I made baguettes using a non-commercial yeast starter, just flour and water and those lovely wild yeasties. Gorgeous crust, lovely soft insides, softer than I thought they'd be actually, but crusty baguettes nonetheless. My first real sourdough bread. Feels great! Oh, and they're whole wheat.
Astrid from Paulchen's Foodblog selected oat as theme for this month's Bread Baking Day.
I got inspired from zorra for this recipe & the method from iban.
For more information about sourdough starter you can read Susan post about Sourdough Starter from Scratch .
60 g (1/2 cup + 1 Tablespoon) oat flour.
374 g (2 1/2 cups) whole wheat flour.
670 g (4 1/2 cups) high gluten white flour.
1 1/2 teaspoons salt.
2 teaspoons sugar.
2 teaspoons yeast.
46 g (1/2 cup + 1 Tablespoon) milk powder.
2 Tablespoons oil.
90 g (1/3 cup) sourdough starter.
3 cups water.
1) Place all ingredients in the bowl of mixer; beat 10 minutes to make soft dough.
2) Cover dough and let rise in warm place until doubled in size, about 1 1/2 hour, stretch & fold every 30 minutes.
3) Divide dough into 2 pieces
4) Shape each piece into round loaf, cover; let it rise in warm place until doubled in size, about 40-60 minutes.
5) Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 500 F.
6) Before baking dust flour over the top of the loaf, slash the bread.
7) Reduce the heat to 400F, bake for 15 minutes with steam, & another 15 minutes without steam.
zainab
I went down to our local mill and purchased some exotic flours the other day. I want to use them as additions to our favorite whole wheat recipe. I was just wondering if anyone else has worked with these flours and has some good recipes for them. I started out today by adding some quinoa to the recipe and it came out dense, but boy was it good.
Thank in advance.
Lydia
Hello,
I have a great recipe for cinnamon rolls. I roll out the pastry to 24x14. after rolling I have a 24 inch log, that I cut into 2 inch rolls.
This makes 12 rolls. However after baking each roll grows to 2 inches high by a radius of 4 inches on average. I would like to make smaller rolls that could be classifed as bite sized or two-bite sized roll for an event we are hosting.
Anyone have any ideas how to accomplish this?
Thanks,
Tanya
I tried making altamura bread using semolina sourdough from Leader's book. I came out somewhat dense. Is this a characteristic of durum flour breads? It didn't seem that my starter was very bubbly. Could I make a semolina starter by refreshing a stiff dough levain with durum flour? Thanks for any help.
Tony
For Thom Leonard's sourdough bread recipe, it states that the starter should be activated ~ 8 hours. If I activate it at 10 PM and begin making the bread at 9 AM, the starter is no longer fully active. Can one activate it fully for about 8 hours and then refrigerate it overnight and use it the next morning?
Thanks!
Hi,
Can someone please explain why you put for example milk, egg or butter in a bread or cake recipe. What is it they do for the outcome? And if possible add other ingredients you know of, that will change a recipe somewhat texturely, et cetera.
Thanks in advance.
According to Wikipedia, about 90% of the people in the USA live in places where the water is hard or very hard. I know I always have.
Now, I've moved to a place where the water is amazingly soft. According to Calvel, soft water prevents dough from having good cohesiveness. And that seems to be the case. My lavash cracker dough at about 55% hydration and a San Francisco Sourdough type dough at about 60% hydration both feel soft to me. How soft? Like 75 to 85% hydration doughs in other areas where I have lived. Even at 60% hydration, and with good dough development, my doughs are too soft to be good free form loaves.
Needless to say, it's driving me crazy. (My wife will tell you that I can walk that far.) Regretably, Calvel didn't mention what to do about very soft water.
Anyway, are there any bakers here who have coped with soft water? And if so, what did you do?
Thanks,
Mike
I caught onto refreshing sourdough starter in bmuir's guide as one of the easier ways to understand my starter -- TFL node 6742. Now that the weather is warming up I find my starter is developing better though this guide really helped me with the numbers.
First, since I have been wanting to convert my 100% starter to a firm one and I had just bought a used Glezer "Artisan Baking Across America" I thought I'd try her method for that. (My starter began about three years ago from freshly milled rye flour per RL Bernbaum's "Bread Bible" method.) I took 15 grams of my starter, added 15 of water and 50 of while bread flour (15-15-50), it rose 2x by 8-12 hours. Since it seemed slow to rise I then used Glezer's method to enliven my firm starter to make sure it was active enough - so I did a refreshing schedule of (15-25-45) starter-water-flour every 12 hours. That just didn't seem to go as Glezer said it would (by tripling or quadrupling!?). So, as I read in various blogs here on TFL (such as node 1807), I took Andrew's advice and used his amounts (30-30-50), and my starter started to grow well to 2-3x in 3-5 hours. So, I knew my sourdough starter was good.
Now, I was ready for bmuir's guide and graph to direct me. I did the (25-50-50) building first, every 12 hours I added on, and by 36 hours I had the 500 Grams of starter/preferment to bake. (I didn't want the 1000 gram amount.) After the first two feedings it had doubled in 4-6 hours (the aroma was soooo goood) and with dmsnyder's and Mike Avery's advice I refrigerated it "because you want to use the starter at the peak of activity when you add it to the dough".
I was now ready to make bread. I took out the refreshed starter/preferment from the fridge and let it warm up for 2 hours to nice and bubbly. I made half recipe of Glezer's Thom Leonard Country French by zolablue's node 3934 -- specifically with the sifted Hodgson Mill graham flour mixed with KA bread flour. I followed the recipe fairly exact; it rose according to the hours mentioned (I made sure of a 75F rising temperature by using a heating pad+rack+towel cover). I made one large boule, risen in a willow banneton, and baked it a total of 40 minutes.
shaped Thom Leonard country french bread
baked Thom Leonard country french bread
sliced country french bread
The bread rose well, had a great oven spring (though maybe not deep enough slashes?) and had a great wheaty taste. I wish I had real high extraction flour to see how that affects the taste.
Then since I had more fresh sourdough starter leftover, I made pizza dough per Peter Reinhart's 'transitional' whole wheat pizza in his WGB book. I quickly made up a soaker with whole wheat flour, let it sit/autolyse for an hour, added it and the remaining refreshed starter to the total dough and refrigerated it until an hour or two before I made the pizza, probably 6-8 hours. The dough turned out much more elastic and fun to work with than in the past when I had used this recipe. I did use active dry yeast instead of instant yeast - maybe this and the nicely active starter helped.
elastic sourdough pizza dough
I used the tomato based sauce per "a pizza primer" by Floydm's recipe and here is the result, a tasty pepperoni-onion-mushroom-basil pizza.
'transitional' sourdough crust pizza
As you can see I used several different books, and many ideas, recipes, and recommendations from a variety of TFL bloggers. The Fresh Loaf has been so good for me!
Anet
This website is great. I recently starting making my own bread using Mark Bitman's NY Times no-knead recipe. I've had tremendous success with it and I am using a clouche. The crust and crrumb almost perfect and I am creating some nice loaves.
I wanted to try a sourdough loaf at the request of my 10 year old daughter. I used Mark Shepard's Simple Sourdough formula/recipe for a starter and the bread.
I am able to get a pretty good starter, it bubbles has a sour smell, has hooch and looks a lot like the pictures posted on the web sites I visit. I also am able to get a pretty good sponge. Its a little too wet but again its bubbly, has a sour smell and when stirred has a pretty good body.
My problem is when I make the dough, I am not getting a good rise. I let it sit in the gas oven with the pilot on for 4-6 hours. It looks like it is rising or doubling is size but when I go to put it in the clouche or a loaf pan it just lies flat. I follow the directions and start out with a cold oven and set it to 375 and let it bake for 55 minutes.
The loaf comes out as a flat disc that is very dense. The last one I made had a an alright crumb, nice holes in it but it was very dense. The flavor was pretty good too but not nice and airy like the other bread I've made. I am using King Arthur Whole Wheat flour for the starter and for the dough.
Any suggestion to get a good rise would be greatly appreciated.
btw, i have ordered the starter from Carl Griffith's page and am thinking about ordering the starter from King Arthur.
I have the starter in the refridge now and it looks pretty good.
thanks
alex