sourdough bread

Anniversary bake and jelly cake

/ Christine Pennylegion / 3 Comments

No, not our wedding anniversary, although we did have one relatively recently. I mean this little lady’s anniversary:

My good girl Sheryl has been hanging out for a year now. She lives in the cold and the dark and puts up with gross neglect for weeks on end. Yet for all that, she still makes some lovely loaves! My kitchen is cold and so they never end up as lofty as other peoples’ seem to, but they’re chewy and tangy nonetheless. Way to go, Sheryl.

Just look at that blistered crust. I have to say, I think that sourdough starters are a lot more flexible and resilient than a lot of people seem to think. The internet is awash with all sorts of finicky methods (usually named after somebody) that involve very precise times and temperatures and adjusting the amount of water in relation to the humidity of the air, as well as (I assume) performing certain obscure incantations and using flour that was ground in the light of the full moon.

I do pay attention to my measurements — a kitchen scale is a handy tool for this sort of thing — but other than that? I figure that people have been making sourdough for thousands of years. This is something you would carry around in a crock while you followed your goat herd and then baked over hot rocks. It’s a yeast colony. It will survive.

In other culinary news, I’ve been (somewhat inexplicably) really getting into gelatine lately. Why? It’s hard to say. I’ve always loved jell-o (especially with a little dab of fake whipped cream on top, like we always had at summer camp). And when I made panna cotta in the kids’ breakfast milk cups for April Fools, I realised how easy it actually is and a whole world opened up.

Anyway, here’s a jelly cake:

The top layer is orange jell-o with shredded carrot inside (something I remember having at potlucks long, long ago) and the bottom layer is a milk gelatin made with sweetened condensed milk. I don’t actually have any proper molds so this was made in a lightly greased bread pan, which worked well except for being slightly too long for the plate once decanted.

As you can see from that “bloom” of milk jelly in the middle, the orange layer wasn’t quite set enough when I poured in the second, and there was a little intermingling. No matter; I count this very successful as a first attempt and look forward to more experimentation. Nobody here likes jellies as much as I do, so I’ll probably be eating most of those experiments alone.

I am 100% ok with this.

Sourdough for a cold kitchen

/ Christine Pennylegion

Remember when I started baking sourdough, earlier on in covidtide? Yeah, me too. It was enjoyable for a while, but I started running into frustrations: having to keep a large amount of starter alive, bakes that didn’t rise like they should, gummy centres. I didn’t like how much mental space it took up as I tried to figure out and execute the perfect timing for each step. It stopped feeling like it was worth it.

But last week, I came across the post in the sourdough subreddit that changed things for me. The author made the point that baking sourdough is something that’s been happening for thousands of years — long before thermometers, fancy le crueset bakeware, or well-calibrated electric ovens. It’s supposed to be easy. She outlined a method where you just mix everything in one step, plop it on the counter for a long rise, and then bake it.

Freaking. Brilliant. After all those months of practicing and experimenting and nit-picking… what finally gave me the perfect rise and crumb was keeping things dead simple, with a tiny amount of starter and a good long rise. It also means that I was able to get rid of my huge tub of starter; now it lives in the fridge in a tiny jelly jar and I only feed it once a week.

I also realised that my kitchen is cold. During the fall and winter, we keep the house at 68F, which does not kill the yeast but definitely slows it down considerably. I had been trying to make sourdough after letting my dough rise on the counter for about six hours. As it turns out, I needed to triple that number. So here is my method for a long, slow rise in a chilly kitchen.

Ingredients:

  • 500 grams flour
  • 20 grams unfed starter (yes: a teeny amount and straight from the fridge!)
  • 10 grams sea salt
  • 355 grams tepid filtered water

Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl. Mix with your hands until there are no dry spots left.

Do four sets of stretches and folds, spaced 15-30 minutes apart. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise on the counter for 18 hours (I start the process at noon to bake a little after 6 am the next morning).

In the morning, your dough should have at least doubled. Place your baking vessel and lid (I used a casserole dish) in the oven and preheat to 500F.

30 minutes after the oven turns on, preshape your dough on the counter and let it rest.

15 minutes after preshape, do your final shape and pop it into the baking vessel — don’t forget your oven mitts! Turn the oven down to 450 F.

Bake 25 minutes, then remove lid of baking vessel. Bake an additional 25-30 minutes until your crust reaches the desired colour. Turn oven off, and leave bread in the oven with the door cracked for about an hour.

Remove to cooling rack and let finish cooling completely before slicing — this may take a few hours but it will be worth it. Then slice and enjoy!

Meet Sheryl

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

No, Sheryl isn’t Tertia’s real name. Sheryl is my sourdough starter. That’s right; I’m becoming one of those people.

A few months ago, my bread machine committed suicide by dramatically leaping off the kitchen counter in the middle of a knead cycle, thereby shattering itself into about seven pieces. It was pretty spectacular. Anyway, since then I have been baking our sandwich loaves most weeks, and I’ve really enjoyed doing it. Baking bread is something that always seems like a larger job in my head than it is in reality; it takes a long time, but very little of that time is active. And kneading dough is very satisfying! I love the way you can feel it transform under your hands.

Anyway, the sandwich bread is just a regular wheat bread made with commercial yeast. But yeast can be kind of pricey (and, apparently, subject to quarantine-related panic buying) and keeping track of how much I have is annoying, especially when the jar is almost gone and there’s not quite enough for another full batch of something. Which made me think, well, why not give sourdough a shot?

I followed this method from The Kitchn to make my starter, which took about five days. At first nothing dramatic was happening — I had little bubbles but not much of that good yeasty smell — but then on day four I could smell the sour yeastiness I was hoping for, as well as the alcohol created by the bacterial action. (I wonder: is sourdough moonshine a thing?) And then on day five — pow! Sheryl had doubled in size overnight and was ready to rock.I knew I wanted to do an overnight rise and bake in the morning, so I followed this recipe, which is literally just the first result I got when I searched for “overnight sourdough bread”. The active time is even shorter than it is with a commercial yeast bread. I measured out some starter, water, flour, and salt, and mixed it with my hands for about a minute. This is what it looked like at that point, as it rested for thirty minutes:

After the dough rests, you gently stretch it and fold it over on itself for about a minute. You can immediately see the difference in the texture between the last picture and this next one: from dry and crumbly we have moved on to stretchy and hydrated.

After that… not much happens for quite a while. The recipe says to let it rest for eight hours; my dough rested for closer to sixteen, which didn’t appear to do it any harm. (The longer rise probably helped, in fact, since we keep our house on the cool side.) But in the morning, it had smoothed out and bulked up, as promised:

When I was ready to bake, I took the loaf out and quickly shaped it. Now, next time I will transfer the dough into an oiled clean bowl before leaving it overnight, because it was really hard to get the dough out of its bowl without squishing it and popping the interior bubbles. It was very and I ended up leaving some behind in the bowl. But what was left had a nice rest before I popped it into the oven. I don’t have a proper Dutch oven for baking; fortunately, my casserole dish also does the trick.

And here is the result!

You may be able to see right by the bottom crust that it’s a little underdone there and could probably have used a few more minutes in the oven. But I am supremely happy with this first attempt! The bread is chewy and tangy, and tastes amazing toasted with some butter and cinnamon sugar. Sheryl and I? I think we’re going to get along.