And the crust? What mix did you use there?
Flours, sugar, water, butter, egg yolk.
I adapted this recipe for flower rolls to use sourdough starter vs yeast. The purple is from milled purple barley that I added to bread flour (I never have AP flour on hand, so I improvise). The texture was denser than what I wanted, so more experimentation is in order.
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Maybe try to use some cake or pastry flour (blended with the AP flour), with your purple barley mixed in?
That looks fantastic, by the way.
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Interesting. I have not tried a steamed bun, only scallion pancakes…which I realize are different. Looks tasty.
More sourdough. This round, I made preserved lemon with pink peppercorns. These loaves were 25% milled whole wheat, but I just got a bag of whole wheat bread flour so I can start experimenting with 100% whole wheat loaves. My aunt had put in a special request for them!
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Incredible. Please share your bread techniques if time allows.
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Sure, especially because your request was so polite and I’ve enjoyed seeing your bakes!
I more or less follow the method posted by Full Proof Baking and adjust my dough formula depending on what I feel like making. I start by taking my starter out of the fridge at least a day before I bake and I give it a small feed, usually a 1:2:2 (starter, water, flour by weight). On dough-making day, I give one last feed and put the starter in a proofer set to 80 °F. I don’t use it until it has at least tripled in volume.
While the starter is rising, I start my autolyse. I mill my whole grains, add it to the white bread flour, and add most of the water in my recipe.
Once the starter is ready, it’s time to mix the it into my flour. I hand knead in the bowl for at least 15 minutes - it’s a high hydration dough, so I usually use the Rubaud method. I check the dough temp and set the proofer’s temp accordingly. I like my dough’s temperature to be between 74-78 °F. Salt gets added about 30 minutes later and mixed in.
Then, it’s a combo of stretch and folds or laminations depending on how much I need to develop the gluten. The dough is shaped and gets an overnight rest in the refrigerator. I bake in a covered cast iron cloche - 15 minutes lid on and 12-18 minutes lid off.
My goal has been to bake sourdough more intuitively, aka learning how to read the dough. I take a boatload of notes for each bake! If you like to read up on sourdough, especially the type with a more open crumb, I highly recommend the ebook Open Crumb Mastery by Trevor Wilson.
Erm, I’ve been kind of obsessed with sourdough for the past three years! So, I could talk your head off about it, but I am trying really hard to refrain myself. Ha ha ha!!! I started doing some donation-based bake sales for different food organizations near me, and it’s been mutually beneficial since I learn so much with the bigger bakes.
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Whoops! I posted on last year’s thread! I certainly don’t want to redo 2020!
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Thank you for such generosity here! You’ve given me a good deal to followup on (reading) and experimenting small batch. I was able to develop a starter last summer but no luck this winter on the east coast. So once my starter is stronger, I plan to revisit sour dough.
Do you use the starter for recipes beyond loaves of gorgeous bread? Your results are stunning.
You are most welcome, and thanks!
My proofer has been a game changer for sourdough. Although I have no right to complain about the cold here in the Bay Area (California) in comparison to the East Coasters, my kitchen is always between 55-65 °F. This meant that I was staying up waaaay past bedtime to finish a loaf. Adding the proofer has made rising times more predictable.
I’ve tried using sourdough discard in a lot of recipes. Kimchi pancakes, carrot cake, pear cakes (similar recipe to pear cake - I’m still experimenting), dumpling wrappers, egg pasta, and probably some more items that I’d need to look through my notebook to remember.
As far as using my sourdough starter in items other than sourdough, I made some Chinese flower rolls last year and subbed out yeast. I’ll post it on the (correct, ha ha) 2021 thread so you can check it out. I have a recipe for sourdough cinnamon rolls earmarked, but I haven’t made them yet. Mostly, because I don’t want us eating them all and so many of my neighbors are on carb-restricted diets now.
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The sourdough cinnamon rolls look great. I hope to try that type of yeasted item at some point myself. Heading over to 2021…
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I use sourdough discard in other breads, or else I make a “detritus” bread, where the discard is the only fermentation element.
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Good looking bread, and thanks for all your references and tips. I’ve been making sourdough since 3 months trying different methods and proofing temperature, also testing out flour from different brands. I’m starting to get good loaves but still need to work on the texture of the bread, still a bit too dense. One thing I don’t master at all is the outer appearance of the bread. Curious how you can be so precise in scoring, how did you do it?
I use a surgical blade with a holder to score the bread (lame). [Wiremonkey]makes the lame I love, but there are others out there. When I want to do fancy scoring, I have to think about how much oven spring the bread will have. This particular loaf has 10% spelt, and spelt tends to get you less oven spring. If I make a bread with more hard red wheat, I get a lot of oven spring, so I need to do at least one deep score somewhere on the bread or else I’ll have a design blowout. Eh, sometimes I still have a design blowout, but that’s ok. In the end, it’s just bread! It’ll taste the same.
With the scoring, you control the depth of the cuts for different effects. In the bread with the swirl, the swirl cuts were deep and the V’s were shallow. The leaves with the jagged edges were made with scissors.
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Thanks for the explanation! Appreciated.
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Those loaves look stupendous! I’m going to have to look up decorative slashing designs. Mine always look too rustic. Yours are very refined!
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So I was intrigued by the idea of a proofer, and was very surprised to find this one at King Arthur. It has a great temperature range, and even folds flat for easy storage!
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Strawberry-almond muffins with strawberry almond glaze. The fresh strawberries have been unexpectedly tasty all this year.
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This is the proofer I have! I live in a small space, so being able to store my proofer with my baking sheets is a huge plus!
