Sourdough baking inspires fear in new bakers. The doughs have much higher hydration, which usually means sticky fingers and much harder shaping times. Just scoring a high-hydration loaf is a daunting task as the first slash causes the loaf to ooze out.
The tips below are my top discoveries which I stumbled onto by accident.
What are the secrets of a healthy sourdough starter?
Sourdough is a living thing. A typical jar of starter can easily contain well over 200 billion lactobacilli cells and 2 billion yeast cells… this means that you have your own pets to look after!
The bacteria and yeasts in your jar are always under threat. Forget to feed them or water them and they will die out. Forget to refresh their food, ad they will die out. Make them too hot and they will die out… but worse than that, it is very easy to treat the jars inappropriately and the good yeasts and bacteria get overwhelmed by bad ones.
So, how do we keep track of these bacteria and yeasts?
- Use temperature to your advantage.
- Gently warm the jar and the cultures grow much faster. This is great if you need to bake soon but the starter is not quite fizzing away.
- Cool the jar in the fridge and you slow down the yeasts and bacteria. This means that they multiply slower and do not consume as much food. You can keep your starter in your fridge without feeding it for about 1 month
- Use quality ingredients
- Filter your water. Chlorine is used to kill bacteria in the water… it will kill the bacteria in your starter.
- Use unbleached flour. Bleach is essentially chlorine and while care is taken to clean up the excess chlorine, one can never be too careful.
- Sterilize your jars prior to use. All surfaces contain bad bacteria and yeasts. Many beginners forget to sterilize their jar to kill pre-existing bacteria and they often forget to use a clean spoon when feeding the starter. It is simple for forget and lick or play with the spoon thus introducing bad bacteria to the starter.
What do I feed my starter?
The type of flour that you select does not affect the starter to much. After all, to yeast, a starch is but a sugar in waiting… However, it is always a good practice to match your flour to your bread. Rye flour for rye bread, wholemeal for brown bread, etc.
In general, white flour is the most neutral but wholemeal flour is healthier than white or brown flour.
If we can, we try to use rye flour though as we find that rye flour is best at maintaining a stable culture and the starter stays lively for longer in the fridge.
If you are planning to make enriched breads such as croissants or Pannetone, you will need to fortify your starter to make it used to the harder conditions. Simply add 20% sugar and 2% salt to the starter and replenish 3 times prior to use.
Why is my dough sticking to my hands, work surface and tools?
Sourdough is a high hydration dough, which means that you are essentially making a thick, sticky paste and then you go and play with it… if your worksurface or hands are not prepared properly, the dough will stick to these surfaces.
There are two ways to avoid a sticky dough:
- If the dough is a low hydration dough, say less than 70%, use flour on your hands and work surface to avoid it sticking.
- Work carefully and every so often, just jerk the dough on the surface to confirm that it is not sticking. Not too hard, just a gentle, sharp push. If the dough sticks, use your scrapper to loosen it and toss a little bit more flour on the worksurface. You need so little flour that you will not change the hydration ratio,
- This hydration level lends itself well to a proper kneading technique as the dough will stick just enough to the worksurface to allow you to stretch and fold it during the kneading step.
- Give your dough a good workout. It will seem too dry at first, then it will get a bit sticky, within the first 5 minutes. Do not panic and add flour. No, keep kneading steadily for another 5 minutes and the dough will become smooth and elastic and will pickup and stray bits sticking to you…
- If the dough is high hydration, above 70%, rather wet your hands and work surface when you handle the dough.
- This is counterintuitive, but adding a little flour will not do the trick. You have to add a lot of flour to make the dough less sticky, essentially bringing the hydration to well below 70%. On the other hand, if you use a little water that you will not change the hydration ratio, and best of all, any excess water is not easily mixed into the dough.
- Using a high hydration dough, and wetting surfaces means that you cannot easily knead the dough as you do not have the required friction with the worksurface. This is not a train-wreck as a special folding technique has been developed to develop this dough.
Overnight proving – when, why and how do it?
Overnight proving is one of my favourite techniques. The basic idea is that yeast will convert starch to sugars and proteins to starch. But yeast is a living organism, so by controlling the temperature, you can control the speed at which the yeast develops.
The bacteria and yeasts at play in the starter are fascinating, with no two starters exactly the same. There are general trends though, with the first set of bacteria acting to break down the starches in the flour into sugars, which are then eaten by the yeast and converted into carbon dioxide (CO2) and ethanol. The starter also tends to contain two types of lactic acid bacteria, homofermentative and heterofermentative. Let’s just call them LAB A and LAB B.. LAB A produce the more complex flavours of sourdough and improve the shelf life and texture of the bread Lab B on the other hand, make the bread taste much more sour. The older the starter, the more of the LAB B bacteria are present. LAB B also makes the bread much more acidic, which breaks down the glutten.
Under colder conditions, most of the bacteria and yeast multiply much more slowly, thus the whole proving process is delayed or retarded… But LAB B prefers colder temperatures, so slowly it will impart its flavours to the bread, adding the subtle tang of acetic acid (vinegar).
A little bit of yeast development is OK, but not great. Your bread will rise some, but will feel dense. Too much development leads to flat breads as the yeast first supports the creation of gluten which gives the dough its elasticity and oven spring. However, as time passes, the yeast will start to breakdown this gluten, reducing the internal structure of the bread, and making it much more acidic or sour. These loaves look great in the banneton, but just collapse as soon as you touch them.
By using the fridge to prove overnight, you can slow down the proving process while developing a much finer crumb and richer taste. Essentially, you can treat the 8 hours delay in the fridge as about 1 hour of proving time. Best of all, you can decide whether the first or second proving should be in the fridge, thus controlling exactly how the end product tastes and feels. The first proving tends to develop the flavour while the second proving tends to develop the denseness of the crumb.
How to develop different crusts
Most beginners will follow a recipe blindly and perhaps ignore the most important step – the Dutch Oven step. Faced with the alien concept of baking a loaf inside a pot placed inside an oven, most bakers will just pop their dough straight onto a baking sheet in the oven. They are then disappointed when they take the final product out of the oven.
- Set your oven to 10 degrees above the desired temperature. When you open the oven to bake the bread, you let some heat out.. setting the oven temperature above the target temperature, you can rest assured that your oven does not cool down too much… Once the bread is in, simply turn down the oven to the desired setting.
- Bake the first 20 minutes without the fan. The initial part of cooking invariably involves removing excess moisture from your material. The moisture from the crust will evaporate and steam up the oven. This is great as a moist environment means that the crust formed will be much thinner. Once you turn on the fan, the steam gets driven out of the oven through vents. The Dutch Oven is simply a smaller volume in which to trap the steam.
- Place a tray of boiling water in the oven for 5 minutes prior to baking. This will create a moist environment full of steam, ideal for the crust of the bread. If you want the steam to last longer, add in a few ice cubes.
- Preheat your baking surfaces. Baking should start from the bottom up, thus preheating a bread stone or a pot helps to grow the bread.
- Spray a gentle mist on the bread to delay cooking even further.
- Bake at a higher temperature for a thinner crust and a lower temperature for a thicker crust. The hotter the oven, the faster the baking time and therefore the less time the crust has to thicken.
How to keep your crust crispy
Ironically, too much moisture in the last part of the baking process is pretty bad. What you need to do is turn on the fan half-way through, or remove the tray of water from the oven and crack open the door to let the steam out.
Also, try baking the bread a bit longer to ensure that it is completely baked prior to turning off the oven.
Cool the bread on a wire rack and then once cooled, set it in an air-tight container. This will ensure that you do not trap moisture in the container, which ages the bread faster.
How to handle low protein content in the flour
Proteins get converted to gluten and with the current fad, many flours have a ridiculously low protein content.
Gluten essentially is alike a rubber band that hold the bread together. helps it maintain its shape and trap the CO2. Insufficient gluten basically means that your bread will be flat and dense.
To counter this, buy a tub full of vital wheat gluten, which is a purified form of gluten, so a little goes a long way.
Substitute between 5 and 10% of the flour with vital wheat gluten and mix properly. You now have the required vital wheat gluten for baking. Too much and your bread will fell like plastic..
