I’m feeling more confident now with this sourdough recipe. I’ve had pretty good success now that I’ve baked it a few times with the hydration lowered to 74% from about 78%. This is Maurizio’s beginner sourdough recipe which fortunately we love the flavour of. The only change this time was that I added 0.5% diastatic malt powder to the dough during the autolyse.
I loved last weekend’s apple pie and needed to bake another dessert to go with dinner tonight with friends. I decided to make this Cranberry Apple Bourbon Pie this weekend. I tried to do a plaid lattice design to also do something different than I have tried before. As I have been doing, I used Bravetart’s all butter crust again as it has become my favorite.
I am still lacking consistency bake to bake. One reason is that I’m only baking sourdough every 2 weeks on average, but this week got another bake in. I’ve still been trying Maurizio’s Beginner Sourdough as that was the first one I started with and wanted to gain some confidence baking it. Two weeks ago I made an error and added way too much water and the dough lacked structure, it tasted fine but it was a bit on the pancake side of things. This week I decided to hold back 20 g of water during autolyse, so rather than 78% hydration the bread would be 74%.
Well a year and a half into my pie baking “career” I’ve finally made my first apple pie. I know a lot of people love apple pie, but I hate peeling apples and have no space for a dedicated apple peeler in my apartment kitchen. However, this apple pie turned out so well I might have to make room.
I followed the Bravetart Apple Pie recipe almost exactly and overall it turned out well. I used once again the all butter crust recipe from Bravetart however, this time I subbed 40 g of the water for 40 g of vodka to see if it would make the pastry a touch more tender.
I am still working on my skills with sourdough, having had some recent success I thought I see if I can replicate that success. With this bake I also thought I’d try shaping using a spritz of water on the counter and my hands, unfortunately that didn’t go so well. I’m not sure why it didn’t work, perhaps I used too much water, that is the most likely cause. After the shaping didn’t go well with water, I let the blob rest and then reshaped using flour, this went a bit better but not as good as my previous bake.
I’m sorry about posting another Beginner’s Sourdough loaf but I wanted to repeat it a few more times to see if I am getting any more consistent results. I reduced the hydration by 20 gms when mixing to try to account for water added while doing coil folds etc. I found that the dough was quite stiff despite a several hour autolyze, I think this was the reduced hydration unless I actually reduced by even more than I thought. The lower hydration made slap and folds very hard.
Tonight’s dinner. Again I used the Community Bake Recipe for sourdough pizza dough, thanks again to Danny and ThePieKing for the CB.
I have found that the dough is even better after a 72 hour cold fermentation and that the gluten hasn’t broken down at all.
