This is really cool, but to complete these recipes successfully on schedule you'd have to account for the ambient temperature of your house and adjust accordingly. A rise overnight at 65 degrees is going to take ~twice as long as one during the day at 75.
I’m pretty new to bread making (like many I’m sure) but today realized I could use the oven to help rise, as our house is kept cool. Basically turn on the oven at its lowest setting for a few minutes and then turn it off, and let your dough rise in the warmer atmosphere of the oven.
If your oven has an incandescent light, often that's just warm enough. Just leave it on. Same with gas ovens with a lit pilot. I recently noticed mine has a "proof mode" I had been meaning to test out.
You can also fill water bottles with hot water (I usually use two) and put them next to the dough in the oven. My oven gets slightly too warm if I turn it on to the lowest setting / light only.
This is cool. One minor thing, at least on Firefox it's not possible to open the links to different breads in a new tab. It'd be nice to have that, just so the user can open the breads that interest them in tabs and then sort through them.
For those of us working in tech, it can be extremely satisfying to bake your own bread. I did that a few years ago, starting from scratch, making my own sourdough starter, and baking daily. It's rediscovering what a typical family did centuries ago. Your starter becomes a pet.
I had to stop it due to a lot of travel, but I still have a packet of my starter vacuum sealed and frozen.
Maybe I should try again. Travel certainly won't be an issue for a while.
I just like fresh bread without all the work ;). With a good bread machine, you only have to mix the ingredients (or purchase a nice mix) and the machine does the work for you. Ours never failed baking a good bread (except for the one time where I forgot to add yeast ;)).
Grams have become kind of standard for baking, even in the US.
I think this is due to the use of "baker's percentages", which specify the weight (not volume) of all ingredients in terms of a percentage of the weight of flour used. So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor.
It's a lot easier to do this using grams uniformly, than some mix of lbs, oz, cups, tsp, etc. The system really takes advantage of the ease of conversion between units in the metric system.
But the oven temperate doesn't change even if you add more flour, so there's no need to do any scaling conversions for that. This let's people get away with using antiquated units for temperate.
> So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor.
I think maybe there's a typo here with "salt" vs "water"?
I've had a hard time with these percentages. 3% salt means 3 grams of salt for every 97 grams of flour, but that doesn't seem to be how it's used in baking. Same with water: 100% hydration is half water, half flour, because they're talking in ratios rather than actual percentages.
I guess the important part is that these are percentage ratios, so it's really 3%:1 salt and 100%:1 hydration.
Yes, you're right! It should say "water" instead of "salt"...and it's too late to edit now.
I too have a hard time with the percentages - it's a ratio against the weight of the flour, not a proportion of the entire dry mass. I guess that's why they call them "baker's percentages", as opposed to "the common understanding of percentages" :)
It makes it easier to adjust the ratios that way. Increasing the contribution of an ingredient only changes the percentage for that ingredient (other than the flour, obviously).
Thanks for this. I'm extremely blessed to have a wife that enjoys making bread, and makes the best sourdough I've ever tasted. It's mostly in her head but from the notes I've pieced together it seems close to the weekday sourdough. Bread is so easy to make and so delicious if you have patience, I really hope this leads to more people making bread. Store bought tastes like paper in comparison.
Protip to any future breadmakers: buy a cast iron Dutch oven. It's the real game changer.
I've been wondering about that. The last time I baked bread was 10+ years ago. At the time, I got professional results with just a pizza stone and a spray bottle of water. The water replaced the steam oven and did a great job of gelatinizing the crust. Unfortunately I don't think I can get a dutch oven during the lockdown.
So, my wife has been making bread a while and it was always 'chewy'. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious, but there was no crust to the bread. After researching, the consensus was that the lid helped keep the steam in and brown the bread. You only leave it on for half the bake, typically. But the difference between bread on a stone and bread in a proper enclosure is truly night and day.
Thinking through not having access to a proper dutch oven, water would probably work but I'd think you'd still need a cover of sorts, even if makeshift foil.
> Unfortunately I don't think I can get a dutch oven during the lockdown.
ymmv and I don't know where you live, but I was able order one off Amazon and get it in about 4 days about a week ago. Just mixed up the dough for my first bread a few hours ago :)
Great idea! Made my first sourdough bread yesterday after a couple of weeks of trying to get a starter going, the process is a fun and interesting project, especially while staying at home, and you don’t need much to get started (flour, water, ideally a cast iron pot, scales). Tastes amazing and reduces social contact of having to go to the shops/bakery too :)
I have been baking sourdough for 2+ years and I don't think people should take the timing too seriously. Yes it's good to loosely follow a schedule but if you don't the bread will still turn out fine. I don't think I've ever followed the exact same schedule twice. A few times I flat out forgot about the dough and shaped it hours after I was supposed to, and it still came out amazing. Sourdough is very forgiving. The most important thing in my opinion is mix it thoroughly in the beginning and to do the stretch and folds properly so the dough has strength and can hold it's shape for the later bulk rising.
Yes! I think it's also important to remember that you're cultivating a living organism. It's an art, and you should adjust your schedule based on what the dough is doing.
That's the most difficult part for me. We need more than a schedule - we need instructions how to modify the schedule and perhaps ingredients based on what we get.
The "Quarantine bread" receipt was wonderful last week. This week, for some reason it turns out terrible (dough very sticky, bread burnt on the outside, etc.) No idea what went wrong and what I should have done to fix this.
As someone who's been baking for a while (both sourdoughs and breads made with commercial yeast), there's a lot of learning to be done through trial and error, and it's difficult to communicate the nuances of how the dough feels or looks via instruction.
Temperature and humidity can change day-to-day (and certainly week-to-week) in a residence. Same with the temperature of "cold" water coming out of your tap. A thermometer and a kitchen scale go a long way towards consistently implementing recipes (and therefore getting consistent results).
Some general tips:
- If the dough is too sticky, add flour! Check the stickiness before bulk fermentation.
- Check the dough during the rise. If it has risen a lot and "domed" early, punch it down or give it a fold. If it's time for a fold but it hasn't risen much yet, let it rise longer!
- If you find your rise times are shorter than the recipe, use cooler water. If your rise times are too long, use warmer water.
- If you don't have a baking stone, baking steel, or dutch oven, you can use an inverted cast iron pan as a baking steel.
- Preheat your oven for an hour or more. Residential ovens often have substantial internal temperature variations. I use dutch ovens to bake bread, but also keep a baking stone on the lowest oven rack as a way to regulate the oven's temperature.
As a beginner, I find a tool like this useful for understanding the general schedule and a visual depiction of the steps required, without taking the precise timing too seriously
Definitely as a beginner it helps to follow a schedule and start to notice some patterns. As you make bread more and more you start to rely on more visual and tactile signals. For instance, I know that the levain is ready when it appears 'bubbly' enough, and the stretching and folding is done when the dough is 'tough' enough, and that the bulk fermentation is complete when the dough has approximately doubled in size.
This is a great beginner's guide that I have shared with many folks:
https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/. After some time I have settled on theperfectloaf's 'best sourdough' recipe, which has a higher hydration.
I am just trying to create my first loaf using sourdough so I have no experience on this (I will bake tomorrow) and I have read a book that says that the more you leave the dough the taster it becomes.
The normal recipe is to leave 24 hours the dough in fridge and it says that you can leave it for 48 or even 96 hours :)
Leaving dough out too long will overproof it. Leaving it out not long enough will not rise enough, or, in the case of sourdough, not develop that sour taste people are looking for.
Your first loaf is unlikely to come out great, if your starter is not matured yet - because the yeast/bacteria ratio in it is unlikely to be optimal.
It's very lively, when i feed it it rises and then it drop a bit but maintains it's bubbles. Hopefully it will be better that the breads with commercial yeast.
So funny how tech people must have such a detailed recipe for baking with sourdough. It's the same with coffee.
Listen.
Dough is a living organism. You cannot set a timer to it. It must be nursed, especially based on what flour you use, freshness of the flour, the climate, the moisture etc.
If you want to be really good at baking, then bake at least 100 loafs and see what you learn.
Then try to change the flour brand and bake again. Then you will se a different result.
Yes, you're right. It really doesn't take a genius to make a sourdough. But you're misunderstanding the tech people. They will take tying shoelaces to the genius level. Same with baking bread. And it's a lot of fun for a lot of us.
Perhaps slightly off topic, but I have for years admired the cooking schematics on Cooking for Engineers. Here's the recipe for meat lasagne - scroll to the bottom and admire the schematic and the bonus layer diagram:
The internet psuhes this idea that you can quickly be an expert in anything, you just need to read a few websites or watch a few YouTube videos. It's nice to have those resources, but the advanced info is often useless without the context of experience. Doing things is often the only way to attain ability.
This is nice! I have been baking my own bread for a while now in a large masonry oven, it takes a while to learn when the temperature in the oven is right and the dough is good. Baking bread is more an art than science IMO. You learn it by doing it, this is a nice starting point.
I've recently been making very low effort bread, which takes less then 10 minutes overall, and is (in my novice eyes) exactly the same as bread that has been kneaded with the "proper" schedule. Perhaps one of the experts here can shine a light on why something simple like below creates (almost) the same quality as a mixture that has been processed with much more effort?
- Put everything in a bowl, and mix it until it's consistent. Usually takes 2-ish minutes. I find a simple, non-sharp knife to work best.
- Cover it with cloth and let it sit for 12-20 hours depending on the mixture and temperature.
- Get the mixture out, en cover with flower on all sides. Don't knead or overly touch (it will lose volume).
- Preheat the oven with an iron cast over pot, once it's hot (250C), take out the pot, put in the mixture, and put on the lid. Halfway into the baking time, take off the lid.
This is exactly my recipe, which I have been using for 5 years now with great success. It's foolproof. The bread will usually look like shit after you dump it into the iron cast pot, but will have a nice and smooth and tight surface after the first baking round with the lid on.
Gluten development can happen through two mechanisms (usually both are in play), once water is added to flour: either physical stretching (kneading), or just time. The stretch-and-fold method balances these two. But if you're letting the dough sit for 12-20 hours, that's achieving the same effect.
I hope this works for somebody, but I'm going to have to critique the whole concept of "timing' when baking sourdough bread.
After years of baking sourdough I find that I cannot predict precisely the timing. I have to judge the dough at each step and not proceed until it is ready. This is especially true in that I like trying new things, making tweaks, fermenting at different temperatures, and this alters the timing. The timing depends highly on temperature, where in the refresh cycle the starter is at (still rising? fallen and foamy?), but also very much on your particular starter. Some starters run slow (especially newly created ones). Others are fast. Using someone else's timing just never seemed to work for me. Early on when I started baking sourdough I made some absolute bricks because I followed the timing that the recipe specified, even though their descriptions of the dough seemed very different to what I was seeing. And if they said two hours, then eight hours must certainly be enough... but it wasn't enough. Yes, it really can be off by that far (especially with a new weak sourdough starter that wasn't refreshed properly).
Nonetheless, you have to have some sort of plan. Turns out that I can always make it work within a certain set of bounds if I am home all day on some given day. And that has driven me into the following pattern:
1. Remove sourdough starter from refrigerator the night before, and refresh.
2. Build dough in the mid morning with active starter
3. Bulk ferment (with stretches and folds) in a proofer until it is ready
4. Pre shape. Then shape. Then refrigerate in bags.
5. Bake the loaves (I always do two boules) early the next morning.
This is by no means the only pattern that can be made to work, but it's robust and flexible enough for anything I've ever thrown at it.
One thing that really made a massive difference for me was making a proofing box. It's a large EPS container (similar to the ones that market sellers use) with a seedling heating mat inside. I control it with a cheap (like < $10) thermostat from Amazon. It maintains around 26C quite easily and is pretty efficient. I've never bothered to check the accuracy of the thermostat, but I imagine it's within a degree or two. You can also use it for fermentation, Noma have instructions on how to build one. My only suggestion is don't do what I did and go nuts on the size. You can get away with a much smaller box (e.g. I bake 500g loaves mostly, and I use a 4L graduated polycarbonate container - it's dwarfed by the size of the box).
Temperature control makes an enormous difference. I live in a cold house, hence why I built this. To make things worse, my kitchen has marble worktops. So if you use cold or tepid water and then knead, you end up cooling the dough even more on the counter. It's a bit different with Tartine because you don't really knead the dough, but still - yeast is optimally active around 25C or so and if you have to wait for the dough to come up to temperature, that can easily add an hour or two. So you can control this by measuring the temp of your water and using a climate controlled box (which costs about a tenth of one of those pop-up Broder ones).
I do agree about starter refresh cycles though, as well as what hydration you put in, how much you put in, what exactly the flour is. I don't climate control my starter except during the winter when it sits by the boiler.
Most of the time my routine is identical to yours. Feed the starter overnight Friday, make the dough Saturday morning and bulk it during the day. Refrigerate overnight and bake on Sunday.
I have a Sous Vide rig. I put my dough in a one gallon plastic bucket and that floats inside a small beer cooler with some water in it that the circulator keeps at whatever temperature I want. A dish towel over top ensures the temperature is basically constant top to bottom. Proofing dough to within 0.1C accuracy is ridiculously overkill, but that accuracy comes for free. Works amazingly amazing.
Anyone know a good recipe for a real French baguette? I haven’t yet been able to find a baguette in the Bay Area that tastes like they do in France (lived there for three years).
And honestly, good butter is hard to find too, although I did locate a little store in San Mateo that carries Echire.
Finding a flour that is close to French type 55 is going to be the biggest problem for getting a baguette that is close to authentic. Try King Arthur for some of the custom blends that are close to what you need; US “all purpose” flour has too much protein and the lower protein “cake flour” has a grind that is too fine.
Or you could also learn how to make mixed 4/3 rye/wheat sourdough with a natural starter, which requires no scheduling at all. Just mix it in the morning and put it in the oven some time in the late afternoon/evening.
I've been doing it for years and it's the only kind of bread that I can make on a regular basis. It's something you can actually do daily, not an additional hobby.
Ingredients:
* 400g full-grain rye flour
* 300g wheat flour
* 10-15g salt
* 600ml water
* 50-80g levain starter (rye based)
mix, wait 6-8h, bake at 210C for 1h05.
This is a very popular kind of bread in Poland, while I found that in the US people don't really know what to do with full-grain rye flour. I've read books that said it can only be used to make dark pumpernickel breads, and I never found the recipe above (or similar) in any bread-baking books I've read.
Also, the rye starter is fairly stable, forgiving and easy to maintain in a fridge.
Yes, when I was in the US I used to order "Hodgson Mill Organic Rye Flour, 30-Ounce (Pack of 6)" through Amazon sellers, and later had trouble getting the stuff. The organic version was better than non-organic.
It's difficult to get because nobody knows how to use it :-)
We do rye and wheat sourdough at home, as well. Prior to the lockdowns I had no problem finding 5 pound bags of wheat flour and 3 pound bags of rye flour. Now, though... Can't even find it online.
I honestly hadn't thought to look for it at any of our nearby Asian grocery stores. We used to frequent our local H Mart, Zion Market, and 99 Ranch, but have been sticking to our more immediate grocery store for the past 4 weeks, or so. I'm due to restock kimchi soon anyway, thanks for the suggestion.
I use glass, and the dough sticks like crazy. What I do is press a sheet of baking paper into the container, then pour into that. Quick and practical.
Given the number of questions, I think I should write up a quick manual on practical bread baking, submit it to HN, and watch it get noticed by no one :-)
Cheers. I'm currently putting extra oil down the sides just before baking. This works pretty well but creates a loaf that's somewhat greasy to the touch. It tastes OK though.
- to clarify, is the "wheat flour" whole wheat or white? If the latter, all-purpose or high protein "bread" flour?
- do you think it makes much of a difference if the levain is rye based? My understanding is that if the amount of levain is small relative to the overall amount of flour in a rye-based bread like this, it doesn't much matter fermentation-wise.
I've read that rye flour in North America isn't as good a quality as that in Europe. This makes me sad. I grind my own rye berries, but it would be nice if I had the opportunity some time to try your stuff.
And let me go out on a limb with one more question. Many years ago, our grocery store in a town with a heritage in eastern Europe sold a loaf of bread called "heavy rye bread". It was made of a fine flour, was quite dark, and was super tough to chew. I have never had a bread like it since and I have looked hard. It wasn't sourdough like a Borodinski bread, nor was it coarse like Scandanavian rye breads. Perhaps you might know of this bread?
The wheat flour is white wheat flour, the most common all-purpose kind. Don't worry too much about the protein, this bread will not develop lots of gluten strands anyway. You do want to mix it quite a bit, if possible, and you will get some gluten, but nothing like with white bread.
I think the levain should be rye-based, but I do not have data to back that up. Never tried anything different.
As to the quality of rye flour in America, the organic one from Hodgson Mill was good and very comparable to what I use in Poland. The non-organic one less so.
I think the dark bread you described resembles a pumpernickel, but I'm not sure. I never liked pumpernickel much.
Oh, I forgot one important thing in the US: the water in your tap! If it's chemical plant waste like in many places, it can't be used for bread baking. Specifically, if it's chlorinated, you might get away with keeping some in a jar waiting for the chlorine to evaporate. But if chloramines are used (like in San Diego, for example), you're screwed. I had to buy a good activated carbon water filter before I could bake bread in San Diego. I think it's a good idea anyway.
Rye flour is vastly under-appreciated in my opinion. Love that stuff.
For a lot of things you can't really get away with fully replacing wheat flour, but you can usually do half / half with good results.
I haven't made sourdough for a few years, but I think I was either doing 1 : 1 : 1 (white, wheat, rye) or 2 : 1 : 1.
Also, the easiest way to create a sourdough culture is literally just mix rye flour and water in roughly equal parts. Cover with a cloth to keep bugs out, and then dump out (our use) half each day and add in more flour and water to get back up to the original level.
It's basically the most idiot-proof process I can think of.
The main reason I keep getting out of the habit is that you need to monitor the thing basically daily. Otherwise you can put it in the fridge and take a bit less care of it, but then you need to build it back up for a few days before you can use it.
I've always wondered if I'm just being too cautious about the starter though. I know that people have said they thrive on neglect.
There is one trap when starting a culture: baking bread too early. The levain will start to rise madly after 2-5 days, but this does not mean it's ready! It needs much more time (two weeks?) to become more acidic and develop a good balance of yeast and bacteria.
Once you get a good one, maintaining it is rather easy, though. Feed it every day, and if you forget for a day or two, it doesn't matter that much. It's fairly abuse-proof: for years I even left a portion of dough as the levain for the next bread, which you should not do, because it contains salt (which slows the development of either yeast or bacteria, don't remember now). Everything was fine.
It's all pretty magical: the levain doesn't spoil, because of the low pH. The bread also keeps for a long time (a week, easily).
The theory goes that full-grain flours tend to inhbit gluten development, so the crumb ends up being finer-textured and the oven spring not that dramatic.
This is generally true, although I mix for a long time, to develop gluten strands. The dough grows by about 30%, and the oven spring is another 10-15% on top of that.
123 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadYou might want to proofread the recipe steps, check the temps update with metric/imperial switches, and add a TLS redirect.
We rarely buy bread at the store anymore.
I tried my first bake yesterday, and it... did not go well. Second try is currently forming. Fingers crossed.
Weights are in grams, but temperature is in fahrenheit (I think, doesn’t actually say).
Please use one measurement system make it consistent, as well as switchable. Thanks.
In Canada the temp is in C, but some weight measurements are in lbs.
I think this is due to the use of "baker's percentages", which specify the weight (not volume) of all ingredients in terms of a percentage of the weight of flour used. So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor.
It's a lot easier to do this using grams uniformly, than some mix of lbs, oz, cups, tsp, etc. The system really takes advantage of the ease of conversion between units in the metric system.
But the oven temperate doesn't change even if you add more flour, so there's no need to do any scaling conversions for that. This let's people get away with using antiquated units for temperate.
I think maybe there's a typo here with "salt" vs "water"?
I've had a hard time with these percentages. 3% salt means 3 grams of salt for every 97 grams of flour, but that doesn't seem to be how it's used in baking. Same with water: 100% hydration is half water, half flour, because they're talking in ratios rather than actual percentages.
I guess the important part is that these are percentage ratios, so it's really 3%:1 salt and 100%:1 hydration.
I too have a hard time with the percentages - it's a ratio against the weight of the flour, not a proportion of the entire dry mass. I guess that's why they call them "baker's percentages", as opposed to "the common understanding of percentages" :)
Protip to any future breadmakers: buy a cast iron Dutch oven. It's the real game changer.
Thinking through not having access to a proper dutch oven, water would probably work but I'd think you'd still need a cover of sorts, even if makeshift foil.
ymmv and I don't know where you live, but I was able order one off Amazon and get it in about 4 days about a week ago. Just mixed up the dough for my first bread a few hours ago :)
Shaping isn't quite as good, and the side crust is less browned, but overall it's night and day better than on a tray/stone.
(Doing it now, cause my dutch oven isn't here, and the pasta pot is.)
The "Quarantine bread" receipt was wonderful last week. This week, for some reason it turns out terrible (dough very sticky, bread burnt on the outside, etc.) No idea what went wrong and what I should have done to fix this.
Leaving it for ten minutes/waiting for the flour to hydrate then mixing again can help out when the temperature is off.
Temperature and humidity can change day-to-day (and certainly week-to-week) in a residence. Same with the temperature of "cold" water coming out of your tap. A thermometer and a kitchen scale go a long way towards consistently implementing recipes (and therefore getting consistent results).
Some general tips:
- If the dough is too sticky, add flour! Check the stickiness before bulk fermentation.
- Check the dough during the rise. If it has risen a lot and "domed" early, punch it down or give it a fold. If it's time for a fold but it hasn't risen much yet, let it rise longer!
- If you find your rise times are shorter than the recipe, use cooler water. If your rise times are too long, use warmer water.
- If you don't have a baking stone, baking steel, or dutch oven, you can use an inverted cast iron pan as a baking steel.
- Preheat your oven for an hour or more. Residential ovens often have substantial internal temperature variations. I use dutch ovens to bake bread, but also keep a baking stone on the lowest oven rack as a way to regulate the oven's temperature.
This is a great beginner's guide that I have shared with many folks: https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/. After some time I have settled on theperfectloaf's 'best sourdough' recipe, which has a higher hydration.
The normal recipe is to leave 24 hours the dough in fridge and it says that you can leave it for 48 or even 96 hours :)
Your first loaf is unlikely to come out great, if your starter is not matured yet - because the yeast/bacteria ratio in it is unlikely to be optimal.
Listen.
Dough is a living organism. You cannot set a timer to it. It must be nursed, especially based on what flour you use, freshness of the flour, the climate, the moisture etc.
If you want to be really good at baking, then bake at least 100 loafs and see what you learn.
Then try to change the flour brand and bake again. Then you will se a different result.
You cannot time food. Get it.
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/36/Meat-Lasagna
Edited to add: Oh, and you mentioned shoelaces, so the venerable Ian's Shoelace Site is a must:
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/
- Put everything in a bowl, and mix it until it's consistent. Usually takes 2-ish minutes. I find a simple, non-sharp knife to work best. - Cover it with cloth and let it sit for 12-20 hours depending on the mixture and temperature. - Get the mixture out, en cover with flower on all sides. Don't knead or overly touch (it will lose volume). - Preheat the oven with an iron cast over pot, once it's hot (250C), take out the pot, put in the mixture, and put on the lid. Halfway into the baking time, take off the lid.
The bread will look like this: https://holycowvegan.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/no-knead...
If you stop the baking without the lid sooner, it will look like this: https://joyfoodsunshine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/dutch...
Care to share your measurements? I’m aiming for something similar, but having trouble getting my ratios dialed in.
After years of baking sourdough I find that I cannot predict precisely the timing. I have to judge the dough at each step and not proceed until it is ready. This is especially true in that I like trying new things, making tweaks, fermenting at different temperatures, and this alters the timing. The timing depends highly on temperature, where in the refresh cycle the starter is at (still rising? fallen and foamy?), but also very much on your particular starter. Some starters run slow (especially newly created ones). Others are fast. Using someone else's timing just never seemed to work for me. Early on when I started baking sourdough I made some absolute bricks because I followed the timing that the recipe specified, even though their descriptions of the dough seemed very different to what I was seeing. And if they said two hours, then eight hours must certainly be enough... but it wasn't enough. Yes, it really can be off by that far (especially with a new weak sourdough starter that wasn't refreshed properly).
Nonetheless, you have to have some sort of plan. Turns out that I can always make it work within a certain set of bounds if I am home all day on some given day. And that has driven me into the following pattern:
1. Remove sourdough starter from refrigerator the night before, and refresh.
2. Build dough in the mid morning with active starter
3. Bulk ferment (with stretches and folds) in a proofer until it is ready
4. Pre shape. Then shape. Then refrigerate in bags.
5. Bake the loaves (I always do two boules) early the next morning.
This is by no means the only pattern that can be made to work, but it's robust and flexible enough for anything I've ever thrown at it.
Temperature control makes an enormous difference. I live in a cold house, hence why I built this. To make things worse, my kitchen has marble worktops. So if you use cold or tepid water and then knead, you end up cooling the dough even more on the counter. It's a bit different with Tartine because you don't really knead the dough, but still - yeast is optimally active around 25C or so and if you have to wait for the dough to come up to temperature, that can easily add an hour or two. So you can control this by measuring the temp of your water and using a climate controlled box (which costs about a tenth of one of those pop-up Broder ones).
I do agree about starter refresh cycles though, as well as what hydration you put in, how much you put in, what exactly the flour is. I don't climate control my starter except during the winter when it sits by the boiler.
Most of the time my routine is identical to yours. Feed the starter overnight Friday, make the dough Saturday morning and bulk it during the day. Refrigerate overnight and bake on Sunday.
Strongly recommend watching Chad do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4dyWZZVeWI
It answered a lot of questions I had from reading the book.
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Noma_Guide_to_Fer...
I recommend adding a wire rack so your container doesn't sit directly on the mat as well.
And honestly, good butter is hard to find too, although I did locate a little store in San Mateo that carries Echire.
Great job great execution, and very nice and clean design!
Cut and Enjoy "
Honestly this site is everything that's up with the world these days. Just bake the bread, for crying out loud.
I've been doing it for years and it's the only kind of bread that I can make on a regular basis. It's something you can actually do daily, not an additional hobby.
Ingredients:
* 400g full-grain rye flour
* 300g wheat flour
* 10-15g salt
* 600ml water
* 50-80g levain starter (rye based)
mix, wait 6-8h, bake at 210C for 1h05.
This is a very popular kind of bread in Poland, while I found that in the US people don't really know what to do with full-grain rye flour. I've read books that said it can only be used to make dark pumpernickel breads, and I never found the recipe above (or similar) in any bread-baking books I've read.
Also, the rye starter is fairly stable, forgiving and easy to maintain in a fridge.
Finding rye at retail stores in the USA is very difficult. I have to order mine directly from a mill.
It's difficult to get because nobody knows how to use it :-)
Then again, Minneapolis is AKA the Mill City!
Given the number of questions, I think I should write up a quick manual on practical bread baking, submit it to HN, and watch it get noticed by no one :-)
- to clarify, is the "wheat flour" whole wheat or white? If the latter, all-purpose or high protein "bread" flour?
- do you think it makes much of a difference if the levain is rye based? My understanding is that if the amount of levain is small relative to the overall amount of flour in a rye-based bread like this, it doesn't much matter fermentation-wise.
I've read that rye flour in North America isn't as good a quality as that in Europe. This makes me sad. I grind my own rye berries, but it would be nice if I had the opportunity some time to try your stuff.
And let me go out on a limb with one more question. Many years ago, our grocery store in a town with a heritage in eastern Europe sold a loaf of bread called "heavy rye bread". It was made of a fine flour, was quite dark, and was super tough to chew. I have never had a bread like it since and I have looked hard. It wasn't sourdough like a Borodinski bread, nor was it coarse like Scandanavian rye breads. Perhaps you might know of this bread?
I think the levain should be rye-based, but I do not have data to back that up. Never tried anything different.
As to the quality of rye flour in America, the organic one from Hodgson Mill was good and very comparable to what I use in Poland. The non-organic one less so.
I think the dark bread you described resembles a pumpernickel, but I'm not sure. I never liked pumpernickel much.
Oh, I forgot one important thing in the US: the water in your tap! If it's chemical plant waste like in many places, it can't be used for bread baking. Specifically, if it's chlorinated, you might get away with keeping some in a jar waiting for the chlorine to evaporate. But if chloramines are used (like in San Diego, for example), you're screwed. I had to buy a good activated carbon water filter before I could bake bread in San Diego. I think it's a good idea anyway.
For a lot of things you can't really get away with fully replacing wheat flour, but you can usually do half / half with good results.
I haven't made sourdough for a few years, but I think I was either doing 1 : 1 : 1 (white, wheat, rye) or 2 : 1 : 1.
Also, the easiest way to create a sourdough culture is literally just mix rye flour and water in roughly equal parts. Cover with a cloth to keep bugs out, and then dump out (our use) half each day and add in more flour and water to get back up to the original level.
It's basically the most idiot-proof process I can think of.
The main reason I keep getting out of the habit is that you need to monitor the thing basically daily. Otherwise you can put it in the fridge and take a bit less care of it, but then you need to build it back up for a few days before you can use it.
I've always wondered if I'm just being too cautious about the starter though. I know that people have said they thrive on neglect.
Once you get a good one, maintaining it is rather easy, though. Feed it every day, and if you forget for a day or two, it doesn't matter that much. It's fairly abuse-proof: for years I even left a portion of dough as the levain for the next bread, which you should not do, because it contains salt (which slows the development of either yeast or bacteria, don't remember now). Everything was fine.
It's all pretty magical: the levain doesn't spoil, because of the low pH. The bread also keeps for a long time (a week, easily).
The theory goes that full-grain flours tend to inhbit gluten development, so the crumb ends up being finer-textured and the oven spring not that dramatic.