A scheduling tool for bread baking
breadscheduler.com
breadscheduler.com
This is a great beginner's guide that I have shared with many folks: https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/. After some time I have settled on theperfectloaf's 'best sourdough' recipe, which has a higher hydration.
The "Quarantine bread" receipt was wonderful last week. This week, for some reason it turns out terrible (dough very sticky, bread burnt on the outside, etc.) No idea what went wrong and what I should have done to fix this.
Temperature and humidity can change day-to-day (and certainly week-to-week) in a residence. Same with the temperature of "cold" water coming out of your tap. A thermometer and a kitchen scale go a long way towards consistently implementing recipes (and therefore getting consistent results).
Some general tips:
- If the dough is too sticky, add flour! Check the stickiness before bulk fermentation.
- Check the dough during the rise. If it has risen a lot and "domed" early, punch it down or give it a fold. If it's time for a fold but it hasn't risen much yet, let it rise longer!
- If you find your rise times are shorter than the recipe, use cooler water. If your rise times are too long, use warmer water.
- If you don't have a baking stone, baking steel, or dutch oven, you can use an inverted cast iron pan as a baking steel.
- Preheat your oven for an hour or more. Residential ovens often have substantial internal temperature variations. I use dutch ovens to bake bread, but also keep a baking stone on the lowest oven rack as a way to regulate the oven's temperature.
Leaving it for ten minutes/waiting for the flour to hydrate then mixing again can help out when the temperature is off.
The normal recipe is to leave 24 hours the dough in fridge and it says that you can leave it for 48 or even 96 hours :)
Your first loaf is unlikely to come out great, if your starter is not matured yet - because the yeast/bacteria ratio in it is unlikely to be optimal.
I've been doing it for years and it's the only kind of bread that I can make on a regular basis. It's something you can actually do daily, not an additional hobby.
Ingredients:
* 400g full-grain rye flour
* 300g wheat flour
* 10-15g salt
* 600ml water
* 50-80g levain starter (rye based)
mix, wait 6-8h, bake at 210C for 1h05.
This is a very popular kind of bread in Poland, while I found that in the US people don't really know what to do with full-grain rye flour. I've read books that said it can only be used to make dark pumpernickel breads, and I never found the recipe above (or similar) in any bread-baking books I've read.
Also, the rye starter is fairly stable, forgiving and easy to maintain in a fridge.
- to clarify, is the "wheat flour" whole wheat or white? If the latter, all-purpose or high protein "bread" flour?
- do you think it makes much of a difference if the levain is rye based? My understanding is that if the amount of levain is small relative to the overall amount of flour in a rye-based bread like this, it doesn't much matter fermentation-wise.
I've read that rye flour in North America isn't as good a quality as that in Europe. This makes me sad. I grind my own rye berries, but it would be nice if I had the opportunity some time to try your stuff.
And let me go out on a limb with one more question. Many years ago, our grocery store in a town with a heritage in eastern Europe sold a loaf of bread called "heavy rye bread". It was made of a fine flour, was quite dark, and was super tough to chew. I have never had a bread like it since and I have looked hard. It wasn't sourdough like a Borodinski bread, nor was it coarse like Scandanavian rye breads. Perhaps you might know of this bread?
I think the levain should be rye-based, but I do not have data to back that up. Never tried anything different.
As to the quality of rye flour in America, the organic one from Hodgson Mill was good and very comparable to what I use in Poland. The non-organic one less so.
I think the dark bread you described resembles a pumpernickel, but I'm not sure. I never liked pumpernickel much.
Oh, I forgot one important thing in the US: the water in your tap! If it's chemical plant waste like in many places, it can't be used for bread baking. Specifically, if it's chlorinated, you might get away with keeping some in a jar waiting for the chlorine to evaporate. But if chloramines are used (like in San Diego, for example), you're screwed. I had to buy a good activated carbon water filter before I could bake bread in San Diego. I think it's a good idea anyway.
The theory goes that full-grain flours tend to inhbit gluten development, so the crumb ends up being finer-textured and the oven spring not that dramatic.
For a lot of things you can't really get away with fully replacing wheat flour, but you can usually do half / half with good results.
I haven't made sourdough for a few years, but I think I was either doing 1 : 1 : 1 (white, wheat, rye) or 2 : 1 : 1.
Also, the easiest way to create a sourdough culture is literally just mix rye flour and water in roughly equal parts. Cover with a cloth to keep bugs out, and then dump out (our use) half each day and add in more flour and water to get back up to the original level.
It's basically the most idiot-proof process I can think of.
The main reason I keep getting out of the habit is that you need to monitor the thing basically daily. Otherwise you can put it in the fridge and take a bit less care of it, but then you need to build it back up for a few days before you can use it.
I've always wondered if I'm just being too cautious about the starter though. I know that people have said they thrive on neglect.
Once you get a good one, maintaining it is rather easy, though. Feed it every day, and if you forget for a day or two, it doesn't matter that much. It's fairly abuse-proof: for years I even left a portion of dough as the levain for the next bread, which you should not do, because it contains salt (which slows the development of either yeast or bacteria, don't remember now). Everything was fine.
It's all pretty magical: the levain doesn't spoil, because of the low pH. The bread also keeps for a long time (a week, easily).
Given the number of questions, I think I should write up a quick manual on practical bread baking, submit it to HN, and watch it get noticed by no one :-)
Finding rye at retail stores in the USA is very difficult. I have to order mine directly from a mill.
Then again, Minneapolis is AKA the Mill City!
It's difficult to get because nobody knows how to use it :-)
We rarely buy bread at the store anymore.
After years of baking sourdough I find that I cannot predict precisely the timing. I have to judge the dough at each step and not proceed until it is ready. This is especially true in that I like trying new things, making tweaks, fermenting at different temperatures, and this alters the timing. The timing depends highly on temperature, where in the refresh cycle the starter is at (still rising? fallen and foamy?), but also very much on your particular starter. Some starters run slow (especially newly created ones). Others are fast. Using someone else's timing just never seemed to work for me. Early on when I started baking sourdough I made some absolute bricks because I followed the timing that the recipe specified, even though their descriptions of the dough seemed very different to what I was seeing. And if they said two hours, then eight hours must certainly be enough... but it wasn't enough. Yes, it really can be off by that far (especially with a new weak sourdough starter that wasn't refreshed properly).
Nonetheless, you have to have some sort of plan. Turns out that I can always make it work within a certain set of bounds if I am home all day on some given day. And that has driven me into the following pattern:
1. Remove sourdough starter from refrigerator the night before, and refresh.
2. Build dough in the mid morning with active starter
3. Bulk ferment (with stretches and folds) in a proofer until it is ready
4. Pre shape. Then shape. Then refrigerate in bags.
5. Bake the loaves (I always do two boules) early the next morning.
This is by no means the only pattern that can be made to work, but it's robust and flexible enough for anything I've ever thrown at it.
Temperature control makes an enormous difference. I live in a cold house, hence why I built this. To make things worse, my kitchen has marble worktops. So if you use cold or tepid water and then knead, you end up cooling the dough even more on the counter. It's a bit different with Tartine because you don't really knead the dough, but still - yeast is optimally active around 25C or so and if you have to wait for the dough to come up to temperature, that can easily add an hour or two. So you can control this by measuring the temp of your water and using a climate controlled box (which costs about a tenth of one of those pop-up Broder ones).
I do agree about starter refresh cycles though, as well as what hydration you put in, how much you put in, what exactly the flour is. I don't climate control my starter except during the winter when it sits by the boiler.
Most of the time my routine is identical to yours. Feed the starter overnight Friday, make the dough Saturday morning and bulk it during the day. Refrigerate overnight and bake on Sunday.
Strongly recommend watching Chad do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4dyWZZVeWI
It answered a lot of questions I had from reading the book.
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Noma_Guide_to_Fer...
I recommend adding a wire rack so your container doesn't sit directly on the mat as well.
Weights are in grams, but temperature is in fahrenheit (I think, doesn’t actually say).
Please use one measurement system make it consistent, as well as switchable. Thanks.
I think this is due to the use of "baker's percentages", which specify the weight (not volume) of all ingredients in terms of a percentage of the weight of flour used. So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor.
It's a lot easier to do this using grams uniformly, than some mix of lbs, oz, cups, tsp, etc. The system really takes advantage of the ease of conversion between units in the metric system.
But the oven temperate doesn't change even if you add more flour, so there's no need to do any scaling conversions for that. This let's people get away with using antiquated units for temperate.
I think maybe there's a typo here with "salt" vs "water"?
I've had a hard time with these percentages. 3% salt means 3 grams of salt for every 97 grams of flour, but that doesn't seem to be how it's used in baking. Same with water: 100% hydration is half water, half flour, because they're talking in ratios rather than actual percentages.
I guess the important part is that these are percentage ratios, so it's really 3%:1 salt and 100%:1 hydration.
I too have a hard time with the percentages - it's a ratio against the weight of the flour, not a proportion of the entire dry mass. I guess that's why they call them "baker's percentages", as opposed to "the common understanding of percentages" :)
In Canada the temp is in C, but some weight measurements are in lbs.
I think, however, that for many folks who are trying out baking sourdough for the first time, it helps them a lot to start with a fully detailed recipe that includes timing. The instructions on that bread scheduler will AT LEAST get you to the right ball park (assuming you use similar flour to the instructions).
For those starting this out, I would recommend following one of these detailed recipes, do it several times or more, and that way develop some sense of what factors to tweak.
Taking a closer look at the instructions, I see they're not emphasizing dough temperature during bulk ferment. Household kitchen temperatures can vary quite widely and this temperature is an important factor in how long the dough takes to ferment. That's why it's valuable to press the dough with your finger and gauge readiness prior to shaping steps.
My dough was a full 10 degrees F warmer than normal after mixing recently, and it finished rising 1/6 faster (about 2 hours). Temperature strongly impacts the fermentation stage (warmer means the yeast works faster).
700ml flour, 350ml water, 1 to 1.5 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp instant yeast. Mix in bowl, cover, let stand for 12-16 hours. Put dutch oven in oven, heat to 250C. Take out the hot dutch oven, sprinkle some bran or flour or cornmeal on the bottom, scrape dough from the bowl into the dutch oven, sprinkle some bran on top. Bake 30min with lid, remove lid, bake 20min more.
I am sure extra steps (autolyse) and extra work (folding, shaping) would improve it, but even this minimal procedure makes tasty bread.
You just scrape the risen dough from the bowl into the dutch oven with minimal disturbance, so you don't disturb the air bubbles too much. And your oven and the dutch oven need to be hot at this point, so the dough goes right into a hot oven, the heat expands the air bubbles and gives you some oven spring.
Other recipes make you sprinkle flour on a working surface, fold and shape the dough into a loaf, and then leave it, giving the shaped loaf a second rise.
- Put everything in a bowl, and mix it until it's consistent. Usually takes 2-ish minutes. I find a simple, non-sharp knife to work best. - Cover it with cloth and let it sit for 12-20 hours depending on the mixture and temperature. - Get the mixture out, en cover with flower on all sides. Don't knead or overly touch (it will lose volume). - Preheat the oven with an iron cast over pot, once it's hot (250C), take out the pot, put in the mixture, and put on the lid. Halfway into the baking time, take off the lid.
The bread will look like this: https://holycowvegan.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/no-knead...
If you stop the baking without the lid sooner, it will look like this: https://joyfoodsunshine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/dutch...
Care to share your measurements? I’m aiming for something similar, but having trouble getting my ratios dialed in.
Protip to any future breadmakers: buy a cast iron Dutch oven. It's the real game changer.
Thinking through not having access to a proper dutch oven, water would probably work but I'd think you'd still need a cover of sorts, even if makeshift foil.
Shaping isn't quite as good, and the side crust is less browned, but overall it's night and day better than on a tray/stone.
(Doing it now, cause my dutch oven isn't here, and the pasta pot is.)
ymmv and I don't know where you live, but I was able order one off Amazon and get it in about 4 days about a week ago. Just mixed up the dough for my first bread a few hours ago :)
You might want to proofread the recipe steps, check the temps update with metric/imperial switches, and add a TLS redirect.
Also, the "Autolyse" step tells you to use 402g of white flour while the overview specifies 804g. (Judging by the hydration they must certainly mean 402g).
Following a schedule exactly is a great way to make Frisbees (short dense loaves)
Listen.
Dough is a living organism. You cannot set a timer to it. It must be nursed, especially based on what flour you use, freshness of the flour, the climate, the moisture etc.
If you want to be really good at baking, then bake at least 100 loafs and see what you learn.
Then try to change the flour brand and bake again. Then you will se a different result.
You cannot time food. Get it.
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/36/Meat-Lasagna
Edited to add: Oh, and you mentioned shoelaces, so the venerable Ian's Shoelace Site is a must:
And honestly, good butter is hard to find too, although I did locate a little store in San Mateo that carries Echire.
Would you mind adding a 12h/24h switcher? I’m in the EU and I can’t figure out what 12am means vs. 12pm even though I keep looking it up.
The easiest way I've found to understand it is to think of 12 as being zero, so the times go 11am (11) -> 00pm (12) -> 1pm (13) -> 11pm (23) -> 00am (24) -> 1am (25).
Feature request: adjust timing automatically given a humidity + temperature measure.
Feature request 2: fetch ambient humidity and temperature automatically from users' GPS and time of day. ;-)
I just set the start time to "right now". Safari Version 13.1 (15609.1.20.111.8)
I tried my first bake yesterday, and it... did not go well. Second try is currently forming. Fingers crossed.
These loaves of bread-style-wheat things are not made with just the basic ingredients needed for bread. There are the E numbers for preservatives and whatever else is 'needed'. Often the additives are added to the flour rather than the dough and therefore do not have to be listed. Stuff derived from human hair can get in there as an 'E number'. Often people self-diagnose themselves as having gluten or other allergies when there could be problems with the additives rather than the core product of what bread is supposed to be.
Chucking out store bought bread and joining the sourdough club is a popular reaction to the industrial nonsense that poses as 'bread'. However, there are economic factors at play here. Sourdough keeps and it can be sold at a premium.
Actual fresh bread made with yeast and zero additives does not keep and cannot be sold at a premium. It is also less trendy and not on the radar of the hipster crowd. However, if one is sorting out one's bread properly then a bread machine and the ingredients for bread making is a shrewd investment. It takes five minutes to load the machine with 500g of flour, 360 ml of water, 25g of some type of fat, a teaspoon of yeast, a teaspoon and a half of sugar (to make the yeast do its thing) and a teaspoon and a quarter of salt. You can then press the start button to have the freshest bread you could wish for in four hours. Or you can set the timer so it is ready in the morning or when you are back from work.
By taking this approach you have the benefits of pure, fresh bread with none of the downsides of lengthy preparation times. You don't need an app to manage your sourdough. It is also energy efficient as a bread machine is a small rather than large appliance. The Panasonic machines are best as you have recipes based on that machine plus you can get spare parts and the beginners manual uses metric rather than obscure 'cup sizes'.
With home-machine, properly bakes bread you don't need to be chewing on some sourdough rusk that is essentially stale, you can fire up the machine and keep the fresh loaves coming every 2-3 days. You can mix and match the flours to keep your bread varied. You can also focus on what you eat your bread with rather than try to forever by adding ingredients to the bread such as tomatoes, olives, nuts etc.
If you can maintain the routine then you never need join the sourdough club, you can cut your own way with the innovative 'yeast' ingredient used properly rather than thrown out.
That is a fair comment that needs a few words to understand. I appreciate that to those that can only write one liners this could appear as a 'rant'. But it is not.
However, I do now have a reason to rant, to rant about those that write things such as your comment without explaining in full why the need is there for sugar in bread.
Try this: Mix yeast and a batch sized quantity of water. Nothing really happens, but the yeast (depending on the type you've added) will dissolve or break apart. Add some flour, about what you'd add in sugar. Mix it so that the flour is not in clumps.
If the water temperature is reasonable, the yeast will start to break down the carbohydrate in the flour into sugar, consume it, and start bubbling. Then add it to bread, as the yeast has been proofed.
Some yeasts don't require the proofing step (SAF red for one). It's perfectly fine to add to the dry ingredients. I like that stuff, super reliable and easy to use but despite being french, I've never seen it outside the states. Some yeasts are better for sweet breads (like panettone, cinnamon rolls, or others). Some yeasts come in little sachets just suck and are hard to work with, like the stuff I had in the cupboard pre-pandemic.