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?

Sourdough Bagels, New York Style

It’s been a couple weeks since we got back from our trip to Manhattan. While my daughter loved Broadway, I really got into the food, in particular hunting down a couple good bagel bakeries and sampling their authentic wares.

Of course, this left me yearning for some New York back home, and wondering if I could replicate them in my own kitchen. And, this particular recipe seemed to do the trick:

New York Style Sourdough Bagels

200g active sourdough starter (stiff)
430g cold water (less for looser starter)
30g maple syrup
750g all-purpose flour
10g salt
15g baking soda (for boiling)
15g brown sugar (for boiling)
150g toppings, eg sesame seeds

First, you should know that I use a fairly stiff starter with about 70% hydration. If you have a looser, wetter starter, your measures should calculate for less water. Bagels tend to target a stiffer dough with a hydration of around 60% so definitely account for that in your water percentage or else you’ll make breadier, lighter, maybe-not-bagels. For example, with a wet starter, say 90% hydration, you probably need about 100g less water.

Otherwise, you’re going to mix up these ingredients — starter, water, syrup, salt and flour –into a nice stiff dough that you can rest for a few hours to a couple days. Longer rests are going to develop the flavours better, of course, but work with the time you have.

After you’ve rested the dough, divide into eight (8) equal pieces, rolling these into balls that you can rest for another ten minutes or so. These balls eventually need to get shaped into the bagels which is an effort that involves rolling out a log that is 20-25cm long and then looping and pressing the ends together into that familiar bagel shape.

Because this is sourdough, you’re in for another 6-8 hours or rise time on your freshly shaped bagels, but when they have risen (which because of the stiffness of the dough is going to seem a bit less than you might get with bread) you can set up your cooking assembly line: a pot of boiling water with the baking soda and sugar dissolved, a plate or shallow dish with your toppings, and a cooking sheet with some parchment.

Boil the rings for about 20 seconds on each side, then as you pull them from the water dip or sprinkle on the toppings and set them onto the baking sheet with a little room to rise (so they don’t stick together!)

Bake at 450F for about 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

My results on the first try were fairly authentic from my week in New York. Tasty. Fresh. Firm on the exterior and chewy-soft on the inside. They cut and toasted beautifully.

My biggest problem is that I’m gonna need to go find myself a vat of whipped cream cheese to schmear atop them.

Local Flours Sours: GroundUp Coffee Flour

I was feeling adventurous when I bought a wee bag of local-ish upcycled coffee flour from a local food market.

For what it purported to be, coffee flour turned out to be little more than milled used coffee grounds, cleaned, dried and packaged as a gluten-free additive for bread or other baking needs.

When I opened the bag for the first time the colour and odor lived up to it’s claim. It looked and smelled like discarded espresso grounds. Admittedly, not very appetizing.

My first batch of bread was as per recommended by the blurb of text on the packaging. I substituted 20% of the bread flour by weight (100g of coffee flour to my 400g of bread flour) to my standard sourdough recipe.

The resulting dough was as black as mud but had a terrific elasticity and smoothness. It still smelled — reeked — of spent coffee, but I was hopeful that the baking process would mellow some of that out.

Honestly, it didn’t.

Those first two loaves could have been mistaken for a couple of over-baked and well-burnt bread. It had the colour of char, for all the world looked like I had forgotten them in the oven for twice their normal baking time. After my standard thirty minutes, the bread was cooked.

First, food that has the colour of burnt is generally not always appetizing. If the first first bite is with the eyes, this bread recipe was a wincing, reluctant bite on colour alone.

Second, though I am a dedicated coffee lover, I couldn’t get over the overwhelming spent coffee scent. A lot of the smell did mellow, but 20% is just too much for this flour. I remarked to my wife (who does not like coffee at all) that they’d do just as well to upcycle cigarette butts into a baking additive for some earthy, tobacco, ashtray aroma.

I ate one slice. Got a stomach ache. (No, really.) And for the first time in a long time in my bread baking career, tossed two loaves into the compost bin.

But I am anything if not forgiving and adventurous, and I tried again. (Not to mention a kilogram of this stuff was the same price as five kilos of bread flour.) This time, however, I substituted at a much lower ratio. Five percent. I used a mere 25g of coffee flour to my 475g of bread flour.

The dough was still grey by the end of the fold cycle, and had a bit of “cookies and cream” appearance, as if little bits of black specks were mixed in with the off-white of the dough.

And instead of two sandwich loaves, I stuck to my single dome loaf for the second attempt.

Success?

I think so.

Note: The third photo, above, is my second attempt loaf, and the main top photo, the first in the post, is the sliced view of the “successful” dome loaf pictured.

It’s not my favourite additive, but the 5% blend does give the bread a very rich colour and a strong nutty-coffee-ish flavour whose odor was mellowed significantly during baking. It was almost a savoury bread, as it tasted pretty decent with a bit of butter but as my morning toast with peanut butter and honey, there was something lacking in the pairing that had me thinking I’ll be sticking to oatmeal until I can bake up a new batch without the coffee flour.

I feel bad that I didn’t really like this, though. Conceptually, it’s awesome. Upscaling food “waste” into reusable food additives or substitutes is a noble goal. And it’s from a company that is just a couple hours down the highway and supporting local business is also something of a noble goal. This would have been a twofer on ethical baking.

At 5% substitution, this little bag of flour will last me for another thirty-five batches, tho. And, to be honest, I can’t see myself making another thirty five batches of this strong-flavoured bread. I’m glad I made it a couple times, but even I only like coffee so much.

Maybe I’ll make some cookies… or biscotti!

Sourdough Muffins

What are English Muffins called in England?

Muffins? Breakfast muffins? Half a Benny?

As I grilled these doughy disks on my cast iron skillet this morning with my daughter lingering over my shoulder hoping she could nab one for her breakfast, I wasn’t really pondering such things.

As 2022 progresses and I recall back to my sourdough goals for this year — in other words, baking with my starter by branching out beyond breads and sandwich loaves — I warmed up and fed my starter yesterday with the intention of attempting to make some English Muffins.

The recipe and process turned out to be much quicker and much simpler than I’d expected.

Unlike the bagels I’d baked about a month ago, the full cycle for this recipe was short and took only about fourteen hours, from idea to tray of hot bready goodness including the twelve hour overnight proof on the counter.

The dough was essentially a wetter, sweeter version of my basic bread, including the addition of liquid sugar (I chose maple syrup, because yes, we just have jugs of maple syrup in the cupboard, ohhhh Canada!) and replacing the water with milk.

the recipe

360g bread flour
240g milk
100g active sourdough starter
20g maple syrup (or honey)
8g salt
cornmeal for dusting

I combined the ingredients (minus the cornmeal) into a fully hydrated dough ball. This took about an hour of resting and folding and resting and folding. My timing here was the critical part, as this needed a twelve-hour counter-top rise. I had this ready to proof for about 7pm so that it would do it’s thing while I slept.

The next morning, the dough ball having easily doubled (or more) in size, I patted it out on a floured surface with my fingertips until it was about 2cm thick. This got cut with a “biscuit cutter” into rounds about 10cm across. (My biscuit cutter was a drinking glass.) I dusted the eight rounds with cornmeal and set them onto a cookie sheet to rest and rise for about one more hour.

I set my cast iron skillet over a medium-low heat. The key here is getting the muffins hot enough to cook evenly through to about 200F, while not over-cooking the outside. Low and slow. We’ve bought enough English Muffins over the years that I have a pretty good eye for what a finished product should look like, but I still used my digital thermometer to make sure they were cooked through. This was mostly me setting the kitchen timer for four minute intervals and flipping only on the beeps. It’s tempting to flip-flip-flip, but I think these benefit from minimal fussing.

For my next attempt (some day in the future) there are some minor adjustments I will make, specifically around the cook time and temperatures, but the only advice I can offer here is that you need to get to know your equipment and work along with it for this recipe. I’m still learning too, but my final product turned out pretty good for a first attempt.

The biggest surprise was the timing. I was expecting this to take much longer. Sure, fourteen hours is not a last minute meal idea, but in the world of sourdough it’s essentially instant fast food, and the type of thing I could see putting together the night before needing to make a family breakfast with unexpected company.

Fresh egg sandwiches everyone?