Comment by stevekemp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevekemp | Hacker News Reader

20+ years ago I tried to bake bread a time or two, and it failed. I "recently" tried again, whilst taking care of a small child - on the basis that even if it went horribly wrong he could sit in his chair and play with dough for a while.

This time around almost all my breads have risen, and turned out to be wonderfully edible. My preferred recipe is cobbled together based upon numerous other ones I've seen, and uses yeast, flour, salt and water:

https://blog.steve.fi/this_is_mostly_how_i_make_bread.html

But I've also had a lot of fun with sourdough, the flavours are much better and despite the longer time involved I think it is definitely worthwhile.

I've baked a loaf of bread each evening this week, and tonight I'm taking the night off. But no doubt I'll be baking again on Saturday & Sunday - as I've just found another interesting variety of (Finnish) flour to try using!

This is kind of interesting because your recipe is 95% hydration (water / flour - this is how bakers do ratios), which is crazy high! I've never heard of this before, but I see you don't really shape it so much as scoop it into the dutch oven, which makes sense. Something like 55% is normal for commercial bread, 70% hydration would be much closer to a nice sourdough from the bakery, 75-80%ish for something like ciabatta (using bread flour w/ approx 11% protein) or when you are using whole flour.

Yup I didn't want to complicate that post by talking about bakers-percentages, but you're right it is higher than average. I've juggled different amounts in this recipe before finding the sweet-spot I prefer, but anywhere from 80% to 95% seems to work.

100% is a bit mixed, which is a little disappointing because it makes weighing a lot easier if you're using a balance-scale as I do most of the time.

I was amazed by how long he bakes it and now that you pointed that out, I think that's why. If I baked my usual bread recipe at 475F+ for an hour, it would be a rock!

This is very close to my recipe too! I keep a ~8 litre container in the fridge with dough always ready to go (pizza or bread). Whenever it runs low 2 lb flour, 1.5 Tbsp salt, 4-3/4 cup warm-ish water. You can add yeast or not. If it's still new 1.5 Tbsp yeast though I've had great results with far less or none if the container still has old dough in it.

I love that the dough is always there ready to bake something yummy whenever I want.

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