread was probably ⅔ wholemeal (500g) and ⅓ white (estimated) and 350ml water. i started with wholemeal only and the result was still very sticky. but maybe i just didn't knead it long enough for the flour to absorb the water.
the second was surely less water although i didn't measure.
> but maybe i just didn't knead it long enough for the flour to absorb the water
If you let the dough mix sit for a 10 minutes or so before you start kneading, it allows the flour to hydrate and thus it'll get less sticky. This is one of the arguments for "no-knead" bread recipes.
But when kneading bread you should always knead it until you can take a piece of dough and stretch it thin enough to see light through it (this is called "the window-pane effect"). This indicates that the gluten in the dough is strong enough for a good rise and crust. Once you knead it to that point it's almost always no longer really sticky.
That's okay, you can mix it by hand and it will work without issue (it's what our ancestors did for thousands of years). But if you don't want to knead for 10-15 minutes, if you roughly mix the water and flour then wait 10 minutes and then start kneading you'll find it takes much less time and effort to get the same result.
I make bread with 80% hydration: 500 g plain flour (11% protein) definitely no wholemeal, 400 g water, 8 g salt, 1 g dried yeast. Mix roughly leave covered for 12 hours at room temperature (that's between 15 C and 20 C at the moment), cook in a preheated pot with a lid for 30 minutes at 230 C, take off lid, cook for 15 minutes more.
You do not, repeat not have to preheat anything before putting your bread dough in the oven.
Starting with a cold dutch oven makes it much easier and safer to get the dough in. Just bake for an extra 20 minutes at the start. If in doubt, overcooking is better than undercooking for bread.
Also... I think the reason why most recipes call for preheating is very interesting! It’s all about reproducing the conditions used by professional bakers. A professional will use an oven that can inject steam to keep the bread from drying out; baking in a dutch oven simulates this. And a professional baker will keep the oven on through the whole working day; preheating simulates this, so you can use the same timings. But if you’re only baking one loaf every couple of days, rather than 200 loaves a day, you don’t necessarily have to do all this stuff.
To use a classic HN analogy, it’s like a startup using all the same technology and processes as Google. Some of them are a good idea (keeping steam in the oven), some of them are premature until you’re operating at a massive scale (preheating the oven).
Another reason is that the time it takes for the Dutch oven to come to temperature depends on a lot of parameters (size of Dutch oven, size of oven, fan or not, power of oven) so pre-heating allows for the timings to be consistent.
But I agree on the safety concerns so I will try your method on my next loaf, now is not the time to get bad burn wounds.
Yes, timings will definitely vary. I timed how long my oven took to preheat with a cold dutch oven, and it was around 20 minutes, so that’s about how long I add.
But I’ve found the timing is not super critical, the main thing is not to undercook. (Note that most recipes say things like “check for doneness, and bake for another 5 minutes if the loaf doesn’t sound hollow”.)
My personal experience is that bread is sensitive enough to parameters that you’re going to have to “get to know” your equipment anyway end do some experimentation.
The steam injection ovens, invented IIRC in the early 20th century, were nearly the death of French bread, supplanted by the insipid industrial baguette.
Luckily Lionel Poilâne revived artisanal French bread in the 1970s, resulting in loaves like those pictured in the article.
I dunno, I’m not sure you can attribute either the industrialization of bread production, or the artisanal bread movement, to any one invention or person.
For example, you could tell exactly the same story about the electric mixer leading to faster bread making, leading to large-scale production of low-quality bread; and Raymond Carvel reviving artisanal French bread with his popularization of autolysis (mixing the flour and water and resting it before adding yeast).
UK supermarket baguettes are a poor approximation of continental Europe's (I suppose most of my experience is of France's).
Actually, Waitrose's baguette - as opposed to its 'flute' or 'French stick' - is not bad. Not as good, but not bad. The cheaper flutes and sticks (which seem to be all that other places sell) are just.. completely different.
I've never had a baguette with a nice crispy outside that results in flakes all over the breakfast table, and a soft, fluffy, inside like those so prevalent in France though.
While I'm at it - tomatoes! Tomatoes are so much nicer in France too.
The industrial baguette (which includes those of a lot of bakeries) is pretty uninteresting, with a uniform and non-structural internal texture and a vaguely crusty exterior. Compare that to the radically different banette you can find at artisanal bakeries which unfortunately of course are hard to sustain financially outside wealthy enclaves.
Also if you didn't experience it, the food choices of the 60s, 70s, and even early 80s were pretty restricted and of poor quality in Europe, Australia and the USA (and likely elsewhere). Even in the USA where there was an explosion of products, the quality of the food was poor and largely undifferentiated. And thus with bread in France.
I was lucky that our home in Paris had several good bakeries within a few minutes' walk of our front door (including Poilâne's) but it was obvious that this was a product of economic good fortune. But when you venture out to the countryside in France or Germany the goods in shops primarily come from a truck from a faraway factory. Surprisingly this appears to me (unscientifically) to be more extreme in France than Germany
I preheat the dutch oven in a 475f oven, but I put the dough on a piece of parchment paper, grab the corners, and safely drop it into the blazing hot pot. As a bonus, this also makes it easy to pull out. Works great.
The reason to preheat the oven is to brown it quickly without drying out the outside and overcooking inside.
The same exact reason you put steak on a hot pan, not cold. If you put it on cold pan it would be cooked through before you get any browning on the outside.
If you take too long baking bread the outside will be dried out, not crisped. Not everybody sees the difference but at least for me it is pretty significant.
Consumer ovens are pitifully underpowered for the most part and will take forever to bring oven to temperature with a large wet mass inside. Even if the oven is preheated the temperature instantly dips very significantly when you put your dough in.
The reason they do it in professional setting is because they don't have time to cool it down and then get it back up to temperature. Another reason is you want repeatable results and not depending on starting temperature.
As to the safety, as long as you are not super clumsy just general common sense is enough to prevent any burns. Don't touch the oven. Use oven mittens. Use extra long mittens if you don't feel safe. Do not operate on the dough while it is inside the oven (tray out, then do whatever you want, tray in). If you use steam to bake (which I do) make sure you understand where the steam goes so you avoid the areas where the hot 200C steam will be when you open oven door so you don't burn your face and hands (the answer: it goes up). Keep your small kids occupied somewhere else so they don't feel the need to have fun with hot oven while baking and after while it is still hot.
If you use a good quality dutch oven with a well-fitting lid, drying out isn’t an issue at all. In fact you have to take the lid off for the last 10-20 minutes to brown the crust at all.
However, getting your dough into a preheated dutch oven is fiddly and a little dangerous. That’s why I recommend just starting from cold.
Hm, I'm willing to pay hundreds of dollars to buy a special pan that doesn't preheat, so I could cook the steak through first, then sear. Maybe I've been doing this wrong! Or maybe there's a Cinder Grill rep here that can get me a special deal for shilling their product :)
"The Food Lab" is also a good book, if you like diving deeper on this sort of thing.
> pay hundreds of dollars to buy a special pan that doesn't preheat, so I could cook the steak through first
You don't need hundreds, just ~$100 for an inexpensive sous vide cooker with integrated thermometer & temp regulation [0]
You can put the meet in a zip lock bag and suck the air out with a straw and have it work just fine if you want to avoid the added expense of vacuum bags. When the meat hits the desired temp, remove, unwrap, sear the outside, and voila!
Everybody has one. Most ovens can get down to 200-275 degrees and stay fairly consistent in temperature. You can take the internal temperature of the meat while its cooking, instead of waiting a set amount of time. The meat comes out dry, which saves you having to dry it coming out of the bag before you sear.
If you really want to pay to make better bread I suggest you save your money and spend a little time researching designing bread recipes instead. I did and I can recreate almost any bread just by looking at it or by person describing what they want to get. It is not at all difficult once you learn how different processing steps and different ingredient ratios influence the result.
The best investment is to learn how to do it right. Every home that has an oven and a weighing scale has essentially everything that is needed to make artisanal breads.
Of the tools that make life easier but are in no way essential:
Are you referring to preheating the oven (i.e. the big box with the stove on top that gets warm) or the Dutch oven (i.e. the cast iron bowl with a lid)?
You also don't need to wait 16 hours for a leavening. Just about 2 hours with the process explained in the article may be sufficient as well.
YMMV though since, in my experience, the simplicity of it all is actually quite nuanced and delicate. Small changes in water amounts or yeast preparation can yield big differences in the end product. Curious to hear someone's thoughts on this...
Edit: This is also often called a "no knead" recipe...
Leavening for fewer hours gives a different kind of structure the the bread.
Shorter leavening: smaller bubbles, more soft texture.
Longer leavening: bigger bubbles, more chewy texture.
Longer leavening also gives it a more yeasty flavour. I think the shorter leavened bread goes well with jam and the longer leavened bread goes well with savoury toppings.
Eh, it really depends on the kind of bread your making. I think it probably works with regular yeasted breads, but you're definitely going to get less oven spring with sourdough.[1]
I was thinking for a “simple” recipe that link sure has a lot of steps. I’ve been making bread like this for a long time. There’s no need to do most of these steps.
I mix all of the ingredients together at once in the beginning. Stir and fold with hands. Will be lumpy.
Come back two or three times after about 20 minutes. No need to set a clock just wing it. You’ll know it’s ready once the dough becomes smooth.
And I don’t buy bread flour. Why keep an extra type of those? I buy AP flour and keep vital wheat gluten (available from places like Whole Foods) in the freezer. Mix in one or two tbsp depending on how you like the texture.
And as you say, no need to preheat the oven. If you’re in doubt stick a probe thermometer in. Bread is done after 190 F.
By not preheating the oven you will generally end up with a denser, smaller loaf. This isn’t a bad thing if you’re happy with the result, but the style of bread this recipe is aimed at typically is very light with a very airy crumb.
When the loaf goes into a hot oven, you get some steam generated as water boils, and the yeast gets heated quickly, giving a minute or two of high gas output before it is killed by higher temps. This all adds air to the inside of the loaf while the dough is still very soft. When cooking at a low temperature, the crust often hardens more before this process happens, limiting the amount the loaf can expand.
Nothing to imply the trade-offs explicitly worse, it’s down to if you like the result.
But it will definitely change what you get out of the oven.
Highly recommend trying it yourself and compare two loaves cooked with and without preheating to see how much it changes the result and if it makes it easier and more enjoyable for you to bake!
There are many ways to make bread. If you got a technique that doesn't require preheating, that's fine, it's yet another way to make a particular kind of bread.
I will not say that your bread isn't good. However, if you want great crust and oven spring using dutch oven while baking in a home oven, a preheat is a good idea and it works.
I preheat at max temp, 500F for 1 hour with the empty dutch oven inside. Here's a good recipe that I've used recently, it's beginner friendly and uses common flours (King Authur bread and whole wheat blend)... https://www.theperfectloaf.com/simple-weekday-sourdough-brea...
Have you definitely tried the same recipe (except baking time) both with and without preheating? Maybe I’m not discerning enough, and I freely admit my results aren’t amazingly consistent at the best of times, but I honestly can’t tell the difference in the results.
A damper is previous even easier, only requiring floor, water, salt and a camp fire --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damper_(food) (depending on your location, a camp fire might be difficult ...)
"The ingredients are cheaper[1], denser and have a longer shelf-life than the final product, and the process of turning one into the other requires much more time than effort...."
"1. If you fancy living 13th-century style, 2000kcal of home-made bread is 35p of flour, salt and yeast."
In a quarantine:
1. Minimising cash expense is good. Cheaper is better.
2. Storage space is limited. Denser is better.
3. Minimising exposure risk through shopping runs is good. Longer shelf-life is better. Stock up, then live off supplies for days, weeks, or months.
4. Time is abundant. Long-running tasks are not a detriment.
5. Low effort is generally good.
"Quarantine bread" minimises use of resources and exposures to risk which you'll want to minimise in a quarantine, and takes advantage of the abundant time resource.
Yeah I get that bread is good in a quarantine - I’m making my own every few days right now - but is this any better than just making any other bread recipe. That’s all I’m saying.
I've been baking for years, because despite all the fancy cuisine that exists (and I do appreciate that too), there's nothing quite like fresh warm bread with a generous layer of butter on top. It's something special that you can't buy anywhere.
Speaking from experience, 1/12th of a teaspoon of instant yeast is below 1 gram. So you need specialized equipment to measure this. But you can estimate 1/12th teaspoon fairly accurately.
It's too small to use a normal gram-accurate kitchen scale; received wisdom is that one quarter-teaspoon of instant yeast is about a gram. So a third of a gram is a twelfth of a teaspoon.
Thanks for a prompt - I've now added a note in the text to this effect!
It's a lot less yeast than I usually use, but I also only let it rise for an hour or two, not overnight, so I suppose that accounts for it. Assuming for simplicity's sake that rising & proving time is directly proportional to yeast quantity; if you had a limitless supply of both yeast and time, would you suggest less yeast and longer rise, for better bread?
Lord, I'm not really qualified; I've only been baking for a few weeks. My justification for writing this was more that I thought I could put it in a style that a new audience would be receptive to, rather than any perceived expertise on my own part.
That said, received wisdom is that loooong, slow ferments give more flavourful loaves. That's usually achieved with tiny amounts of yeast and time in the fridge. But please, go ask the experts over on /r/breadit, you'll get a much more reliable answer there.
All yeast is different so you'll have to do some trial and error regardless. In general, too much yeast is better than not enough yeast. The most important thing is that you have a consistent way of measuring yeast amounts, whether by weight or volume. And always buy the exact same yeast.
> The most important thing is that you have a consistent way of measuring yeast amounts
Well, when sharing recipes, it certainly help if _we_ have a consistent way of measuring amounts. 1/12th teaspoon sounds very hard to actually measure in real life and some teaspoons have different sizes. Using grams (weight) or milliliters (volume) would make it much easier to replicate + it gets easier to multiply the recipe in your head.
So I agree, let's start using international measurements for recipes please!
In theory, this is fine. In reality, we need some of these other systems. Few folks have a couple of good scales (and yes, you need two: One for small amounts and one for the larger ones).
Luckily, bread making isn't that exact, especially for home kitchens.
I'm not sure I'd say "few" but my frame of reference is Europe. Most people I know have a tool which seems to be called "measuring spoon set" in English, which has the common volume-measurements. People who do baking with recipes usually have a scale that can resolve down to 1g, which seems to work out for most recipes.
Good to hear that bread making is not that exact though, so you could probably eyeball it in that case.
(just wanted to add that with one weight you can usually [imprecisely] weight both really small values and really big values by multiplying/dividing. Let's say you need 0.5g but your scale can only do down to 1g, so you can weight 1g and then just half it and now you have 0.5g. Same goes if you need 1kg when max is 100g, just do 100g and then multiply)
> (just wanted to add that with one weight you can usually [imprecisely] weight both really small values and really big values by multiplying/dividing. Let's say you need 0.5g but your scale can only do down to 1g, so you can weight 1g and then just half it and now you have 0.5g. Same goes if you need 1kg when max is 100g, just do 100g and then multiply)
Not with a 1gram-resolution scale - at best it's measured 1g +/- 0.5g, so after you halve it you have anything from 0.25g to 0.75g, +/- your own inaccuracy in halving such a small quantity. (I suppose you could count out each spore cluster!)
However, I really don't believe it's going to have a material affect on your homemade bread; that level of recipe precision just isn't important outside of commercial manufacturing.
"Europe" is a big place, though. I fully expected everyone to have kitchen scales when I moved here from the US, but honestly, folks around here use a measuring cup. Flour is measured in dl, salt in teaspoons (or parts of them). I think the standard teaspoon is 5ml and the Tablespoon is at 15ml.
I happen to have scales: The large volume scale was easy to find. The scale that would measure things like salt? not so easy to find and not cost effective at all.
The amount of yeast will depend on the exact brand of yeast (and for perishable yeasts, its age). So recipe are more of a guideline and not a substitute for trial and error and knowing your yeast. Yeast isn't like sugar, it's a living organism rather than a simple molecule, so by weight measurements are not sufficient for reproducibility.
Hm, I wonder if that's local to your region? In the countries I've in in Europe, I've always followed the recipes exactly regarding all ingredients, including yeast, and made good stuff, even with different brands of yeast. Or simply my taste buds are terrible.
This is probably because most recipes specify more yeast than is truly required. Yeast is generally quite forgiving, you can use a lot more than required before experiencing side effects. It becomes less forgiving the longer you ferment your dough, if you are fermenting for several days then you can't get away with blasting the dough with yeast, in any case the problem isn't taste but the texture of the final product.
When you make bread regularly (as in quarantine), reserve piece of the dough to add it to the dough the next day.
This is guaranteed, absolutely the easiest way to have sourdough bread regularly without having to tinker with the starter. The dough is less hydration than typical starter, it is also already salted. This makes it more stable than typical 100% hydration starter.
Also, it has the hydration and salt content of your final dough which has the fantastic property that it does not change your basic proportions regardless of how much you add it. This makes all calculations extremely easy.
I typically add around 10% of starter. If you can't stand sour flavor add just 5% and let it rise quickly (higher temperature) so that bacteria does not have time to grow and accumulate lactic acid.
It seems like everyone in this town (Brighton, UK) realised that they were about to run out of dried yeast yesterday, and there's none to buy. This morning I took to twitter with photos of the beginnings of a sourdough starter and there are a lot of photos of folk doing the same.
Mine won't work though. It's Half and half strong white flour and whole buckwheat flour. The idea is that the latter will donate yeast. Or maybe it will...
Give it time. It takes about a week to bootstrap a starter. You need to feed it every day by giving it equal amounts fresh water & flour and discarding about half of the starter.
Once you have a stable starter, it's very forgiving. I tend to use pretty much all of it and then toss some flour/water into the container it used to be in. The little starter left behind in the container mixes with the flour and water and it lives on. I keep it in the fridge when I don't need it.
I had to give it 3-4 days before I got some activity. Any flour should work as long as it is unbleached. I've had good success with just Sainsbury's strong white bread flour. It has given me a fragrant peachy starter.
I too have been making lots of bread lately (baguettes) and have a question to which I didn't find a satisfactory answer yet. Most recipes seem to suggest baking temperature of 450-470F. But there are hints that higher is better. My oven can do 550F. Is higher better? What is the temperature used in bakeries?
Higher isn’t necessarily better. You are balancing how long to fully bake the dough with how dry/crisp/burnt the crust becomes. Depending on hydration, presence of steam, baking surface, etc... Deck ovens (typically used for French style baguette) are usually in the 450-500 range for baguette, but have some major differences with home ovens. Even if your oven goes up to 500 or 550, actually maintaining that internal temp can be quite difficult for a home oven, which is why many home recipes suggest turning it all the way up. Best advice is to try different things with your oven, see what difference it makes!
Convection is another good one to test. At least in my experience oven temps often end up lower with convection on up over 450F, because of increased exhaust (obviously depends on oven). And if you are not using a Dutch oven and maybe even if you are, it dissipates moisture much faster often leaving a duller, thinner crust and one that darkens too quickly for the bake. I have seen posts from people baking at home with convection that are really happy with it though.
Updating mostly for myself: Using convection worked great. The time needed went from 26 minutes to 16, and the crust is better. I baked at 500, but will probably reduce to 475 next time.
not professional advice - just a tinkerer. I find that pre-heating to 450 and dropping it down to 380 for the bulk of the bake is a nice tradeoff between getting that good initial spring against an even bake with a chewy not not overly dry crust.
I also use a 3/8" steel plate to have some leftover heat to transfer to the dough after the door closes..that probably helps
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadBedourie ovens would work if cast iron, but they often aren't.
What most people think of as casserole dishes are just not the right size and shape.
It requires minimal kneading, and the total turn around is less than a couple of hours.
Of course for both recipes the problem is that they use yeast, which most houses don’t have. For many/most houses that have baking supplies they’re almost certain to have baking soda, so a soda bread presumably works better.
If the supply is there, you'd think it'd be straightforward to bring in a few dozen pallets of big (10-15kg) bags of rice and flour, 1 per customer, so that people can avoid coming to the store for the next month or so and avoid infecting themselves/others whilst shopping. I'm curious what the holdup is.
TFA recipe looks delicious. I wish I could try it.
Staff at the grocery store can find out when new stocks are coming in. The orders have already been placed, the trucks are already scheduled to arrive, and staff are scheduled to stock the shelves. It’s just a pain to answer questions from so many people.
Stores here (NYC area) had stockouts in bread earlier in the week. The stockouts are happening less, they’re less severe, they’re not lasting as long. Your experience will depend on where you live, exactly which store you go to, and what time you go to the store. My personal experience is that some stores will stockout much sooner than others, e.g., Trader Joes, maybe because the clientele is more prone to panic buying, maybe because of differences in stocking.
The catch here in NYC is that plenty of people just eat out and don’t know how to cook, don’t have food stocks, don’t have tools. Our household bakes bread anyway so we stock flour.
I don't think there is any panic buying going on. Buying for 6-12 weeks for a household is a very rational and prudent thing to do during a declared national emergency for a pandemic with a doubling time of approximately 3-4 days so far.
12 weeks is what the NSA/IC recommends for their own staff during an uncontrolled pandemic: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/nsa-corona...
Presuming that people buying enough to avoid the store for a month or two is "panic buying" is to invoke the term "panic" when there probably isn't any panic, which I think is a very harmful thing to do.
Rational or not, that's the definition of panic buying. If everyone bought their normal 1-2 weeks worth of supplies then there wouldn't be a problem.
I'm saying that this literally is the definition of panic buying: buying significantly more than you normally would, because you fear that goods will be unavailable, or you will be unable to do your regular shopping in the future.
I think the term "panic buying" is a really bad term for it, then, if you can be entirely not-in-a-panic and fit the definition of "panic buying". It paints it as something it's decidedly not, and people who don't encounter the term very often are likely to make incorrect assumptions about it.
I did my "panic buying" in February, and there was no panic or urgency whatsoever involved.
So lots of food supply that used to go to restaurants will now be going directly to homes - it does not affect producers much, but it's a very different distribution chain than what the restaurant purchasing uses/used.
I don't even understand why, if you buy a packet of 50g fresh yeast and use a couple grams a day it would last you a month, I think we need to educate people to have slow leavening!
The process is (white or brown):
1. Fill tin half way without flour
2. Add some salt (to your taste)
3. A small layer of yeast on top (I experimented to find a few shakes of yeast is enough)
4. Pre-mix the dry mix
5. Mix with luke-warm (warm to the touch) water (keep adding water until everything is mixed)
6. Allow to rise for half hour
7. Glaze with oil to prevent sticking (all the way around)
8. Throw in an oven (from cold) at ~180 degrees
9. Wait 30-50 minutes (depending on the oven)
Experiments that have worked out well:
* Add a light dusting of salt to the outside
* Add seeds to the outside
* Bury lumps of cheese deep into the top of the bread
Benefits are:
* Great testing fresh bread (great having the butter melt into warm bread)
* Exercises your hands quite well
* Very cost effective + ingredients keep for a very long time
If you plan on keeping it (i.e. you don't eat it all at once) its best to leave it to cool before cutting it open. Even after it comes out the oven the dough in the middle continues to cook from the steam. If you cut into it too early the steam will be released leading to somewhat soggy bread.
Anyhow what I’m saying is that 4 days seems too soon to start using in my limited experience.
Apparently in the first days there are many bacteria fighting for territory and until the right ones win it’s gonna smell like death!
Personally I'd question whether its worth even bothering with a dry powder starter, I just make mine with flour (mix of rye and wheat) and filtered water. The yeast is either present in the flour or is picked up naturally from the air.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bread%20recipes&g...
Though my favorite is the search trend for 'bidet':
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bidet&geo=US
*Perhaps less sensationally: "caution buying".
Edit: Though if you are looking for a recipe to start with, I would recommend the Serious Eats one with quantities cut in half: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/08/simple-crusty-wh...
Spraying on water before closing the dutch oven really does improve the results.
Scales are definitely a good idea, but I don’t think the general point (“don’t mess with the recipe!”) is quite as true as people make out, at least for bread baking. You can vary the yeast, salt, fat etc a fair amount and still get decent results.
Getting the hydration level right (ratio between water and flour) is the key bit. Too dry (below about 60%, meaning 60:100 water:flour) and it won’t rise. Too wet and it’ll be difficult to work (70% and up is hard) and if you don’t work it properly it’ll be too weak and again won’t rise. The whole business of folding and resting is about working with higher hydration dough.
Yes, but no-knead recipes tend to be wetter and they come out okay.
It does work but I find kneading just as easy and a lot faster, personally.
What if I wanted something more similar to wheat bread? Would it be as simple as using whole wheat flour instead of standard white flour?
I've made this recipe many times, but I go by another[1] method, which is less wall-of-texty, but basically the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knead_bread
Especially proofing times in recipes are in my view complete horse shit because it depends on so many variables beyond your control that any time unit would probably have a very high margin of error. Making bread in the summer and in the winter with the same recipes is guaranteed to have very different outcomes unless you adapt. Over proofing is a thing. So, is under proofing. If you have a sourdough starter, it can be in a barely alive state or in a hyper active state. It's going to affect what it does to dough and how fast it does it. Slow is actually good because time == flavor. Put your dough in the fridge to build more flavor.
The reason scales and exact ratios are nice is that they provide repeatability of the same context; or at least some level of control over it. So if, you've baked a few breads the same way, you can start tweaking a few things. Add a bit more water. Proof a bit shorter/longer, etc. People talk a lot about hydration levels of their doughs. But if you are adding a 150 grams of some sourdough starter with unknown hydration, you are going to mess up the hydration percentage of your perfectly measured ingredients.
When you've done this a couple of times, you develop a sense of what the dough is supposed to feel like and ways to correct if it doesn't feel right. I did not actually use scales until half a year ago. I use them a lot now because it helps me nail things like hydration percentages and salt levels with less guesswork but I use measurements as a starting point and adapt by eyeballing.
I was getting fine results just eyeballing it. Shake in half a pack of flour, that would be about half a kilo. Pinch of salt (most recipes suggest 1.8% by weight), add some starter and about two thirds of a pint of water (I used an actual pint glass) and add water/flour until it feels right. Don't over think it. 60% hydration breads are going to be a bit dense but fine if you knead them well. 85% hydration levels are going to be a sticky mess and a PITA to handle. You need skills to handle that and an understanding of what you are doing. But if you do, the results can be spectacular. I rarely go over 70-75%.
i had a recipe that put 350ml water to 500g flour. i used whole grain weat flour and the result was a very sticky dough. i added regular flour until it stopped being sticky.
the dough rose beautifully and baked nicely. (i burned it a bit at the top, but that could be scraped off)
today i made another. this time i only used the 500g whole grain flour and didn't add any regular flour but reduced the water, adding more water until it started getting sticky.
this dough didn't rise well. and the resulting bread was denser and had a slightly stronger taste of yeast.
from other comments i see that the stickyness is to be expected and will get better after the first rise. so my second try didn't rise because i didn't use enough water.
interestingly, i just realized thst the consistency of the second attempt is very close to black bread that i got in latvia.
As an aside, for anyone confused why recipes online can have 70% hydration (when 50% hydration for your dough makes it much sticker than reasonable), it's because they mix wholemeal flour with bread flour and don't mention it in the recipe. I'd suggest adding wholemeal flour (but not much more than 30% of the total flour because too much reduces the amount of gluten you get and thus the structure is noticeably more cakey) because it really improves flavour.
the second was surely less water although i didn't measure.
i'll have to pay closer attention next time.
If you let the dough mix sit for a 10 minutes or so before you start kneading, it allows the flour to hydrate and thus it'll get less sticky. This is one of the arguments for "no-knead" bread recipes.
But when kneading bread you should always knead it until you can take a piece of dough and stretch it thin enough to see light through it (this is called "the window-pane effect"). This indicates that the gluten in the dough is strong enough for a good rise and crust. Once you knead it to that point it's almost always no longer really sticky.
"mix roughly" gives me a hint though...
Has a good crust and crumb.
https://github.com/hendricius/the-bread-code/blob/master/bas...
Easy to make, just mix and plop in pan
Starting with a cold dutch oven makes it much easier and safer to get the dough in. Just bake for an extra 20 minutes at the start. If in doubt, overcooking is better than undercooking for bread.
I’ve done this myself several times and it works great. Here’s the needed citation: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2017/07/05/baking-in-a-...
Also... I think the reason why most recipes call for preheating is very interesting! It’s all about reproducing the conditions used by professional bakers. A professional will use an oven that can inject steam to keep the bread from drying out; baking in a dutch oven simulates this. And a professional baker will keep the oven on through the whole working day; preheating simulates this, so you can use the same timings. But if you’re only baking one loaf every couple of days, rather than 200 loaves a day, you don’t necessarily have to do all this stuff.
To use a classic HN analogy, it’s like a startup using all the same technology and processes as Google. Some of them are a good idea (keeping steam in the oven), some of them are premature until you’re operating at a massive scale (preheating the oven).
But I agree on the safety concerns so I will try your method on my next loaf, now is not the time to get bad burn wounds.
But I’ve found the timing is not super critical, the main thing is not to undercook. (Note that most recipes say things like “check for doneness, and bake for another 5 minutes if the loaf doesn’t sound hollow”.)
Luckily Lionel Poilâne revived artisanal French bread in the 1970s, resulting in loaves like those pictured in the article.
For example, you could tell exactly the same story about the electric mixer leading to faster bread making, leading to large-scale production of low-quality bread; and Raymond Carvel reviving artisanal French bread with his popularization of autolysis (mixing the flour and water and resting it before adding yeast).
Actually, Waitrose's baguette - as opposed to its 'flute' or 'French stick' - is not bad. Not as good, but not bad. The cheaper flutes and sticks (which seem to be all that other places sell) are just.. completely different.
I've never had a baguette with a nice crispy outside that results in flakes all over the breakfast table, and a soft, fluffy, inside like those so prevalent in France though.
While I'm at it - tomatoes! Tomatoes are so much nicer in France too.
Also if you didn't experience it, the food choices of the 60s, 70s, and even early 80s were pretty restricted and of poor quality in Europe, Australia and the USA (and likely elsewhere). Even in the USA where there was an explosion of products, the quality of the food was poor and largely undifferentiated. And thus with bread in France.
I was lucky that our home in Paris had several good bakeries within a few minutes' walk of our front door (including Poilâne's) but it was obvious that this was a product of economic good fortune. But when you venture out to the countryside in France or Germany the goods in shops primarily come from a truck from a faraway factory. Surprisingly this appears to me (unscientifically) to be more extreme in France than Germany
The same exact reason you put steak on a hot pan, not cold. If you put it on cold pan it would be cooked through before you get any browning on the outside.
If you take too long baking bread the outside will be dried out, not crisped. Not everybody sees the difference but at least for me it is pretty significant.
Consumer ovens are pitifully underpowered for the most part and will take forever to bring oven to temperature with a large wet mass inside. Even if the oven is preheated the temperature instantly dips very significantly when you put your dough in.
The reason they do it in professional setting is because they don't have time to cool it down and then get it back up to temperature. Another reason is you want repeatable results and not depending on starting temperature.
As to the safety, as long as you are not super clumsy just general common sense is enough to prevent any burns. Don't touch the oven. Use oven mittens. Use extra long mittens if you don't feel safe. Do not operate on the dough while it is inside the oven (tray out, then do whatever you want, tray in). If you use steam to bake (which I do) make sure you understand where the steam goes so you avoid the areas where the hot 200C steam will be when you open oven door so you don't burn your face and hands (the answer: it goes up). Keep your small kids occupied somewhere else so they don't feel the need to have fun with hot oven while baking and after while it is still hot.
However, getting your dough into a preheated dutch oven is fiddly and a little dangerous. That’s why I recommend just starting from cold.
"The Food Lab" is also a good book, if you like diving deeper on this sort of thing.
You don't need hundreds, just ~$100 for an inexpensive sous vide cooker with integrated thermometer & temp regulation [0]
You can put the meet in a zip lock bag and suck the air out with a straw and have it work just fine if you want to avoid the added expense of vacuum bags. When the meat hits the desired temp, remove, unwrap, sear the outside, and voila!
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Anova-Culinary-Precision-Bluetooth-In...
> You can put the meet in a zip lock bag and suck the air out with a straw
You can stay safer by leaving just he corner not zipped and pushing the rest of the bag slowly underwater, it'll squeeze the air out for you.
Everybody has one. Most ovens can get down to 200-275 degrees and stay fairly consistent in temperature. You can take the internal temperature of the meat while its cooking, instead of waiting a set amount of time. The meat comes out dry, which saves you having to dry it coming out of the bag before you sear.
https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/03/how-to-reverse-sear-best...
The best investment is to learn how to do it right. Every home that has an oven and a weighing scale has essentially everything that is needed to make artisanal breads.
Of the tools that make life easier but are in no way essential:
- pizza stone
- thermometer (to measure water temperature)
- thermometer (to measure oven temperature)
- _a_ razor
- dough knife
- dough whisk
- bread proofing basket
Thank you
Although I now realize I should have clarified, I’m only talking about baking bread in a dutch oven.
I haven’t tried any other baking methods in a cold oven. I suspect it wouldn’t work well but I don’t know for sure.
YMMV though since, in my experience, the simplicity of it all is actually quite nuanced and delicate. Small changes in water amounts or yeast preparation can yield big differences in the end product. Curious to hear someone's thoughts on this...
Edit: This is also often called a "no knead" recipe...
Shorter leavening: smaller bubbles, more soft texture.
Longer leavening: bigger bubbles, more chewy texture.
Longer leavening also gives it a more yeasty flavour. I think the shorter leavened bread goes well with jam and the longer leavened bread goes well with savoury toppings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CyYA-p1dMA
I mix all of the ingredients together at once in the beginning. Stir and fold with hands. Will be lumpy.
Come back two or three times after about 20 minutes. No need to set a clock just wing it. You’ll know it’s ready once the dough becomes smooth.
And I don’t buy bread flour. Why keep an extra type of those? I buy AP flour and keep vital wheat gluten (available from places like Whole Foods) in the freezer. Mix in one or two tbsp depending on how you like the texture.
And as you say, no need to preheat the oven. If you’re in doubt stick a probe thermometer in. Bread is done after 190 F.
When the loaf goes into a hot oven, you get some steam generated as water boils, and the yeast gets heated quickly, giving a minute or two of high gas output before it is killed by higher temps. This all adds air to the inside of the loaf while the dough is still very soft. When cooking at a low temperature, the crust often hardens more before this process happens, limiting the amount the loaf can expand.
Nothing to imply the trade-offs explicitly worse, it’s down to if you like the result.
But it will definitely change what you get out of the oven.
Highly recommend trying it yourself and compare two loaves cooked with and without preheating to see how much it changes the result and if it makes it easier and more enjoyable for you to bake!
I will not say that your bread isn't good. However, if you want great crust and oven spring using dutch oven while baking in a home oven, a preheat is a good idea and it works.
I preheat at max temp, 500F for 1 hour with the empty dutch oven inside. Here's a good recipe that I've used recently, it's beginner friendly and uses common flours (King Authur bread and whole wheat blend)... https://www.theperfectloaf.com/simple-weekday-sourdough-brea...
Seems the same as baking non-quarantine bread, albeit with more steps.
Personally I find this recipe way easier and also foolproof. https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/paul_hollywoods_crusty_83...
"1. If you fancy living 13th-century style, 2000kcal of home-made bread is 35p of flour, salt and yeast."
In a quarantine:
1. Minimising cash expense is good. Cheaper is better.
2. Storage space is limited. Denser is better.
3. Minimising exposure risk through shopping runs is good. Longer shelf-life is better. Stock up, then live off supplies for days, weeks, or months.
4. Time is abundant. Long-running tasks are not a detriment.
5. Low effort is generally good.
"Quarantine bread" minimises use of resources and exposures to risk which you'll want to minimise in a quarantine, and takes advantage of the abundant time resource.
I started baking my own yesterday after making pizza dough while the kids were wathing a movie.
An entertaining and very informative series of videos on sourdough, including recipes and some basic info: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURsDaOr8hWWSiMZBLGP2...
Thanks for a prompt - I've now added a note in the text to this effect!
That said, received wisdom is that loooong, slow ferments give more flavourful loaves. That's usually achieved with tiny amounts of yeast and time in the fridge. But please, go ask the experts over on /r/breadit, you'll get a much more reliable answer there.
Well, when sharing recipes, it certainly help if _we_ have a consistent way of measuring amounts. 1/12th teaspoon sounds very hard to actually measure in real life and some teaspoons have different sizes. Using grams (weight) or milliliters (volume) would make it much easier to replicate + it gets easier to multiply the recipe in your head.
So I agree, let's start using international measurements for recipes please!
Luckily, bread making isn't that exact, especially for home kitchens.
I'm not sure I'd say "few" but my frame of reference is Europe. Most people I know have a tool which seems to be called "measuring spoon set" in English, which has the common volume-measurements. People who do baking with recipes usually have a scale that can resolve down to 1g, which seems to work out for most recipes.
Good to hear that bread making is not that exact though, so you could probably eyeball it in that case.
(just wanted to add that with one weight you can usually [imprecisely] weight both really small values and really big values by multiplying/dividing. Let's say you need 0.5g but your scale can only do down to 1g, so you can weight 1g and then just half it and now you have 0.5g. Same goes if you need 1kg when max is 100g, just do 100g and then multiply)
Not with a 1gram-resolution scale - at best it's measured 1g +/- 0.5g, so after you halve it you have anything from 0.25g to 0.75g, +/- your own inaccuracy in halving such a small quantity. (I suppose you could count out each spore cluster!)
However, I really don't believe it's going to have a material affect on your homemade bread; that level of recipe precision just isn't important outside of commercial manufacturing.
I happen to have scales: The large volume scale was easy to find. The scale that would measure things like salt? not so easy to find and not cost effective at all.
I'm in Norway, by the way.
When you make bread regularly (as in quarantine), reserve piece of the dough to add it to the dough the next day.
This is guaranteed, absolutely the easiest way to have sourdough bread regularly without having to tinker with the starter. The dough is less hydration than typical starter, it is also already salted. This makes it more stable than typical 100% hydration starter.
Also, it has the hydration and salt content of your final dough which has the fantastic property that it does not change your basic proportions regardless of how much you add it. This makes all calculations extremely easy.
People who like 21st century vinegar-flavored bread can ignore this!
Mine won't work though. It's Half and half strong white flour and whole buckwheat flour. The idea is that the latter will donate yeast. Or maybe it will...
Once you have a stable starter, it's very forgiving. I tend to use pretty much all of it and then toss some flour/water into the container it used to be in. The little starter left behind in the container mixes with the flour and water and it lives on. I keep it in the fridge when I don't need it.
I also use a 3/8" steel plate to have some leftover heat to transfer to the dough after the door closes..that probably helps