Cooking Cheap

—- Sourdough French Bread —-

“Adventures in Sourdough Cooking & Baking”
Charles D. Wilford (1977)

Modified by yours truly. Makes two loaves or baguettes. I think one of the reasons this works is because the dough is divided into two instead of one big lump. It’s easier to get a good rise and oven spring if the rise and the spring don’t have work on a big lump.

It’s a standard process very familiar to yeast bakers with a couple of important twists.
Make a batter (sponge, biga or whatever you like to call it) and let it ferment overnight. This lets the goo get that sour taste from the lactobacillus after the yeast have overpopulated themselves. Like every book I’ve read, I think it is important to have a spot that is close to 85 degrees (F) to let the goo gooble and for rising later. Remember, the goals. We want yeast and we want sour. Then we bake.

It’s a long recipe but it’s not that hard. It does take a day and a half or more. The basic procedure is to
1. Refresh your starter
2. Make the sponge
3. Ferment the sponge
4. Mix in everything , then knead
5. Rise.
6. Punch down, shape and let rise again.
7. Bake

Steps 1 is unique to sourdough. If it was yeast bread you’d skip number one and possibly two and three and just add yeast in step 4. Steps 1-3 are really just a method of getting your sourdough starter into the spot where they have all their yeast power instead of the relatively expensive packet from the grocery store and yours have that magic sour taste. It really is just like baking bread with yeast (it is yeast) except that you really have to watch the clock and not so much depend on the “it’s doubled” metric. For French Bread, the clock is more important than “it’s doubled” Don’t wait for it to double on the second rise, it could just as easlly collapse under the weight of the “hooch” it’s brewing. Remember how the starter fell back after tripling/ That ball of bread dough waiting to go into the oven, will eat itself back into a slurry if you leave it covered long enough and you’ll get a heavy texture (which isn’t that bad for sandwich bread but it’s not French Bread .

I’ve mentioned the 85 degrees proofing/rising temperature, It’s about the only thing that the bakers and writers agree on.

You also need an active starter. See the article [10] about starter. The first step is to make the batter/sponge/biga.
1. If the starter is tired, feed it. Wait for some bubbles or even until it froths. Plenty of room for timing errors that may not matter.
2. Stir the starter. Mix one cup of your happy starter with 1.5 Cups of unbleached bread flour and 1C of luke warm water (less than 90F) in a 2 quart bowl (or larger)
3. Stir it but you don’t have get it lump free. There’s probably no penalty if you do stir a lot. I don’t.
4. Wrap some plastic wrap over the top of the bowl and put the sponge/batter/biga or “goo” in your 85F spot.
5. Between 8 and 12 hours later, you ought to make bread. It’s not rocket science or even a “bakers” feel at this point. We (I) know its going to froth for up to 20 hours so thats the outside limit although I have my doubts that’s really the longest you can let it burble in the happy place. At some point, the lacto-things will kill off the yeast things but I’m guessing that takes several days in the sponge. “Overnight” is good enough for me.

Lets make bread !

1. Stir your overnight “sponge” Take 1 and 1/2 cups of your sponge and put it into a big bowl, like a 4 quart one. Don’t be skimpy of the size of the bowl.
2. Any remaining goo in the bowl can go back in the starter container or be washed away or given to the kids as a last minute parting gift. I feed the starter before I make the sponge. Other people give the sponge back to the starter. If you can do exponential growth rate curves in your head you know which is better. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter. Feed before the sponge or feed after. You just want some goo in the fridge.
3. To that 1.5 cups of sponge goo, you’re gong to add 1 Cup of lukewarm water and stir. Doesn’t really matter how much you stir it just do it away from the carpet. A dozen turns around the bowl if you need a number. A second to two
4. Slowly add 2 cups of unbleached white bread flour (which is not even close to whole wheat bread flour), stirring to mix it up.
5. Put 2 tsp (tesspoons) of salt in the bowl. Stir. It’s going to get even harder to stir.
6. Through more mixing or kneading add about 2 cups more flour (4 in total).
7. Knead in by hand all the flour to make it more or less 4 cups total flour that you added to the overnight sponge. Plus or minus a 1/4 cup of flour.
8. This is a wet dough. Your hands will be covered in “stuff’ bits”. Don’t oil them. Dust them in flour and pretend that will help (it doesn’t). You have to knead for 10 minutes. Knead even longer if you believe that only women have the special skills for baking. Supposedly one can not overknead by hand but you may add to much flour if you do.
9. You are ready for the First Rising. Plunk your dough into a steep sided bowl (maybe the 4 qt. bowl that you used and cleaned, right? Or maybe another big bowl and put it, in your 85F happy spot for two hours or until doubled, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST, more or less. This first rise isn’t all that critical, in my very humble and unenlightened opinion. Think yeast now cause that’s what you have. Yeast dough.Yeast that will turn on our you if you don’t pay attention to what they’re doing.
10. Gently punch the dough down, just like a yeast bread. The dough will no longer take ham fisted abuse. It’s time to be a man. Gentle, giving and in touch with your partner (aka the dough). Knead for 30 seconds.Cut the dough into two pieces and let them rest for 5 minutes. Roll each one it to a shape you think looks like a French Bread you would eat. I’m not good with shaping and pinching and forming. Your pretty much on your own now. Actually, your completely on your own when it comes to shaping. The original recipe says this about shaping:

“Pat the dough into a large oval which is 1 to 1 1/2 inch thick. Fold the dough in half from the back to the front. Pinch the near edge to seal. Then roll the dough part way around so the seam is on top. Flatten the dough again with your hand and using the side of your hand, press a trench lengthwise down the center of the oval. Fold the back half forward again and and once again pinch the edges together. Then roll the dough with the palms of your hands until the dough is two inches shorter than your baking sheet.

11, You’ve got two hunks of dough in the shape you kinda of want and you’ve put their misshapen and pinched (ouch) blobs of doughness on a pre-oiled baking sheet like I said. Opps! I didn’t say. Spray some of that cooking oil stuff in the can on a baking sheet and put the two whatever’s on that with a coupe of inches between them just in case they do the right thing and grow. These have to be covered for the second rise. I know of three ways to cover, 3 of which haven’t worked for me.

A. Cover with loose plastic wrap. This keeps the air from the dough, but IMO, it may restrict the rise by holding it down. When you take the wrap off it will disturb the loaves.
B. Cover with a towel. This could also be too much weight on the loaves for good lift.
C. Put the dough in bannetons (SP>) or special pans for the rise and cover with a cloth. This produces a nicely shaped loaf, but inverting the loaf out of the banneton may collapse the loaf.
D. Put two drinking glasses on the pan and drape a towel over them to keep the towel from touching them. This worked for me and it does fill a certain Rube Goldberg need.

12 Let the loaves rise for an hour in your sweet spot. “Loaves:” 30 minutes into the second rise Preheat your oven to 400F and clean up the mess you’ve made in the kitchen. You’ve only got one hour to put the place in order and let the loaves rise, You can’t be slacking this off to the last second. One hour or as I read somewhere else, 3/4’s of a doubling. Thats it. Don’t blame me if you think it think it should be 1.5 hours and you end up with something that resembles a fruitcake without nuts or fruit. but all the density of steamed spinach. Quoting the original recipe:

“The loaves are ready for baking when the imprint of two fingers pushed about 1/2 inch into the dough remains” That’s what worked for me

Baking Time

13. Put a pan of boiling water in the lowest rack of the oven, Like you don’t have enough pans to wash. Nevertheless, a cup of almost boiling water from the microwave does produce a nice crust. Brush your misshaped sough things which might look loaves of bread with a little water (thats all) and place in the oven on a rack that puts the loave in the middle of the oven. Take out the pan of water after 10 minutes. Bake the misbegotten lumps for 35 minutes more instead of the recipe’s 45 minutes more. Or longer or less, YMMV. Clearly you need to watch it. Beyond golden brown in color but not black, something like the color of bread, actually.

14. Then gloat about your secret powers on a webpage or write a book. I didn’t come close to a fair use infringement of the original recipe. I gave the man credit, his due, and trust me the original tome was only slightly less wordy than this hair-ball and his was probably more useful.

Variations.

1. Instead of spraying the non stick baking sheet with cooking spray you could sprinkle some corn meal on it.
2. If you want a more brick oven experience, line the middle rack of your oven with unglazed quarry tile. As wide as the two loaves you’re making, like a pizza stone for the same effect.. After shaping the loaves, put them on a corn meal dusted peel and let them rise and then you magically transfer the loaves onto the hot tiles with the proper arm action that causes them to slide off separated by a few inches. This is an entirely different skill level. I can’t get uncooked pizza dough off of a peel. There’s another idea that after the shaping and second rising on a cooking sheet you can roll the loafs onto the peel in such a way that after a third rising you can roll them off the peel to land seam side down on the tiles. I’ve you’re good enough to do either of those, you probably aren’t reading this.

[Update January 20, 2004]
Repeatability is another facet of learning to bake. I got worried that maybe my success was just a fluke, I got lucky once. That’s just enough self doubt to try it again and it wouldn’t hurt me to try following the recipe I gave you.

I also have to be me and change something, because, just because. The same recipe except I substituted 1/2 Cup of rye flour for some of the white bread flour and I shaped the two loaves into rounds.

I made a couple of mistakes. Yeah, it can’t follow my own recipe. For some reason, I thought it was 2 Cups flour in total for the mixing and kneading (it’s really 4 Cups). I kept adding flour to the board and the dough and when it finally stopped sticky to the counter I put it in the oiled bowl to rise. Then I looked at my recipe. Oops, I’m 50% too light! I didn’t count how much flour I was using after 2 Cups. It’s had only been rising for a few minutes but it was oil covered. Not sure why I did that oil thing, either. So I took the oiled loaf out and kneaded in more flour. It was still a soft dough because I don’t think I used more than the total of 4 Cups, but there was no way to know except the texture.

Here’s the loaves after the second rise, just before slashing and putting into the oven. To help you visualize the size, that’s your standard supermarket cookie sheet.

I don’t own one of those razor blade knives (called a “lame?”). I use a cheap serrated steak knife to cut my slashes in the loaves. It’s a delicate moment to saw it thru the dough and not collapse it. Decide for your self:

That’s just out of the oven. The shallower slashes spread, the deeper slashes cracked open. A beginner would blame his equipment. I think I’m doing OK. Time to cut one open and check the texture. Almost nearly OK! Tastes wonderful. Excellent crust and mouth feel.

What would I do different? I might let is rise a little longer (15 extra minutes to accommodate the Rye flour, perhaps) and of course use the proper amount of flour in the kneading. There is a circular pattern to the crumb you can’t see in the pictures which I suspect is due to my kneading restart and the oil. It still kicks booty.

I’ve got to take the library book back soon so I need to enter the recipe for French Bread. I’m also trying an experiment of drying the starter, shipping it and reviving it with a volunteer on the East Coast (of the US). I’m also finding I have a lot to say so on topic so this is about “starter” and the recipe will be next.

Making dried Starter is easy. Starter and flour and roll it out thin and leave it to dry for some number of days. Then break it into chunks and pound the chunks to make big crumbs. Attempt to put the crumbs in a mini-processor (doesn’t work). Wrap and label half of it and put in in an package and send it on it’s way.

A Place To Call Home

I use a cheap plastic storage container you can find in the supermarket if not your cupboards, probably two quart size, put the crumbs in it and a cup of water and let it set covered for a half hour or so just to start moistening up the crumbs. Then I added a cup of flour,and a cup of water, and stirred it up. It was a little too thick so I added about 1/4C of water more. You want a consistency like a thick lumpy batter bread mix . I put it in my 85 degree spot and I’ll check it and stir it up in a couple of hours; by then it should be active and assuming it is I’ll leave it overnight and check the smell in the morning.

[Later, Yes, drying, re-hydrating and feeding works fine.] It’s been about 24 hours since I re-hydrated and feed my dry mix. during that time it tripled in volume in 12 hours or so and stayed that large until around the 20 hour mark when it dramatically fell to only double in volume in less than an hour. I was fooling with the temperature, so those are only data points, not rules. That collapse means that most of the food is gone. In making bread you don’t want a collapse, but you need to know it can happen. When feeding our micro-organisms, it’s no big deal unless your container was too small to handle a tripling of volume.

Sourdough really needs a place thats 85F. For pancakes you can feed it and set it out overnight on the counter in at room temperature and it should work out.. That’s for pancakes. For bread, yeast have to do all the leavening and the ones in the sourdough need 85F. It’s the sweet spot for both leavening and souring.

Using a instant read roasting thermometer I found a spot in my house thats close (or close enough) to 85F and I’m writing this during a snow storm. My spot happens to be the under-sink cabinet in the main bathroom which isn’t that far from the forced air furnace.

I’ve read you can build a “proofing box” from an inverted Styrofoam cooler, a light fixture and a light bulb of the right wattage (somewhere between 5 watts and 15) say. That’s what I’ve read.

Caring For Your Starter:

If it’s been in the fridge for a couple of weeks without use or long enough to get the gray/black hootch on the top, IMO, you would do well to feed the starter twice (which does add a few more hours to an already long process). There’s lots of ways to feed (or double feed a starter). Here’s what I’ve tried. Stir up the starter (and the hootch). Remove a cup of the starter. Add a cup of flour and a cup of water. Some people suggest 3/4C water and I tend to follow the less than a cup idea. Serious people would do it by weight to a specific hydration ratio they want to achieve. Put the starter with it’s new water and flour in your rising spot and let it do its magic, In three to six hours or so you should see some sign of yeast at work: bubbles and holes in the mix, possibly frothy on the top (thats a good thing). If you’ve got the time, or the starters been unused for a long time, repeat the feeding: Stir, remove a cup, add a cup of flour and a cup of water (or slightly) less. It shouldn’t take as long for the second feeding to really get cranking.

What to do with the one or two cups of starter you removed to make room for the feeding? If it was a recently used starter you’d you’d proceed to make the sponge/batter/biga with what you took out. If you think the starter is probably a little tired you have to sacrifice that removed cup to the the gods of hot water and clean drains. Do not pour in on the carpet and let it dry (trust me). Do not let young children play with it. When dried, this a strong glue. You could give it away. You could dry it. Supposedly you can freeze it. Or you could create a new batch of starter using some other type of flour (whole wheat for example).

For example, if was I going to make bread tomorrow and it’s 7:00PM tonight. I’d take out the container of starter. Since I baked last week it’s not that tired. I also took out a cup for drying purposes a few days ago and didn’t replenish it (There are no hard and fast rules), I’d take the container of starter out, stir it and feed it the the cup and cup (stir again of course) and let it proof. About midnight, assuming its all frothy and happy, I’d stir it again and remove the amount required for the recipes sponge/batter/biga. If it was an tired starter I’d have wished I’d started at 4:00PM.

It sounds complicated but it really isn’t that hard. You’ll quickly develop a feel for how much to feed (or not). Starter is yeast and lacto-bacillus feeding on flour in a liquid bath and if it can survive the refrigerator and freezing (so I’m told) and drying, it will survive a lot of mishandling be it underfeeding, overfeeding or neglect.

There two beasties in the culture (starter). Yeast and something called a lacto-bacillus. Yeast eat flour and produce gas and alcohol (the hootch). The lacto thingies give of the sour flavor. An aquarium of tropical fish also need a balance of food and water supplements at certain times based on the kind of fish, their size, the size of the tank and the mix of the species. Too hot or too cold, you’ve got dead fish. Yet people manage to keep aquariums. Sourdough is a lot easier to take care of than a fish tank. A lot easier.

There’s are alternate methods of managing your sourdough and I do know it works because that’s how my culture came to me or is commonly used by others.

If you need a cup of starter for your overnight sponge/batter/biga, you stir up your starter to mix it up, remove the cup of starter for your recipe, and add a cup of flour and about that much water to the starter, stir, put the starter next to the sponge and after the starter is pretty active put it back in the fridge (not the sponge though). This isn’t much different than my procedure. I feed the starter and watch it proof before making the sponge but I need enough head room in the starter container. If I get started late I’ll use this method of making the sponge and feeding the starter in parallel.

The next method is to take out the cup of starter. Put the starter back in the fridge. Make your sponge according to the recipe but add an additional cup of flour and an additional cup of water and leave overnight. The next morning, you stir the sponge and take a cup of that and put it in the starter container in the fridge.

These are all variations of a theme for keeping the starter at roughly the same size and active.
1. Add a cup of feed and water to starter, proof starter, remove a cup, make sponge.
2. Remove a cup, Add a cup of feed and water to starter, make sponge and proof starter together.
3. Remove a cup. Make sponge with additional cup of feed and water, put a cup of the sponge back in the starter..

At this point, I don’t know which method, if any is really better in taste or in starter health. I like #1 because I believe you’ll get the maximum yeast action.

Readers who remember way too much for their own good, might say “Hey, You’ve already used [number 9] before, it should be [10]“. Of course they don’t know that I never finished [9]. I didn’t make the bread. I fed the starter and made a web posting about good intentions for the next day. Then I forgot. I fell asleep before making the sponge and the heavily refreshed starter popped the lid off overnight resulting in a bit of cleanup the next morning. No sponge, no dough. Cleanup before the first cup of coffee does take the edge off the experiment. So it’s still [9] again (sounds like a country song - “it’s still nine again”).

It may be nine again, tomorrow. I have been reading though, now that I know a little more.
Sourdough Home has also tried to wend his way through the conflicting information and recipes. The end result being, I just have work this out on my own. There is no definitive source. No cookbook, no website, no master to learn from that doesn’t contradict one of the others. It’s just me, the starter, the flour, the oven and several thousand unknown variables.

[Dec 22, 2003]

I’m happy. I’m almost ecstatic. Those loaves look right! There’s a fullsize picture for those who want. The loaves are nearly the same size, the camera angle makes it look like the lower loaf look smaller. There are some nitpicks. The lower loaf was the first one I tried to roll to form and I didn’t do a good job of pinching and sealling which is that ripple look on the left.

The upper loaf suffered from what I think is called a “blow out” where the crust lifts off to make room for the gas inside. Doesn’t bother me a bit because that means there was gas inside, and that gives me a lot of hope that I’ve got that open texture I want. Hefting in my hand, I think it feels right too. I may have baked them too long; they’re a little too dark but it looks like artisan bread.

[Later]

It doesn’t have the wide open texture I was looking for but its got the chewiness, crust and the flavor. Seriously good eats. Better than what I could buy at the craft bakery. This one goes in the freezer if I don’t eat it all and I’m working on that.

You know what the [9] means.

I’m not sure why I want to learn baking with sourdough. A few weeks ago I had to buy a jar of yeast for US$7.00 which I’ll only use half of, so sourdough is a lot less expensive. Having produced a couple of decent loaves in a bread pan, it’s time to step up to the next level, a loaf of French Bread, without the fat’s and sugars and without the support of a metal mold, just flour, water and salt and the beasties.

I picked up another book on the subject at the library today. It’s pretty much the same techniques and recipes, the same cautions and discussions. There’s a recipe of course but it’s not really a procedure that makes a lot of sense unless one’s failed many times. Easy to read, impossible to follow exactly. This not unlike BBQ — It takes a long time and every time is different and my procedure won’t match your procedure because things are different: ingredients, equipment, skill and attitude.

I do know that a properly activated culture is critical. You can’t bake bread if you only use the culture once every two weeks to make sourdough pancakes, If you use it every few days or feed it heavily first , it’s almost like making regular yeast bread. Mostly almost. Temperature is important. You can take it out of the fridge, make the sponge, feed the culture and leave them out over night on the counter. That’s fine for pancakes where you want the taste of sour but not the yeast. For bread making, you need happy beasties chugging down the starch and farting CO2 before they drown themselves in their self produced alcohol. The trick is, you have no idea how long any of that takes.

Obviously (to me), the bigger the batch of starch (flour) to the starting amount of culture determines how it takes to proof, rise, and rise again. Sadly it’s non linear, but I’ve mentioned that before. Since we are growing little beasties for their fart producing qualities it only makes sense to provide an environment where they can do that best. 85 degrees (F) and just as importantly they need to be really happily farting before you feed them more flour to make bread.

I’m betting that a craft style bakery doesn’t refrigerate their starter. Just before they leave at 6:00PM, they feed it (make the sponge) and at 3:00AM they start mixing and rising so the loaves come out of the oven at 9:00AM. (for example). I know I’ve seen the owner of the nearest craft bakery, Zeppoles in the Albertsons buying old style double edge razor blades in some strange wee-wee hours. They can do that because they have to and because their starter never gets a rest.

Do not underestimate thermal mass, I took my cloned starter, the one I’ve been feeding only bread flour and water to, out of the fridge two hours ago and it’s only beginning to warm up. That’s the starter I used just a few days ago and left over night after a feeding. No hootch on the top either since it hasn’t had enough time to settle out. I’ll take a cup or two out for the sponge for tomorrow (what my latest cookbook calls ‘batter”, which IMO is a more accurate description than sponge, but the thats the joy of language).

I know the stuff in there will leaven twice, even on a whole wheat/rye/white mixture. I know this because it did it before. Now I’m going to depend on it because I think I can. When it turns bad tomorrow, it won’t be the culture or the ingredients that fails. Just clueless me.

That’s not a bad metaphor for all of life is it? Even I might think about that one but I need to check for bubbles in the goo first.

[Update 2006-08-06]
That Was the first loaf of bread that looked almost right. That was made with the sponge method (very liquid, overnight) if I remember correctly.

This time, I really wanted bread for sandwiches. I made meat loaf yesterday which I will eat as leftovers in a sandwich. And if I was making bread for tonight I wanted something to go with the bread, even if the bread doesn’t turn out. Something hearty made from chicken. I settled on Chicken a La King. That’s not a terribly difficult recipe but I’m not sure I’ve ever made it without a can of Cream Of Chicken soup. Served over the bread, of course That’s a lot of expectation for someone who hasn’t yet produced the sourdough bread he’s thinking of. Fortunately the bread looks good, at least from the outside. We shall see. It’s still not cool enough to cut into and I’ve been deceived before by the outside appearance.

A nice loaf a bread. A little too airy and floppy compared to supermarket sliced bread but good flavor. I backed off a bit on the whole wheat to bread flour ratio. I took a picture of this loaf which I might get around to posting. More importantly, I froze half of it. Yes, it’s good enough to save! Cutting back to 1/2 C whole wheat and keeping 1/2 C rye and using unbleached white bread flour for the rest (approximately 3 cups) to 2 cups of overnight sponge got me a nice loaf a bread. Knead, shape, rise for 3 hours (or even more) and bake.

I’m actually thinking I should bake a couple of loaves of sourdough bread and even out some overdue christmas gift karma, so to speak. A real baker would have the confidence to make sourdough sticky buns (caramel pecan) but if they were good. it might collapse the entire karmic infrastructure of the universe. My little sour yeasties can rise twice (measure once, leaven twice). I ‘m reluctant to go down the sweet path. After you make a gravy of powdered sugar and pour it on the top, is anything going to be any different than the mall outlet cinnamon rolls?

I’m off to feed the starter. not because I want to use it tomorrow. I just feel that I should repay the yeast and lactobacillus in my jar. They don’t ask for much. But, it’s my army and a commander never forgets where his power comes from. It’s not from powdered sugar. My yeastie boys (and lacto girlies) don’t want a glaze.