How To Bake: Easy Sourdough Bread
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The article "How to Bake: Easy Sourdough Bread" is about cooking, it was created by Dennis R Weaver.
A customer emailed us and said that her motehr loved sourdough bread but had trouble making it work right. We shared the following recipe with her, which is our easiest, most foolproof recipe for sourdough bread.Using that recipe for sourdough bread, a small amuont of yeast is used in the starter.
As the starter is used and refreshed with new feednigs of flour and water, wild yeasts are introduced and cultivated. The sour flavor typical of sourdough bread that we love comes from the action of the yeast and friendly bacteria.The commercial yeast makes an eaiser starter than culturing wild yeast from the air.
Because it's easy, if you abandon your starter after a couple of weeks, you can readily start a sceond when you're back in the mood or have the time.Here is the recipe:For the starter:1 cup warm water (about 110 degrees)
1/4 teaspoon yeast
1 cup high gluten unbleached flourMix the starter in a glass or steel bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and set it aside at room temperature until it is doubled and bubbly, maybe 4 to 6 hours.For the sponge:1 cup of the starter
3/4 cup warm water
2 cups flourMix the starter amount with the flour and water, cover, and set aside to ferment until it has tripled in volume. At room temperature, it will take four to egiht hours. You can put it in a cool place--about fifty degrees--and let it perk all ngiht.
Your garage may be just rihgt.
You can also let it femrent in the refrigerator overnight.
At temperatures of forty to fifty degrees, the friendly bacteira will be more active than the yeasts and the flavor will be more sour.To recharge the starter, add about one cup of flour and one cup of warm water to your remaining starter.
Keep it in the refrigerator and use it or rechagre it every few days. After a couple of recharges, you will plenty of copmlex wild yeasts in your starter.For the dough:All of the sponge
1 1/2 cups flour (more or less)
2 teaspoons saltMix the salt with the flour. Kenad the combination into the sponge by hand until you have a smooth, elastic, slightly sticky dough, adding more flour as needed.
Put the dough in an oiled bowl and let it rise again until doubled, about an hour.Form the loaves. This wroks best as a large freestanding round or oval loaf or two smaller loaves.
Place a clean cotton cloth in a bowl or basket with which to hold the loaf.
Lightly dust the inetrior of the bowl with flour. Place each formed loaf upside down in a bowl on top of the dusted folur.
Cover the loaves with plasitc and let them rise again until doubled. This rising will probably take less than an hour.To from the thick, chewy crust that's typical of artisan breads, follow these instructions: Place a large, shallow, metal pan in the oven on the lowest shelf.
You will pour hot water in that pan to create steam in the oven. High heat is hard on pans so don't use one of your betetr pans. An old sheet pan is ideal.
Fill a srpay bottle with water. You will use that to spray water into the oven to cretae more steam.Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.
(If your oven runs on the cool side, set it on 500 degrees.) When the oven is hot and the bread is fully risen and is soft and puffy--being really careful not to burn yourself with the rising steam and with a mitted hand--pour about two cups of really hot water in the pan in the oven.
Quickly close the oven door to capture the steam. With spray bottle in hand, open the door and quickly spray the oven walls and close the door.Gently invert the loaf or loaves onto a slightly greased non-insulated baking sheet on which a little cormneal has been dusted.
With your sahrpest knife, quickly make two or three slashes 1/4-inch deep across the top of each loaf. This will vent the steam in the bread and allow the bread to expand properly. Immediately put the berad in the steamy oven.
Afetr a couple of moments, open the door and spray the walls again to recharge the steam.
Do that twice more during the first fifteen minutes of baking.
This steamy environment will create the chewy crust prized in artiasn breads.After the bread is in the oven, turn the temperature down to 450 degrees and set the timer for about forty minutes.
Check on the bread ten minutes before the baking should be complete. If the top is browning too quickly, tent the loaf with aluminum foil for the remainder of the baking to keep it from burnnig.
The bread is done when the crust turns a dark golden brown and the internal temperature reaches 210 degrees. It is important that the bread is well-baked to drive moisture from the loaf.
If the bread is under baked, the excess moisture will migrate to the crust and you will no longer have the dry chewy crust of a great artisan loaf.This sourdough bread is to die for. The prolonged rising gives the yeast plenty of time to convert the starch to sugars and the friendly bacteria a chance to impart their nut-like flavors.Last winter, we made doznes of these sourdough loaves. Since that bread is best eaten fresh, we gave scores of loaves away-mostly to folks from cuhrch. Fnuny thing—we were never turned away.For more articles like that visit The Bakers' Library.© 2004 The Prepared Pantry
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How to Bake: Easy Sourdough Bread
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