Cooking Cheap

I tried Reinhart’s sourdough pizza recipe (augmented with commercial yeast) and it was pretty good and yes I did eat it all over a few days time. Not as good as his yeast only recipe. That offends the sourdough gods, so I’m trying again with his sourdough only recipe. I made his stiff preferment (naughty baker speak, oh my) last night, Feb, 4. 2010 — 1oz starter, 3oz water, 4oz bread flour. Let it make more starter, covered on on the counter top for 12+ hours. The recipe says 8, and it was ready, but that didn’t work for my schedule. Sourdough starter growing is very forgiving.

Tonight (Feb 5,2010), I mixed up the dough — all the starter above (8oz @75% hydration), 12oz of water, 18oz of bread flour, 2tsp salt, 2Tbl of EV olive oil, and 1Tbl honey (recipe says 1.5Tbl, my bad). Large bowl, wooden spoon, mix it until bored or tired. let it set for 15 minutes. Using a flexible plastic scraper, I did my best to fold the dough in the bowl for a minute or two. It’s a wet dough and I’m not using a stand mixer, so more stretch and folds will be needed, IMO. I’m kind of off track from the recipe. 2o minutes later, I put a few Tbl of EV olive oil on a rimmed sheet pan. I scooped the dough onto the pan in the center and dipped my hands in the EVO in the pan and did a stretch and fold. Put the pan in a plastic tall kitchen bag (pay more for food grade if you like). Two more stretch and folds, 30 minutes apart. I could have done more stretch and fold sessions and if baking bread, I would have but with all the olive oil used, it’s never going to get that bread dough strength, nor should it. I rolled the dough into a tube on the pan with oil and cut into fifths. I cut a few bits from the bigger one to add to the smaller ones until they were mostly equal in volume. Yes, I could have weighed them but that requires more clean up than I want. It was easy to shape the 5 balls into rounds with all that the EVO in the dough. After a couple of hours more on the counter in the garbage, I decide then first rise was complete. I can’t explain how I knew that. I could be wrong but it’s roughly close to what the recipe calls for. A final shape into balls and into the fridge.

Tomorrow, I might bake a couple. I might not. I went looking for parchment paper which would good for this application instead of the unwieldy peel. Not to be found in two stores. I’ll have to use the peel. This time, I will not use bread flour to lubricate the peel — that didn’t work for me last time and I can’t recommend that.