Artisan Bread Course Day 3

Yesterday was all about sourdough, one of the trickier and unfathomable subjects in bread making. (We also interspersed our work with folds of our croissant dough, which will be ready to bake today). I have tried starters before, and even got a decent one going last summer with rye flour after the Kneading Conference lectures. We each received a small dollop of starter on the first day of the course and began feeding and building it out until we had 1 pound four ounces of starter in the morning. We put one pound in a bowl and the rest in small containers for us to take our starter home with us.

The bread we made was a sunflower sourdough that was probably about 25% whole wheat and the rest all-purpose flour. I have been a bit surprised at how much we use all-purpose flour in this course -- we have not touched bread flour, and used whole wheat and others sparingly.

The big change with the sourdough is how wet and sticky the dough is, which makes handling it tricky at times, but the kneading techniques we have learned and using the autolyse method (whereby we mix the starter, flour and water until it is only partially incorporated, then let it sit for 20 minutes to hydrate) actually makes it easy and builds structure without spending forever over the bench, throwing dough around.

After some resting and a fold, we were ready to shape the dough and retard them for a final time in some baskets (or couches as they are called). Shaping this dough actually requires a clean, un-floured board to create the friction needed to create a nice, tight ball. I have a video that I am working on uploading in the near future (Blogger for Android was not uploading video from my cell phone for some reason).

We are baking our dough today after retarding in the refrigerator over night, but we did bake some yesterday that will be an interesting contrast. Retarding in the fridge allows the acetic acids to build up, creating that sharp sourdough tang, but it also slows yeast growth, so should only be used at the end of the process.