I've not often tried to write down recipes, but i'll give this a shot. Really there are a few steps
- make a starter (takes a few days ... or just revive your starter if you already have one)
- one early evening start your dough. Sourdoughs love a long rise in the fridge
This takes a while. In the unlikely event that I'm going to bake them the same day I typically start at 8 in the morning (which isn't that early I know), but don't finish the bread until close to 8pm. It takes a good solid 12 hours to do this right. You can cut it shorter, but you pay for that in lack of lift in your bread. Or, you can just start things the night before as you'll see below.
One more thing. You can add bits like seasoning the top with sesame or poppy seeds, and the like. But this is basically what I do.
So with those highlevel steps in mind here's what I do
Starters are easy, but they do take a couple of days. I've made these before and probably done it differently, but this time I did it with a mixture of rye and plain flour. For my longest living starter I feed it almost exclusively rye.
Find a nice glass jar that will hold up to a liter. Add
- 100 ml of luke warm water
- 100 ml of rye flour mix well with a spoon and let it sit
- 50 ml of luke warm water
- 50 ml of rye flour mix well with a spoon and let it sit
- 50 ml of luke warm water
- 50 ml of wheat flour mix well with a spoon and let it sit
- 50 ml of luke warm water
- 50 ml of rye flour mix well with a spoon and let it sit
- 50 ml of luke warm water
- 50 ml of wheat flour mix well with a spoon and let it sit
By around now you should notice that when you feed your starter that after few hours it's filled with bubbles. Your starters will get better with age, but if you're seeing a lot of activity and bubbles then you're probably good to go. So at this point I stop feeding twice a day unless I know I'm gonna be doing a lot of baking and start feeding once a day... On the internet you'll find a whole bunch of opinions, but this is the way I do it.
Anyway, at this point you have a starter and you can use this for breads forever. If you're not baking often enough and are worried you'll overflow your jar you can pour some out. You can also put in the fridge for a week and then take it out once/week and feed it (typically, feed twice before use).
Now you've got a starter that's working and bubbling away. Early in the morning or the evening before you wanna bake add the following to a bowl
- 500 ml of warm water
- 700 gr of flour. I use
vetemjöl specialas the primary gluten part of the dough. Usually, I'll do about 400 gr ofvetemjöl specialcombined with some whole grain, barley (kornmjöl), semolina (mannagryn), whole grain spelt (dinkel), etc. Now mix it all up with spoon, until it starts to thicken and then work it over with your hands until it forms a nice, sticky ball. NO YEAST YET! We're just starting a chemical process to work on the gluten.
Let this sit for an hour ... Or, if you like, two hours.
Now we're gonna take that autolysed predough and bake with it.
- 150 ml of starter
- 2 - 3 teaspoons of salt (depending on how salty you want it and if you're adding other things)
- some olive oil... I have to be honest I don't measure this. Maybe like a tablespoon I think
- other things if you like... Sometimes I chop olives and add (and if I do I use 2 teaspoons of salt from above 3 is too much if you're also adding olives) or bread spices, or rosemary (which I really like).
This is roughly a 72.5% baker's percentage ... I won't get it into that here, but you can geek out on that online if you like. Take dough beaters and use a mixer to mix this for at least 5 minutes. The goal here is to get the dough so compact and elasticy that it pulls away from the sids of the bowl as you work it. For me this is about 5 minutes.
Now for the next three hours or more so you're going to want to visit the bowl and fold the dough a bit. What I do is wet my hand and then reach down the side of the bowl, grab part of it and try and fold it toward the middle. Then I give the bowl a quarter spin and do it again. I do this 4 times so that if it were a compass I've hit all 4 cardinal directions. When you're done put the towel on and leave it for 30 mins to an hour. Over time this will make the dough more and more finished. It will start to feel firmer and be easier to pull away from the sides of the bowl. At the beginning it's really liquidy and will be hard to work with. Also, you should be seeing it rise. We NEED the dough to rise, so be careful when you're folding to not crush it too much.
At this point your dough should have enough gluten for the windowpane test (look that up if you don't know what it is), but your bread can devlop more flavor if you give some time. I like to cover my dough now and let it rise on the counter for a bare minimum of 2 hours. In fact, I find that if you're house is cool and you're using AC you may be best off waiting 5 hours. At this point I'll take the dough bowl, cover it with plastic (to keep out oxygen.... we want an anaerobic fermentation at this point) and put it in the refrigerator over night or longer. Plan on keeping it in the fridge at least 10 hours, but more is better. After about 48 hours, however, you may go too far. In the morning you can take it out of the refrigerator, sprinkle a workspace with flour and prep two loaves.
Sprinkle your counter with flour and pour it out of the bowl and shape it a bit. Don't crush it and push all the air out, but try to form it into a rough shape without squishing it too much. I like to take my fingers sort of tuck the dough underneath itself over and over again to build of a sort of surface tension. Do this until it starts to get a rough loaf shape. Then cover it in some flower, put a towel over it and let it sit for maybe 30 minutes.
If you have a banneton basked then sprinkle flour (ideally semolina) into it, and all around it and then gingerly lift and roll your dough into it. If you don't then just work it into it's final shape and let it sit for at least 1 hour. Once you've shaped either in a proofing basket or on the counter squeeze the sides toward the middle like you are pinching a burrito. The goal is work on utilizing the surface tension created by the gluten to make the loaf hold itself together even more prior to baking.
If you've got a dutch oven then put it into your oven empty and set your oven to broil (275) for half an hour at least. Then take out your dutch oven, pour your dough out of your banneton basket or just lift if you didn't use one onto a sheet of baking paper. Score the bread with a razor/lome or extremely sharp knife to your liking and lift it into the dutch oven. Put the lid on, turn down the oven temp to 250, and bake it for 22 minutes. When 22 minutes have passed remove the lid, lower the temperature to 225 and bake for 10 more minutes.
If you don't have a dutch oven it's all the same except that you'll pour your dough onto a baking sheet and add a tray of 100% cotton towels that have had boiling water poured over them. Put these in 5 - 10 minutes before you put the bread in the oven so that your oven will begin to get steamy.
When time is up turn off the oven and open the door of the oven a crack and let it sit like that for 15 - 20 minutes. Now take it out and let it cool and then eat and enjoy.