Making your own sourdough bread
Love bread? So does Vincent Wu, a third-year graduate student working toward a degree in microbiology, who has been making his own bread since his undergraduate years. We at the Clog chatted with him to find out his secrets to his delicious bread. Check out his tips and recipe below so you can start baking your own bread.
Daily Clog: When and why did you develop an interest in baking your own sourdough bread?
Vincent Wu: I first started baking bread as an undergraduate. I got a no-knead recipe using regular dry active yeast from a friend, and it turned out great. I wanted to try sourdough because I always loved sourdough, and packaged yeast is surprisingly expensive as a poor student. That’s when I began to create my own starter.
DC: How much flour would you recommend to begin with for making a starter? How can you tell when the starter is ready?
VW: It’s recommended that you start with whole wheat flour rather than all purpose flour as it is supposed to contain more things that wild yeast and lactobacillus need. The process is to mix in 50/50 flour and water and let it sit loosely covered in a warm place for a couple days. Once there are some bubbles and the mixture starts to smell sour, the yeast and bacteria have colonized it. Then you can start feeding with more flour and water. A healthy starter should double in volume after feeding. Here’s a link to a site with some more specific instructions.
DC: What happened to your first starter?
VW: My first starter died from neglect and contamination pretty early on, and I stopped baking sourdough, but during its short life, it inspired my good friend to bake bread. He started his own sourdough a couple of years later and got me into baking again. I like to think that the spirit of my first sourdough never died.
DC: What’s a common mistake to avoid?
VW: The autolysis step is very important: Mix flour and water together, and let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes before adding salt and starter. Before I started doing this, I could never get the stretchy consistency of dough that allows bread to rise properly and give its nice chewy texture.
Vincent’s Sourdough Bread Recipe yields two large loaves
Ingredients:
- 1000 grams bread flour (all purpose is okay too)
- 700 grams water (maybe 600 or 650 if using all-purpose flour)
- 2 tablespoons kosher salt
- 250 grams sourdough starter (starter composed 50/50 water flour)
Directions:
- Mix flour and water. Let rest for 20 minutes or more. (During this time, flour and gluten absorbs water and making dough elastic and stretchy. Do NOT add salt yet as it inhibits this process.)
- Add salt and starter.
- Mix and knead for five to 10 minutes.
- Knead for one to two minutes and let rest for 10 to 15 minutes.
- Repeat this cycle four or five times or until dough passes thewindowpane test.
- Place into oiled container and let rest for about eight hours.
- Shape dough into whatever shape you like.
- Place into floured bread proofing baskets or a bowl lined with parchment paper.
- Let rest in warm place for about four hours. Alternatively, you can place the dough in a fridge (make sure it’s not too cold!) all day and bake when you get home.
- Score the top of bread with razor blade or very sharp knife. This allows the bread to open up as it rises in the oven. Otherwise, it will open on the side, which isn’t quite as pretty.
- Bake at 400 to 450 degrees on pizza stone or cast iron until crust is brown (normally about 30 to 60 minutes, depending on size of loaves).
Tip: Steam the bread while it’s baking. It’s important that the loaf reaches a high temperature quickly so that the dough can expand before the crust hardens, and steam allows this to happen as the moist air conducts heat better than dry air. We suggest putting a pan with a half cup of water on the bottom of the oven underneath the bread. Or you can spray water onto your loaf before placing into oven. It’s hard to over-spray the loaf, so do so generously.
Happy baking, Bears!
Images courtesy of Vincent Wu
Contact Stephanie Wang at swang@dailycal.org.
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