If you read this blog, you’d know that I’m a bread fanatic, both baking and consumption, it’s something I love doing and I’m always working on how to get the best results. The last few month have seen me dabble with sourdough in an attempt to nail down a certain process and dough. The dough in question is from Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, great bread but also a slightly tricky method, its taken me seven attempts to get results I’m happy with.
Today’s loaf has been the best yet, I feel my method is getting more accurate and I’m hoping to be more consistent in the future. The key to this is two important steps for me, firstly I use my starter to make a young leaven and secondly I rise the bread in the fridge over night.
Today's Loaf
A young leaven is made using the starter I described previously, which should have a strong acidic almost unpleasant smell, and at times if you use too much can be overpowering. A young leaven uses 2 tablespoons of this along with 200g of flour (whichever flour you want to use for you bread) and 200g water, mix them together the night before you need the leaven and leave at room temperature. This produces an active bubbly leaven with a light fruity smell, rather than something that will overpower you loaf. I then use 150g of this leaven per 500g flour in the dough recipe.
Close up of the crust
The long rise in the fridge has two effects, firstly producing a better flavour, but more importantly making the dough more manageable. Due to using a very wet dough, 75% hydration, getting the loaf from the proving basket to baking tray and slashing was proving (excuse the pun) difficult. I had several times when the dough stuck to the basket or collapsed and spread too far, with the cooled dough, the final loaf easily came out of the basket without any collapsing or misshaping. The slashing of the dough was also easy with no drag of the blade on sticky dough.
The crumb
This isn’t a full recipe, if you want one please see an earlier post of mine, or preferably buy the book Tartine Bread, its excellent. If you are having trouble with your sourdough, as I was, or if you want to try it yourself these tips should really help you.
- Tartine Bread (liverpoolrestaurants.wordpress.com)
- Sourdough Bread Recipe (liverpoolrestaurants.wordpress.com)
- San Francisco Sourdough (bewitchingkitchen.com)
- Sourdough starter from scratch (maekellan.wordpress.com)
- Sourdough Progress – Day 3 (blessedrootsblog.wordpress.com)
