Bread to share

Today is Glasgow Harvest and I made some bread to take along. Everyone likes bread apart from anti-yeast nutters, so I'm hoping it will go down well. Making it also gave me practice in making larger batches of bread — I usually just do one or two loaves at a time, which is not really the most efficient way of using an oven. I decided to make a few light rye breads with a bit of rye flavour, but enough white wheat flour that the dough stays easy to work with.

As sourdough takes a long time, I had to start a while in advance. On Thursday I took the starter from the fridge where it had been languishing for a while, and refreshed it:

50g starter
200g rye flour
200g water

Then late on Thursday I stepped it up with more flour and water:

1000g rye flour
1000g water
450g goop from Step 1

Halp! It’s alive!

I ended up with 2300g of starter, as some inevitably gets left in the bucket, smeared on the walls, etc. It looked like a lot. Often I just make a straight dough with a small amount of starter, but didn't want to risk the finished dough not rising when it's supposed to. By Friday morning the sponge still didn't seem to be doing very much, but by the evening it was escaping onto the kitchen worktop.

Rather than calculate a particular percentage of rye, I decided just to add another 3kg of white flour to make the final dough. That meant I only had to figure out how much water and salt to add.

3000g white flour
1150g rye flour in the sponge from Step 2
=4150g flour.

For a dough of 59% hydration we thus need (4150 x 0.59) = a total of 2450g liquid in dough
1150g water already contained in the sponge
1300g liquid to be added

85g salt (2% of 4150g)

For a bit of fun, I used beer instead of water for the remaining liquid. It's only 3% and rather bitter. I wonder if anyone will notice?

As I’m of the school that believes in a minimum of kneading, 7kg of dough without a mixer isn't too bad. Just get your hands in, mix it up, let the dough itself do the work. Get it relatively smooth on the counter and it should look after itself.


Then just into the oven with it. I can’t wait to have some of this for breakfast.

Dough split up and proving

Under-proving

Under-proved dough is easier to slash, and doesn't collapse after slashing.


Not completely happy with the crumb though.

This is mostly white flour with a bit of chapati flour. Sourdough of course.

Sourdough pizza

I've been making a lot of pizza recently. I'd kind of got out of the habit. I used to make it regularly, but when I moved to my current abode with its weedy electric oven, I found my old method produced heavy, doughy focaccia instead.

Now I've started rolling out the dough thinner, and since my visit to Franco Manca in Brixton I've experimented with a sourdough base. I never thought it would make such a difference, but it does. I used this recipe from a sourdough guru (though he insists "All this praise is jolly nice of course so long as it is appreciated that the original yeasted recipe is Carol Field's. All I did was convert it to sourdough a long time back.") for the dough and the pizza tastes so much better.

I didn't have a written recipe before; it was more: half fill a bowl with flour, bit of salt, glug of olive oil, yeast, glug of lager, enough water to make a dough. And it worked.

I always enjoyed making the yeast dough because it was ready so quickly. Yet after having tasted a naturally leavened dough with a 20 hour fermentation, I don't want to go back. Of course my oven doesn't go up to 500ºC like a proper pizza oven, but it's still nicer than a yeast dough.

I've also learnt not to leave the dough out at room temperature. The gluten will degrade within a day im summer; you can really feel the difference by the second day when it has already lost its strength and you have to add more flour just to stop it falling apart. It's really weird the way it feels almost liquid-like rather than stretchy and pliable.

The person who taught me to make pizza said old dough was better than freshly made, and he was right, but that's only if it's kept in the fridge.

Insomnia loaf

I couldn't sleep. This is weird for me because I can almost always sleep like a log.

My mind was racing with thinking about baking and brewing (shut up). Eventually I had to get out of bed and go and make some dough. Partly out of solidarity with Andy from the loaf who has to do it at three in the morning, and partly because I'll have no bread tomorrow if I don't.

25% rye, 75% white wheat flour, fennel, caraway and linseed, salt and natural leaven.

Bread bread bread

I haven't baked for a week, and even resorted to buying bread at the weekend. I had a tasty, tangy baguette and a dull poppy seed roll clearly made from cake flour from different stalls at the market. Saturday night I relaxed and fed my sourdough, and by Sunday evening I had this:

Bread again

It looks like my new, re-grown from scratch sourdough is ready to use. I think it's actually better than the old one. Here's the first loaf.

I have taken to making pretty much the same loaf over and over. This is 40% rye and 60% cheap supermarket bread flour, with a touch of caraway.

Also, I've noticed my bread is best when I bake it late at night after coming home from the pub. Don't ask me why.

My fridge is largely devoted to the cultivation of microorganisms, something most people try to prevent

Normal people have mineral water, yoghurt, lettuce, pimientos de padrón and cheese in their fridges.

I have jars of sourdough culture, bottles of beer yeast, proving dough and air-drying bacon.

I'm a freak.

New sourdough

I posted a few days ago that I'd killed my sourdough. It was proving impossible to keep it free of mould, so I reluctantly decided to throw it out (I'd had the same culture for about four years) and start anew.

The culture took off from nothing and was bubbling vigorously after only a day. I don't know whether the warm weather is more conducive to it or whether I just have a lot of yeasts floating about my flat as a result of various fermentation activities. I've noticed sample jars of beer wort spontaneously fermenting too, so I suspect both suppositions are true.

I may attempt to bake from this at the weekend and see if it's potent enough yet.

I killed my sourdough

I think I killed my sourdough.

I'd been having trouble with mould appearing on the surface and it seemed like I was regularly having to scrape off the mould and grow the starter up from a salvaged tablespoonful.

I added a slug of 10% acetic acid vinegar thinking that would keep the mould at bay. And the lactic bacteria like it acidic, don't they?

It also kept the yeast at bay. Dough made from this starter is now showing no signs of growth. I am quite upset.

Back to sourdough

I think my infatuation with beer yeast for bread is coming to an end. It is tremendous fun when freshly harvested and full of life, but goes dormant quickly in the fridge so you never quite know how much of a rise it will give the bread. Sourdough starter is a good bit more predictable. Back to sourdough, back to rye. I've missed them.

Pottering about on a school night

Busy stuff to do tonight. I'm making a batch of chilli and some bread dough. I have neglected my sourdough culture recently in favour of baking with left over beer yeast. I'm going to give it a good feed with rye flour and hope that gets it going again.

I also need to sort out somewhere to store the empty bottles between drinking and filling, so my flat doesn't permanently look like an alcoholic lives there.

Sour Ale Bread

I still have half a dozen bottles of Stale. It's pretty much undrinkable. However, it should be ok in this.

350 ml stale ale
11g salt
sprinkle caraway seeds
150g rye flour
200g white flour
150g wholemeal flour
2 tbsp sourdough starter

Update: no signs of life this morning. I hope the alcohol hasn't killed the sourdough beasties. They usually recover eventually though; I should give them a chance – after all, they've been in a cold fridge for a couple of weeks without much feeding or exercise, as most of my bread recently has been made with beer yeast instead.