It has been about 2 months now since I went full on into the world of baking bread with sourdough and it feels now like I am having a rhythm in there on getting the best breads with the least of effort.
As I mentioned in other posts before and here as well, I am not too fond of the the whole hype hanging around the whole sourdough community. It feels like a lot of the people there are making a way too big of a study of tiny nuances and are acting way too fancy on all of it.
Yes you need a decent a good alive starter to get your dough going which takes a couple of days, but after that. Life gets easy and there is no way to overcomplicate things.
I remember getting a reply from @felixxx saying it shouldn't be all that weird, just mix some stuff together and you are good to go.
This is my bread of today and I can say that I am pretty proud of how this turned out with also some seeds on there.
Different recipes
Now also in this whole sourdough community what I don't like is that everyone acts like their recipe is the recipe from the baking God itself.
After trying out a couple of recipes and percentages flour/water and having some successes and some failures for me I have been sticking to the same for a while now and it just feels fine.
I call this a success, nice colour, great crust and nicely risen
What I have been using now the most of times are rough estimate as I really like to wing it during cooking but that is usually not the best for baking. However, I found the wing it modus.
- 500 grams of flour
- 300 grams of water
- 100 grams of starter
- 9 or 10 grams of salt
I also tried some out with more water in there or also more starter in there, but that didn't bring anything extra. So I went back to the original amounts of everything and it was perfect again.
This was a failed one that collapsed, flavour was still awesome though!!
Busting myths
Now also about how you make this dough, for me the experience has been up until now that the less you do about it, the better the bread gets.
As in....'the community' talks about autolyse to form the gluten. That is mixing flour and water together and leaving that for an hour before you add the starter, and add the salt a hour later again....Wtf ...who has that amount of time anyway?
But again, I tried it once on a rainy day and this literally did not help the dough at all.
My best result? Dump everything at once together in the same bowl and mix that. No autolyse, no fancy nothing. Dump it!
Also with the sort of ingredients.'The community' talks about unfiltered water and special flour for the best results. I use tap water and literally the cheapest flour from the supermarket that I can find and that works out just perfect.
I also got some flour from the mill here which costed a fortune and sometimes I toss in 50 grams of that flour and the 450 grams of el-cheapo flour for a bit of extra wheat in there.
Also the whole time line on everything is just a lot less radical than 'the community' wants it too be.
After coming from work and while cooking dinner I also take the starter from the fridge and give it like 50 grams of water and 60 grams of flour and leave it outside the fridge.
In the morning the starter has risen generously and that means I can dump all of my ingredients together, and I will put the remaining starter back in the fridge. 'The community' wants you to do all kinds of stretch-and-foils and coil-foils and shaping-foils every half hour on the minute.... sighhhhhh
The reality is I will do like 1 or 2 folds of whatever I feel like with wet hands for the anti-stick at a time when it suits me and I will leave it on the counter for the rest of the day without doing anything.
In the evening I will put the whole dough in the fridge, the end.
It isn't all that complicated so lets not make it complicated. But for now, it means that I have a new endless access to bread. It is super cheap and super tasteful and not all that stress to make anymore. YAY!!
Good food recipe.
!discovery
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Looks good! 😋