Sourdough baking

This is 30% wholegrain rye, the rest white strong bread flour, 75% hydration (rye is thirsty, the dough was quite easy to handle). Splash of olive oil, sea salt, caraway seeds.

First loaf in a few weeks, looking pretty good. I left it in the oven a few extra minutes uncovered to get a darker crust.

• 80% bread flour
• 10% scalded whole khorasan flour
• 10% whole khorasan flour
• 77.5% hydration
• Bake 38 minutes at 450°F with steam

I'm new at this but this is one of my more successful attempts. Previously I had been baking sandwiche sourdough with a loaf pan which I think is easier than doing a boule.

65g starter 315g water 10g honey 240g bread flour 175g whole grain spelt 25g medium rye 9g salt 450°F 25 min 425°F 20 min

Baked in a Le Creuset dutch oven. This starter was conceived 8/3/23 from our local back porch yeast.

Today's breads were made with a flour that is easy to handle and shape, because it is nice and strong.

However, in previous bakes I've found it slow to increase in volume during the final proof. The breads have just been denser and less open than I think the flour can do, and I think that I've been baking too soon and not giving it enough time to properly fill the bannetons.

Today is the first time I've got an open crumb with this flour. The trick, it seems was to take it out of the fridge and place in the proofer for 1.5 hours, then back in the fridge to chill before baking.

This bread is about 79% of this flour, 18% whole wheat and 3% vital wheat gluten. Final hydration is about 76% but I start at 70% and increase it with a bassinage step.

Saturday bake.

450 wheat flour, 50g whole wheat flour, 100g starter, 350 water (70% hydration) and 10g salt.

Now cooling down, will post picture of the crumb later today.

65% hydration: 700 grams bread flour, 200 grams starter, and 420 grams water. Baked in lodge combo cooker. They're cooling now, can't wait to cut into them!

Following up to my previous post, I'm really curious what your go-to method is for baking a single sourdough loaf.

Currently, I'm using a Dutch oven (cast-iron pot) and a spray bottle to add some extra moisture to the dough. But definitely getting mix results.

Drop a comment below. Let's learn from each other 👇

Had a little experiment last night with two portions of the same dough.

The one of the left is baked with the steam-oven. I just used the standard bread recipe in the oven's settings. The one on the right is baked with a Dutch oven.

Tried to get the variables (like scoring etc.) as consistent as possible. What a different.

Any thoughts? The only thing I can think of is that the Dutch oven wasn't the same temp as the oven, so that stopped the rise of the loaf on the right.

I'm inclined to try refrigerating my dough after mixing in the starter to prevent acids from the yeast interfering with the autolysis. But cold usually slows chemical processes too, so this may be counterproductive.

I'm trying to max out the autolysis of the dough, so I don't need to knead much. Anything more than 3 minutes of kneading feels like too much work.

Adam Ragusea talks about autolysis in this video -- he seems to be of the opinion that acid from fermentation is not a factor: https://youtu.be/orpTeX_EGXA?si=n0OxksbbUynUFhJO&t=770

Pictured: My most recent loaf of sourdough. I like the crust, but I did not get enough oven spring.

This was my first attempt at making a seeded bread (using caraway seeds to give it that traditional Jewish rye bread flavor).

Came out really nice...flavor reminded me of the kind of bread I'm used to getting in the deli.

It came out so good that I (obviously) had to immediately run to the store and pick up some sliced corned beef to make some corned beef sandwiches.

The basic make-up was; 75% bread flour, 25% whole dark rye, 73% hydration. Oh yeah, and 75% of the liquid I used was actually dill pickle juice from a near-empty jar of store-bought dill pickles. It's been hot here, and I don't have air conditioning, so I used cold packs from the freezer to keep my fermentation bowl chilled in order to stretch out my bulk-fermentation time to 9 hours.

After messing with the moisture content, I think a slightly dryer loaf is getting me the results I'm looking for. Firmer crust and better definition in the scoring.

1/3 wholegrain rye

1/3 white whole wheat

1/3 strong bread flour

70% hydration

20% starter (made with all purpose unbleached white flour 50% hydration)

2% salt

Wee bit of olive oil (oiled the rising bowl)

All the spicy olives we had

Overnight ferment

425F, one hour - first half en cloche, second half just loosely tented with foil because my oven heats from the top.

100g starter + 100g strong flour + 100g water
Let sit 2-9 hours

Add 400g strong flour + 250g (ish) water + 12g (ish) salt
Mix well and adjust water as needed for a relatively dry dough
Let sit 2-20 hours

Fold/roll into a loaf
Proof in fridge 8-48 hours.

Bake 28 minutes at 260c covered in dutch oven
Bake 3 minutes 260c uncovered

They're still tasty but the boules are too short to make decent sandwiches with.

I used less starter, more salt, and a shorter proof time than the recipe called for but they still collapsed. I think I need to cut the amount of starter more aggressively.

A lot of us are experimenting with different ways of baking - driven by high energy prices or issues with a constant supply of electricity, as we have in South Africa.

So, I took a bread in banneton along to a family member who has recently purchased a Kenwood 25l "air fryer oven" which can operate as a convection oven as well, and uses only 1.7kW of electricity, so is more feasible to be powered by solar panels during the day.

The benefit to this little oven is that it claims to reach the 230°C after only 6 minutes - which is far faster than my oven which I give an hour! This is probably where the greatest electricity savings could be realized.

Still learning how to bake with this one - we did 30 minutes in a covered casserole on the bake setting at 230°C (446°F) - followed by another 20 minutes reduced to 200°C (392°F) uncovered. Even after 50 minutes the bread was still pale so we used the air-fryer setting to brown it for a further 10 minutes.

The resultant bread was lovely, the sesame smell really carried through the house that I don't normally get with a normal bake!

This was a lovely bread, even if the shape wasn't as good as it could be - didn't get an ear as it was still fairly slumpy on the bake setting - and the top had a darker strip in the middle, but I think with experience and using the air-fryer setting from the beginning it could be possible to consistently get a great loaf with less electricity usage.

My starter is already quite sour and full of character, so if I use more of it, I'm directly adding those flavors sraight into the dough, but by using more starter it will result in less fermentation time, and less proofing time, which means less sour and less character developed through fermentation and proofing.

On the other hand, if I use less starter, the dough is starting off with less of that initial flavor and character, but the lower starter amount means longer fermentation and proof times, which means more character in the final product.

So which is more impactful to the flavors of the final loaf? The extra initial starter, or the longer fermentation and proof times?

1000g bread flour, 710g water, 40g unfed starter, 20g salt, a few tablespoons of toasted flaxseed and meal, a squirt of honey and some chopped fresh sage. I lost track of what I was doing measuring the flour and had to guess to correct the ratio, so it was wetter than normal, but worked out.

Sharing a gallery for an old bake. I learned a lot and got a lot of inspiration from the sourdough subreddit, so I'm glad to find a community here. This was a recipe for two large boules, containing 1000g flour, 710g water, 40g unfed starter, 20g salt, 1-2tbsp honey, 1-2 tbsp toasted flax and about two handfuls cheese.

That’s all, just was excited and thought I’d share. 😊

I have a recipe I've found and like making because the crumb regularly turns out nicely for me, but I'd like it if the final loaf was a little bit bigger. If I wanted to scale up the recipe to make a 10% bigger loaf, would it be fine to just scale up each of the ingredients by 10% and bake it a little longer? Is there anything else I need to do? Any sort of formula for estimating changes to baking time?

Felt like something sweet. The shaping is based on the accordion bread by autumn kitchen (YouTube https://youtu.be/hLlaB2jacKE).

All of the dough was mixed in the mixer with the sweet matcha paste. Then the dough was split in two and cocoa paste was added to half of the dough, and the two doughs were joined together by following the accordion bread video method. White chocolate and some dried pineapple as inclusions.

This was a fun bread too make. I used a raisin yeast water rather than sourdough here because of all the sugar. Next time I'll up the matcha to get more colour yet and more matcha flavour.

Did them both in dutch ovens, mostly followed King Arthur's "Naturally Leavened Sourdough" recipe with some extra water. I didn't slash them very well, but they still rose quite nicely~

We’ll see soon if I added enough rosemary to make it count as a rosemary loaf.