Hi everyone,
I'm not sure if anyone will read this, but I so want to thank all the many bakers on this site that I have read and learned so much from. I've probably read several hundred threads! Thanks to these many forum posts, I do feel I understand a little of what I am doing and that's so much more robust and satisfying than simply following a recipe. You are a great bunch of people! I'm inspired by you, one and all.
Secondly, given I just made my first sourdough bread, I wanted to get some advice on improving my technique. This is my first post so bear with me.
My recipe is from Artisan Sourdough, everyday recipe by Emile Raffa
- 50g sourdough starter (mine's called 'Insomnia')
- 350g bread flour
- 500g warm water
- Salt - about 2 teaspoons - my accurate scales need new batteries!
Here's my bubbly starter below. I bought it about 2 weeks ago from Freshly Fermented here in the UK. Link :
Since then I have fed it all purpose flour and 20% wholewheat flour lately and that got it going. The ratios have varied but recently 1:1:1 has proved effective in getting a foamy, bubbly, light appearance.
I combined the ingredients and did a 45 minute autolyse, then did ten minutes of slapping and folding in the way of Bertinet's book (dough). I enjoy this approach as it's more fun than simply folding. I bake bread because I love handling the dough! Ended up with this:
Then it had a bulk fermentation (recipe is geared to overnight) of about 8 hours - it's autumn cool in the house. Looked like this:
Shaped it into boule. Left it 10 minutes, then tightened it up and placed in a floured tea towel in a bowl for proving.
After an hour, I got this:
When I tipped it out, it stuck to the tea towel, but managed to eventually get it into a stainless steel pan that is quite a bit bigger than the boule but has a lid.
I used the amazing soaked tea towel technique from this site to create steam for the first 20 minutes of the bake at 220C. Then out of the pan for the remainder, along with steam out. Baked another 35 minutes at 170C, because i was trying to put two toddlers to sleep and thought I may get delayed. Also, I looked quite brown already.
Ended up with this:
And
And title image:
Had a amazing yeasty smell and good crust. I don't think I had enough salt in it, but combined with a good cheddar and it tasted good.
As a third request (apologies, I'm very enthusiastic), I do want to start adding some WW flour for health and flavor. Any recipe tips along a similar line to this one?
I can't enlarge the thumbnail photos, but looks good to me. BTW, the recipe seems to be off, or you mistyped, 500 water to 350 bread flour would be pretty soupy. - though the other way around would work.
As to salt, 2% is a good baseline number , which would be about 2 teaspoon of table salt, though you can certainly add more to taste.
I generally bake only 100% whole wheat, my advice is to slowly substitute whole wheat - and see how it works out . Typically, you need to increase the water a little, and shorten the time, but go by how the dough feels. You know how it feels at 100 regular flour, substitute 25% whole wheat, add a percent or two of water, and see how it comes out.
Hi Barryvabe,
Thank you for advice on transitioning to WW. That's really helpful advice regarding the times and percentages. Could I just keep on increasing the WW till I get to 100% WW? Or would I need to do some other fancy techniques that I don't quite understand yet like preferment etc.. I've read people sieve out the bigger bits and soak them in a preferment?
By the way, I changed the photos from thumbnails to regular pictures, but perhaps I should have unchecked the constrain box because they still do not enlarge.
And thank you, I edited the recipe errors. That would have been a heck of a hydration!
Many thanks for your advice :)
I still can't enlarge the thumbnails, the only one I really wanted to was the one showing the crumb - in the thumbnail it looks very good, but hard to tell on a small photo.
In change to WW, if you go with home milled, which is what I do, some sift out the larger bits, but others don't. With commercial WW, I don't think people sift.
In terms of techniques, I don't think you need to add any, except that you need to lower your expectations on looks - when done perfectly, WW does not rise as well as BF. Secondly, BF is much more forgiving and easy to get good oven spring . But the taste can't be beat, especially with home milled white or red wheat.
Looks like a few stray big bubbles that should have been popped during shaping. Bread still looks great. For overall larger bubbles a longer final proof might help. For smaller ones, more degassing before shaping.
Mini oven - thanks for sorting out that image of the crumb for me. Also, you wrote a few lines but there's a heck of a lot for me to process.
Point 1: I should look for bubbles in the final shaping, and pop them in the shaping process. I never realised. Will check this in future. Cheers
Point 2: a longer final proof can reduce larger bubbles. That sounds hopeful, as I felt like I cut the final proof a little early to get to bed in good time.
Point 3: more degassing before shaping helps reduce little bubbles? I wasn't quite sure what degassing was, so I did a little read and found a discussion you were in a few years back in October 2016. http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/49427/importance-degassing
I must say it seems like degassing occurs when there is any S&F (stretch and fold? Slap and fold?) during bulk fermentation, and presumably during shaping, which I believe occurs at the end of bulk fermentation. I didn't really know I was trying to do this during shaping, so I'll pay more attention and read more about this. Because it's simply called 'shaping', that's what I did.
Barryvabe - thank you for your advice regards transitioning to WW from BF (bread flour I guess). I'll definitely look into home milling in the future as I gain confidence. Sounds like I'm overcomplicating things, and I'll limit the variables by sticking to this formula and simply changing the flour gradually and adjusting times and water as you suggest.
Many, many thanks to you both. This really is a very special forum.
25% WW and did a retard overnight. This tastes gorgeous. Really pleased. Great advice from both of you.
:)
Wow both your first and second loaves are super successful, congratulations.
Benny