Further Bread Experiments
I mentioned at some point, probably towards the beginning of last week, that I’m working at coming to sourdough from “the other direction.”
I’ve been working with a “no knead” technique of keeping dough retarding in the fridge, and letting the initial rise in the oven take responsibility for it’s final rising action. It’s been working very well in general.
But I’m really unhappy with the crumb. The crust is delightful. The crumb is just too tight for my liking. It’s fine. Nothing normal people would complain about. But I need more.
So I’ve been experimenting a little bit with final rising, oven temperature and such and I’m just not getting far. A couple things seem to be working a little, but not enough that I can say what they are.
However.
The flavor of the bread I’m coming out with is improving markedly with every single loaf. I’m really quite surprised.
The general procedure that leads to this almost looks accidental, but that it’s exactly what I’m driving for.
Take a double batch. Mix it (just mix it. Don’t worry about kneading it.) Let it rise in a bowl for a while and then put it in the fridge. Wait a couple/few days. The longer the better up to at least a week, though I assume you could get away with more.
Take the bowl out, and split the dough in half. Bake half of it as described elsewhere.
The other half goes in a mixing bowl in which you put another single-batch of ingredients, thereby replenishing the dough.
Then repeat the same way you started. (let it rise, back in fridge, etc.)
That all is well documented. No rocket surgery there.
So then what’s all this crap about sourdough?
A sourdough bread is a bread made with “naturally occurring” rather than commercial yeast. If you mix flour and water together and let it sit, it will start getting bubbles after a couple days. Split it and replenish it every day and soon you’ll have sourdough starter. Where’d the yeast come from? Ah… therein lies the magic.
Then you use a portion of that starter in your bread recipe, and don’t add any yeast.
I’ve never really been able to make that work. The proportions and procedures have always been just a tad elusive. I wondered to myself, I wondered… “Self? What if you just made the whole damn thing sourdough from the get go?” I just couldn’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work.
So in addition to the procedure I described above, I’ve been making one additional modification.
With every iteration I’ve dropped the yeast I’ve added by one gram. So a 60-3-3 with 420g flour ends up with 13 grams of yeast. I’m now down to 9.
I believe that what this is doing is transitioning to naturally occurring yeast, rather than having the dough start over from scratch every time. Though it is possible that once I started with commercial yeast, that it’s simply the same strain from thereon out. I don’t know that much about the biology of yeast.
But what is undoubtedly happening is the flavor of this dough is maturing and strengthening. It doesn’t taste like a sourdough by a long shot and indeed I think it will be a couple weeks beyond the point where I’ve completed weaning it off of commercial yeast before it does. But there’s a flavor there that just can’t be achieved in a single baking cycle.
It’s really quite something.
Now I just have to figure out how to get an open crumb. I’m thinking I’ve got some more playing around to do with the oven temperature, baking surfaces, hydration levels and protein content of the flour I’m using. I’m very happy with everything else about my bread so far.
Tags: Baking