First loaf---pleasantly surprised with the outcome!
I've been cultivating a new starter for about 2 weeks now. After 12 days, I was getting consistent doubling 4-5 hours after feeding on a 1:1:1 ratio, so I decided to take a crack at my first sourdough bread. I mostly followed Claire Saffitz's recipe from the NYT: https://cooking.nytimes.com/article/sourdough-bread.
700 g bread flour
300 g rye flour
750 g water
200 g starter
20 g salt
(makes two loaves)
Day 1
- Early morning, mixed 20 g of starter with 100 g of water and 100 g of 70:30 bread flour, rye flour mix
- Evening, (at this point starter almost tripled in volume) discarded all but 20g and repeated the above.
Day 2
- Autolyze for ~1 hour
- Mixed in starter by hand, add salt and rest for 10 minutes
- Did stretch and folds for about 15 minutes quite vigorously. Stopped when dough passed window pane test. Let dough rest on counter.
- After an hour of rest, I did 4 stretch and folds, this time much gentler and let the dough rest for another hour.
- I repeated the above three more times. However, I had to run an errand before the last set and the dough sat undisturbed for about 2.5 hours.
- Total bulk ferment time up to this point was about 6.5 hours in a 72-75 degree kitchen.
- At this point, the dough almost doubled, was jiggly and had bubbles throughout. So, I moved on to the preshaping step.
- I dumped the dough onto a floured surface and cut into two. I stretched each dough into a rough square and folded from the corners, flipped it over, and used a bench scraper to form a ball as best I could. This step was tricky since the dough was still a bit tacky---I had to apply several sprinklings of flour to get things moving.
- After 20 minutes of rest, I did the final shaping---dough was noticeably easier to handle---transferred to bannetons and let rest for 1 hour.
- After 1 hour, when I poked the dough, the indentation slowly pushed back out. I then transferred to my fridge for overnight ferment.
Day 3
- 10 hours later, I pre-heated my oven at 500 F for 1 hour with a dutch oven inside.
- I took one loaf out, flipped it onto parchment paper and did a score.
- I transferred to the dutch oven and baked with lid on for 20 minutes.
- I then took the lid off, reduced temp to 450 F and baked for an additional 30 minutes and transferred to wire rack for cooling
It was a bit of a journey. I didn't really appreciate how challenging it would be to handle such a hydrated dough, but it all worked out. The inside was a tad moist but that's probably because I got impatient and cut into it 3 hours after cooling. The bread tasted great and family devoured it in no time.
I will bake the second loaf tomorrow and make sure it gets to cool over night.