I Dive Into Sourdough
Last fall I decided to try my hand at baking sourdough bread, since I might have been among the 1% who didn’t take the plunge during COVID. The first step was to make a starter from scratch, which was supposed to take seven days. After three weeks of minimal activity, I emailed the blogger who had posted the recipe and method to find out why it wouldn’t rise. After a bit of back and forth, she suggested that my water might be the culprit. I was using tap water from my well, which had been treated by a reverse-osmosis purifying system that takes out the acid and iron, along with the beneficial chemicals needed to make yeast. She also suggested that there was no shame in buying a starter, so I ordered one from King Arthur Baking and began feeding it, using Poland Spring water. Within a few days the starter was bubbling and rising happily, and a couple of weeks later I was ready to bake.
My first loaf was surprisingly successful, though the scoring was lame and the ear was misshapen.
In the meantime I found a thread on Reddit and began reading about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat that is the sourdough journey, and uncovered some great resources. What a rabbit-hole that has been! Armed with enough knowledge to be dangerous, I decided to make loaves as Christmas gifts.
My maiden effort was Chocolate Sourdough from a great baker named Ash Turner, who lives in coastal Nova Scotia. Her loaves were beautifully scored…mine, not so much. I doubled her recipe but must have gotten distracted while I was mixing the dough and got the proportions wrong; the top two images below are my near fails (the one on the right I call Running Yeti). So I whipped up another batch, and the still ugly ones below, with chocolate chips, were the result. These loaves were not sweet (they weren’t supposed to be) and tasted best with cream cheese or as French toast. The crowning glory was bread pudding on New Year’s morning, drizzled with leftover chocolate fondue from the night before. Talk about gilding the lily!
Undeterred, I tried again, this time with a better outcome, and experimented with stencilling.
Next up was Deli-Style Rye, which was my first big success. The recipe developer is a guy named Grant from Arizona, whose recipes turned out to be simple, straightforward, and reliable.
The Sun-Dried Tomato and Goat Cheese Artisan Loaf made a good Christmas gift, and I’ve since enjoyed it made with feta instead of goat. When I ran across goat cheese with figs, I was inspired, and will make a loaf with that and more dried figs.
Through the winter I tried a number of variations, including jalapeno-cheddar, caramelized onion and rosemary, croissant, olive-parmesan, spelt, and a lovely turmeric and ginger that looked like sunshine on my counter.
One great source of bread recipes, not surprisingly, is King Arthur Baking, so I was excited to try their purportedly easy Pain de Campagne, or Country Bread. It was flat as a pancake, but made good croutons for the Thanksgiving dressing!
When I studied the recipe, I realized it called for only 28 grams of starter for 1000 grams of flour (a typical double recipe like this one would normally use 200 grams of starter, or 20% of the amount of flour). The starter would need to be monstrously strong to lift that much flour! So I tried again with 100 grams of starter and 500 grams of flour, and voilà! A buxom beauty she was!
The hardest part of sourdough baking is the bulk fermentation process, which begins when the flour and starter are mixed together. After a brief rest, you strengthen the dough and develop gluten using different folding techniques, resting between rounds. Typically you might do three sets of stretch and folds 30 minutes apart, then leave the dough alone for the remainder of this period. Many recipes instruct you to ferment for X more hours. However, every kitchen is its own environment and temperature plays a key role, both the ambient temperature and the temperature of your dough, which are more important than time.
BF ends when the dough has risen the desired amount, has bubbles on top and throughout, and jiggles like Jell-O. The warmer the dough (and the ambient temperature) the faster the process; and the percentage rise you’re looking for is lower. For example, if your dough is 76°F, your target rise might only be 40-50%, which could take 6-7 hours. If your dough temp is more like 70°, BF time could be 12 hours, and your target rise might be as much as 100%. So the appearance and behavior of the dough is more important than time.
Over the winter my kitchen was about 68°, so I had to use artificial means to get the dough into the mid-70s, rather than letting it sit on my counter. I tried placing the proofing vessel in the turned-off oven with the light on and a measuring cup of boiling water on the shelf alongside. I also tried using my warming mat, which turned out to be too hot. I finally settled on using the proof setting on the oven, which I think created an ambient temp of about 100. You can also use a proofing box made specifically for sourdough, but I have an aversion to tools that serve only one purpose, so I didn’t buy one.
My usual timeline was to feed the starter before going to bed, then mixing the dough by late morning so as to have plenty of time for bulk fermenting before the next step of shaping the dough into loaves and sticking them in the fridge overnight, to be baked the next day. But since life often gets in the way, I wanted to find a way to manage the process on my schedule, not the dough’s. My solution in the next installment.