This week in Bread of Heron, the Heron Corn Mill's community bread group, we tried our most ambitious bake yet - sourdough. And I discovered how flustered mental arithmetic can make me.
There is no getting away from the fact that there is something special about sourdough, but equally there is some special complexity about making it. It really needs lots of time, and it is temperamental. You need to take account of what it looks and feels like, and how it is behaving. If you don't get in tune with the dough, you will not get a happy loaf out of it. I know this sounds a bit like looking after a Tamagotchi, but seriously, you need to get on your sourdough's wave length.
Following Julius Caesar's example in the Gallic Wars, we split our problem into three parts -
- sponge production
- dough production
- shaping and baking
Pars prima - sponge
Four adventurous bakers have their own sourdough cultures at home in their fridges, and they started their own sponges off at home from their cultures on Wednesday.
I went into mass sponge production from my culture on Wednesday so that anyone who didn't have their own culture could have some of my common stock sponge when we met for our extra session at the shepherd's hut on Thursday. In effect these bakers joined the action at the second stage.
Pars secunda - dough
On Thursday we met at the shepherd's hut to make up our dough using the sponge that we had started the day before. The dough was then covered up and left in the hut overnight.
One baker brought a very unusual ingredient along - grated beetroot! This was extremely interesting, not least because it introduced an extra unknown into the equation: how much water is there in a beetroot? Time would tell.
There was something quite exciting about leaving the dough to its own devices for so long, and just walking away. A bit like putting the kids to bed in a tent in the back garden.
There's always one
There was something quite exciting about leaving the dough to its own devices for so long, and just walking away. A bit like putting the kids to bed in a tent in the back garden.
Pars tertia - shape and bake
Our regular Friday morning session then started with inspecting our dough to see how it had fared overnight. There were some satisfying gasps when we found that all the dough had risen strongly and was ready for shaping and proving in baskets. There had always been the chance that we would have nothing to bake if anything had gone wrong overnight.
Our extra meeting - Pete nearly flips
Thursday sounded like a nice easy day - just take the sponge and make some dough with it. What could possibly go wrong with that? Well, you only find out that you have been making assumptions when somebody challenges them.
I had made my sponge by eye - that is, I knew what kind of consistency I wanted, and I just aimed at that. I fed and re-fed the sponge over 24 hours, and so long as I finished up with the right kind of gooiness, I was happy.
Arithmetic alert
Readers of a nervous or sleepy disposition may wish to skip forward to the section called The normal Friday baking session.
Error primus
Unfortunately, at some stage I had decided that my sponge was basically half flour, half water, and that idea had got lodged in my head. So when I shared my sponge with the other bakers, I said they should think of it as half flour, half water, and adjust the other ingredients in the recipe accordingly.
That was my first mistake, because if my sponge was, as I intended, a quarter sponge - a quarter of the flour and a half of the water - then it would actually be 58% water and 42% flour.
That was my first mistake, because if my sponge was, as I intended, a quarter sponge - a quarter of the flour and a half of the water - then it would actually be 58% water and 42% flour.
Total weights for a loaf:
500 g flour
350 g water
Weights for a quarter sponge:
125 g flour
175 g water
Total weight of sponge:
300 g
Percentage of water in sponge:
175 / 300 = 58%
Error secundus
My second mistake was to get mixed up between the amount of culture that is put into the sponge (100 g), and the amount of sponge that is put into the dough (300 g). I told everyone to put 100 g of sponge into their mixing bowls, and then add the rest of the flour. Because of my first error I said there was 50 g of flour in the sponge, so I said the bakers should add 450 g of flour to make up the full 500 g of flour.
Nell then pointed out that my original recipe said 300 g of sponge, so I had to quickly try to work out how to correct the mess I had got everybody into. Mental arithmetic under pressure is a lot harder than in normal circumstances, and I rather went to pieces at this stage.
We increased the sponge in our bowls from 100 g to the correct 300 g (which I was still assuming was 150 g of flour and 150 g of water); reduced the flour from 450 g to 350 g to make (as I thought) a total of 500 g of flour; and added 200 g of water to make (as I thought) a total of 350 g of water.
But that first mistake meant that although we were aiming at 70% hydration (700 g water per 1000 g flour) we were actually getting something a lot wetter.
Assuming my sponge was at exactly the right level of gooiness for a quarter sponge, then the 300 g of sponge we put in each loaf would actually contain 174 g water (58% of 300 g) and 126 g of flour.
And the dough we ended up with would be 174 + 200 = 374 g of water and 126 + 350 = 476 g of flour. That means our actual hydration level would be 374 / 476 = 78% hydration. The difference between 70% and 78% hydration is very significant!
And of course as I made the sponge by eye, it could have been even wetter than that. So I have really learned an important lesson here: you need to measure the contents of your sponge as meticulously as you measure the ingredients of your dough.
So long as you measure the sponge ingredients carefully, and assuming you are always aiming at 70% hydration in the finished dough, the 100 g of sponge you keep back for your next bake will be pretty accurately 140% hydration. So next time you bake, you can produce a sponge at 140% hydration simply by adding extra flour and water in the proportion 5 parts flour to 7 parts water.
To keep your sponge production simple, don't feed your culture between bakes. When you want to bake just make a sponge by putting the whole 100 g of culture into the sponge, and then weigh out 100 g of the sponge to keep in the fridge as your culture for next time.
This all sounds like fanaticism, but I really don't think this is too much trouble to take to make sure you get the result you want.
I am now coming to the conclusion that I have probably been making my dough quite a lot softer than I intended, because I have been significantly underestimating my hydration level. However, this is all good practice, because I have got reasonably well used to handling very soft dough, so if I find that my dough in future is a little firmer, I should be able to handle it a little easier.
The normal Friday baking session
The day dawned bright and fresh, and I was in the shepherd's hut early to check the dough.
At 9 o'clock the others joined me, and three home sponging bakers had brought their own dough from home. So we had a full house, and were on the way to a successful bake, even if there was a question mark over the hydration question.
Shaping the dough
Our first job on Friday was to shape our dough and load it into baskets to prove. As we had some first timers, I did a quick demo of my legendary shaping technique. I turned my wobbly dough out onto a very well floured worktop, pointing out that shaping introduces a little structure into dough which has had a long time to develop, but has developed in an untidy way. We could see lots of gluten strands, but everything was very soft - no tension at all.
My first step was to roll the dough up into a swiss roll shape. I stretched the dough gently as I turned it, so that I introduced a little tension round the outside of the swiss roll shape, in the direction I was rolling the dough. Then I let it rest for a while, with the trailing edge of the dough running along the bottom of the swiss roll. In theory, letting it rest allows the "seam" to seal up.
The dough was still quite soft after this first roll, and very wide - too wide for the basket, for sure.
The second step was to turn the dough through 90 degrees and repeat the stretch and roll, this time rolling the dough up along the considerable length of the swiss roll shape. After this was complete, the dough was quite noticeably firmer. I had introduced another set of tension at 90 degrees to the first lot, so the gluten was being made to sit up and take notice. You are aiming at a network of gluten strands, after all, strong enough to contain the gas that the dough is still producing. I let the dough stand on the seam again, to let it seal up as best it could.
Finally I turned the dough through ninety degrees again, and stretched and rolled it for a third time. After this it was really nice and elastic. Before leaving it to seal, I tucked the ends of the swiss roll underneath so that I would have a nice tidy end to my loaf, instead of it looking like the swiss roll it really was.
When I thought it had had long enough to seal the seam up, I confidently turned the dough upside down into my proving basket, only to find that the seams had not really sealed up at all. Never do demonstrations - they always go wrong! (The two pictures in this section are not pictures of my bread.)
Over to you
Once I had my bread safely in the basket, it was time for the group to have a go at handling some really soft dough. For some bakers, this was a first, as this was their first sourdough. And it can be quite daunting when the dough is so soft, because it quickly starts to slide around in your hands. If you lose it, and rush to correct the situation, you are unlikely to remember afterwards what you actually did, so you don't learn anything from the experience.
Stay calm is the best advice - stay calm and make some tea.
People had varying levels of success with the shaping, I think it's fair to say. It's not something you can get right first time, and it really feels different with sourdough.
Eventually we were all safely in the baskets -
After a good couple of hours resting in the baskets, the next hurdle was to turn the bread out onto the worktop. Because we had lots of bread to go in the oven, we needed to get two loaves on each stone.
I suggested we turned the bread out onto parchment on the worktop, and then shoot the whole thing off a tray into the oven, parchment and all. This got the bread in the oven double quick, so the doors could be closed quickly, And it also meant that the difficult job of fitting two loaves side by side could be done on the worktop, rather than on the way onto the stone in the oven.
Again, fortunes were a little mixed at this stage, and some loaves opened up rather more than would have been ideal. And there was some sticking to the baskets, particularly our friend Mr Beetroot. Do you fancy your chances of getting that pink blob of dough out in one piece?
Er.... not really.
As it turned out, it was happy enough once it made it to the oven. And all the straggly bits just take on a life of their own in the finished bread, giving character to the shape - no problem!
But with such wet dough and all that beetroot colour, cleaning the basket out was a bit of a mare, it must be said.
Final results for the sourdough stakes
Given our over all lack of experience with sourdough, I think we produced very commendable results. And if everybody's tasted as good as mine, I think there will be some happy bakers this week, as well as justifiably proud ones.
There are some unorthodox shapes, it's true, but that's just rustic, after all!
It's hard to see how this next shape was raised in an oblong basket, but it was!
You don't see one of these every day. This is due to the way we got two on a shelf, of course.The bread itself looks really good.
A calculator is not just for Christmas
Hopefully the lesson the group learned was that sourdough may be a bit fiddly, but it tastes great and it really is within everyone's grasp if they want to do it, and it's fun. Here's the evidence that we had fun -
Whatever the weather when we start, it's not long before the smiles break out.
Sodabread and similar
Everybody went pretty much to town with the sodabread recipes this week, which is great. Not only do we get to taste lots of interesting variations, but we get to see what works that we might not have tried ourselves.
I sat out and didn't do a sodabread this time, because I have had trouble getting the soda element right in the past. But our intrepid bakers seemed to have no trouble at all with dispersing the soda properly through the dough.
And what about this? This is a fantastic six-strand plait, and didn't it turn out well, egg glaze and all!
Here are some photos from the Thursday group's last couple of bakes. Hopefully they tell their own stories.
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