Bready wisdom

I realized that except for when I'm making something specific, I no longer need to follow a recipe when baking bread. This morning I baked a nice loaf of wheatberry fig bread and I thought it might be nice to write about my current process.

I bake with a sourdough starter. I captured my current starter last year (after abandoning my previous 20-year-old starter). I wrote about capturing my starter here but it's basically just feeding a 50:50 mixture of water and wheat flour for a 3-4 days (I use my chlorinated tap water) followed by gradually weening it onto white flour.

I keep the sourdough starter in a small transparent plastic container with straight smooth sides. It's a good idea to keep your starter in a transparent container to see how well it's doing. A living starter will sweat a dark alcoholic water when neglected, and will sit up and blow bubbles when you feed it. Use a container with straight smooth sides, so you can scrape it down with a silicon scraper. A live starter won't grow moldy but if you leave any crust on the sides of the container it will dry out and go bad.

My container isn't perfectly airtight, so I don't have to worry about the jar exploding if I click the lid into place.

I keep my starter in the fridge when I'm not baking. I generally feed it a 50:50 ratio of all-purpose white flour and water. I try to feed it with 10-20g of flour, but it's sometimes hard to give it so little. My old starter was fed with a 50:42 ratio because it made it sit up more, but now I think this was selecting for a dryer yeast, and it made calculating the final dough hydration difficult.

My starter has survived without being fed for 40 days. A neglected starter will look like thick sediment in a pool of black alcohol. Many people throw their starter away when they see it like this, and would be surprised to find it will come to life again with the addition of a little more flour and water.

I currently use about 20-40g of starter in my breads (and sometimes up to 80g when I'm trying to reduce the amount in the container). 20g is about a spoon full. I think I could probably get away with less. I used to bake with 200-400g of starter, but this doesn't help the bread, and keeping that much starter makes feeding it more expensive and means you're more likely to have to throw out the excess. If you only use a spoonful of starter when you bake, you can keep it in a small jar, and when you feed it, it requires only a little flour.

Some recipe books suggest you feed your yeast several times over the course of a day or two before baking to make sure you get the best rise. I bake with unfed yeast or yeast that's been fed a few hours before. I haven't noticed enough of a difference to go to the extra effort.

I use all-purpose flour. Other flours have their uses, but plain all-purpose flour without additives makes the best bread. Acidic dough won't rise well so if I'm baking with pickled ginger or sour fruit I'll use some baking soda cut the acidity.

Basic bread requires just four ingredients: flour, water, starter, and salt. The starter is made with flour and water and the yeast comes for free.

I use a variant of my high-hydration dough recipe for all my breads. That recipe is for an 80% hydration loaf. Going any higher is not worth the effort because 80% hydration dough already needs special care. I usually save the full 80% hydration for simple white breads and I scale it back depending on what I'm making and how much I want to fuss over shaping the loaf. An 80% hydration dough is made from 500g of flour and 400g of water. To reduce the hydration I add more flour, but I don't go above 580g (69% hydration). A dryer dough will rise higher and hold its shape a little better.

I don't spend much time kneading the dough, you can't really with a high hydration mixture, the best you can do is to stretch a bit away from the puddle and let it plop back down again. When you stretch the dough like this you can feel the gluten grow firm. The dough will tighten up, turning from a jelly to a jello. Stretch the dough until it's just about to break and then fold the strand back into the puddle. Turn the bowl to do this to all four sides. Use a dry scraper and make sure your hands are dry. You will be tempted to work the dough with wet or oily hands, but this is a mistake. I stretch the dough three times with 15-minute intervals, and then I cover it with some plastic and let it sit out on the counter all day to develop a nice sourdough flavor.

After resting all day, gather the dough into a ball, while preserving as much air as possible, and move it to a heavily floured couche or proofing basket. I use more flour in the proofing container when the dough is wet because it's heartbreaking when a beautifully risen dough sticks to your proofing container. Sprinkle the top of the dough with semolina flour or corn meal. The top will be the bottom of the loaf when you put it into your pan and the heavier flour will give the bottom a nice crust. Put the entire proofing container into a trash bag for the final proof.

Leave the bagged loaf on the counter for another hour or so before putting it in the fridge for another 12 hours.

I bake the loaf right out of the fridge. A cold dough will hold its shape and will let you slash the surface easier. I slash the surface with a lame. The thin curved blade slices better than a sharp knife. After 24 hours your loaf will have a nice sour flavor.

I've been baking my ~500g loaves in a 9-inch cast iron skillet. I bake with my oven's 'roast' setting (where both the top and bottom heating elements are engaged) and I preheat the oven to 450F (232C) with the skillet inside. When the oven is up to heat, I remove the pan, plop the cold dough into it, cut it with my lame, brush hot water over the surface (this gives it a nice brown crust), and then put it back in the oven.

I bake at 450F for 29 minutes, but I'll remove it early if I think it's done or leave it in longer if it still feels dense. You can check if a loaf is done by popping it out of the pan and knocking on the bottom. Finished bread will sound hollow. I usually bake until the top is a dark chocolate brown (almost burnt) because this brings out some of the caramelized flavors. Baking until the top is nicely brown is enough for most breads, but I'm still experimenting on how to bake bread with lots of chocolate or other heavy wet fruit.

Additions are fun, but keep in mind the more you add, the worse your dough will rise.

• Dried fruit of all kinds is good (avoid wet fruit). I just eyeball the amount, but add no more than 200g.
• All nuts and seeds are good, but I like walnuts because they're cheap, and the bitterness goes away when you bake them.
• Wheatberries are good and cheap if you can find them, and they add a nice texture to the bread. I don't bother cooking them beforehand even though this means they're drier than you'd get in a loaf of store bought wheat flour. Incidentally Bulger wheat is just expensive pre-cracked wheatberries.
• Sunflower and Sesame seeds can be stuck to the top of the crust after you brush it with water. I usually don't bother because it makes a mess incommensurate with the additional flavor.

After writing this out it seems like a lot, but it's really pretty simple. Here's a recipe. Start this in the morning, and you will have delicious bread for breakfast the next day.

• 500-580g flour
• 400g water
• A spoonful of salt (about 10g)
• A spoonful or two of starter (fed or unfed)
• Other additions like nuts, seeds, berries, or dried fruit
• Mix until it comes together and move it to a bowl
• Stretch and fold 3 times with 15 minute intervals
• Let sit covered all day
• Before bed move the dough to a couche/proofing basket/towel lined colander, cover this with plastic, and put it into the fridge
• Put a cast iron skillet into the oven and preheat to 450F (230C)
• Put the loaf into the pan, slash the top, brush with water, and bake for a half hour (or until the bottom sounds hollow).

Baking on a 24-hour schedule like this is more convenient than preparing a loaf of bread with bakers yeast over 4-6 hours in the middle of the day. Waking up knowing you will have a fresh loaf of baked bread for breakfast is nice.

Finally, homemade bread will go stale faster than store bought bread. As soon as it's cool, cut your loaf and freeze the bits you don't intend on finishing in the next few days. Freshly baked bread will be almost as good right out of the freezer as it was when it came out of the oven. Don't keep your bread in the fridge, this can make it go stale faster.

posted by na on May 8, 2024 11:28