Extra Tangy Sourdough Bread
Not the Most Attractive Bread
Time: 37 Hours
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Difficulty: 3/5
Sourdough is something that is somewhat intimidating to make. Not because it looks especially difficult to make for a bread, but because you need to have invested significant time and a decent amount of effort ahead of time to develop and a sufficient starter for you to even have a chance at success. This requires a lot of patience and after all of that waiting, you don’t want to be left disappointed. This recipe is from King Arthur’s Baker’s Companion. I also used that book to make my first starter, which took about two and a half weeks to develop. Hopefully all of that time was worth the wait.
Key Ingredients & Omissions:
The ingredients here are very simple. There’s nothing that you can leave out of it and end up with an edible bread. The real key here, obviously, is the starter. You really need to be patient to make a sufficiently active starter, as some will take longer than others to ripen. The book has its guidelines set up for about a week to have a strong ripe starter, but says to keep feeding if it hasn’t doubled in volume yet. As I mentioned earlier, mine took longer at about 11 days before it looked like it was ready to be used. Without a good starter, you won’t have a good bread.
Tools:
Stand mixer (optional)
Bowl
Cooking Review:
Initial Mix: 4 Hours 15 Minutes + Overnight (12 Hours)
The initial mix for this dough starts with the starter, some of the flour, and all of the water. I used a scale to get as accurate and precise measurements as possible. Once all of the ingredients were in a bowl, I used a wooden spoon to vigorously mix them together before covering and letting it sit out at room temperature for 4 hours. The mixture was then transferred to the refrigerator overnight.
Knead & Rise: 10 hours
The rest of the flour was added to the bowl along with the salt and the bowl was put under a stand mixer with a dough hook to knead until the dough is smooth, 5-10 minutes. This could also be done by hand, but would be a lot of work. Once kneaded, the dough is left to rise until airy and bubbly. Every hour, I degassed the dough gently, stretched, and folded the dough to build strength according to the recipe. To be honest, I never really thought the dough became particularly light or airy, but after 10 hours of doing this, I thought maybe I was looking for too much.
Form Loaves & Rise: 12 Hours
I split the dough and half and formed them into oval/round loaves to be transferred to a parchment lined baking sheet. I covered the loaves with a lightly greased piece of plastic wrap and put the dough in the refrigerator. The recipe says to leave the dough out at room temp to rise until puffy, but it was so late when I got to this point that I decided to slow it down by refrigerating the dough, and taking it out early the next morning to rise. Once I took it out of the refrigerator, it took about 4 hours before I considered it to be somewhat puffy.
Bake: 47 minutes
I sprayed the loaves with lukewarm water and used a serrated bread knife to slash the tops before baking for 44 minutes. The recipe says to bake the loaves until golden brown or 25-30 minutes, but mine were very pale at that point. Once I thought the color was good enough, I removed the loaves from the oven and put them on a cooling rack.
Analysis:
Visually, this bread is pretty disappointing. The color is lacking and it hardly rose at all. Maybe my starter wasn’t as ready as I though or I just needed to be more patient so that it rose more. The loaves also felt pretty dense when I picked them up, not light or airy like some other breads. Despite the pretty negative first impressions, once the bread was sliced and I gave it a taste, it actually wasn’t so bad. The crust was very crispy and crunch, which I enjoyed. Although there weren’t many large bubbles in the crumb of the bread, it was still soft yet chewy. Some people may not like a chewy bread, but I think it works well in a sandwich. The flavor was good, as well. I could definitely taste the starter in the dough as it had a pleasant sour note. This bread is at it’s best toasted with some butter or made into a sandwich. I made both a BLT and grilled cheese with this bread and throughly enjoyed them. With that being said, I think a fair score for this recipe is a 6.5/10. Given all the setup, time, and effort that went into this recipe, it should’ve been better. There were certainly some positive aspects of this recipe, but the return on investment just wasn’t there for me. I will say that it is completely possible that I did something wrong that caused this to take much longer or not rise properly. However, a recipe should do everything in its power to prevent or explain those possible mistakes.
