Sourdough

As my wife was away in Washington, DC for a conference, there wasn't much time for baking, since I was alone with a three-year-old, an all-consuming (though rewarding) task if there ever was one. Nevertheless, I soldiered on, especially since I had a craving for Desem bread.

Alas, though I finally went for 85% hydration, I had no time to fold the dough properly. What's more, since I was pressed for time (I was needed to help put out a fire in the bathroom, taste chocolate treats made of wood and eat blueberry muffins with a baby polar bear, as all proper polar bears do) I never really kneaded it thoroughly in the first place. The result was as could be expected -- desem flatbread. Though tasty! Unfortunately, the Desem, knowing it had not risen to the occassion, was too camera shy for a photo.

Pizza, however, is another ball of wax entirely. This was pretty simple. I based my recipe on the sourdough pizza crust from Peter Reinhart's American Pie.



I used Arthur the whole wheat starter at 100% hydration, which made the dough about 30% whole wheat, and shot for 66-68% hydration. I also had to do a half-and-half mix of KA Bread Flour and KA All-Purpose, since I ran out of bread flour, and added 2 Tbs of olive oil. Also, instead of making four 10-oz dough balls, I made two 12 ounce dough balls -- I like a slighly bigger pizza than Reinhart, I guess.

Saturday evening, I kneaded it up lightly, folded it twice during the initial four hour fermentation and then divided it into two. One dough ball went into the freezer while the other went into the fridge. The next day, at 4pm, I took the dough ball from the fridge to warm up, grated the cheese (2 ounces low-moisture mozzarella, 1 oz feta, 1 oz parmesan), cut up the olives, sliced the turkey sausage, defrosted the sauce (I had some leftover a couple of weeks ago, so I just threw it in the freezer -- thawed out well! I highly recommend Reinhart's recipe for basic tomato sauce.), and roasted half a yellow pepper I found in the fridge, still fresh, over our gas burner. I set the oven to 550 F at 5pm, and then headed for the airport. When we got home with Aurora around 6ish, it took just 10 minutes to make the pizza and slide it into the oven. Bella! My first (successful) sourdough pizza!



Later that evening, I finished up the weekly whole wheat sourdough sandwich bread that is a lunch staple for our family. It rose well. Tasty stuff.

This weekend, we're having our annual church dinner at my homey Unitarian church -- I always enjoy it because it gives me an excuse to bake something I'd never bake at home because:

• My wife and I are each trying to drop 15 lbs.
• I'm kind of a nut about ensuring my family eats nutritious food, which means whole-grains.
• Dammit, I bought a grinder and 200 lbs of wheat berries! I've got to use it!

Yes, started the day well. Made 3 loaves of sourdough plain loaf. 12 blueberry muffins, a tray pf cinnamon rolld and three loaves of multi grain.

I was inspired by Jane and Srishti and the other folks trying whole wheat sourdough (thanks!), so I tried it. I started with the proportions I found here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2059/100-whole-wheat-bread#comment-7919

My variations -- I halved the recipe, kneaded in my Zojirushi bread maker, and used my white sourdough starter and Whole Foods whole wheat flour. My my I love weighing ingredients, especially in grams. I just keep slinging stuff into the bowl, so fun and easy.

Everything proceeded nicely until the final rise. Instead of rising like New York, it spread out like Los Angeles. The resulting bread was delicious, but in the interest of bread art (and sandwiches), I'd like it to be a little taller. I'm still new to sourdough, but am loving every trial. My starter is quite vigorous -- I'm pretty sure that part is ok.  Any suggestions?

I've been real busy the past few weeks so have not been online much, but did make time to bake each weekend.

Back in Feb., I was lamenting that my Thom Leonard boules, which I had been making successfully for weeks, were suddenly getting overproofed and collapsing when hitting the hot stone (thread here). I was wondering if it was my switch to 100% organic King Arthur Artisan flour, or if my starter is getting too strong and acidic. I took the advice people here gave me about folding the dough more and paying attention to shaping better. So I did a test to see if the flour played a role or not, but also incorporated the advice given on folding, and I was careful to ferment them at about 70-75F rather then 80-85F as done earlier. To see if my flour switch played a role, I bought some regular King Arthur AP flour and made two batches of the Leonard loaf side by side, one batch with KA organic artisan flour and the other with the KA AP. I folded each batch 4 times, 30 minutes apart during the first bulk fermentation. I also carefully shaped each loaf into a tight boule, rested for 10 min., then placed in the bannetons, and I could not believe how high the loaves rose during the final proof, after only 3 hours:

I was in for even more surprise when I baked them - the oven spring was HUGE. Here are the loaves made with the King Arthur 100% organic artisan flour on the left (oval shape), and to the right are the ones made with the King Arthur AP flour (round shape). No discernable difference in the quality of the rise, oven spring, or crumb structure, they all came out excellent, and all because I paid a lot more attention to proper folding and shaping, and note that these were wet doughs:

I also retarded 2 of the loaves in the frig for about 6 hours before baking right out of the cold frig and into the hot oven, and got equally huge oven spring as for the ones I did not retard.

Here is the crumb shot of yet another batch a week later done by the same folding/shaping method, but using King Arthur organic whole wheat flour for 30% of the flour in the recipe (I have not been able to get that yin/yang symbol again in my bread that JMonkey likes though, ha!):

Conclusion of the experiment: My earlier overproofing problems were not due to the KA organic flour. It performed equally as well as the KA AP flour. The extra folding of the wet dough, and tighter shaping of the boules seemed to make all the difference, plus probably cooling the fermenting temps down to 70-75F I think helped. Thanks especially to gt and Bill Wraith for pointing out my lack of folding as being the main culprit. I've been having consistently great outcome with this recipe ever since.

I also made some sourdough spelt blueberry flaxseed muffins. These rose nice and high, but needed a little more sweetening and perhaps a bit more salt than my usual recipe calls for, probably because of the extra liquid and flour brought in by the sourdogh levain, otherwise they were quite nice. Somehwhat dense due to 100% spelt flour, including in the levain. The regular recipe for my muffins is here, but I modified it by expanding my regular batter white SD starter with 1 c. spelt flour and 1 c water (similar to how the King Arthur baking book makes a levain for sourdough waffles), which replaces the same amount of flour and liquid (oil) in the original recipe. Then followed the orginal recipe using baking soda rather then powder to get even more rise. Next time I will add a bit more oil, brown sugar, and salt:

I really like the Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire or Struan from the BBA and have been modifying since I first made it with the hope of using sourdough as the main leavening, since Struan is an old Scottish bread I thought it would be good to have it all sourdough.

So with my Spelt starter in hand I changed the recipe once again:

My soaker was:

• 2 Tbsp Organic Polenta
  
• 1 Tbsp Organic red and white Quinoa
• 3 Tbsp Organic steel cut oats
• 2 Tbsp organic wheat bran
• 1/4 cup room temp Kefir milk

Mixed the grains together in a small bowl and poured the Kefir over, then covered bowl and left on the table overnight. I really like the flavour of Kefir soaked grains.

My dough was:

• 9 ounces organic hard flour
• 4.5 ounces organic whole spelt flour
• 1.5 ounces brown sugar
• 1 1/2 Tsp sea salt
• 3/4 Tbsp instant yeast
• 3 Tbsp cooked organic brown rice
• 1 1/2 Tbsp Buckwheat honey
• 1/2 cup Kefir milk
• 3 ounces Spelt starter
• 2.5 ounces room temp water
• handful of poppy seeds (Floyd, I now know your nightmares)
  

I mixed the flours, sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl and then added the soaker, rice, honey, Kefir, starter, and enough water to make the dough tacky. After it was well mixed, I transferred it to the counter where I kneaded it for 20 minutes until it passed the windowpane test, then I misted the top with some spray oil and covered it with plastic wrap.

I folded it once every half hour for the next 90 minutes at which point it had nicely doubled in size. Whereupon I placed it in my loaf pan, misted the surface with water and coated the loaf with poppy seeds. I sprayed the loaf with spray oil and covered it with plastic wrap and left it until the loaf had risen about 2 inches above the top of the pan, this took about 5 hours. I had left it to rise so high because I had a pork loin taking up the oven, but it worked out well just the same.

I baked the loaf at 350 F for 20 minutes and after turning 180 degrees I baked for another 20 minutes. The bread turned out nice and soft and with a good spring to the crumb. It was incredible toasted with either raw honey or my wife's strawberry jam.

This is after the first folds and rising (the picture is actually of 12 pounds of dough, not the 2 pound loaf stated above)

And the final loaf, or what is left of it. I actually did this recipe times five and I now have half of a free standing loaf remaining after making it on Thursday evening. This picture doesn't show it well but the loaf is 4 inches high.

Next time I will be going with less yeast and more starter and a mix of whole grains too.

My sourdough techniques have really come a long way. This weekend's loaf was far and away the best I've made. Delicious, sour, great crumb and texture, it had it all. I used about 25% whole wheat flour.

So what's for dinner? Turkey bacon lightly fried in a skillet then put on top of tangy Greek grilling cheese on my fresh sourdough. The whole sandwich goes back on the skillet and a hot cast iron skillet is put on top to press it down. Some green beans lightly sautee'd with garlic and extra virgin olive oil, and some garlic dill pickles to round it out.

Oh, and a pint of English ale. Who's got it better than me? :)

-Joe