Chris Poupart in Food 13 minutes

Starting with Sourdough

Sourdough bread is all the rage these days. I’ve been baking bread at home for years now, so I thought that I would share some tips and techniques for people who are interested.

Some basic terms:

  • Autolysis: Autolysis (also known as autolyse in French) is a method of letting the yeast and bacteria do some of the work on your dough for you. By mixing the leaven, flour, and water together, but withholding the salt and letting the dough rest for an hour, you create a solid gluten structure similar to what is achieved by kneading. Only, you don’t need to knead. The salt is added after the autolysis to ensure the dough develops a better elasticity and strength. I use autolysis in most of my recipes because frankly, I’m too busy to bother with kneading.

  • Cold Proofing: Many people know this from the no-knead bread baking craze, cold proofing produces a lot of extra flavour in the bread. It slows down the fermentation, and supposidly increases the bioavailability of nutrients in the bread. A cold boule will also give you a more caramelized crust. You can leave your dough in the fridge in your proofing basket for 12 to 36 hours. This also provides some flexibility, allowing you to bake your bread when you have the time.

  • Measuring: The most accurate way to measure ingredients for baking is to use a kitchen scale. If you don’t have one, you are going to want to go buy one. Decent kitchen scales can be purchased for as little as $15. The truth is, measuring flour based on volume is tricky. You can end up with more or less flour in 1 cup depending on how fine it is ground.

  • Flour: Bread flour should be fairly high in protein. For an optimal crumb look for a stone-ground flour that is at least 11% protein. White bread flour is usually between 12%-16% protein (the nutritional label should read something like “12g protein” for a 100g portion). Lower protein bread will still work, but will provide a different texture. That being said, my new favourite flour, an integral whole wheat bread flour is 11.7% protein.

  • Mixing: If you can, mix by hand. Machines are prone to over-mix, and when you mix by hand, you will learn what your dough feels like. Over time, you will be better able to know when the dough has the right feel and texture.

  • Water: The amount of water needed will depend on your flour – whole wheat will often require more water than white flour. Flour that has been sitting on the shelf for longer will likewise require more water. If your dough feels too dry, don’t be afraid to add some more water, though, slowly.

  • Tangzhong: (Also called tangzhong roux or tangzhong water roux) Not a classic technique for European sourdough, this is an Asian technique that can be used in making rolls and sandwich bread. It involves boiling some of the flour before mixing it and create a fluffly light crumb and longer shelf life. Some traditional European breads are done similarly, cooking the bran from the whole wheat before adding the slurry back into the bread.

  • Leaven: This is much like feeding your sourdough starter. You take some of your mature starter and feed it, letting it get active for a few hours before mixing it into your autolysis. It is important that your leaven is at or near it’s peak in order to get proper sourdough bread. If it is underdeveloped, your dough will not rise properly and you will have dense bread. If you let it overdevelop, it will impart a very sour flavour to your dough which will overpower the mild flavours of your grain. Despite the name, sourdough should not be sour.

    How long it takes to mature depends on several factors, including how much starter your use. In the chart below, I include a short maturation recipe, and a longer maturation recipe.

    To know if it is done, it must have swelled in size and become porous, with some bubbles on the surface. It should smell mildly acidic, with a slight fruity sweet smell. To be on the safe side, the first few times you make a leaven, you should consider doing a “float test”. This is exactly what it sounds like – you take a cup of water, and add roughly 1 tsp of leaven. If it floats, it is ready for use. If it sinks, wait a little longer.

  • Scoring: Scoring your bread with a very sharp knife is important. It allows your bread to expand as it bakes, even once the crust has begun to form. If you do not score your bread, it will develop a more dense crumb. If you make bread reagularly, you should consider investing in a bread lame. These are usually a handle to which you can attach safety razor blades. The blades will last a while, and are inexpensive to replace (costing as little as $0.30 each.)

  • Steam: Steam is also important during the baking process. It helps keep the crust soft in the early stages of baking, which will allow better expansion of your loaf. If you are cooking in a cast-iron Dutch oven with a tight lid, you don’t need to do anything else. The moisture from the bread itself will provide all the steam that is necessary. On the other hand, if you are baking on a baking stone or fire stones, then you will need to add ~500ml of boiling water to a roasting pan on the bottom level of your oven. In both cases, you will want to reduce the humidity after the first 20 minutes of baking, by either removing the lid of the Dutch oven, or crack the door of your oven to allow more of the water to escape.

Basic Sourdough Loaf - Step by Step

I am not going to get into details on starting your soudrough starter. This presumes that you have a mature active starter that has been fed at least twice over the past day, and that it is full of life and ready to go. I may do another post on beginning a starter.

This should produce a nice loaf, and the techniques used here can be leveraged for many other European-style sourdough breads.

1. Set the Leaven

Starting a leaven is a lot like feeding your starter, with more or less the same intention – to get the yeast and bacteria active and making CO2. Everything takes place in a mixing bowl.

Option 1: Short leaven (2-4 hours)

Add the following to a mixing bowl, stir together well, and let it sit at room temperature for 2-4 hours, until ready:

  • 40g mature starter
  • 30g warm water
  • 15g white bread flour
  • 15g whole wheat flour

Option 2: Long leaven (4-8 hours)

Add the following to a mixing bowl, stir together well, and let it sit at room temperature for 4-8 hours, until ready:

  • 20g mature starter
  • 40g warm water
  • 20g white bread flour
  • 20g whole wheat flour

2. Autolysis

Add the following ingredients into the mixing bowl with your leaven, and combine with your hands until mixed. Gather the dough and the extra flour from the edges with a spatula or a soft dough scraper. Cover the bowl with a damp dish cloth and let it sit for 1 hour at room temperature.

  • 375g to 425g of warm (~39C) water. (Start at the lower end, and then add more if your flour requires it.)
  • 250g of white bread flour
  • 150g of whole wheat flour

3. Add Salt and Pinch

Add 2 tsp (10g) of fine sea salt eavenly over the dough, and then using your thumb and index finger, pinch out small balls of dough. Repeat the process of pinching the dough until you feel it begin to tighten and it becomes harder to pinch. This helps break up the gluten network, forcing it to reorganize again and form stronger bonds.

Cover and let it rest for 30 minutes on the counter.

4. Stretch and Fold

This proces is repeated 3 times at 30 minute intervals.

Wet your hand (and wet it again as needed so that the dough does not stick to it) and push your fingers down around the edges of the dough and the bowl. Grab the underside of the dough and fold it over to the opposite edge. Rotate the bowl and repeate. Work your way around the bowl, folding 5 to 8 times, until the dough has firmed up. Unlike pinching, the goal here is not to break the gluten network, but to stretch it.

Wait 30 minutes, and repeat 2 more times.

After the last folding, let the dough rest until it has increased in size by roughly 30%. This can take between 30 minutes to 1 1/2 hours, but usually takes 1 hour.

5. The First Shaping

Take out a bowl of flour (to dip your hands into), add some flour onto a clean flat surface, then add some more. It should be well floured. Scrape your dough onto the floured surface with a bread scraper. Use the bread scraper to fold the dough over itself a few times working your way around the dough, and then all the way over so that the dough sits folds-down on the table. If you don’t have a bread scraper, you can do this with your hands. Keep them floured so the dough does not stick to them.

6. Bench Rest

Sprinkle some flour over the bread and let it rest for 15 to 20 minutes. The dough should become a little flatter around the edges as the gluten bonds relax. This relaxed dough will make the next shaping easier.

7. Final Shaping

Begin this stage by flouring your proofing basket. Add more flour than you think you will need until you become familiar with the process and get used to how much flour you actually need. In this case, more is better than less. If you have rice flour, a 1:1 mix of wheat flour and rice flour works really well to prevent sticking.

If you don’t have a proofing basket and don’t want to buy one, then use a mixing bowl. You can use a bit of cooking spray in order to get the flour to stick to the walls of the bowl.

Next, flour your dough and the surface next to it. As with before, it’s better to have too much flour at this stage instead of not enough. Loosen the dough from the surface and flip it over onto the floured surface. Then, fold the top of the dough towards the center. Repeat with the right side, then the left side, and finally the bottom. You will now have a large square. Grab one corner, stretch it a little bit, and fold it to the centre. Repeat with the remaining corners. When all 4 corners are folded in gently flip the dough over so the smooth side is up. If the dough still feels loose, use a dough scraper or spatula to tighten it some more by pushing in around the bottom.

Finally, lift it into your proofing basket so that the seams are up.

8. Basket Proofing

How long you need to basket proof will depend on many factors, including how warm it is, and how much it rose in the bowl during step 3. This is where experience will really come into play, as you don’t want to over or under-rise the dough at this stage.

If your kitchen is cold, stick the basket in your oven with the oven light on. This is usually enough to ensure a good rise.

Let the dough rise for roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

9. Cold Proofing

Stick your proofing basket into your fridge. Cover it loosly if you want. Keep it there for between 12 to 36 hours, depending on when you want to bake it.

10. Baking

Baking bread needs two things: Very hot heat, and moisture. The below techniques describe how to achieve both to get the best possible crust and crumb out of a home oven.

The baking itself can be devided into two parts. In the first part, moisture is essential to allow the bread to expand. It keeps the crust moist, and will allow the scoring made on top to burst open. In the last part, the crust is formed, and it is best done in a dry environment, so efforts should be taken to remove as much moisture as possible. This will result in a darkly caramelized crisp and delicious crust.

Option 1: Dutch Oven

  1. Stick your Dutch oven and lid into the oven and preheat the oven to it’s max temperature for 1 hour.
  2. When the time is up, remove your dough from the fridge and place it on your counter. With good oven mits, remove the pot from the oven and remove the lid. (Note: I don’t like to place this super-hot pot on my glass stovetop, so I place it on a cutting board. The cutting board now has many scorch marks. Be careful, this is hot.)
  3. Reduce your oven temperature to 460F
  4. Sprinkle a thin layer of flour the underside of your loaf (the side that is up in your proofing basket), and sprinkle some flour onto a bread peel or something similar (my bread peel broke some time ago, so I have been using a wooden cutting board). Gently dump the dough out of the proofing basket onto the floured peel.
  5. Score your dough with a lame or very sharp blade. For your first time, a simple square works well. You should cut about 0.5cm deep. Use quick fluid movements to prevent the dough from tearing.
  6. Slide the bread from the peel into the pot. This takes some practice to get right, but don’t worry. The shape of the Dutch oven almost guarantees a decent looking loaf.
  7. With your oven mitts on, put the lid on, and put the pot back in the oven.
  8. After 20 minutes, remove the lid, and reduce the temperature to 450F.
  9. Cook for another 20 minutes, or a bit longer until your crust is a dark golden brown colour.
  10. Remove the pot from the oven, and dump out the bread. Let it cool on a rack.

Option 2: Firebricks or Baking Stone

  1. Add a roasting pan to the bottom rack of your oven. Make sure that your baking stone or firebricks are on the middle rack.
  2. Preheat the oven to it’s max temperature for 1 hour, and set a kettle to boil some water.
  3. When the time is up, remove your dough from the fridge and place it on your counter.
  4. Reduce your oven temperature to 460F.
  5. Pour 500ml of boiling water into the roasting pan.
  6. Sprinkle a thin layer of flour the underside of your loaf (the side that is up in your proofing basket), and sprinkle some flour onto a bread peel or something similar (my bread peel broke some time ago, so I have been using a wooden cutting board). Gently dump the dough out of the proofing basket onto the floured peel.
  7. Score your dough with a lame or very sharp blade. For your first time, a simple square works well. You should cut about 0.5cm deep. Use quick fluid movements to prevent the dough from tearing.
  8. Slide the bread from the peel onto your baking stone or firebricks.
  9. After 20 minutes, crack the door of your oven to allow more moisture to escape and reduce the temperature to 450F.
  10. Cook for another 20 minutes, or a bit longer until your crust is a dark golden brown colour.
  11. Use your bread peel to remove your loaf from the oven, and allow it to cool on a cooling rack.