Cooking Cheap

The trick with sourdough is to sort through the advice, opinions, myths and find out what works for you. The only single path is the one you went down and backed up to the previous fork on the road. There are many forks on the road. You have to make or buy your starter, You have to choose how to keep it alive, You have to choose which website to believe and which ones to ignore. Which book to read, which book to ignore. Clearly, they are all correct. The books and websites have pictures and they all look good.

Bread baking is a skill to learn, not a recipe to follow. You cannot duplicate the conditions of the author. Sure, you can get close even really close and you can spend a lot of money on equipment and ingredients and get anal about temperatures and hydration percentages and you could write a book about what you know or write web page or two.

The trick is that people willing to write will sound authoritative. Tis the nature of writing or passing on knowledge or just being helpful. Toss in writing styles and personalities and it’s impossible to find the one true way just by following instructions. Those are someone else’s path. You need to find your path.

The book “Breads From The La Brea Bakery” (Nancy Silverton. 1996) is high on procedure and technique to duplicate what she does for her bakery business in the home. It’s not a beginners book but it tries to be and thats just one more source of confusion.

That’s not a slam on Silverton or her book. Here’s what I learned from it. You’ll probably learn something different. She advocates a different mixing/kneading/rising technique thnt the sourdough sponge method. It’s not a new method by any means, nor does she claim so. It’s what she thinks is best from her bakery experience translated to her home. with all the nifty tools and accessories that can be looted from a bakery (every thing but the oven).

The book takes great pain to explain the process but like all of sourdough wisdom, it only muddies up the process.This temperature, this weight ratio, this starter, this hydration reading. If I was running a successful bakery I’d harp on the technical things that make repeatability too. But I’m not a bakery and I know just enough to find the beginners way through her experiences. Which would make me a bread baker because I know enough to reject some bit of advice or pursue another path.

Quick rundown. If you need details, buy the book or read some more on the web.

1. Mix the amount of sourdough starter, water, most of the flour. Knead in the rest of the flour to touch. No sponge. Just mix up up and kneed. Towards the end of kneeding, you add the salt and kneeding it in.

2 Put in a bowl for many hours to rise,(up to 4 hours depending on your starter, room temp, flours, etc). I’m leaving out the “greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap” details that you should understand already. If you don’t, this is not for you.

3. Divide the dough into the size you think you want. Roughly shape them into what you want. If you have bannetons use them.

4. Let them rest/rise/proof for another hour on the sheet pan or bannetons and then form them in the final shape you want. Shaping is not my strong spot so I’m not passing my wisdom — read a book.

5. Put the sheet pan inside a plastic garbage sack . Tie up the mouth or wrap the bannetons in plastic wrap. Which ever, put in the fridge for a long overnighter and you can go to bed.

6. Next day. Take the loaves out of the fridge and garbage bag. and put them on the counter or your proofing spot. Silverton and I will now part company. I’m not screwing with proofing cloth and peels and which end is has to be up on the rise and then down on the peel Perfectly decent loaves of bread are ruined by following the dogma of going into the oven. She says to cover with proofing cloth. I don’t have one. I tried a kitchen towel but that didn’t work. The dough dried out. Spray some cooking oil on some plastic wrap, lightly drape it over the loaves while they rise. You can transfer the still cold loaves onto parchment paper on top of some cardboard (your cheap peel) or leave them on the sheet pan. If you know how to turn out a boule from a banneton and not deflate it, you know enough to ignore my suggestion.

You let it rise for a long time. Three or four hours Or two or five. It’s up to you and your touch, your baking skills. Somewhere, you decided to crank the oven and baking stone up to 500F. I have my misting/steam technique. Silverton’s is a bother. It might be better — don’t know.

7. Bake until done. Here’s another bit of “you just know”. I’ve seen recipes for 450F for 45 minutes and 350F for 35minutes . Even more confusing, I make mini loaves. Most recipes start with around 7 or 8 cups of flour and make two loaves with probably a cup of sourdough stater. I make half of that. I’m not feeding the miltary, just me. Then I cut that half recipe in to two mini-loaves and after baking I cut each one in half and freeze three of the four for another day. That’s my only contribution to the sourdough mythology, “Sourdogh For One (or two)” 25 minutes at 450F works for my mini loaves. 25 minutes at 350 . That works too so I have much to learn.

The retard method does work for me, so far. Works well enough for me to adopt it as a new technique. I’d rather mix and knead at 5:00PM and 9:00PM on day one than do it all on day two. The technique fits me.My experiences and all the pictures on the web show that either one works for the part time home baker Pick one, master it enough to try switching techniques. Decide for yourself what works. I’ve made good bread either way. When You know the next loaf might suck carpet tacks but in your heart you know it won’t, then you are a baker. Then you can go all California and build an outdoor oven to indulge your bad self and then have HGTV feature your pathetic wannabe insecurities and spending habits for millions of other wannabes to admire.

That’s not baking. Actuallly it is baking. It’s not baking bread through.

[Update 8-14-2005]
I took a half a mini loaf out of the freezer (the boule), defrosted it in it’s tin foil wrapper and then sliced it length wise to make a hamburger bun. After the burger was grilled I tried toasting the bread slices over the charcoal, but grill marks didn’t arrive before I wanted to eat the burger.

That bread was awesome. Whether its the freezer or the counter defrost or a minutes on the charcoal grill, i can’t say but the sour was there, a big flavor in the bread. Crust was still crisp, inside still chewy and tear and texture and all that stuff was great. It was better for the freeze and thaw. Go figure. So I will.

The mini-loaves could have baked at a lower temp for longer. Try 400F for 30 minutes? Slicing across the boule showed some big time tunnels. Too big. They were damn tasty holes though. This suggests that the sour increases more slowly than the yeast so the retard method tries to give it a few extra hours. I think it works.