sourdough bread
I enjoy the concise presentation of Andy Jones' Quarantine
Bread recipe, as opposed to many other
recipes that are often ad-overloaded or missing a tldr; version that you can
easily skim through or refer to when you don't have a lot of time at hand. This
post follows his general outline and re-uses some of his links, but documents my
process for making sourdough bread.
last update: 2020-05-06
ingredients: levain
| weight | baker's percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| Sourdough starter | 60g | 100% |
| Lukewarm water | 60g | 100% |
| Plain wheat flour | 30g | 50% |
| Whole grain wheat flour | 30g | 50% |
ingredients: bread
| weight | baker's percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| Sourdough levain | 140g | 40% |
| Lukewarm water | 190g | 54% |
| Plain wheat flour | 350g | 100% |
| Salt | 10g | 2.8% |
equipment
- Kitchen scale
- Kitchen bowls with lids (plastic wrap should work as well)
- Spatula
- Stand mixer with dough hook
- Dutch oven
schedule: the night before (levain)
- 19:00 ~5min
- In a bowl, mix water and sourdough starter to spread out the starter
- Mix in the flour with a spatula
- Leave overnight
schedule: the morning of (bread)
-
7:00 ~10min
- Using the stand mixer on lowest setting, mix water and levain
- Mix in the flour and salt
- Mix on highest setting for 7 minutes
- Transfer dough to bowl
- Cover with lid and let rest on kitchen counter
-
7:30 ~1min
- Stretch and fold the dough
- Cover with lid and let rest on kitchen counter
-
8:00 ~1min
- Stretch and fold the dough
- Cover with lid and let rest on kitchen counter
-
8:30 ~1min
- Stretch and fold the dough
- Cover with lid and let rest on kitchen counter
-
9:30 ~5min
- Pour the dough onto a flat and lightly floured surface
- Cover the bowl with a cotton cloth or kitchen towel to prevent sticking
- Shape the loaf
- Put the shaped loaf back into the bowl, seam up
- Cover with lid and place in the fridge
-
12:00 ~1min
- Place dutch oven into oven
- Pre-heat oven to max temperature 275c
-
12:30 ~5min
- Remove the dutch oven from the oven
- Change oven temperature to 225°C
- Take the bowl from the fridge
- Pour the loaf onto kitchen counter
- Lightly flour the loaf (only for visual effect)
- Put the loaf into the dutch oven
- Score the loaf
- Cover the dutch oven and place it into oven
-
13:12 ~1min
- Change oven temperature to 180°C
- Take off the dutch oven's lid.
-
13:24 ~1min
- Take dutch oven from the oven
- Remove the bread from the dutch oven
- Leave bread to cool on a cookie cooling rack
-
18:00
- Enjoy the bread 😁
notes
My first sourdough starter experiments started in August 2019 and I have been working on a simple process that works for us since then. Several rabbit holes and dead ends later, we're pretty happy with the result and the benefits of making our own bread outweigh the downsides.
To get a sourdough starter, I tried to follow several guides but A Frenchman's Guide to Making Sourdough Starter worked best.
I use a simple spreadsheet to apply a factor to the ingredients, e.g. at the moment we use a factor of 1.5 on the above ingredients to produce a bread that'll last us two days. I also use the spreadsheet to keep track of the actual amounts of ingredients I use when I bake bread so that I can easily refer back to it later.
The target temperatures took a while to dial in for our oven and YMMV. Compared to most other recipes I followed, it seems that we need a lot less heat.
For ingredients, I use what's readily available in local supermarkets. In Austria, that's any organic type W700 for plain wheat and any organic whole grain wheat flour type W1800 that I can find.
We also use the sourdough for pizza, perfect loaf's recipe works best for us.
Some of the resources that I've used and keep coming back to:
variations
The above recipe is our default, but we also have two simple different variations that include more whole grain flour and seeds:
-
For the bread ingredients, use only 270g of plain wheat flour and add 80g of whole grain spelt flour. No other changes.
-
Change the bread ingredients to:
| weight | baker's percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| Sourdough levain | 130g | 39% |
| Lukewarm water | 200g | 61% |
| Plain wheat flour | 150g | 45% |
| Whole grain wheat flour | 100g | 30% |
| Whole grain rye/spelt/buckwheat flour | 80g | 24% |
| Salt | 10g | 3% |
On the third stretch and fold, fold in sunflower and flax seeds.
Do a fourth stretch and fold at 9:00.
pictures
