Sourdough.
Sourdough once again. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but I don't bake bread without sourdough anymore. It just feels wrong.
This time I've taken a step to a kind of.. non-knead style of baking? Instead of using machines or kneading the machine I'm stretching and folding the dough. This makes the baking kind of simpler, even though you need to do a bit more work while the dough is rising.
So is it simpler? Maybe? No? At least you won't need a machine, you won't need to knead it for long and you'll still get a very nice finished bread.
So now to the bread recipe:
1000 grams of flours (I had 700g wheat flour and 300g wholegrain wheat)
700 grams of water
20 grams of salt
200 grams of active sourdough
The first step is to mix only the flour and water. Just put them all inthe same bowl and mix them together. Don't knead it, but just a simple mix that the water and flour are well mixed together.
This will be left for one hour for autolysis. The autolysis should help to create a stronger gluten in the dough.
After one hour, add sourdough and the salt in the dough.
Just mix them well together once again, the sourdough won't do any good if it's not well in the entire dough. As most of you should know, the sourdough contains wild yeasts (and bacteria) which will make the dough/bread rise. This is also why we don't need bakers yeast.
Sourdough gives a very special flavor in the bread which can't be mimicked by "normal yeast bread".
As all the ingredients are mixed, we'll need to stretch and pull the dough a bit.
I'm lazy and I'm using the same bowl, but this is what you do:
First you can put some water on your hand and fingers, it helps in handling the dough.
- Grab the dough
- Pull it to stretch it
- Fold the dough in the bowl
- Repeat
You'll need to continue this until you can feel that stretching is becoming more difficult. At this point, you can cover your dough with a lid or a cloth, wash your hands and let it wait for 30 minutes. Then you'll repeat it.
The ideal is usually to repeat this 3-4 times during the rise. The dough will have to rise (usually) for 6-8 hours depending on everything - your sourdough, room temperature, dough temperature, etc.
Just let it rise until it's well risen.
The dough is well risen and at this point we can divide the dough into three bread trays.
I've rubbed some butter in my bread trays to make sure the bread will not stick.
This phase was quite simple. I put some flour on my baking board, poured the dough on it and cut it in three pieces. All three pieces were put in their own trays.
I didn't have anyone to take photos of the process so I'm sorry I don't have any photos of it.
The trays are left for 30-60 minutes on the table and then put in the fridge.
Next morning I chose the best looking one and baked it.
As stated on a previous post, I'm usually making 3 doughs in the fridge and baking them on 3 consecutive days. Fresh bread every day and I don't need to bake daily!
I recommend everyone will get a food temp. meter. That's the best way to know when your bread is ready.
Approx. 30-40 minutes in 200-225 degrees Celsius. More or less might be required based on your dough and your oven.
This beauty is what I got.
Highly recommended! If you want bigger slices of bread, I'd recommend increasing the dough size with 25% or using different size bread trays. Or different size bread. Or being different size yourself!
I'm too tired to come up with anything funny. But bread won't wait.
Awesome! Making bread at home must feel so satisfying!
It is! I really recommend that people could try baking bread, especially sourdough bread as I've been baking for the last few years.
You can do something amazing - but mostly you'll just have to wait. You do something, you wait for hours, and then you do something again and wait again. Super fun.
Now I can tell everyone "I spent 3 days on this bread" even though I was mostly doing everything else.
Hahaha funny. I think that bread making can be quite relaxing, especially that feeling of submerging the hands into fluffy dough. I think the process is well worth it. And the smell of freshly baked bread....yum
That's some fine ass looking dough you got there, bread!
Thank you ruben! Not everyone appreciates a great dough as much as they should, so I'm glad some know a fine ass dough when they see one.
It makes me wanna try this out myself. The bread kinda looks too "heavy" for my taste... I'm not a casino-bread guy, but German bread for example (I have no idea if you know it), is too heavy/firm/solid for my taste. I like airier bread. Do you know Rye bread? If you compare it with Rye bread, how close is your bread to that?
Well it depends on the type of rye bread. In Finland we have a ton of different kinds of rye breads and this isn't close to any of them. I could bake some rye bread but.. I haven't tried so far. I've done some airier wheat bread but it takes a bit more work, so I've done usually this kind of "heavy bread".
Here are some types of rye bread:
Type 1
Type 2
Type 3
Type 4
I would probably eat the first 3, but the one I know looks a lot like your Type 4. Have you written a walkthrough for white airier bread?
I mean no disrespect to Rye, or bakers... but man...
The taste of it is as if someone burned down the entire bakery, stepped on it while looking for white airy bread... but had no other choice than to save this puddle of hardened man-truffle. "Its healthy, rich of various fibers"
I don't mean to judge, but the rye bread in your photo looks terrible even on the level of rye breads in general.
Rye doesn't really have gluten in it like wheat does, so it can't be light and soft bread like wheat breads are. BUT! With rye bread you can make really nice bread or terrible satan anus bread. And when you make terrible satan anus bread, you have to tell everyone it's healthy because nobody will eat it otherwise.
The bread you displayed are beautiful indeed. Even without the comparison. But that's what the Dutch supermarkets have in store, so probably that's why it tastes like shit.
I really have to try and "change" part of my sourdough to wheat (I always kill my wheat sourdough). I love folding, but with rye bread (especially rye + sourdough) that just don't work - I have the dough everywhere, everything is sticky and the dough is more or less dead.
How do you manage to kill your wheat sourdough? Luckily turning your sourdough from one type of grain to another is somewhat simple. Folding rye bread isn't really a thing BUT you should be able to bake wheat bread using rye sourdough. Quite many people do it.
I neglected my sour dough because I had no oven - both, wheat and rye. But I had a "dry copy" of the rye one ;)
That's too bad, but glad you had a dry copy of the rye one. It would be a shame if all had been lost :)
Right now I am making a sourdough bread with a tad of buckwheat and nuts... experiment (I never used buckwheat) and while I wait between the stretches (bread stretchtes, not me stretching) I read your post. I am amazed at the quantyties you easily work with. And the bread looks fine, so I guess your method worked out.
I bake my bread more or less the same way. Often the autolysis is only 30 min and I only stretch the bread two times, but the rest is very similar. What was your "before" method? I only know this simpler no-knead technique and I am curious to learn.
I'm usually using 25-40% of "something else" and rest is regular wheat. The stronger the wheat is the easier it is with higher % of everything else. But my favorite is 67% wheat and 33% spelt. That's the best, the dough is good and spelt gives a nice flavor.
Experimenting really helps. It's great you're testing the buckwheat and nuts, buckwheat can be tricky but when you know your and buckwheat's limits, you can find the perfect balance for yourself :)
Normally I've used a machine to knead the dough. Something like this:
However, usually a more expensive machine is needed for reasonable dough's as most machines can just break down when you try to do a proper dough. This method is kind of easier, as you only need to run the machine at the beginning and then you can have a longer pause. With stretching (the dough, not me ;D ) I can't leave the dough for that long because I need to stretch it.
Thank you for this long and profound answer. I am still at the beginning of my bread journey and a kneading machine is not planned in the near future (oh my ... they are really expensive). I will experiment with the stretching method and different kinds of flour (the buckwheat worked fine, but I only used a tiny amount in comparison to the other flour).
Next thing I have to improvise/buy is something to get steam into my oven without destroying it :-D I want to be able to bake bread without a pot.
Welcome back, sourdough baker @apsu! Hot days are back here in Germany, my kneading machine was broken ... no excuse, I must be back to sourdough baking. Your post motivated me to bake one within next days 😊
Thank you @akipponn and I'm sorry for your loss, as kneading machine is more important than many understand. However, luckily it's not mandatory in sourdough baking ;)
Hope you can enjoy the warmness. It's getting grey and rainy in here so I have to be more indoors.. so more baking and more posting. During summer I did some tests like I baked some sourdough bread in a coal grill ;) I should probably make a post about it..
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