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I think I'm finally getting pretty decent at making sourdough. Last weekend's loaves and this week's have all four been quite good, with good crust and all. I'm quite happy with them. (When I figure out how to do image uploads with slices, I'll add some of them too!)
My basic recipe is from the Perfect Loaf blog:
though as I've practiced, I've found that making a decent loaf is not as fussy as that article would have you believe. The weight measurements are really the most important part, and getting a feel for the dough. So basically what I do now is this. Instead of having the times of day for the steps, I've just started at hour 0 and numbered them that way.
Yes, you'll need a starter, or mother, or culture, or whatever you want to call it -- basically a goop of flour and water that's been sitting out for long enough that it's been colonized by yeasts and bacteria and smells kind of funky. Actually making one is, I'm told, pretty easy, though I've never done it -- my starter was a gift from a friend and I've kept it alive since then. They're actually pretty hard to kill, though, so there's that. Anyway, later on I might add something about starter maintenance, since this is not so much a "hey I feel good about my progress" as a "how I make bread and how you should too" thing.
Proofing baskets are those cute little wooden baskets, sometimes with cloth in them, that the fancy bakers have to let their bread rise in. I don't think they're super expensive, but if you don't want to bother you can also use a tea towel in a collander, which works just as well. Just make sure to flour the towel really well so the dough doesn't stick.
If you don't have a dutch oven, you should get one, they're great. But if you're making bread *now*, you can also use a pizza stone or cast iron pan or *maybe* even a baking sheet, though you'll want to find a way to spritz the oven with water as you put the bread in to get that mythical ~ oven spring ~, which I honestly only really discovered after I started *using* a dutch oven. It makes a huge difference, and takes bread from "fine" to "insta-ready."
Also called a "dough knife" (at least by me), a bench scraper is a metal spatula-looking thing that really helps working with dough. You could use a regular butcher knife to cut dough, in a pinch, but if you're going to make a good amount of bread I'd get a scraper. It's way more useful than for just cutting. Watch bakers, you'll see what I mean.
A levain is a fancy term for starter culture; I guess it's related to "leaven," as in leaven a loaf? Anyway, it's the flour and water your starter (the thing you keep around *between* loaves) will feed on to get happy and ready to really rise your bread. It's not hard to make though, just mix this stuff up in a bowl:
A word that's even more confusing than 'levain,' autolyse is basically a shaggy mass of dough that's unleavened or salted, to allow the flour to get hydrated before being made into bread. There's some good reason for doing things this way, but I don't know what it is. Look it up if you want to know, you're a big kid. Anyway, put this stuff in a bowl and mix it together:
The Perfect Loaf makes a big fuss over getting the dough the right temperature (78F/25C) for this step, but I haven't bothered. Ditto for the flour mix: if you don't have rye, just sub whole wheat. I think I made it once with all bread flour, and it was okay. The different types of flour give it a better flavor, but I mean, it's still *bread*. How bad can it be?
Add the levain and the autolyse together, along with
The recipe on Perfect Loaf also calls for
but I've actually not used that, and it works fine. What I *DO* do, though, is mix it all together with wet hands -- and here's a good spot for a sidebar.
The way I mix this sourdough, I got from a guy called Ken Forkish. He wrote Flour Salt Water Yeast (or whatever the order of the ingredients is, just search Ken Forkish), a great book on making bread. He's also got some YouTube videos which really helped demystify the whole thing for me, and he showed me the "Pinch method" of mixing dough.
Basically, get your hands wet -- have a bowl of water next to your dough bowl, and dip them in and out; this keeps the dough from sticking, weirdly -- and take the dough between your fingers and thumb like it's a big bready sausage, and pinch it, or rather cut it between your thumb and finger -- this is hard to describe. Hmm..
Okay, make an "OK" symbol with your hands, then close the hole like a camera shutter until it snips the dough. And do that all the way down the dough, cutting it into pieces. Then rotate it 90 degrees and do it again. Keep doing that until it mixes.
If you're still confused, here's Ken himself:
Anyway, I kind of rely on the wetness of my hands to incorporate the remaining 50g of water, but you could add some in there, too, if you want or if you live in a dry climate. As I get better at this, I'll probably work on using a wetter dough, too, since that's my main hangup about this whole bread thing -- I get nervous with too-wet doughs.
After you mix the dough, however you mix the dough, cover it and let it stand in your kitchen for four hours or so. In the meantime, you're going to do some folding.
Wet your hands with water, uncover the dough, and do four folds at ninety degree angles to each other. You want to grab the edge of the dough closest to you, pull it up almost until it breaks -- but don't let it! -- then fold it over the body of the dough. Rotate and do it again.
Do the folding thing again.
And again. This is the last one -- after this one you can, I don't know, go eat dinner or something. Sing songs to your dough. Play cards. Whatever.
This is where you're going to divide the dough and put it in proofing baskets.
Slide the dough out of the bowl and onto your floured work surface. Kind of spread it out -- I like to put a line of flour where I'm going to cut at this point, to keep it from sticking to the knife and because it's fun -- and cut it in half decisively with the bench scraper/dough knife. That's one thing about bread that I like -- it's forgiving, but you really need to be decisive about what you're doing. Just do it!!
Anyway, once you have your two pieces of dough now, you want to form tension on their surfaces. You can do it this way, which is from the Perfect Loaf:
Lightly flour your work surface and dump out the dough. With your bench knife in one hand divide the dough into two halves. Lightly flour your other hand and using both the knife and your hand turn each half of dough on the counter while lightly pulling the dough towards you. This gentle turning and pulling motion will develop tension on the top of the dough forming a round circle.
Let the dough rest for 25 minutes, uncovered.
Or you can skip the resting part and go straight to the shaping, which is what I do. Basically, you want to get the floured part of the dough up, because you're going to fold it together sort of like an envelope -- bottom, left, right, then top toward the center -- and then you're going to flip it back over and pull it on the counter top to form tension.
Like, okay, you have your dough package in front of you, right? You're going to take your hands and rest them on the dough, fingertips touching. Then, slide your hands away from you while still touching the dough, until your pinkies hit the worktop. Then you'll pull the dough toward you, and if you're doing it right, you'll feel the dough kind of pulling on your pinkies, and you'll see the top get tighter. Geez, this is hard to explain. Feel free to search "Shaping bread" videos online.
At any rate, after the loaves feel tight enough, you'll flip them again and put them in the proofing baskets. Pinch the edges together and cover each basket with a plastic bag, kind of poofing it up to give the bread room to rise. Then pop those suckers in the fridge overnight.
Put your dutch oven or combo cooker in the oven and turn the temp up to 450 F / 232 C.
Take the first loaf out of the fridge and unwrap it. I use a pizza peel for this next part, but you could use a plate or whatever.
Put a piece of parchment paper over your flat thing and spray some oil on it. (I do that so it doesn't stick.) Kind of flip the loaf onto the parchment -- I do this by inverting the flat thing onto the top of the proofing basket, then flipping it all over together -- and gently pull the basket or towel away so that you have a beautiful raw loaf sitting there.
Take a razor blade or really sharp knife (fancy bakers use a razor on a stick called a "lame") and score your loaf at an angle -- I do something like a 50 degree angle or so. I've done a box pattern, I've done lines, at some point I'll get fancy and do some of those leaves that you see all over influencers' pages. Anyway, it doesn't matter that much, just that you do cut the loaf -- and pretty deep actually -- so that steam can escape.
Don your oven mitts. Pull the dutch oven out of the oven and pull the lid off the dutch oven.
After all that, you'll lift the parchment with the dough from the plate or flat thing and gingerly, carefully, place it in the dutch oven you pulled out, put the lid on, and slide the dutch oven back into the oven.
Bake for 20 minutes.
Open the oven and remove the dutch oven's lid, or the top part of the combo cooker.
Bake another 20 minutes.
Stick a thermometer in the bread -- it should register at least 208 F / 97 C. If you don't have a thermometer, I've heard you can knock on the bottom of the bread and listen for a hollow noise, so try that. I don't know, does it *look* done?! The original recipe called for 30 minutes after the first 20, but I've done 20 and it was fine. So.
Pull it out and put it on a cooling rack.
Turns out, if you slice hot bread the crystals get all gluey. Or something. Look, it just gets stale really fast and stuff, or I don't know, Big Bread is just trying to get us all to stop eating hot bread. Whatever.
At any rate, the conventional wisdom is to wait 1-2 hours to cut into the bread, so do that, and then enjoy your work. Good job, you did it.
That's it. That's sourdough, the way I make it. Let me know if you try it and let me know how it goes.