Demystifying Sourdough Bread Baking

Thank you for this explanation. I’m trying to develop alternative procedures at the beginning of the bread making process for: sourdough (covered here), poolish / biga / preferment (??) and regular ol’ commercial yeast. Do you know if anyone has ever written such an explanation. It would be handy to just pick one and experiment … and then pick another one next time.
Kind of a tall request.

Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t really understand what you are asking about. If you asking if I am familiar with similar treatments to what I wrote, except instead of covering sourdough it (they) go into other leavening methods, then no, I’m afraid not.

But I also want to say that my post was not an attempt to present a sourdough leavening “procedure” (aka “recipe”) either. I mentioned details of one process (of many) that I use for the purpose of illustration. My whole point here is trying to free newish sourdough bread bakers from the mental confines of any specific procedure by encouraging experimentation and a basic understanding of the process of sourdough leavening.

I too use my boning knife for scoring. It is always handy and easy to sharpen

I updated the post to include a short section on dough hydration.

Dough Hydration

After confusion over length of proofing / fermentation time, probably the next most common mystification in sourdough bread baking (or maybe any form of bread baking; I’m not really sure because I’m pretty much just a sourdough guy myself) has to do with the dough hydration; how wet it is. Technically, in bread baking, hydration is the percentage by weight (or, if you must and in my opinion, you mustn’t, by volume) of water to flour in your dough. For example, if you have 1,000 grams of flour and 900 grams of water, that is 90% hydration. 1,000g of flour and 650g of water would be 65% hydration.

Dough hydration is another area where you are likely to experience problems sometimes if you try to follow a recipe to the letter. This is because different flours have wildly different responses to water. You could measure out the same weight of two different flours and mix them with the same weight of water and have two doughs that feel completely different; one might be relatively stiff, dry, and very manageable and the other might be wet, sticky, and hard to handle.

And when I say “two different flours,” I mean any two different sources of flour, which could include even two different batches of flour of nominally the same grain, milled in the same way (though those will tend to be more similar than flour from two different grains, or floured milled in different ways). White (roller milled) flour has very, very different properties when mixed with water than 100% whole grain flour. Bolted (sifted) flour is different from either white or whole grain. In general, all other things equal, the closer the flour is to whole grain, the more water you will likely need to use to get the same dough consistency. In other words, a 70% hydration dough made with white bread flour might feel similar to an 85% or 90% hydration dough made with 100% whole grain flour.

As with proofing time, in my experience, you also have to hold any recipe instructions that specify a certain amount of water very loosely, develop a sense of the useable range of dough wetness, again, listen to the dough and expect to adjust the ratio of water and flour in a recipe (maybe fairly dramatically) in order to get the dough into that range.

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Thank you for this article. One question I have is how do you know when your sourdough has risen enough? You mention listening to the bread, but I don’t understand the language of “risen” very well. With my dry yeast breads, risen enough means, for me, that it is has come to the top of the bowls I use for this purpose. My sourdough very rarely gets much larger than when I started but will sometimes be very dense after baking (perhaps over proofed) and sometimes will be just fine. I’ve tried letting it rise on the counter over night, and I’ve tried putting in the fridge during the day and then on the counter over night, and I always get these mixed results. How can I tell when it is ready if there is no obvious change in size of the mass? Thanks for your help. Jill

You probably can’t. If there is really no rise at all, then either 1. your dough is so wet that all the C02 is bubbling right out the top of it, or 2. it is rising fine without you ever seeing it and then falling back down again before you take a look at it, or 3. your starter is not really a starter (i.e. does not have a living culture of yeasts and bacteria that makes it useful for leavening bread).

Hard to know which is the case without being able to look over your shoulder. But you can rule out each of these possibilities by doing experiments. For number 1 you could try to lower the hydration (use less water) in your recipe so that the dough is stiffer. For number 2 (and in general to be able to “listen to the dough” and learn its language), you need to pay attention to the changes that the dough goes through during the fermentation process. That means looking at the dough at least every hour or so and noting its size and smell. Wet your hand and touch the dough (a stretch and fold won’t hurt) so you can feel how its texture changes. That’s how you listen to the dough. For number 3, try taking a tablespoon of your starter and putting it into a glass. Add and thoroughly mix in 1/2 cup of white bread flour and 1/4 cup of unchlorinated water. Put a rubber band around the outside of the glass to mark the top of the level of the mixture, put it on the counter and look at it every hour or so. At 70 degrees or so, it should be doubling in size sometime within 10 - 15 hours. If it never goes above the top of the rubber band, you have a problem with your starter.

thank you, I’ll try these suggestions.

I’m 100% Team Parchment, all the way.

Groovy article, thanks. I had come up with the ingredients for my bread being: flour, water, and salt, to which I added, as at least equally important, the three "T"s, Time, Temperature, and Technique.

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Hello, everyone.
Could someone share the recipe from the sourdough baguette that is posted early in this thread? I am looking for a recipe that gives me almost a zero crumb (large wholes/bubbles) and it seems that in this one from the picture one can achieve that. Thanks a million. Caroline

@caroline Caroline, do you mean this one?

https://breadtopia.com/how-to-make-baguettes/

Leah

Hi Leah
Thanks so much for your support. This is the one I meant.

It is the second picture on the right hand side.

I would love to have this recipe.
Thanks again,
Looking forward to your response.
Caroline

@caroline Caroline, the author of that article is @homebreadbaker.

Perhaps if you contact him, he’ll send you his recipe for the bread pictured that you’d like to bake and/or post it in this thread.

All the best,
Leah

Semi-recipe-like bla bla from my instagram:

Hi there~
I live in a temperate climate with house temp in the 80’s. Will this cause a problem with getting a starter started and if so what can I do to get a starter going?

This article is excellent!

It makes so much sense to consider sourdough, both the starter and the pre-baked loaf, as an independent living entity that needs its own specific care and attention in order to get the best from it. Changing to this mindset and getting to know your own particular sourdough’s character and traits just feels right!

Warm temperature won’t cause a problem. Everything will just happen faster. So if you are following some procedure and it gives you a timeframe, expect whatever that step is to happen sooner / faster.

I’m 4 loaves down and with each loaf an issue is solved, but after reading this I have a good feeling that my next loaf will be a winner. Thanks!

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I’m 5 loaves down and I still am not getting a good crust or rise, for that matter. The crust is too hard and thick and the inside too soft. I’ve been using a 450 oven and I wonder if I jump to 500 I might get a better result. I’m always afraid of the high temps since having to replace electronics in 2 ovens after using the “cleaning” function.

In my experience, going higher on the temperatures is likely to make both those issues worse, not better. For starters, try going down to 400 and baking longer and see what happens.

8/10 times when new-ish bakers aren’t getting a good rise it means they are over-proofing.

Also, can you give more description of what “too soft” means when characterizing the crumb? Maybe post a picture too.