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Who doesn't love the tangy, slightly sour flavor of sourdough bread? The chewy, crisp exterior and a soft, airy interior.
It seems like everyone loves sourdough bread, I know I do. Most people pickup a loaf at the local store but have you ever thought about making it yourself?
It's not a difficult process but it does take some time and care. The steps below are from a couple of years of making sourdough and trying to simplify a mystical process.
Ingredients:
Leaven
100g room temp water (78f)
25g sourdough starter
100g bread flour
Bread
300g water
200g starter
400g bread flour
50g whole wheat flour
12g salt
Directions:
2 days before you want bread, you will build the starter.
Take your current starter and mix the leaven, starter & bread flour together.
Cover and let rise till double in size
Put into the fridge
1 day before you want bread, you will mix your bread and let it cold ferment
Mix dough:
Add 270g of water to a mixing bowl. Take the remaining 30g aside and add the salt to start disolving. Set aside.
Mix the starter, bread flour & whole wheat flour.
Mix with a spoon till it starts coming together, the using a wet hand, mix by pinching and squeezing the dough for about 2 minutes.
Add the remaining salt & water mixture and continue mixing for another 1-2 minutes till combined.
Fermentation 1
Cover the bowl and set in a warm place for 30 min. I like to use a towel to cover and put inside an oven with the oven light on. This keeps the temp at about 72 deg.
Strengthening 1
After 30 minutes, give the dough a set of strength building folds the round it into a ball creating a taunt skin. See 6:30 for process.
If a little sticky sprinkle a little flour
Having a wet hand when shaping into a round ball helps.
Fermentation 2
Repeat steps from Fermentation 1 for another 30 min.
Strengthening 2
Repeat steps from Strengthening 1
Review
If you are not getting a nice taunt skin, you can do 1 or 2 more sets of Fermentation & Strengthening for 30 min each
Fermentation 3
Repeat steps from Fermentation 1 but now set in a warm location for 2 hours.
Shaping for cold fermentation
If the dough has not doubled in size, put back in a warm place and check in an hour. Once it has doubled, contine the next step.
Flour the dough and work surface generously and gently flip/spill the dough out onto the work surface. The dough should have doubled in size and be light and airy and probably sticky.
Shape as shown at 8:19. 4 main folds then pull in the edges.
After folding the edges in, flip over, edges down. Dust with a little flour and use bench scraper to push the edges in a bit.
Cover with a damp towel and let sit for 15 min.
Dust proofing baskets while waiting.
After resting, they have relaxed and spread out and may still be sticky.
Flip over then pull the edges to spread out a bit. Watch an example at 15:12.
Fold the left and right sides in and pinch together if needed then roll up from the bottom like a jelly roll, pulling it taunt a bit.
Add to basket seam side up.
Flour on top.
Cold Fermentation
Cover with plastic wrap and put in fridge for 8 to 48 hours.
The nice part about a long cold fermentation or proofing is that you can have all the previous steps done before the day you would like bread. When ready to bake, you will just need to preheat your oven and bake.
Baking bread day
Leave the dough in the fridge till you are ready to put it in the oven.
Preheat your dutch oven in a 500 F oven for 30-45min.
Take bread out of fridge after the dutch oven has heated up.
Sprinkle flour onto a piece of parchment and flip your proofed dough ball onto the parchment seam side down.
Gently peel the basket cover off.
Score with lame, razor blade, or scissors.
Load parchment and dough into preheated dutch oven with the lid, reduce oven temperature to 485 F and bake for 18 minutes.
After 18 minutes, remove lid from dutch oven. Reduce oven temperature to 450 F and bake for 22 min.
If you lke a crispier crush, you can let the bread go another 5 min or till the color of the bread is a darker color.
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