Baking Bread At Home Again

Today I baked my first loaves of bread at home since coming back from vacation. I came back Saturday night, but didn’t remember to take Dulce (my starter) out of the fridge until Sunday morning. For the previous week and a half, Dulce had been in a fairly stiff form, and had been chilling away in the fridge with very little fermentation. So when I took her out on Sunday morning, I fed just a bit of extra water and flour, and turned her into a wet starter to get things active again. Maybe 4 hours later, I built her up just a bit more (maybe doubling her in weight) so that she would be ready for use in Bagel Monday.

On Bagel Monday, I fed her a small amount in the morning, and then a bit more at night. Finally, last night I used 277g of Dulce to make 1550g of dough (about 750g for each loaf, and 50 attributed to dough loss). To get 75% hydration, I calculated the need for 876g of flour, 657g water, and 18g salt. Since I was keeping Dulce at 100% hydration (equal parts flour and water), that meant I only needed to add 738g of fresh flour, and 519g of fresh water. I had wanted to use all high extraction flour, but ran out after 350g. This meant that overall, my bread was around half high extraction, and half regular white flour (all purpose, bread flour, Artisan Bakers Craft from Central Milling, whatever you want to call it).

At 75% hydration, this was a somewhat wet dough, but not massively. If it had been all white flour, it would have felt wetter, but the high extraction soaks up a bit more of the water. I did my initial incorporation in the container I was mixing, and then took it out on to the bench (wooden work table) to make sure all the flour was wet. My initial mixing as at 9:15AM in the morning, so my plan was to develop it slowly over the next several hours, let it ferment and expand for a few more, shape it in the early afternoon, and bake it at night. I gave it a few folds every 20-40 minutes, and it started to tighten up quite a bit. But because my plans fell through, and I had to work at 331 Cortland, followed by meeting with Tiffany of mmm, Butter!, I knew I wouldn’t be wanting to bake a loaf so late at night.

I had done my final fold some time around 2PM, and got back around 11PM to see it had doubled or tripled in size (I should have actually taken note of the volume measurements, but I didn’t, and it was fine). I took the dough out of its container, and noticed that it was still fairly strong, even though it had grown so much. Had I shaped the dough at 2PM instead of leaving it to ferment, it seems like it would have produced a very light loaf. I shaped the dough by putting it on a light layer of flour; then I cut the dough into 2 pieces, and for each piece folded everything towards the unfloured center. I applied a bit of pressure to deflate some of the gas that had built up, knowing that they would be proofing for quite some time, and needed more room to grow. I placed the loaves into floured, linen lined bannetons, and covered them with a cloth that I sprayed with a bit of water.

I woke up the next morning around 8AM, worried that the loaves would have overproofed, or run out of energy, but discovered that they still had a good amount of support, and had grown decently. They did deflate a bit when I scored them, but overall they were still fairly light, and had a decently open crumb. When I tried to load them into the oven, I bit of the stickiness was still present, and I ended up throwing one of the loaves a bit over the stone. I thought it was going to burn by being too close to the oven wall, but I was able to flip it around 15 minutes later, and the only downsize was a small groove from where it was leaning over the stone. The ears opened up slightly, but the dough was too wet, and had lost too much of its strength to really open much. The taste was a decently tangy sour, but not overwhelming, considering the 24 hours of overall fermentation.

I kept one loaf for myself, and gave the other to Jaime, of La Victoria. He said it was in the top 5 of breads he had had that I’ve made. I think I agree; it was good, but not great. If I were to do these loaves over again, I could have changed one of several things: if the timing stays the same, I would make it a stiffer dough, maybe 73% hydration, to slow down the fermentation, and increase the dough strength; if I could of baked it at night, I would have shaped it in the early afternoon to give it a good 6-8 hours to proof; if I was going to keep the hydration the same, I would have used less starter (maybe 10% of overall dough), and continue to develop the dough much later into the afternoon, before giving it its final rest before shaping.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the loaves, and am ready for more. I’m glad to be baking at home again, and also to be writing about bread. There are a lot of people who are looking to learn how to make bread, and I’d like to help. Sour Flour is going through a lot of change right now, and my energies are being put onto many different things, but if I can continue to bake and write, I think a lot of knowledge can be learned and shared.

Now I’m going to go start my next loaf.

1 thought on “Baking Bread At Home Again”

  1. Itss like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like youu wrote the book in it or something.
    I thnk that youu could do with a few pics to
    drive the message home a bit, but instead of that, this is magnificent blog.
    A fantastic read. I’ll definitely be back.

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