Oakland Sourdough
Oakland sourdough:
This is the basic sourdough that I keep around the house. Nearly every sourdough bread that I do is an edit on this basic recipe, which is sort of a combination of Daniel Leader's Pain de campagne and Chad Robertson's Country Bread.
Ingredients:
310g Sourdough Starter (130% hydration)
250g Water
440g Good quality unbleached AP/Bread Flour
60g Whole Grain Flour (I use whatever I have, WW/Rye/Spelt, etc)
12g salt (I use course grey sea salt)
(50g boiling water)
Method:
In a large bowl, mix sourdough with water and flours until a shaggy dough forms. Let autolysis.
Measure out salt into a small bowl, pour boiling water over the salt to dissolve it. let the salt water come to room temp.
After 45 mins mix the salt water into the dough. (I do this all by hand within the bowl, ala tartine)
S&F the dough a few more times over the course of the rising time (about 2-4 hours, depending on the temp of the house). At this time I either retard the dough in the fridge (on a weekday, so I can go to work), or proceed to pre-shape.
Pre-shape the dough into a round (If removing from fridge, let dough reach room temp before pre-shape). Let pre-shaped dough bench rest for 15 mins, then shape into a round and place in a cast-iron dutch oven to rise.
30 mins before bread is proofed pre-heat oven to 500F. Place lid on DO and put into pre-heated oven. Bake for 20 mins covered. Remove lid, turn down to 450F and bake for 15 mins.
Take bread out of DO (carefully) and let cool on a rack. Enjoy!
The pictured bread is cracked wheat/White Whole Wheat as the whole grain part.
Comments
This is one really beautiful sourdough. BaybaKin!! Nice way proofing the formed dough in your DO. Absolutely lovely crust, but why tease us? Show us what it looks like sliced.
Thanks! I haven't broken into the bread yet, but I shall when I get off work, and I'll update with a pic.
Beautiful looking crust. What is the purpose of adding boiling water to the salt?
The purpose is to dissolve the salt, I use a very course salt that wouldn't mix into the dough very well if added straight after the autolysis.
The crust looks like the bread was retarded after shaping, but that's not the procedure you describe. It's gorgeous, in any case.
David
My fridge never seem to have enough room in it for a shaped bread, so as a result my process has strayed away from it. I think the blisters may have to do with the DO trapping steam and the pressures involved, as I only seem to get ones this dramatic when using a DO.
And also in a cold DO for some reason. It's all in the steam I'm thinking. Good steam good blisters.
Good fermented bread, nice crumb picture, baybakin!
a very nice looking boule. Especailly the very brown blistered crust. Seems SF SD has the small % of whole grain in it. It must be required! Nice baking!
Great looking loaf baybakin. David's right I see the same retard blister spots on the crust. How does it toast?
Wild-Yeast
The bread toasts up awesome! Had some with avocado and brie on it for breakfast, but with just butter it really brings out the acidity and wheat-y flavors.
The crust looks delicious!!
I´ve noticed you did not preheat your DO, though result looks awesome. I always have a hard time placing my loaves on super hot DO. Can you please comment on this, do you think that preheating DO is not necessary?
Thanks
I too had problems putting the risen bread into a super-hot DO (I didn't have the nifty interlocking ones recommended in the Tartine book). There's a video someone posted here on thefreshloaf which showed Chad Robertson himself not pre-heating his DO before baking. I searched around, and found some people where having some pretty good results with the final rise taking place in the dutch oven itself. Of course this could result in a flatter loaf if the gluten structure isn't developed enough, and you can't retard the final shaped dough. I find these two problems are outweighed by me not burning a hole in my hand and deflating my loaf by attempting to place the fully-proofed dough into a 500F DO.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/27143/chad-robertson-masterclass-video <- here is the link
Thanks a lot for the detailed response! I am doing an attempt without preheating in a few hours...
I echo all of the compliments above, fab looking loaf. I once tried a cold dutch over (cast iron) and an overnight rise in same. The bottom of the bread stuck when I tried to remove it. Perhaps because i removed it while the loaf was too hot. Two questions please:
After the bake, how long do you let the loaf cool before removing it from the dutch oven?
Are you using any parchment paper or oil on the dutch oven, or just putting it in "naked"?
Thank you!
Hey Nick, I'd love to answer your questions:
1. I remove the bread from the dutch oven as soon as it is taken out of the oven. I do this with a large uneven spatula so as not to burn myself, and place the bread on a cooling rack.
2. No parchment paper, but I do lightly oil the dutch oven with peanut oil before placing the bread to rise within it (peanut oil has a high smoke point, I've found olive oil more likely to leave black marks).
Hope this helps!
Tried this recipe today as I have been drooling over these photos for a month now. The dough turned out super slack, almost like ciabatta. I did the retarding in fridge for 14 hours then pre-shape. If it was too much water to flour ratio, I would have had to adjust the ratio quite a bit from the recipe above. Not sure what went wrong. :( Perhaps over-proofed.
Dont let the blistered crust fool you into thinking this was a success. So many things went wrong with this loaf. Why did the dark spotting happen? Why the odd Ciabatta shape? If you look closely to the first photo, on the right side you can see where I performed a poke test. Nice little divet. What gives?
Will update with crumb photos and flavour, but I'm afraid to find out.
John
Ok Hold The Phone....
I just saw this recipe on the following link:
http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/san-francisco-style-sourdough-bread/
This recipe states to make the 'starter' out of
126 g bread flour
83 g water
24 g sourdough culture
This to me sounds like a levain build but they call it a 'starter.' I thought the term starter refers to what we keep in a jar, and feed and discard...that thing up in the cupboard that I feed like a pet, I call that my sourdough starter.
So did I do something majorly wrong by using my starter from my jar instead of a 'levain' in the Oakland Sourdough?? The recipe calls for
310g Sourdough Starter (130% hydration)
So I just poured 310 g of my sourdough starter into the recipe. NOT a levain. Does the Oakland Sourdough recipe above expect us to figure that 310 g of LEVAIN is supposed to be used and NOT a starter from our jar?
Might this explain why my dough was so slack?
John
It is a pretty wet dough, hydration comes it at about 78%
The sourdough culture I keep is at 100% hydration, but this bread calls for 130% hydration. To get to that from my stock starter I do a feed as follows:
50g mature 100% hydration sourdough starter (yes the culture you keep in a jar)
180g water
130g flour
Let ferment for about 8 hours (I do overnight) if you use 310g of this mixture, it comes out about right. the other 50g usually just gets stick to the bowl for me, and I turn it into crackers.
Baybakin. Thanks for the clarification. I had a feeling I did something wrong. In saying that, I did slice the bread up and was happy with the crumb and the texture and flavour was amazing! I LOVE it. The only thing I didn't like was how slack the dough was and unmanageable during the shaping process. Horrible actually. AND I wasn't quite happy with the exterior look, but I can live with that. Next time I will try it using the levain method you describe above. Here are some photos of the crumb.
You may need to do a few more stretch and folds. You could be having a problem with gluten development.
I was thinking this as well. I was worried to extend the bulk fermenting time as I was already at the 5 hour mark. I did feel the dough still needed a few more stretch and folds because of the feel, but didn't want to prolong the ferment to 6 or 7 hours. What would you have done?
I think my mistake (other than using 310g of straight sourdough culture starter) was to take the bowl of dough with me in the car while I went grocery shopping. It was a cool day and I think the 2 hours in the car did not give the proper heat needed in the first 4 stretch and folds.
John