another sourdough day

It’s a random Wednesday morning in March and I’ve just pulled my starter out of the fridge. The lovely box of yeasty goodness will celebrate it’s fourth birthday next month and my daughter is keen to break out the sourdough recipe book and try some recipes that are not bread.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing quite a bit in my daily thread this past month and a half about my sourdough and it felt like a good day to combine, mix, fold and proof those words into a proper post here.

Set oven to hot and…

sourdough loaves

I’ve stopped counting how many loaves of bread I’ve made with my starter. It passed the three hundred mark about six months ago, and I ran out of room for tick marks on the lid of the container where I keep the magic.

I made two more last night, sandwich loaves in little cast iron loaf pans, crispy on the outside and fluffy and delicious on the interior.

This morning (February 13th) there are about one and a quarter loaves left. That’s what happens when four adult (or at least three adults and one not-quite-but-eats-like-an-adult) lives in your house. Fresh bread does not last long.

sourdough first day

I sometimes tell people who ask about my bread that sourdough isn’t difficult. It’s just twenty minutes of work spread across two full days.

On day one I start in the morning and take my starter out of the fridge. Some people will tell you that you need to keep in on the counter, feed it every day, and care for it as if it were a child. My starter will be four years old next month and he comes out of the fridge for about 12 hours at a time, just long enough to prime for action… then fed, watered, and right back to bed.

My starter comes out of the fridge at about 7am, before I head out to work, and by the time I get home it’s warm and bubbly and active.

I mix my dough, and while I’ve got the flour out on the counter, I replace the half of the starter I used with two parts flour and one part water and double him back up to his regular size with a good mix.

The starter goes back in the fridge. The dough has some countertop time and some folds over the next couple hours, and it joins the starter.

Ten tough minutes of work, spread across that first day and I’ve got a fed starter and a bowl of dough resting for tomorrow.

sourdough second day

The dough spent the night in the fridge and this morning, shortly after I got up and while I was bustling around the kitchen to feed the dog and make coffee and wake up, I put the covered bowl onto the counter to warm up a bit.

It was still cool an hour later when I weighed, cut, kneaded and rolled the dough into a pair of loaf blanks and dropped them into my parchment-lined cast iron loaf pans.

Those two loaves will rest and proof on the counter, out of the way from disturbance, covered and quiet and warm at room temperature until later today. Maybe it will take ten hours, twelve hours or even fourteen — it all depends on the mood of my yeast this week. (But I’m guessing 12 hours.)

When those loaves rise up over the lip of the pan and start to look and feel ready, I’ll heat the oven up to 450F and put them inside for a thirty minute bake.

When the timer chimes, I’ll pull them out onto a cooling rack and savour the smell of fresh baked bread through the house while it lasts. It only lasts a while, sadly.

Ten more minutes of work, spread across the second day and I’ve got two loaves of fresh sourdough ready to enjoy for breakfast in the morning.

sour flour power

The flour makes all the difference to the end product… at least according to my daughter, who will devour a half loaf of bread in a sitting when I use 100% white bread flour to make my weekly breads versus a slice here and there when I substitute even as little as 10% for rye, whole wheat or some other blend into the mix.

I prefer the grainy breads and the darker results.

But there is something captivatingly powerful to the teenage mind for white bread, it seems.

This is doubly strange when one considers that we never buy white bread. Not that we buy bread much (or ever really) now anyhow but back when loaves of sliced bread were still on our shopping list we would always go for the grainy, wheat-ish, non-white bread every time.

Hamburger and hot dog buns, sure. White bread.

But sliced loaves? Never.

So, all this means that I’ve had to limit my flour experimenting to alternate bakes, white one week, blend the next, repeat, to surrender to the allure and power of white bread flour.

dough, soured

The thing about sourdough is that there is an advantage to a long proof.

So, when you mix your dough on Wednesday night, say, and intend to rest in the refrigerator overnight and then countertop proof it the next day so that, say, you can bake it on Thursday evening… but you forget and go to work instead and leave the dough in the fridge…

Well.

You can countertop proof it on Friday and bake it up Friday evening (instead of Thursday as you had intended) and not only is the final bread fine, it is arguably better for the longer rest in the fridge. Better flavour. Better rise. Better all round.

Amazing.

This may have definitely been a true story.

bread journaling.

Do you keep a baking journal.

I know, if you’re not a hardcore baker or sour-bread-head, then maybe that sounds a little nutty.

But after nearly four years of baking sourdough from my little kitchen and having a few of photos and plenty of tasty memories, I realize I haven’t kept great notes on what I made, how I made it, or when or why or how or whatever…

I blogged a bit, and you can find it here.

I made lots of tick marks on my starter-ware to denote a baking event.

But I couldn’t tell you the specifics.

Specifics and details and notes are how you learn and get better.

My bread is pretty good, but it could always be better, right?

So. Maybe a journal isn’t a terrible idea.

How do you keep a bread journal and what kinds of things do you write in it?

Lotsa Bread

I’ve been thinking about bread a lot more than I’ve been writing about it here.

Eating it too.

I crossed yet another sourdough milestone this past weekend when I extracted from my hot oven a pair of pandemic bread loaves, loaves numbered two-hundred-and-forty-nine and two-hundred-and-fifty.

Yes, I keep track.

And yes, I’ve baked 250 loaves of sandwich bread in the last two years since that fateful day when I got sent home from the office to work in my cold basement.

My starter, which turns three next month, is mature and active and beautiful. I pulled it from the fridge that same afternoon to warm up on the counter, prepping my plans for bread baking even before setting up my laptop for work.

Two years of bread. Three years of sourdough. Two hundred and fifty sandwich loaves and so many other random baking experiments that had I not kept careful record of I might not even believe it myself.

In that time…

My flour collection has rotated through all purpose bags, to generic supply-chain shortage stocks, to small mill local flours, to artisan bakery bags, and grocery store best for bread varieties.

I’ve played with beers replacing water.

I’ve dabbled in mix-ins and spices and cheeses and sweetness levels.

I’ve made bagels and pizza dough and buns and pan bread.

It’s been two years of hundreds of hours of baking that has taught me so much about bread yet has only just whet my appetite to learn more. And there is lots more to learn.

I go back to the office (at least part time) in a couple weeks and the mid-day bread baking breaks will shift to accommodate that new life.

It’s a little sad, but then again, when I started this and was only a couple dozen loaves in I joked with my daughter that someday she would inherit the “pandemic bread starter” that bit of flour and water and yeast that helped sustain us through a weird time in history.

And it really did.

Cheesy Garlic Pan Bread

Back in December I was going through my end-of-the-year questions and spent a post lamenting the fact that despite baking up a lot of sourdough, I hadn’t spent much time exploring the potential of my starter as a starter for other recipes besides bread.

A goal for 2022 was to branch out, and the suggestions I gave myself in that post were to try some variety of recipes such as doughnuts, bagels or english muffins.

Instead, as inspiration would have it, I started instead with a crusty pan bread.

The Youtube algorithm tends to show me a lot of baking content these days, and my playlist offered up a recipe for a thick crust pan pizza. I skipped the pizza part and instead used some of the pizza advice and a half a recipe of my sourdough bread to whip up a tasty cheese bread that complimented our evening meal of beef stew.

cheesy garlic pan bread

500g bread flour
350g water
12g salt
250g active sourdough starter
250g hard cheese
3 garlic cloves
60ml olive oil
10g finishing salt

I made my basic sourdough recipe using the flour, water, salt and starter. This went through the typical hydration and folding cycle and then got covered and popped into the fridge overnight. Technically, I only used half of this to make the pan bread and used the other half to bake some simple sourdough rolls, but I’m sure any innovative baker can figure out something clever to do with half a recipe of ready-to-rise sourdough dough.

I oiled up my ten inch cast iron pan (using half the oil) and halving the dough from above, I balled and then flattened it, shaping it into a thick disk that sat about an inch from all sides of the pan. It was about 8am when I did this, and I wouldn’t go onto the next step until nearly 5pm when the dough disk had risen to a lovely volume that was closer to being ready to bake.

My folks had given us a huge wedge of gouda cheese as part of a Christmas basket, so I grated down a bunch of that. I also crushed the garlic in the remaining oil. Just like one might do with a loaf of foccacia I dimpled the surface of my dough disk with my finger tips then spread the garlic oil roughly over the surface.

Here’s the first trick I learned from that Youtube video. I took about half the grated cheese and made a thick edge right up against the edge of the disk and touching the cast iron. The point here is that as is melts it drips along the crack and gets all fried and crusty making a crispy cheesy edge.

The point is, you want the cheese (and quite a bit of it) right up to the edge of the dough.

With a saltier cheese I may have skipped this extra finishing salt sprinkled atop this whole creation. I like salty garlic bread, probably an artifact of growing up on garlic bread made from buttered toast sprinkled with garlic salt not real garlic, but it really does bring an added dimension to the finished product.

This spent 28 minutes in a 425F oven, but I was watching it carefully for the last five.

The second trick I learned from that Youtube video came right at the end. I checked the browning on the crust of the bread after I pulled it out of the oven to make sure it wasn’t too brown (it wasn’t) and then lit up the stovetop where I continued frying the bread right there in the cast iron pan for another 3 minutes. That crust just browned up a little more and it popped out of the pan glorious and crusty and cheesy as I expected.

My biggest problem was making sure there was some left over for tomorrow.

It was delicious, fresh and steaming hot from the oven, and I’ll be adding this to my regular rotation for family meals or perhaps even to share with friends some day again.

Sourdough But Not Bread

It’s been a long twenty-one months of pandemic craziness, but I’ve kept myself a little more sane by baking a lot of sourdough bread.

A few loaves per week. A regular diet of sourdough toast for breakfast. A healthy source of bread for the family.

But in all that time I haven’t explored much further into the sourdough family than experimenting with basic flour blends and a bit of beer hydration. I haven’t explored all the possibilities that a fine-tuned sourdough starter has to offer.

What’s something you
should have cooked in 2021,
but didn’t?

In the coming year I’d like to try at least three new sourdough recipes.

I don’t yet have these recipes, but I’ve encountered them in the past, online, and I know with just the right search words I’ll likely be able to find something that lines up neatly and to my satisfaction.

First up, bagels.

Bagels? You know the dense and chewy bready rings popular in different styles around the world, Montreal-style or a’la New York. A bit of cream cheese with some smoked lox from nearby British Columbia seems like it would suit a sourdough experiment just fine by me. I’ve seen a few Youtubers spinning up a delicious bagel recipe with a sourdough base and I’ve never had the nerve to follow all the extra steps to get that job done, but in 2022 I think this is something in my cooking queue.

Second, english muffins.

We’ve been buying only one type of bread with any consistency since the pandemic started and my adventures with supplying the household with sourdough loaves began. English muffins are the classic ingredient in a hearty breakfast sandwich, which also happens to be one of my daughter’s self-sufficiency foods: she cooks herself a breakfast sandwich for lunch on the weekends or whenever a teenage hollow-leg syndrome strikes. A fried egg, a slice of ham, a bit of cheese all squeezed between a toasted english muffin is also an ideal thing to prep on a cast iron griddle, but I think I can go one step further in 2022 and try making my own english muffins using my sourdough starter.

Finally, doughnuts.

Like our neighbours to the south, we Canadians can be fiends for our doughnuts. In the past I’ve used my big dutch oven to deep fry multiple batches of yeast doughnuts. My daughter loves this because not only do they turn out delicious but she enjoys decorating them with chocolate, sprinkles, or all sorts of other toppings. Like bagels and english muffins I’ve come to appreciate that store bought yeast has nothing on bready treats that start with a bit of mother dough instead. I’d like to put this theory to the test.

Next year, it seems, is going to be one where I explore the tasty potential of my sourdough starter. And who knows, I might even find a new specialty. If nothing else, you’ll be reading about it here.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.