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.

Carrement Chocolat, the Fancy Cake from Dorie Greenspan (Baking Chez Moi)

My sister came to Atlanta for her birthday (September 4) on Labor Day weekend. I wanted to bake her a cake - I am fifteen years older than she and used to bake her cakes when she was a little girl. So I went out of order in Baking Chez Moi and baked the cake on the cover of the book.

Now I can say I baked the cake on the cover, but mine was a far cry from the gorgeous cake on the cover. Mine tasted incredible but was not a work of art.

Hers is a work of art.

I weighed the ingredients and put the cake together in stages as she recommends. So I made the ganache, the chocolate shards, the syrup, the filling on the day before. I made the cake the day of the gathering to celebrate my sister. I wish I had made the whole thing the day before.

I baked it in a pan with tall sides.

It's a one layer cake that is then sliced and the filling put in between the sliced off top and the bottom.

Here's how it looked in the end:

But even though it didn't look like the book cover, it was melt in your mouth delicious and I would make it again for another special occasion.

Bouchon Bakery: Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

My second foray into Bouchon Bakery cookbook occurred today when I baked the oatmeal raisin cookies on page 32.

I am dedicated to weighing everything, but I didn't weigh the vanilla paste. I used my measuring spoon instead! Ingredients all gathered below. I've never weighed eggs before. I broke two eggs and then whisked them to break them up so I could pour off the excess.

I was supposed to sift the cinnamon and the soda into the flour, but I did the cinnamon and the salt. The Kosher salt had no inclination to go through the sieve!

Maybe because my brown sugar is not new, the lumps didn't break up with the whisk as described. I got a pestle and broke them up with it instead. Then I whisked it all together.

Creamed butter - supposed to look like mayonnaise.

I forgot to take photos for the adding of the dry ingredients, the flour/cinnamon/soda/salt mix. Then when it was time to add the oatmeal, the directions said to pulse 10 times. That kind of instruction goes with a food processor and this was being made in a stand mixer. I turned it quickly on and off ten times, but it didn't make sense to me. I used my rubber spatula to fold the oats in and then to fold in the raisins.

I made the small version of the cookies so that the recipe made a dozen cookies. It is designed to make six huge cookies, which I guess would be the size of salad plates. I had no desire - these are more than big enough for me. I baked in a convection oven and my cookies look darker than the photo in the Bouchon Bakery cookbook. But these taste DELICIOUS. 

My son-in-law and daughter each ate one and had a fit over how good these are.

 Confession: the photo below is of the recipe with golden raisins in it, but my grandchildren don't like raisins, so I baked six with golden raisins and six with chocolate chips. In the photo above, the left six are made with raisins and the right six are made with chocolate chips.