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I hope this works for somebody, but I'm going to have to critique the whole concept of "timing' when baking sourdough bread. After years of baking sourdough I
by mikedilger 7y ago
I hope this works for somebody, but I'm going to have to critique the whole concept of "timing' when baking sourdough bread.
After years of baking sourdough I find that I cannot predict precisely the timing. I have to judge the dough at each step and not proceed until it is ready. This is especially true in that I like trying new things, making tweaks, fermenting at different temperatures, and this alters the timing. The timing depends highly on temperature, where in the refresh cycle the starter is at (still rising? fallen and foamy?), but also very much on your particular starter. Some starters run slow (especially newly created ones). Others are fast. Using someone else's timing just never seemed to work for me. Early on when I started baking sourdough I made some absolute bricks because I followed the timing that the recipe specified, even though their descriptions of the dough seemed very different to what I was seeing. And if they said two hours, then eight hours must certainly be enough... but it wasn't enough. Yes, it really can be off by that far (especially with a new weak sourdough starter that wasn't refreshed properly).
Nonetheless, you have to have some sort of plan. Turns out that I can always make it work within a certain set of bounds if I am home all day on some given day. And that has driven me into the following pattern:
1. Remove sourdough starter from refrigerator the night before, and refresh.
2. Build dough in the mid morning with active starter
3. Bulk ferment (with stretches and folds) in a proofer until it is ready
4. Pre shape. Then shape. Then refrigerate in bags.
5. Bake the loaves (I always do two boules) early the next morning.
This is by no means the only pattern that can be made to work, but it's robust and flexible enough for anything I've ever thrown at it.
- thendrill 7y agoI like how seriously you take the lorem impsum of a front end programmer
- joshvm 7y agoOne thing that really made a massive difference for me was making a proofing box. It's a large EPS container (similar to the ones that market sellers use) with a seedling heating mat inside. I control it with a cheap (like < $10) thermostat from Amazon. It maintains around 26C quite easily and is pretty efficient. I've never bothered to check the accuracy of the thermostat, but I imagine it's within a degree or two. You can also use it for fermentation, Noma have instructions on how to build one. My only suggestion is don't do what I did and go nuts on the size. You can get away with a much smaller box (e.g. I bake 500g loaves mostly, and I use a 4L graduated polycarbonate container - it's dwarfed by the size of the box). Temperature control makes an enormous difference. I live in a cold house, hence why I built this. To make things worse, my kitchen has marble worktops. So if you use cold or tepid water and then knead, you end up cooling the dough even more on the counter. It's a bit different with Tartine because you don't really knead the dough, but still - yeast is optimally active around 25C or so and if you have to wait for the dough to come up to temperature, that can easily add an hour or two. So you can control this by measuring the temp of your water and using a climate controlled box (which costs about a tenth of one of those pop-up Broder ones). I do agree about starter refresh cycles though, as well as what hydration you put in, how much you put in, what exactly the flour is. I don't climate control my starter except during the winter when it sits by the boiler. Most of the time my routine is identical to yours. Feed the starter overnight Friday, make the dough Saturday morning and bulk it during the day. Refrigerate overnight and bake on Sunday. Strongly recommend watching Chad do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4dyWZZVeWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4dyWZZVeWI It answered a lot of questions I had from reading the book.
- atomi 7y agoI love this idea of a proofing box with temp control using a heated mat. Thanks for sharing it!
- joshvm 7y agoFYI the basic design is actually within the preview on Google Books (page 47). https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Noma_Guide_to_Fermentation.html?id=-iJ9DwAAQBAJ https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Noma_Guide_to_Fer... I recommend adding a wire rack so your container doesn't sit directly on the mat as well.
- MegaDeKay 7y agoI have a Sous Vide rig. I put my dough in a one gallon plastic bucket and that floats inside a small beer cooler with some water in it that the circulator keeps at whatever temperature I want. A dish towel over top ensures the temperature is basically constant top to bottom. Proofing dough to within 0.1C accuracy is ridiculously overkill, but that accuracy comes for free. Works amazingly amazing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]