Tag Archives: bread

Whole Wheat Sourdough

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In which there’s the staff of life.

I made another whole white wheat sourdough boule! Whoo! This decent loaf somewhat redeems me from that ridiculous Pyrex debacle from last week I’m not going to tell you about.

Sourdough Boule

It’s not 100% whole white wheat like usual, though, because I used white flour for kneading, thereby probably incorporating half a cup or more into the dough. But, hey, it’s close enough.

It was handsomely scored using my very ghetto homemade lame!

I got decent oven spring, as you can see, but I don’t think you ever get that really astonishing spring (like you see from pros, or in bread forums) when using strictly whole grain flour. For whole wheat, though, this is a pretty credible-looking loaf.

Haven’t sliced it yet, but I have no doubt it will taste like all my previous loaves made with the same ingredients. (My whole white wheat sourdough bread so far is flavorful without quite being nutty, hard to slice with our cheap-ass dollar store bread knife, dense, chewy, not very sour usually, and especially delicious when, because it’s so substantial, heavily toasted and paired with fat like butter or brie or olive oil.)

Its crust was spread with melted butter and sprinkled with rock salt, because at three o’clock in the morning when I was cooling this loaf, I thought it would taste good and look cool.

I just read a blog post tagged #sourdoughbread, and it was all, “no matter what, MEASURE YOUR RECIPE CORRECTLY,” which made me lol, because I don’t measure anything. Ever. I just wing it. Every time. I pour some random amount of levain into a bowl, stir in some amount of flour that looks good, let it autolyse some random amount of time, or not, add some amounts of salt, water, and additional flour. There is no recipe, only process.

Kneading, rising, and proofing times are all whatever, around behaviours like work and sleep, but usually I end up with what generally turns out edible. The most important things to know about bread are how to tell when you’ve kneaded enough (smooth texture, really, because windowpaning doesn’t really happen with coarse flour, since there are sharp pieces in the dough that cause it to tear if you pull it out thin like that), and how to tell when your dough’s done proofing (the dimple, when you poke it with your finger, doesn’t fill back in like it does right after kneading).

Here are some pictures of breads indicating that I’m starting to figure out how to produce a recipe-less sourdough loaf at will without any special scrapers, baskets, scales, or Dutch ovens:

Whole Wheat Sourdough Boule

Whole Wheat Sourdough

Sourdough Whole Wheat Boule

Day 2: Sourdough culture

Sourdough 2

The link below is brilliant if you’re interested in three-ingredient bread, but I didn’t really get it until I re-read it earlier today. The last time I read it, sometime between putting up my starters and now, a lot slipped by me:

debunking the myths and mysteries of harnessing wild yeast

In short, I feel I’m reaching my recipe-less sourdough bread goal. I could make bread pretty much anywhere if I had flour, water, salt, and time, and that feels pretty groovy.

No-Knead Sourdough Bread

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In which there’s no recipe BECAUSE BREAD IS ENTIRELY fucking RANDOM! Whoo! IT’S ALIVE!

This is one of those food blog posts in which the author bangs on and on about nothing and talks about her personal life, but there’s no recipe at the end so it’s technically not one of those posts, you know, the ones I bitch about because the irrelevant nonsense takes like half an hour to scroll past before you get to the fucking recipe but there is no recipe here so it’s totally different!

I have no idea if any of this about the healthfulness or digestibility of sourdough bread is scientifically backed or even true, but it sounds nice and I’ve had time on my hands so I grew some sourdough starter and fed it every day for about a week.

Then I split it in half, and now I have two sourdough starters: one primarily white, one whole wheat. (The whole wheat one is slightly more active, which is the opposite of what I expected.)

I know nothing about baking but I can cook, I can read, and I can learn. So I’ve been reading everything I can get my eyeballs on about traditional bread baking, no-knead bread, and sourdough.

Sourdough

My observation is that there’s no such thing as a bread recipe. Every single recipe is different. Every single video shows utterly different methods. Baking temperature, baking times are always wildly divergent, even for the same amount of the same type of dough. It’s a complete disaster, this whole bread-baking thing.

If you want, for example, to learn how to make enchilada sauce, because you’re not Mexican and you never saw the elder women in your family do it and so you have very little sense of how it’s done, you get online and you read anywhere from 6 to thirty enchilada sauce recipes in a row. You find out what all the recipes have in common in terms of ingredients, ratios, and procedures, and you more or less do the mean, the average, the gist of all those recipes. And you’re going to end up with something fantastic.

This is how I have learned make everything I cook, from chicken noodle soup to pudlas: read as many recipes as possible, do what they all have in common. If you see the same exact noodle recipe in fifteen different places, use that one. It’s the one that works.

People have been baking bread for ten thousand years, and apparently everybody does it differently and has a different pet theory about what’s happening in the proofing bowl. Bread’s alive, and it responds to the various environments it finds itself in, so there are no hard and fast rules. All those incredibly verbose bread blogs I skimmed are trying to teach instinct, not technique: how to tell when to add more flour, when to leave it alone, when to bake it and for how long and how high. Every single blog says somewhere that you just have to bake enough bread to get a feel for it.

My conclusion: It’s just fucking bread! We discovered leavening by accident, probably from just leaving dough lying around like lazy ancient hippies! There is no technique as much as intuition! Apparently any idiot can make bread!

And I’m definitely any idiot. (In my entire life I’d made no-knead bread twice, a couple of soda breads that don’t even count, and a kneaded sourdough once that didn’t really turn out that well because I dunno shit about kneading bread. And that’s my whole entire baking career.) So I decided to wing it and go by feels!

I’d gotten the starters down from the top of the fridge to feed them and thought, “What the hell. I’ll use the discards and fake my way through some bread.” So I poured half of each into the ugly pink bowl that is my only bowl and therefore gets constant use — possibly as much as two cups of unfed starter, maybe even more — added some warm tap water, added some white flour, added some salt, added some yeast. Stirred it up. Set the bowl on the top of the (gas, and therefore always warm) stove and covered it. And forgot about it for twelve hours while I drank wine, read sci-fi, watched 70’s British horror films, and slept.

Sometime in the middle of the next day I poured the doubled-in-volume, bubbly dough out onto a floured counter top and it was so wet it just ran all over the place. I had to scrape it up with a spatula. It was a huge, sticky fucking mess. I threw it back into the bowl with a bunch of flour and stirred it up, then covered it and returned it to the top of the stove.

Did the same thing again in the evening. The dough was slightly stiffer, but still just flopped all over the place and could scarcely be folded in thirds. Needless to say, I floured the hell out of it and stuck it back in its bowl — after I’d scraped a bunch of half-dried sticky wallpaper paste out of it and washed and dried it — on top of a generous sheet of parchment.

At about the 24-hour mark, I used the now-damp parchment paper to lift it — still a floppy mass and unable to hold a shape, but still clearly active in terms of yeast — into a pre-heated stainless steel stockpot in a 400F oven, where I let it bake for the better part of an hour, misting the floor of the oven with water at random intervals and watching classic pro-wrestling with my boyfriend. (Some of those costumes are seriously hilarious, as is this video. Plus he gets a kick out of it, so who am I to judge.)

Sourdough 2

When knocking on the bottom of the loaf produced a hollow sound we left off baking (even though I’m convinced it could easily have stood another 15 minutes in the oven). It overnighted on a wire rack, and when I got up today I cut into it. It’s heavy, moist, with what they call ‘beautiful artisanal crumb’ and a gorgeous (for a bread containing whole wheat) soft but chewy crust.

Sourdough 3

It’s also incredibly sour, like a San Francisco loaf. So sour it drowns out the taste of butter altogether. I knew it would be sour because of the long rise time, but it’s REALLY SOUR. It’ll have to be eaten with really strong flavors: olive tapenade, aged cheeses, pesto. Maybe a thick, spicy tomato soup.

I’m guessing that the whole kneading thing offers a baker a little more control over her bread, but I’m not sure I’m up to bothering to learn it yet when I can have perfectly edible loaves with the no-knead “method” and time and guesses.

Off to go see what the internet suggests one do with a very sour loaf of sourdough bread, then.

I totally need a Dutch oven.

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In which I might finally tackle the whole ‘learn to make decent bread’ thing this fall! Srsly!

Since bad bread isn’t even worth eating and good bread is expensive, I’ve been thinking for a looooooong time about maybe learning how to make my own bread. It’s not rocket surgery, so it can’t be that hard, right? Well, in preparation I’ve found the following items of interest on the Internet:

1. This recipe for Sicilian No-Knead Bread.

2. This article about baking your own bread.

3. This recipe, apparently from an issue of COOK’S (I found it as an image online and typed it out myself):

Almost No-Knead Bread

An enameled cast-iron Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid yields best results, but the recipe also works in a regular cast-iron Dutch oven or heavy stockpot. Use a mild-flavored lager, such as Budweiser. The bread is best eaten the day it is baked but can be wrapped in aluminum foil and stored in a cool, dry place for up to 2 days.

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus additional for dusting work surfaces
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1-1/2 teaspoon table salt
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons mild-flavored lager
1 tablespoon white vinegar

1. Whisk flour, yeast, and salt in large bowl. Add water, beer, and vinegar. Using rubber spatula, fold mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl until shaggy ball forms. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 18 hours.
2. Lay 12- by 18-inch sheet of parchment paper inside 10-inch skillet and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface and knead 10 to 15 times. Shape dough into ball by pulling edges into middle. Transfer dough, seam-side down, to parchment lined skillet and spray surface of dough with nonstick cooking spray. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let it rise at room temperature until dough has doubled in size and does not readily spring back when poked with your finger, about 2 hours.
3. About 30 minutes before baking, adjust oven rack to lowest position, place 6- to 8-quart heavy-bottomed Dutch oven (with lid) on rack, and heat oven to 500 degrees. Lightly flour top of dough and, using razor blade or very sharp knife, make one 6-inch long, 1/2-inch deep slit along the top of the dough. Carefully remove pot from the oven and remove lid. Pick up dough by lifting parchment overhang and lower into pot (let any excess parchment hang over pot edge). Cover pot with lid and place in oven. Reduce oven temperature to 425 degrees and bake covered for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue to bake until loaf is deep brown and instant-read thermometer inserted into center registers 210 degrees, 20 to 30 minutes longer. Carefully remove bread from pot; transfer to wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours.

The recipe also has an Olives, Rosemary, and Parmesan variation I might try.