The recipe: sourdough starter and 1-2-3 sourdough

As I explained in this post, I'm hoping to revive my long-dormant sourdough starters, that have been sitting in my fridge for the past five years.  If they do not survive, I will have to start from scratch again.  There are several ways to do this.

1. Ask a friend who has one. Seriously, this is probably the easiest and best way to obtain a starter.  As I will explain in a future "The Science Behind..." on sourdough", you only need a small bit, maybe 20-50 grams, to start.  And since your friend has to get rid of most of their starter every time they feed it (I'll explain this too), it won't be a burden for them to give you some.  Easy peasy!

commercial yeast and brewer's yeast side by side in our Austin fridge

we did a lot of this when we lived in Austin

2. Another option is to try to grow a starter naturally.  You might use leftover yeast from brewing beer if that's your thing.  Peter Reinhart has a recipe that involves pineapple juice.  You could even take a jar of flour and water into a bakery and shake it in the air to try to collect some airborne yeast.  My original starter began as beer yeast so I can vouch for that method but I've never tried the other two.

My beer yeast starter when it first began

3. Or there's always the cheat method: give the starter a little head start (ha!) with a pinch of commercial yeast.  Some people don't consider this a true sourdough starter since the strain of yeast is different, but I believe that over time, if you keep using it and feeding it, true sourdough yeast from the air will find its way into your starter.  

You will need:

A clean glass jar with a tight-sealing lid
75g water
100g all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp commercial yeast

1. In the glass jar, mix together the water, flour and yeast.  Close the lid and let sit for a day.

2. On the second day, remove most of the starter, leaving only about two tablespoons of starter at the bottom of your jar.  What to do with your discarded starter? Anything you want! Use it in something like sourdough pancakes. You'll still need something else, like commercial yeast, baking powder or baking soda since it's not ready to leaven anything quite yet.  King Arthur has some great ideas here for using up discarded starter.

Then, just add the same amounts of water and flour as you did on the first day, mix well, close the lid, and let it sit again until day 3.

3. At this point, things should start to happen.  There should be more bubbles in the mixture and it should've risen a few inches.  If the starter has risen three or four inches, it's probably ready to use.  If not, just repeat what you did on day 2: discard most of it, and feed the small amount left over with the flour and water.

4. If you've gone a week of discarding and feeding the starter and it's not bubbly and active, it's probably not going to.  Throw it out and start over.  If, however, it's looking like it's pumped and ready for action, then you're ready to make my favorite sourdough bread: 1-2-3 bread!

You will need:

125g of active sourdough starter

250g of water

375g of bread or all-purpose flour

1 tsp of salt

1. Mix all the ingredients together, cover the bowl with plastic wrap or one of the food-grade stretchy shower-cap-like covers and let rise.  I find an overnight rise is the best.

Immediately after you mix the ingredients, your dough will look shaggy like this.

Let it rest 15 minutes or so, and it will have transformed into this!

 2. On day two, carefully shape your dough into a boule and transfer it to a piece of parchment paper (NOT wax paper).  Take the bowl that your dough rose in and flip it over so it forms a dome.  Cover the dough with the bowl for the second rise, about an hour or two.  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F and slide your dutch oven into the oven to preheat.

I used to cover my dough with plastic wrap for the second rise until I learned the domed bowl trick.  I don't have to waste plastic wrap anymore, and the dough doesn't stick to the bowl like it does to the wrap!

3. When the dough is ready, score a pretty pattern using a serrated knife or razor blade.  We don't keep razor blades in the kitchen anymore because we have a very curious little helper now ;)

4. Bake for 25 minutes with the lid of the dutch oven on.  Then remove lid and continue baking for another 20 minutes or so until the bread is crusty and golden brown.

That's all there is to it!  Stay tuned for The Science Behind... sourdough starter!

Bringing my sourdough starters back from the grave

we've been missing this

If you thought my nearly one-year hiatus from the blog was long, you haven't heard about my nearly five year break from making sourdough.

The last time I blogged about sourdough, it was May of 2011, my very first mother's day.

http://thebreadmaiden.blogspot.com/2011/05/mother.html

My last substantive post about sourdough starter was here, back in 2009:

http://thebreadmaiden.blogspot.com/2009/05/sourdough-starter-troubles.html

If you peeked at that last post, you'll see part of the reason why I waited so long to get back into working with a starter, even though I've continued to bake bread with commercial yeast.

For one thing, it's a living organism.  Unlike commercial yeast which is dormant until activated by liquid, starter is alive and needs to be fed once a day for several days before it can be used.

Because it takes two to three days for a starter to get nice and active, then another day to rise a dough and bake, it requires knowing you will have a chunk of time to bake on the starter's schedule.  Bread with commercial yeast generally rises consistently, evenly, and takes about the same time, all the time.  So you can plan the bread baking around your schedule.

A starter is its own animal.  It is fussy.  It is messy.  It has a learning curve.  And if something goes wrong, it's one more part of the bread baking process that you need to troubleshoot.

But I think it's time.  I'm at a pretty good spot with Little Bread Boy and Little Bread Baby, where I might have a chunk of time here or there to feed the starter or bake the bread.

That said, these starters have been sitting in my fridge for the past five years, and who knows if they will come back.  Will they rise again after three days?  We'll just have to have faith.  Taste and see!

For The Science Behind...sourdough starter, check out this post.

The Science Behind... Raspberry Breakfast Cake

Welcome to my second post of the "The Science Behind..." series!

If you haven't read it yet, please CHECK OUT the recipe for Raspberry Breakfast Cake, then come back here for the science.

This post will touch on the following topics:

1. How is baking with baking powder/baking soda different from baking with yeast?
2. How come I can substitute the yogurt with sour cream or buttermilk and get the same result?  What else can I substitute out from the recipe?
3. What gives this bread its cakey texture?
4. What gives quick breads their structure?
5. Quick breads often have you separate wet and dry ingredients and then combine them at the last moment.  Why is that?

That's a lot to cover.  So let's get started!

1. What is the difference between baking with yeast and baking with baking soda or baking powder?

Baking soda, baking powder and yeast all achieve the same end result: they help rise the dough or batter by releasing gas.  How they do this, however, is really different.

Yeast is an organism that lives and reproduces from eating the sugar in flour (or any added sugar you use).  As it eats, it releases carbon dioxide gas which builds up inside your dough over time.  Then, when bread is baked in the oven, the heat causes the yeast to release more gas a second time.  This reaction can take place over many hours.  If you try to bake a loaf of bread without letting the yeast gases form, your loaf will be very dense and not taste very good.

Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate.  When mixed with an acidic liquid, it too forms carbon dioxide gas.  Unlike yeast which takes time to release gas, the chemical reaction between baking soda and acid is immediate and so the batter must be baked right away.  For this reason, breads that use baking soda or baking powder are called quick breads.  Yes, this raspberry cake is actually a quick bread!

Baking powder is baking soda mixed with a starch (typically cornstarch) and a powdered acid (typically cream of tartar).  That means you don't need to add a separate acidic liquid to start the chemical reaction - any will do.  Because baking powder also has starch and powdered acid, you typically add more of it to a recipe than baking soda, about three times more.  So a recipe that uses baking powder and baking soda together might say 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.

2. How come I can substitute the yogurt with sour cream or buttermilk and get the same result?  What else can I substitute out from the recipe?

Once you have a handle on the reasoning behind baking powder and baking soda, the sky is the limit! Any acidic dairy liquid will have the same effect as the yogurt.  For example:

the recipe for this cake called for sour cream, but I used crema

buttermilk is just milk or cream with a little vinegar

yogurt

in the case of beer bread, the carbon dioxide in the beer is the leavening ingredient!  Like baking powder and baking soda, the chemical reaction takes place immediately so you need to bake beer bread quickly. 

I also adapted my pancake recipe from one that used milk to one that also included sour cream by adding 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to offset the additional acid in my new recipe.

Other things you can substitute in the recipe without interfering with the chemical reaction of the leavening agents are: the seasonings (cinnamon would be a good addition), the extract (I throw in vanilla but Niequist calls for almond extract), the berries you choose to use, and the type of sweetener you use.  Because almost no gluten formation takes place, you don't have to worry about hydration levels.

lemon zest

3. What gives this bread its cakey texture?

You may have already guessed why this bread (and all quick breads) have a cakey texture; it's because the gluten doesn't have time to develop if you have to mix and cook it right away.  Also, quick breads tend to have very wet, runny batters (sometimes called "pour batters") which provides lots of room for small air bubbles to form.

4. So if gluten doesn't get a chance to form, what provides the structure for this bread?

The eggs!  If you remember from the last "The Science Behind...," eggs contain both fat and protein.  Protein is mostly found in egg whites, and like gluten strands in flour, it traps the carbon dioxide released by the baking powder or by the baking soda + acidic liquid.

5. Quick breads often have you separate wet and dry ingredients and then combine them at the last moment.  Why is that?

Again, because the chemical reaction between the baking powder or baking soda and the acidic liquid takes place the minute they are combined, recipes often instruct the cook to combine all the wet ingredients together, then all the dry ingredients together before combining the wet and dry into the final batter.  This isn't always necessary, but with two Little Bread Offspring, I find it is a lifesaver.  Often I will mix up the dry ingredients, then I can walk away and do something else knowing nothing chemically will happen while I'm gone.

That's about it for this episode of The Science Behind.  If you want to learn more about baking with baking soda and baking powder, this tutorial from King Arthur Flour is really good.

And now you know a bit more about your Raspberry Breakfast Cake!

The Science Behind... soft sandwich bread with bacon drippings

Welcome to the first post of my new series, "The Science Behind..."!

This post will touch on a few subjects:
1. What makes sandwich bread different from my basic 1-2-3 bread
2. How to incorporate fat into your dough's hydration ratio
3. How the addition of fat impacts the baking process

If you haven't read the recipe I'm referencing here, CHECK IT OUT then come back.

1. How is sandwich bread different from bread that only consists of flour, water, yeast and salt?

Think of the bread you probably ate sandwiches on as a kid - it's soft, slightly sweet, and has what's called in the business a "tight crumb."  That is, very small holes as opposed to the large holes in french bread or ciabatta.  After all, we can't have the jelly leaking out!  Fat and high protein content are what give sandwich bread their characteristic softness and tight crumb.  This recipe has three sources of fat: milk, egg yolk, and bacon drippings.  It has two sources of protein: the high protein content of bread flour, and the egg white.  The sweetness comes from the honey.

2. How can I incorporate fat into my bread without messing everything up?

• The most important factor in making successful bread is maintaining the right ratio of water and flour.  This ratio is called hydration, and it's super important for the development of gluten, which gives loaves of bread their structure.  

What do you see in this recipe?  There's no water as such.  There's milk. Bacon drippings. Egg.  Honey.  This recipe has a lot of different wet ingredients, but none of them are the same as water.  Because of this, they aren't absorbed in the same way water is.  Milk, egg yolks and bacon drippings all have fat in addition to water (milk also has a negligible amount of protein), and egg whites have protein.

it's bread math time

Milk is 85-95% water
Bacon drippings are about 30% water
Eggs are 90% water
Honey is about 20% water

If you add up the total weight of the wet ingredients in this recipe, you get 425+85+85+50=645.  645/795 = 81% hydration.  Clearly that isn't right, because at 81% hydration, the dough would be very wet and difficult to manage.  This dough is supple and easy to handle.  So we need to calculate what the actual hydration is by taking into account each ingredient's percentage of water.

Milk is 425*.95 = 404 (rounding up)
Bacon drippings are 85*.3 = 26
Egg is 50*.9=45
Honey is 85*.2=17

Therefore, the actual hydration of this loaf is 404+26+45+17 =  492/795 = 62% hydration.

Ok, confession time: in this case, you really didn't need to do all this math.  Peter Reinhart already did the math and figured out that the recipe would work with the water content of the above ingredients.  But if you wanted to make up your own recipe or figure out what would happen if you added an egg to another recipe, you would need to use the water content of the egg to figure out the total hydration of the dough and make sure it would work and not become a gloppy mess.

BUT WAIT!  Before we leave the topic of fat and hydration: Eggs are a special case.  Because the yolk has fat and the white has protein, you need to be careful just adding it to a dough that isn't enriched with anything else.  While the egg yolk adds softness to a dough, whites add protein strands which increase the chewiness of the loaf.  Too much protein and the loaf will be too tough.  For this reason, Peter Reinhart adds milk and oil, butter or bacon grease in addition to the egg.  Another adaptation I've seen has you add one egg plus an additional egg yolk to increase the fat.  It's up to you which you prefer.

this is just a random picture of eggs; the recipe only calls for one egg

• Knead, knead, knead!

Most breads are improved by letting the dough rise for a long time with a little bit of yeast.  The USDA cautions against leaving raw egg and milk out on the counter for long periods of time, so this recipe cuts down on the time the bread needs to rise by adding more yeast than usual.  When you add more yeast, it is vital that the gluten "net" be formed quickly by kneading.   Otherwise, all that gas created by the yeast will escape and the dough will not rise, or it will quickly deflate when it bakes. 

3. How does the addition of fat impact the baking process?

If you already read the recipe for soft sandwich bread, you saw that the baking temperature is 350 degrees F, a much lower temperature than loaves without fat can withstand.  There are two reasons for this:

• Dough with fat and sugar will brown more quickly than un-enriched dough.  Therefore, in a hotter oven you run the risk of burning the crust while the inside of the loaf is still raw.

• For sandwich bread, you want a soft crust.  A hotter oven produces a crustier crust.

I hope you enjoyed this first post in "The Science Behind..." series!  If there's another aspect of bread science you wish to explore, please let me know in the comments.

Bread for Communion Part V: Soft sandwich bread with bacon drippings

Hello all!

After a lengthy hiatus, Bread Maiden is back.  Now with double the bread baby action!  That's right, we've added a second baby and we're high on life (also lack of sleep).  Unlike with my first bread baby, I've actually been baking since #2 was born and didn't go through quite the cataclysmic adjustment period as I did with #1.  A few months ago I also returned to baking communion bread for my church.

Little bread baby makes his blog debut

Last month, I decided to try something new for the "look pretty" loaf for communion.  If you have no idea what that means, go here.  I wanted to mix things up and decided an easy way to do that was to swap one type of fat for another.  So instead of using butter or oil, I decided to use bacon drippings, which we save and store in the refrigerator.

tastes better than it looks

The recipe I used comes from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day.  I love this book in particular because it has the best biscuit recipe ever, with the fastest method of cutting in the butter I have ever seen (seriously, it saves SO much time).  The recipe I tweaked is his Soft Sandwich Bread and Rolls recipe.

You will need (for two loaves):

1 3/4 cup lukewarm milk
1 Tbls yeast
795 g Bread Flour
1 Tbls kosher salt
1 egg
1/4 cup honey
85 g melted butter, oil or bacon drippings

1.  In a small bowl, sprinkle the yeast on top of the milk and let sit for five minutes.  If it smells yeasty, it's working.

2. In a large mixing bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the flour, salt, egg, honey and bacon drippings and set aside until your yeast mixture is ready.  Then add the yeast and milk into the mixing bowl.

3. If you are using a stand mixer, get everything nice and combined using the paddle attachment.  When it becomes a ball, switch to the dough hook and knead for about five minutes.  If you don't have a stand mixer, just knead the heck out of it for five minutes.  You really do want to knead here - there is so much yeast that things are going to move quickly and you'll want to make sure the gluten has really developed a strong net to trap in those yeast gases!

before

after

4. Place the dough in an very large oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap.  Let rise until doubled in size.

before

after

5. Once the dough has doubled, punch it down and divide it into two equal parts.  This is more important if you plan to use loaf pans; if you are baking both loaves at the same time they need to be exactly the same size or they won't bake evenly.  Weigh out the dough after punching it down and then divide into two equal halves.  If you are making boules, you can just eyeball the two halves.  Shape the loaves as you wish.  If you want to use the dough to make sandwich bread, flatten it out and then roll it up and place it for the second rise into two buttered bread pans.  If you want boules, shape the loaves into balls and place for the second rise onto sheets of parchment paper and cover each loaf with a large bowl to form a dome.

6. After about an hour rise, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Score the boules in a pretty pattern or score the sandwich loaves with one long line down the middle.

look at all that condensation on the inside of the bowl!

I use a serrated knife to score the loaf

I tell Bread Camp attendees that the most important part of scoring the loaf is Not Being Afraid!

7.  Bake for 40-50 minutes until the top of the loaf is golden brown and it can withstand a nice hard thump with your nail.  Remove from the oven and let rest until cooled.

Voila!  A loaf of bread that is nice and flaky with no bacon flavor.  Everyone who tried this loaf loved it, and it's nice sometimes to tweak favorite recipes and see what else they can do.  You could even take the bacon to the next level (if bacon flavor is what you're after) and add bacon bits (cooled of course) to the dough after the first rise but before you divide the loaf in two.  Let me know how it works out.

If you're interested in more of the science of baking enriched breads like this sandwich bread, check out my "The Science Behind..." post here.

New series: "The Science Behind..."

During my long hiatus from this blog, I've been thinking about the direction The Bread Maiden will take in the future.  I still like having all my favorite recipes in one searchable place, and I have enjoyed sharing my bread-baking journey and my adventures in baking for my church's monthly Communion observance with my followers.

At this point, I've been baking bread for nearly ten years, and I've learned a lot in the process.  I enjoy sharing my knowledge at my Bread Camp, and I'd like to share it in a more useful way here too.  

Therefore, I'd like to try out a new blogging format that will delve deeper into the science behind my recipes.  I want to break down the recipes and explain why they work.  In doing so, I hope readers will be able to see why each step matters, what steps DON'T matter, and how they can tweak the recipes to make them work better.  

Everyone likes and needs different things. I have a friend who lets her bread rise overnight and then bakes it in the morning.  How can she adapt a recipe that calls for a rise of only two hours?  Or another friend want to incorporate more whole grains. How can he adapt a recipe that calls for bread flour?  In order to satisfy those who care about such things and those who only want the recipes as they are, I'm going to divide what used to be a single bread post into two separate posts: 1) the ingredients and process, or what most people would consider the "recipe," and 2) a post explaining the "why" behind the recipe.  Each "why" post will be tied to a specific bread recipe post.  I'll be using more bread math, but don't be scared!  There's really only two equations you will need.

I hope you enjoy this new format and tell me what you think!

(no recipe in this post, sorry! If you'd like to make the recipe these pictures are from, check out this post)