Totally not trying to be a call for “no recipes.” I’m trying to suggest a different way of looking at sourdough bread recipes that includes the understanding that since we are making use of a living culture, a fixed (mechanical) recipe is not going to work well consistently. So you have to learn to listen to the dough and be flexible enough to make changes in response to what the dough is telling you.
I really like the series of recipes / tutorials that @eric posted here at Breadtopia called Eric’s Easy Bake Series. In those he tried to do the same thing that I tried to do in my blog post; help people discover the intuitive side of baking sourdough bread. Though instead of being overly loquacious, as I tend to be, he did it in his typical low-key, straightforward way. Amusingly, he got a fair bit of negative feedback on this forum for not having explicit enough recipes. Talk about missing the point. Below is a link to the first episode in that series which includes links to the rest of them.
The float test works because if the starter is actively creating C02 bubbles and your starter is the right consistency, then the starter will float. But very “wet” starter that will work fine in terms of leavening your bread can also fail the float test, so it’s a good test in that pretty much any starter that passes it will leaven your bread, but it’s not such a great test in that some starter that is totally fine for bread leavening will fail the float test.
My test is mixing the starter into bread dough and seeing if the dough rises. If it works, then it was ready. Sorry if that sounds glib, but that’s really how I have learned most of what I have learned about baking bread; by trying things and noticing what works and what doesn’t work.
In the video that I included in my post where I score the dough in the oven, I’m using a blade that needs to be changed so it’s kind of dull and could work a lot better than it did, but the dough you see in that video just came out of the refrigerator for about 16 hours. Cold dough is very blade friendly.
Re your tip about “Transferring Dough from Proofing Basket” - another option is to use the cold bake method which is far safer than messing with hot pots and works a treat.
I alternate between baking in a Breadtopia clay baker or Le Creuset pot.
In either case I cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the baking vessel. Then I lay that over the dough in the banneton, place my baking vessel upside down over the banneton and then flip the whole works which deposits the paper and dough nicely into the baking vessel.
Score the dough, place the covered vessel into the **not-**preheated oven, then set the baking temperature.
I’ve been using 475°F for 30 minutes, then reducing temperature to 425° for 30 minutes and so far it’s working perfectly. Sometimes an additional 5-10 minutes uncovered browns the crust further if needed.
Reading this revealed why I was almost giving up on sourdough. Somewhere I read that rye flour was really very good to feed your starter with. We ground some up and mixed it in. WOW the starter filled the 1 L Weck jars to overflow iin four hours from a start with only about 2" in the bottom. That’s the good news. The bad news was that we started to get turned off our breads. Just too sour. We did not make the connection to the switch to rye and how it made a more sour starter.
Thanks Eric.
Great article, thanks. So during the bulk ferment, you don’t do any intermittent folding and turning that many claim are needed for “building structure”?
Thanks again.
Expanding on a theme already well debated, there is a man (you’d know him if I mentioned his name) who traveled the world collecting, and selling starters. For years I purchased such-and-such a starter from him, thinking the one from Egypt or Romania or wherever, would have flavors like those he described, only to eventually come to the realization that all starters quickly convert to the same flavor. This is not only because of what we’re feeding it, but where we live, what pets and houseplants we keep, etc., etc. Buy that man’s San Francisco starter and within two or three feedings it will be the same as the one you made from wild yeast right in your own house.
@Golden8647 For scoring, I use a long, thin-bladed, flexible boning knife with a Nike-like swoosh shape and fine serrations. The scoring needs to be done with a single, confident stroke. The knife is always around and fits snugly in my knife block – no twin-edged razor blades lying around.
The wet hand trick together with using rice flour for dusting the proofing basket has been a big saver of messes in my kitchen.
And, while I prefer baking in the exact same clay baker you’ve used in your videos, I’ll often bake in a metal loaf pan, with another pan inverted on top to keep the steam in, and a spray of oil in the pan. You start with room temperature dough and vessel and just pop it in the oven. It works particularly well if the dough is sticky. Or, if I want to bake two loaves (since I only have one clay baker). Or, if I want consistent sized slices for sandwiches.
Be brave! The knife is much easier to handle than one of those lame bread slashing tools. And one less single-purpose tool in your kitchen. Practice and you’ll get the hang of it.
Thanks for the timely article. I recently revived a starter that I had neglected for two years. It was happy and I was looking at recipes for sourdough discard when this bread article appeared. I need to tweak my time and temp, but I feel my first attempt in over two years was not bad.
Thanks for the helpful article. It’s a very nice summary of a number of issues. As you probably expected, the most surprising portion was the one about a particular starter not mattering much for the end result. It made me want to revive my dehydrated, white starter and experiment again with it. In my own baking, I’ve repeatedly noticed variation between loaves’ flavor and consistency when the only difference was an all-white starter in one and a more wholegrain starter in the other (same amount of starter, same fermentation time, etc.). Maybe the difference is more indirect, given the more aggressive fermentation with higher percentages of wholegrain flour? At any rate, your “heretical” view is encouraging further experimentation.
Great article and thoughts, I guess I can sum it up with “be the starter” or “think like starter”.
More seriously, its interesting to see your “half teaspoon” in contrast to the Ken Forkish “make 1,000 grams of refreshed starter the night before your bake and throw all but 200 grams away.” I do find the “refresh” works, or at least speeds things up I guess, although the quantities Forkish calls for are way over the top.
On parchment though, I will part company; even gloves wont help my clumsy efforts to get the dough into a scorching pot evenly and neatly. I find the parchment is foolproof, it makes it so easy to unmold, and I dont see any difference in quality (except perfectly shaped loaves).
Dang, so the starter i build 12 years ago from the local organic apples is no different from the two other cultures i nourish weekly? Psssssssssssspt goes my bubble!
I started my weekly baking about 10 years ago when i received “52 loaves” as a Christmas gift. I have used it as my guide. My practice is to bulk ferment at least overnight (and sometimes overnight x2) before shaping. I guess i will try retarding again after shaping and see if it exhausts the supply of sugars before i bake. Gotta say, though, bread baking “instructions” that have the dough sit out to rise “an hour or so” has never worked for me. My kitchen is too cool, and perhaps my starter too weak. My results are MUCH improved when my dough sits out 4 or more hours pre-bake.
In my experience, I see these kind of differences when the ratio of starter to flour is on the higher side. The greater that ratio, the more difference the quality of the starter makes in the resulting loaf. If you built two doughs side-by-side with the only difference being what starter you used in each, and in each you used a very small amount of starter, my guess is (my experience is) that you won’t be able to tell the difference between them in the end. And my belief is that this is because the microbial environment in each loaf will be dominated by the near-identical conditions given by the flour in the recipe.
Parchment works great and I still use it sometimes (like for transferring baguettes to a hot baking stone). I’m just an efficiency freak and I didn’t like the waste of paper and the addition of yet another component and (to me) fiddly process in my regular country loaf production. For me, I like the directness of just turning the basket over into the baking vessel. But I also like what @MTJohn wrote earlier in this thread:
It totally depends on what method I am using to make a given loaf, and also on what else I happen to be doing when the dough is fermenting (sometimes too busy with other stuff to get to the kitchen and stick my hands in the mixing bowl). But yeah, usually I do some stretching and folding, and lately I have been experimenting with shortening the bulk fermentation a little early and then doing a pretty thorough flattening and lamination of the dough before shaping it and then doing a bit longer second proof in a basket.
Such manipulations, done well and at the right time, definitely help make the dough’s consistency more elastic and extensible and that definitely can contribute to a better rise and a more open crumb texture because the more elastic and extensible the dough, the better it will do as a balloon-like container of C02.
I’m not trying to recommend that people forego such techniques (though I think initially just using a basic no-knead method and keeping things as uncomplicated as possible is the best way to develop an intuitive understanding of sourdough baking). I’m trying to recommend that people understand why they are doing what they are doing, rather than just following some set of rote instructions that they read somewhere.
Parchment works great and I still use it sometimes (like for transferring baguettes to a hot baking stone). I’m just an efficiency freak and I didn’t like the waste of paper and the addition of yet another component and (to me) fiddly process in my regular country loaf production. For me, I like the directness of just turning the basket over into the baking vessel. But I also like what