This is the fourth in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown.
This post has been a while coming, but my sister in law was interested in the sourdough loaf last night, so I figured I should finally document my process. First off you need to have a sourdough starter, which I wrote up in a previous post. I am sure less cheaty ways will work too, but the cheating was where it was at for me.
Then, you basically follow the process I use for my super simple non-breadmaker loaf, but tweaked a little to use the starter. For the loaf itself:
- 2 cups of bakers flour (not plain white flour)
- 1 tea spoon of salt
- 2 cups of the sourdough starter
- 1 cup water
Similarly to the super simple loaf, you want the dough to be a bit tacky when mixed — it gets runnier as the yeast does its thing, so it will be too runny if it doesn’t start out tacky.
I then just leave it on the kitchen bench under a cover for the day. In the evening its baked like the super simple loaf — heat a high thermal mass dutch oven for 30 minutes at 230 degrees celcius, and then bake the break in the dutch over for first 30 minutes with the lid on, and then 12 more minutes with the lid off.
You also need to feed the starter when you make the loaf dough. That’s just 1.5 cups of flour, and a cup of warm water mixed into the starter after you’ve taken out the starter for the loaf. I tweak the flour to water ratio to keep the starter at a fairly thick consistency, and you’ll learn over time what is right. You basically want pancake batter consistency.
We keep our starter in the fridge and need to feed it (which means baking) twice a week. If we kept it on the bench we’d need to bake daily.