Sourdough baking

After messing with the moisture content, I think a slightly dryer loaf is getting me the results I'm looking for. Firmer crust and better definition in the scoring.

1/3 wholegrain rye

1/3 white whole wheat

1/3 strong bread flour

70% hydration

20% starter (made with all purpose unbleached white flour 50% hydration)

2% salt

Wee bit of olive oil (oiled the rising bowl)

All the spicy olives we had

Overnight ferment

425F, one hour - first half en cloche, second half just loosely tented with foil because my oven heats from the top.

100g starter + 100g strong flour + 100g water
Let sit 2-9 hours

Add 400g strong flour + 250g (ish) water + 12g (ish) salt
Mix well and adjust water as needed for a relatively dry dough
Let sit 2-20 hours

Fold/roll into a loaf
Proof in fridge 8-48 hours.

Bake 28 minutes at 260c covered in dutch oven
Bake 3 minutes 260c uncovered

They're still tasty but the boules are too short to make decent sandwiches with.

I used less starter, more salt, and a shorter proof time than the recipe called for but they still collapsed. I think I need to cut the amount of starter more aggressively.

A lot of us are experimenting with different ways of baking - driven by high energy prices or issues with a constant supply of electricity, as we have in South Africa.

So, I took a bread in banneton along to a family member who has recently purchased a Kenwood 25l "air fryer oven" which can operate as a convection oven as well, and uses only 1.7kW of electricity, so is more feasible to be powered by solar panels during the day.

The benefit to this little oven is that it claims to reach the 230°C after only 6 minutes - which is far faster than my oven which I give an hour! This is probably where the greatest electricity savings could be realized.

Still learning how to bake with this one - we did 30 minutes in a covered casserole on the bake setting at 230°C (446°F) - followed by another 20 minutes reduced to 200°C (392°F) uncovered. Even after 50 minutes the bread was still pale so we used the air-fryer setting to brown it for a further 10 minutes.

The resultant bread was lovely, the sesame smell really carried through the house that I don't normally get with a normal bake!

This was a lovely bread, even if the shape wasn't as good as it could be - didn't get an ear as it was still fairly slumpy on the bake setting - and the top had a darker strip in the middle, but I think with experience and using the air-fryer setting from the beginning it could be possible to consistently get a great loaf with less electricity usage.

My starter is already quite sour and full of character, so if I use more of it, I'm directly adding those flavors sraight into the dough, but by using more starter it will result in less fermentation time, and less proofing time, which means less sour and less character developed through fermentation and proofing.

On the other hand, if I use less starter, the dough is starting off with less of that initial flavor and character, but the lower starter amount means longer fermentation and proof times, which means more character in the final product.

So which is more impactful to the flavors of the final loaf? The extra initial starter, or the longer fermentation and proof times?

1000g bread flour, 710g water, 40g unfed starter, 20g salt, a few tablespoons of toasted flaxseed and meal, a squirt of honey and some chopped fresh sage. I lost track of what I was doing measuring the flour and had to guess to correct the ratio, so it was wetter than normal, but worked out.

Sharing a gallery for an old bake. I learned a lot and got a lot of inspiration from the sourdough subreddit, so I'm glad to find a community here. This was a recipe for two large boules, containing 1000g flour, 710g water, 40g unfed starter, 20g salt, 1-2tbsp honey, 1-2 tbsp toasted flax and about two handfuls cheese.

That’s all, just was excited and thought I’d share. 😊

I have a recipe I've found and like making because the crumb regularly turns out nicely for me, but I'd like it if the final loaf was a little bit bigger. If I wanted to scale up the recipe to make a 10% bigger loaf, would it be fine to just scale up each of the ingredients by 10% and bake it a little longer? Is there anything else I need to do? Any sort of formula for estimating changes to baking time?

Felt like something sweet. The shaping is based on the accordion bread by autumn kitchen (YouTube https://youtu.be/hLlaB2jacKE).

All of the dough was mixed in the mixer with the sweet matcha paste. Then the dough was split in two and cocoa paste was added to half of the dough, and the two doughs were joined together by following the accordion bread video method. White chocolate and some dried pineapple as inclusions.

This was a fun bread too make. I used a raisin yeast water rather than sourdough here because of all the sugar. Next time I'll up the matcha to get more colour yet and more matcha flavour.

Did them both in dutch ovens, mostly followed King Arthur's "Naturally Leavened Sourdough" recipe with some extra water. I didn't slash them very well, but they still rose quite nicely~

We’ll see soon if I added enough rosemary to make it count as a rosemary loaf.

I bake weekly using a levain. I preserve about 25g from the levain in the refrigerator as my starter. There seem to be two choices for how to do this:

1. After feeding the old starter to begin the levain ferment.

2. After the levain has fermented.

So I conducted an experiment. I now have two 25g starters in my refrigerator. The first is fed but not fermented. The second is fed and fermented.

Visually these starters are quite different. (1) is ‘ bready’ and full of bubbles. (2) is soupy and no visible bubbles, but on close examination there are fine bubbles in it.

Baking the same recipe for each I get approximately identical results.

As far as I can tell it makes no difference which method I use.

My wife and I are looking forward to learning how to maintain our starter and bake with it!

I like my focaccia thick.

So, I want to play with making a levain, which I’ve never done before, and I’m drawn to this recipe: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/pain-au-levain-recipe mostly because I have used other King Arthur recipes with a lot of success. The thing is, it calls for pumpernickel flour and my spouse isn’t a fan. So can I just replace it with the same amount of… Whole wheat flour? Or just white all purpose flour? Or does that not really work and I need to find a new recipe?

Thanks!

I am realizing that my bread knife is not strong enough to handle the crusts on my loaves and it’s impossible to get through the bread much less evenly. What bread knife do you use/would you recommend? Is it just a matter of sharpness or are there other factors to consider?

So, everywhere I look people are saying “getting an ear is easy! Just score it all the way across with a 30 degree angle. It’s so easy!” But what does 30 degrees mean‽ 30 degrees from what? 30 degrees from the table it’s sitting on? Is it the angle of the blade as it enters the dough, or it is 30 degrees up the surface of the dough? Or something I’m not thinking of? Any help would be awesome. Thanks!

As for me, today Iam getting back to making sourdough things and starting a new starter, after being on pause for a year and a half. I look forward to eating my own delicious bread again and would love to see what you made for inspiration!

Made these yesterday and they turned out perfect. This recipe is now my holy grail biscuit recipe. Recipe source: https://littlespoonfarm.com/sourdough-biscuits/

After an overnight cold proof in the fridge these were baked the next morning, with a single difference in how they were handled. The loaf on the left with white sesame had an hour in the proofer whilst the oven heated, and the one on the right stayed in the fridge. They were baked together side by side on my baking steel and did touch in the oven.

Odd that it is the one with the ear! A bit counter intuitive that the loaf on the right didn't open up as cleanly even though it had an hour less of "warm" fermentation. It could also be that the loaves touched in the oven and that changed things.

Sometimes, when we do these slight difference tests we don't learn much.

Enjoyed eating these. 10% of the flour was wholemeal einkorn and the other 90% was of a very interesting sifted white bread flour (that contained a lot of red wheat in it) as can be seen by the colour of the crumb.

Hi all,

So I'm doing experiments to see how 'effortless' I can make fresh sourdough.

I have a dream - and maybe this can't be reality - of doing the cold ferment in a baneton, then transferring that to the freezer for long-term storage.

Has anyone managed to freeze a fully-proofed loaf before baking?