A Lesson in High Hydration Sourdough Bread

I love making bread with sourdough starter, using only the starter as a natural yeast/leaven for the bread. I bake out of lots of cookbooks but particularly enjoy Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa.

I promised my brother I would put photos of the process here so that he could follow them as he makes his first sourdough loaf. I made the high hydration sourdough recipe in her book yesterday and today and will provide a photographic journey through the loaf.

Here is my bubbly starter that has been fed daily for at least four days. When I'm going out of town I put the starter in the fridge, but the rest of the time, it is bubbling on my counter every day.

When I start this process, I turn the light on in my oven. The light will heat the oven just a little and I can let the dough rise in the oven overnight, with a jumpstart from the light warmth on this coldish winter night.

Good bakers weigh everything so I live by my digital scale and try to be as exact as possible - I'm not perfect, by any means and am often off by a gram or so but it doesn't seem to matter. I weigh the starter and then weigh the water and stir them together.

I weigh the flour and the salt and stir them into the yeast/water mixture.

I give it a bit of a rest - maybe 30 minutes. Then I form it into a ball. It helps for that part to use wet hands, so I generally hold my hand under the faucet and shake the water off and form the loaf with a rather wet hand. I cover the bowl with a damp towel, put it into the oven and close the door. I turn off the oven light and go to bed, leaving the bread to rise overnight.

The next morning, the dough should be ready to form into a loaf. So I turn it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a loaf.  

I put the loaf seam side up into a banneton that is lined with linen and dusted heavily with flour.

I cover the banneton with a damp towel to rise while the oven heats to 500 F - takes my oven about 40 minutes to get there. I put my cloche in which the bread will bake into the oven while it preheats.

As we get closer to 500, I get the bread ready. I take parchment paper and cut a circle a little larger than the banneton.

When the oven hits 500, I put a no-edge cookie sheet over the parchment paper topped banneton and flip the whole thing over.

Then I lift the banneton off of the risen loaf very carefully. I made a huge mistake here. I had washed the linen liner of my banneton and although I had floured it, I obviously hadn't floured it enough and the bread dough stuck to it. What a mess! But all was not lost. It did look pretty bad and lost a lot of its rise because of the sticking episode - see how folded over it looks below.

Not to be defeated, I plowed ahead. I also am terrible with the lame. I have learned that the lame seems to be easier to use if I rub the bread all over with flour first, so I did that.

I take the cloche out of the oven (carefully) and remove the top. Lifting the cookie sheet, I slide the bread on its parchment paper into the bottom of the cloche.

I cover the cloche and the bread bakes covered for 25 minutes. Then I turn the temperature down to 450 and it bakes covered for ten more minutes. Then I remove the cover.

The above photo is how it looked after that amount of time. I put the bread uncovered back into the 450 degree oven for about 15 minutes more and then it's done. You can tell that it's done by the darkened brown crust. But if you want to know for sure, use an instant thermometer. The internal temperature of the loaf should be between 200 - 212. You can't read the digital screen but this one measured 212 F when I took it out.

When it's cooling, I always listen to the crackling of the crust. My oven which has been at 500 degrees runs its cooling motor automatically even when it's off until it has cooled down, so that's the hum you hear in the background, but turn your sound up so you can LISTEN to the crackling of the cooling bread!

And despite the almost tragedy of sticking to the linen, the slices were still lovely. The large hole at the top is because of the fold that happened as a result of the sticking but the bread is absolutely delicious!

Delicious bread with olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar!

My bread roots

My bread baking was inspired by my mother. In the eighth grade I had to do a home-ec project. At the time I think she was considering becoming a bread baker - she was a great home cook and this would be a new skill for her. She provided me with cookbooks and I baked a different kind of bread every week for six or eight weeks.

The whole family enjoyed the bread and one of the breads from my project, Monte Carlo Bread, a white bread with cardamom and currants, became her signature bread. I still have the cookbook in which we found the recipe -

   

And here's the Monte Carlo bread recipe:

She tried a few other breads along the way but always had Monte Carlo bread in her freezer, wrapped to give away to any friend who dropped by, any repairman who came to work on something in the house, or to toast for us for breakfast.

I did the home-ec project in the 8th grade, so she started baking bread after that and was an eager bread baker during my high school years (1962 - 1966). Somewhere in there when I was 15, she ordered sourdough starter that was 100 years old, from San Francisco. She kept that starter going all the rest of her life.

When she died in 2015, she had not been cooking or baking much at all in the last few years of her life. She was 93 when she died. When my sister and I went to Mississippi to begin cleaning out the house, I found a quart jar on the back porch. It was not in the refrigerator and was black, black, black on the inside.

I stared at the jar as I realized that it was her "100 year-old starter," now 152 years old. The starter had been sitting unrefrigerated probably for three or so years on a hot Mississippi screened back porch. I picked up the jar and headed for the kitchen.

Using some hot water around the lid and all of my strength, I screwed open the canning lid and lifted it off. A smell worse than the sewer poured into the room and could be experienced throughout the house. Totally gross and beyond decrepit, the starter seemed all but lost. I was not daunted, though and spooned the black goo out and into the garbage disposal. 

In the very center of the jar, in the heart of the smelly stuff, was some pure white sourdough starter still remaining. While my sister opened every nearby window to try to get rid of the odor, I put the white starter into a plastic bag and triple bagged it before taking it home with me to Atlanta.

In my Atlanta kitchen, I divided the starter into about eight or nine bowls and added 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water to each bowl. I covered the bowls with a wet kitchen towel and left home to go to work for the day. When I walked into my kitchen at the end of the day, it was like the monster that had eaten my kitchen!

Delighted to be fed and relishing the opportunity finally to have food, the starter yeast had gone rogue and bubbled all over my counters. 

I was THRILLED. So I bottled up the starter and began feeding it regularly. I now use it every single week to make the best ever bread with natural yeast.

A number of years ago, I read Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn. He studied sourdough starter and said that it contains microbes from every place it has been. As a result, everyone's starter is unique.

I love thinking that every time I make sourdough bread, my mother's microbes and the microbes from her Mississippi kitchen are mixing with my microbes and those in my Atlanta kitchen as well as with the original microbes from San Francisco 155 years ago.