Sourdough: a Revival

I spent the past week with a cold, bookended with bouts of bread baking. Not much other cooking besides; a fair amount of canned soup, scottish oats, sandwiches, and eating out. I did make a comical observation - my weekend dinners consisted of three cultural takes on "round piece of dough as delivery method for meal"; namely Ethiopian, burrito, and gyro. I thought of pizza on Monday to round it out, but decided soup would be more fitting. But, yes, on to the bread. Last year, around this time, I started a sourdough experiment that ended when I got lazy and the sourdough got mold. Sad, really. A chance encounter with the Tartine Bread book in an art museum gift shop told me there was an easier way. Less baby sitting starter, less watching dough rise. Sign me up!

Armed with my partially-remembered sentences from a book and my newly-purchased cheesecloth, I began the starter. I did the following, and it seemed to work, though I'm not sure how proper it is: I put 1/4 cup whole wheat flour, 1/4 cup bread flour, and 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp warm water in a bowl (non-reactive, non-metal is a must - use Pyrex or equivalent) and stirred it. Cheesecloth on top, let it rest in my kitchen for 3 days. Made sure it smelled funny - cheesy, almost. Threw out half of it, added in enough flour/water to bring it back up to the same size; stirred. Let sat for 2 days. Made sure it rose a little. Also, smelled funny. Threw away half of it, refreshed back to size. Everytime it rose and then fell, I refreshed; the period is a feeding every 2-3 days right now and I've reduced the size a bit so it is perfectly sized for making a loaf of broad ~160 grams, of which 80 goes into a loaf. The refresh amount is about 2 tbsp of each whole-wheat and normal flour and 2.5 tbsp of water.

I've made two loaves with this; the first (pictured below) was a half-whole wheat bread with ~70% hydration. I skimped on salt accidentally, leaving it with that peculiar taste of bread that doesn't have any salt. The second loaf (both pictures above) was 100% white flour, not counting the starter, with ~80% hydration and black sesame seeds. The second loaf was infinitely better, so I've included the process below. And, for the person who doesn't have a few hours in the morning spare for bread, this recipe is fantastic - straight from the fridge to the oven, easy peasy. Delish.

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Rustic Sesame, Naturally Leavened

Makes a single loaf

80g starter (recipe approximately above)

320g bread flour

256g cold water

10g black sesame seeds

5g salt

Take the starter right when it needs refreshing; that is, it has risen recently and begun to fall. Combine with flour, water, and sesame seeds and mix with a wooden spoon until it has come together, then stir for a minute longer. Cover; wait 30 minutes. After that first wait, add the salt to the bowl, lightly wet your hands, and stretch-and-fold the dough until you can no longer feel the grain of the salt. Cover, let rest for 3-4 hours. Stretch-and-fold it every 30 minutes or so, until it feels very difficult to do so or the bread has risen a bit (it will feel fluffier). Refrigerate the dough for a day and a night.

After giving it time in the fridge to complete the rising process, turn your oven up to 500 degrees and prepare, as I did, a bespoke dutch oven consisting of a cast-iron frying pan and a brownie pan, turned upside-down, for the lid. Have this in the oven to warm up. Remove the bread from the fridge, flour a work surface and your hands, and shape it into a round somewhat. After you think the cast iron is hot (30 minutes or so), place the dough on some parchment paper and put the parchment paper in the dutch oven, reducing the oven to 475. Cook for 20 minutes, remove the lid, and cook for 15-20 minutes longer (until the bread is ~200 degrees inside, looks golden brown, and sounds hollow).

Eat.

Oops!... I Popped It Again

Sad face. A repeat of breadtastrophe. This time with a more complex recipe - Pain au Levain. This is a sourdough recipe, like the last few I've made, but I decided to make sure it rose by using the optional yeast in the recipe. Oops. It is supposed to be the hallmark of naturally-leavened bread - the starter is a mix of whole and white flour, and the final loaf is all white. Otherwise, it is a standard loaf (flour, water, salt, yeast). Edit: holy crap I just took a bite. This bread is good. Definitely don't need a jar of peanut butter to save this one.

Not as disastrous as it could be in the looks department, this bread was only lightly walloped with the ugly stick at birth, its parents reprimanded by the CPS but allowed to keep their child pending further evaluation and monthly visits by a sworn officer of the law; it will grow up and be lightly ridiculed in high school but still find a date to prom and the date will not be unattractive. Altogether, it will live a decent life, relatively unmarred by its appearance but forever a little insecure.

So, what went wrong? I'm guessing a few things. One, my schedule has been more than a little spotty this past week - the starter was prepped Monday and refrigerated overnight as the recipe called for. Tuesday morning, I mixed the final dough and plopped it in the fridge where it sat until Friday morning. The book says it can survive up to four days in the fridge; this I do not doubt in the least. However, it got rather cold in my fridge. Post-shaping, the loaf was too cold to hold. At this point, I should have known I was in trouble. The yeast was most definitely sleeping the entire time in the fridge, not rising in the least. It would wake up when warmed, yes, but it should have done that over the past few nights and when it was first mixed.

I let it proof in my apartment for around an hour and a half, at which point I checked in on it. It had risen a bit, and spread out quite a bit on the surface. Again, I knew I was in trouble but just said "bah, what is the worst that could happen? Full speed ahead!". The proofing stage is just that - you let the dough prove it is ready to be cooked. That it rises a little is expected, but once shaped it should mostly retain that shape (unless working with a very watery dough). This rose more than a little and refused to keep its shape.

You saw above what happens when dough that is still rising goes in the oven. It pops when cooked and lives a mundane life. I think there were a few things I could have done to save this. First, let it rise and then proof. At the 1.5 hour mark, when I saw it had risen and flopped out, I should have reshaped it and let it sit out a bit longer. Instead, I simply stuck it in the oven. If the dough is that cold coming out of the fridge, there is no way it was doing much of anything while sitting there until it had warmed. The starter also went direct from the fridge to the dough - this, too, could have been warmed slightly.

The way you go from per-loaf starter to dough is to combine the starter with some water to soften it, then mix in everything else. The water is supposed to be luke-warm to make sure everything wakes up, but given the coldness of the starter when I combined it with water, I think letting it warm slightly before mixing would do wonders.

There is always a next time.

Sourdough is Hard, Let's Go Shopping

My sourdough starter decided it was mature enough to enlist in the bread-making army a few days ago. For a fresh recruit, it didn't do a bad job. Now, sourdough starters are hard work. Not in a prison sentence, manual labor kind of way; it is more like taking care of a small child for the first week. You have to stir it a few times a day, feed it every few days, and keep a careful eye on it. It took about 8 days to go from a small pile of flour and pineapple juice to a mother starter that now sits in my fridge, to be picked apart and used in any future sourdough breads.

On top of that first week of twice-a-day checking, the bread involves much more waiting than any of the other loaves. I went with two recipes - San Francisco Sourdough (fitting) and 100% Whole Wheat Sourdough. Both were purist - that is, they contained no yeast beyond what I captured in the air for my starter. This meant making a bread-specific starter [few minutes of mixing, 6-8 hours of waiting], making the dough itself [few minutes of mixing, 40 minutes of stretch-and-fold, 2-3 hours rising that night], and letting it rise yet again before the baking [4 hours of rising]. I can't imagine cooking this bread having to work that day.

Going for the purist version, especially for my first sourdough, was probably a mistake. The San Francisco loaf did not rise the least in the oven and I undercooked it - it became a somewhat doughy, very dense mass of sourdough. Still tasty, mind you, but nothing like the lean bread in airiness. Next time I may have to add in some instant yeast after the starter to get those pockets a-forming. The Whole Wheat fared much better, as evidenced by the photo above. Neither loaf really had much sourdough tang; I will assume this is due to my starter being fresh.

 Now that I have the starter, I can try some fancier recipes without worrying about subbing in instant yeast for the starter - Pain au Levain might come next, or possibly even a panettone-based recipe (though the one in my book needs 12-16 hours to rise, which would be difficult to fit into any schedule).