A new standard sourdough recipe
I've had more than my fair share of experimental failures lately! This is the curse of being an experimental baker. My failures of late have included, amongst others and going through my baking notes, a 90% biga with raisin yeast water that took too long to rise, a sourdough made with a cool and stiff preferment, and a sourdough made at warm temperatures with a very very low inoculation. Some bakes have had whacky hydrations too...
So, I needed to bag a win, and going through my baking notes again I realized that I don't actually have a base-line bread recipe to return to anymore. For this bread I decided to play it safe, keep the hydration down, give it a normal duration ferment with an amount of levain in the conventional range. And, at the same time keep an interesting flour base starting with the idea of about 76% bread flour, 16% wholewheat and 8% rye which I picked up from Trevor J Wilson. Since my bread flour here is a weakish 11.5% protein I did supplement with some vital wheat gluten and introduced malt as well because I like what it brings to both flavour and dough handling. And it has been a while too since I've done a true autolyse, lately I've been adding the levain upfront into the water for the final dough, but I'm still somewhat on the fence whether that is better than a true autolyse. For this bake I brought the autolyse back.
These breads were then made with a two hour autolyse with no salt. Then the autolysed dough, the salt, and 'only' 15% levain were mixed all together using the dough hook only for 2 minutes, just to mix the ingredients which is easier than by hand. I then gave it only 30 slap and folds, which I prefer to machine sometimes, so here I've got a combination of both machine and hand mix.
Then a small amount of water was bassinged in, a couple of coil folds during the earlier part of bulk and a longish bulk until pre-shaping of 5 hours, followed by another 2 hour 15 minute rest of bannetons in proofer before going into the fridge overnight and baking the next day.
Although I didn't do anything wild with making these breads I was fairly experimental with the seed toppings. The one loaf had golden linseeds, whereas the other has white sesame, chia and basil (subja) which brought in a savoury flavour.
It was nice to enjoy bread with a soft open crumb again! And, when next I deviate into the experimental wilderness, I'll remember this bake as a point to return to for making breads that I love.
-Jon
Comments
It sounds like a lovely bread; basically a pain de campagne au levain. Good in its own right and a marvelous base for various options.
Paul
A nice way to look at it, as back to basics. Thank you Paul
Jon, those two loaves look absolutely perfect. Trevor would be proud of those had he baked them himself I am certain. I certainly have my fair share of failures as well, like you I experiment a bit, more in the past than recently. I can relate to having a go to formula when you need a reset and a great bake.
Happy Baking.
Benny
It will be like my equivalent of your wholewheat Hokkaido 🤔!
Looks like your back-to-basics bread was a success. It's funny you mentioned the autolyze versusfermentolyse I have done both in the past and have not really noticed much of a difference either way. Currently I do around a 30 minute autolyse and then add more water and the starter and salt in my mixer.
Your crumb came out very nice on this one.
Happy baking!
Ian
Hmmm... Ian, do you add the extra water slowly or all at once with the starter?
I add it a little at a time as needed.
Beautiful crumb and crust, and love the seeds! Marvellous combination of flours as well. I do find that autolyse helps with handling and rise, but I did wonder if it was only because I don't use a mixer.
What happened to the bread that you rose at high temperatures with extremely low inoculation???
-Lin
The low inoculation one ended up under proofed... and I hadn't made an under proofed bread with fools crumb for ages. I followed Bill Wraith's proofing table [1] which says that 0.5% pre fermented flour (10g levain for 1000g of flour) at 27°C should be ready to shape after about 9.79 hours. At about the 12 hour mark, I just proceeded because nothing seemed to be happening, and, well, it turns out very little was happening!
I still have the idea to try the opposite though, a high or normal inoculation at "wine fridge" temps of about 15°C. So, on his table 25% pre fermented flour, at 15.6°C has a time to shaping of 9.85 hours. On my to do list! And a little like those bigas...
Why don't you use the mixer? Curious to know what your experience has been.
-Jon
[1] https://www.wraithnj.com/breadpics/rise_time_table/bread_model_bwraith.htm And also https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/5381/sourdough-rise-time-table
Those tables can give you and idea of what to expect when you change something but they are rarely going to apply directly to your own case.
Here's my mental picture of how changing the starter amount might affect the development of the dough. It's too simple, I'm sure, but it's useful. Support you make a dough with X amount of starter. At first the yeast multiply, then as they use up all the oxygen, theystop multiplying and start generating lot more gas. Yes, I know the boundaries aren't all that sharp, but stay with me here. Let's say that time is T hours.
Now you make up another batch of dough but you use X/2 times the starter. After T hours have gone by, some oxygen should be left since there weren't enough yeast cells to use it all up yet. So the growth stage of the yeast continues. If there were enough oxygen left, after one doubling time the number of yeast cells in the second dough would equal the number the first dough had at T hours. After that, the development would continue about the same for the two batches of dough. It won't work out exactly, but a difference in time of a few hours would be typical for my doughs.
Once the fermentation gets well under, the effect of the amount of starter becomes less important. In fact, the final proofing time for loaves made from the two doughs will not differ much. At least, that's what I have noticed. The bread made with less starter will taste a little better because even unleavened dough will taste better the longer it sits hydrated. OTOH, if your flour is temperamental, there might be more tendency for degradation of the dough properties for much longer fermentation times. With ordinary (US/Canada at least) flours, that's not a worry.
Maybe we should do a CB of "wine-fridge" breads one of these days. My basic loaf a while back was actually that: 20% PFF at 15-16 degrees - took me 10 hours before shaping. I ended up moving away from it because I started adding a lot more wholegrains. I found that an even higher PFF with longer levain fermentation times and shorter BF times at higher temperatures gave me the right degree of sourness and gluten strength control I liked; the wine temperatures definitely gave me tangier, harder-to-shape loaves. But would be very happy to try them again.
Re mixer - I simply have never owned one!!
-Lin
Very nice looking; anyone would be happy with them! A good basic process like this is going to be tolerant towards variations, that's another good thing.
About whether to rest the dough with or without levain, salt, etc, I don't think it matters much if there is going to be a long process time anyway. I think I've noticed that doughs that would be very tight come out a little less tight and more extensible if I leave out the salt until later. In reverse, if I'm working with a flour I know is going to try to be too extensible, I add the salt at the start, before resting. With most flours I use, throwing everything in at the beginning works as well as anything else.
A short process time, that's going to a whole different thing.
TomP
I do wonder what happens to the gluten of the starter... For the approach where you take the starter, float it on the water, then whisk it thoroughly into the liquid and then add the flours after that. Pretty much what Chad Robertson describes.
At least with the other approach, where you blend the autolysed dough with the starter you could perhaps say that it results in a stronger dough, although it could be a pain to bring them together.
Is that gluten even important, when you use the first method and essentially dissolve the starter gluten in the water? Tom, you're just the right person to ask since you've probably got some thoughts on the matter!
- Jon
Thoughts, yes! Hard information - not quite as much.
Floating the starter and mixing first? I don't really see that as mattering. If the starter is developed and airy, testing it to see if it floats doesn't tell you much. But I normally do mix the liquid with the starter first. In fact, I put in only an oz, 30g, first, dissolve and distribute the starter in that, then add the rest of the liquid. I do it as a practical matter to reduce clumping of the starter, like putting cornstarch into a spoonful of water and mixing it up before added more water. If I mixed using a mixer I probably wouldn't bother. And I don't always - with some recipes I dump the liquid into all the flour. I doubt that I've been able to tell a systematic difference.
That effort of combining them later makes me want to mix all the ingredients together at the same time. Going to the other extreme, if you were going to use an overnight build of levain, you could make an unleavened dough with the rest of the flour and water and let that sit overnight too. Combine them together the next day. The bread will taste exquisite. When we first tried this technique out, my pen-pal baking buddy called it "RMSB" - Real Mad Scientist Bread. Peter Reinhart came up with it around the same time and called it the "epoxy" method, because it brings two parts together. But I don't do it very often because it's too much work to do it by hand (and you would want a very robust mixer, I think).
Is gluten even important? Yes, I'm sure it is though sometimes I think that the window pane test is over-rated. I once let some starter sit unfed for several days until it turned into a thick, runny liquid. I wanted to see whether it would act as if it were all water, in terms of its effect on the dough. It wasn't a terribly well-controlled experiment, but I concluded that the runny starter acted as if 2/3 of its weight were water, judging from the handling properties of the dough. Since the starter began life at 100% hydration, the effective amount of liquid had increased from 50% to ~70% of its weight. Not 100% as you might think. The bread came out all right (I don't remember any more details). Even this horribly degraded starter didn't ruin the bread.
A few weeks back I made a loaf with flour that just couldn't stand too much water, and hydration wasn't really all that much. Partway through proofing a tear developed in the surface, indicating weak gluten. Note that there's a difference between extensible and weak. Your well developed but very extensible dough will stretch way out when you pull; the weak one will tear and break. I let it continue to proof - not as long as I would have otherwise - and when I baked it I tried to include the tear into the scoring pattern. The baked loaf was pretty normal, not great but quite decent.
IOW, when you bake a loaf, it doesn't normally stretch to the point of window-pane thinness. Thin-crust pizza is obviously a different beast.
One other thing about gluten to reflect on. You can wash the starch right out of a piece of dough if you keep working it under water; running water works better than a basin of it. I don't know if you've tried it, but if you keep working at it you end up with a tough, rubbery mass. That's the gluten. Dry it out and grind it fine, and you've got "vital wheat gluten". It's not going away or collapsing no matter how you mix starter with the other ingredients.
Thanks Tom for lots of food for thought, I wouldn't expect less!
I'm going to try your method of an ounce or 30g of water with the starter. Mostly because I'm perhaps over thinking what I do, but to disperse my starter in the water I do use an old fashioned hand whisk (not a Danish whisk). It is a frothy white liquid when I'm finished, no remnants of dough left, I believe. And if there is a larger than normal amount of levain I was wondering just what was being lost.
Having said all that, I'm still on the fence - is a proper strong autolyse and then combine of that actually better? I guess it does then devolve into us thinking back to individual breads and anecdotes about which is better, but if there is one thing I've learnt from lots of experimental baking is that I can't jump to any conclusions from one single bake, sometimes when starters are involved what I assume to be repeatable and true doesn't stand up. As you said, thoughts yes, hard information, well, to quote Reagan's maxim, trust, but verify!
I think that the value of an autolyse is different for different baking situations and doughs. I think it was originaly used in a professional bakery setting where many loaves had to be cranked out in a short time while still having good quality. Holding back salt would let the yeast get to work faster and promote good hydration and gluten development - all good things in that setting. I don't know how things changed to hold back both salt and yeast, but you know how things get changed and it's never clear why. There are aspects of ritual in all this, I have no doubt.
In a home setting where one intends to let fermentation proceed slowly and gently, the balance of the factors is different. To take an extreme example, there is no-knead bread. You mix everything together and put the dough in the refrigerator for days. Do you think that a half-hour's difference in when you add salt will make any perceptible difference? I don't.
For my own approach to baking bread, I am usually looking for techniques that let me avoid using a mixer, keep my time input low, aren't finicky, and yet produce very good bread. Exact scheduling is not usually an issue since I'm retired and usually at home. I have found over many years that if I combine all the ingredients (except for various add-ins), and mix them together until there are no dry flour bits, then half an hour later (give or take), the dough will be well hydrated, easier to handle, and will come together into a smooth, slightly elastic mass with just a few minutes of kneading. If I didn't give the dough that initial wait, I would have ended up working with it for ten or 15 minutes, especially if I were going for a windowpane. I can wait half an hour to get to the same point with only a few minutes work, so why not?
Some people love to knead. Fine, they can do so after the initial rest and it will be even more enjoyable because the dough will start out feeling pleasant.
If I'm busy, that half hour rest can stretch out to hours and the dough will only get better to work with - and it will take fewer S&Fs. That's what I've noticed, anyway.
I don't do a window pane test because the gluten is going to develop with time anyway. By shaping time it will be in fine shape. If I had to turn out loaves with a 3 1/2-hour cycle time, I would act differently but I'm not in that situation.
I use the timing of adding salt as a tool to help me adjust the extensibility vs elasticity. I have noticed that adding salt after a rest tends to produce dough that relaxes faster and gets more extensible, while adding it early tends to promote elasticity and the dough relaxes more slowly. So if I bake with a lot of let's say emmer flour, the salt goes in early. If I'm making pitas and need good extensibility so they will roll out easily, the salt goes in late. Very high hydration dough is very extensible, so the salt goes in early. Between extremes, it doesn't matter much.