Pancakes and Loaf Pans

Having just run out of that powdered yet somehow "real" buttermilk, I decided the time had come to expand my sourdough horizons. The above pancakes were simple to make and had a nice taste. Definitely different from buttermilk pancakes, but I think I'll save the money and hold off on getting more of the buttermilk.

Sourdough Pancakes Recipe (modification to the one found here):
Mix all of the following together and cook however you want to cook pancakes:

• 1 1/2 cups sourdough starter, fed the night before
• 1/2 Tablespoon sugar
• 1 Tablespoon oil or butter
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 egg slightly beaten
• 5/8 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 Tablespoons soymilk

For my fourth sourdough baking session, I finally broke down and decided to bake bread from my New Zealand starter in loaf pans.

Per Amy's suggestion, I split the dough in two in hopes that there would be a tremendous oven spring

Issues with sunken doughs and burned bottoms made me curious about the other realm, and I have to say, the results were pretty good. And a nice bonus was that the pieces were not so awkwardly wide, allowing for easier toasting.




But, I forgot to slash once again, so the spring was small. Or at least that's what I'm going to blame for these wimpily small (yet still delicious) breads. I've been reading Peter Reinhart and I'm starting to see several mistakes in my methods. My next breads will be following his methods outlined in The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

Notes for next time:
-Follow Reinhart closely; this means shaping boules with INSTRUCTIONS (what a concept) and proofing as he recommends, not just winging it

#3

Bread #2 with some perfect berry jelly made by someone Amy knows

With about 1/10th of my #2 remaining, I went ahead and made a third sourdough bread, this time ditching the terracotta planter altogether and using my new cheap ($10 at Target) pizza stone. This change is one of several that I experimented with for this bread.

Another change was to let the final rise take place on a freestanding inverted sheet pan, which would allow me to slide the dough directly onto the preheated stone with minimal disturbance.

At first, I was going to leave a round Pyrex storage container over the dough, but decided that it was not going to be large enough. I was correct, but the dough spread out more than I would have liked.

Perfectly risen, as well as spread out. This is when I should have baked.

A great theory, but, as you will see, the dough ended up collapsing onto itself, giving me yet another flattish bread.

If only the oven had been ready!

I witness first hand one type of disaster possible when baking bread.

The third thing I did differently was institute a steamy environment by adding boiling water to my cast iron pan, positioned on the top rack of the approximately 500 degrees Farenheit oven.

I snapped this picture early in the baking process, just after spraying down the walls of the oven.

And, for once, I remembered to slash the dough! As you may have guessed, I have actually buckled down and studied a little bit, exclusively dependent upon Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I'm not nearly through with it, but I picked up some quick tips while I was waiting for the overnight proof period to end Sunday morning. But no matter how much I read, I still don't have the necessary instincts to create consistently pleasing bread. I take comfort in Peter Reinhart's "golden rule" for home baked bread, however: "It will always be a hit no matter how it turns out." And so far, that rule has proven to be correct. My third loaf was really a different beast than the first two, with a crisp and delicious crust I didn't realize I was lacking until the first bite. The steampan and spraying the oven walls had had a major effect, as well as the freestanding pizza stone. The heat went through the dough in a completely different way this time.


Aside from being flat and wide, the bread had another unforeseen issue; the bottom was blotched with charred crust. As long as I don't eat the burnt bits, this bread is definitely my best sourdough so far, but if even a speck of burnt crust hits my tongue, the experience is ruined until I drink something to clear my palate.


And I should also note that the overall volume of this bread was much greater than that of the previous two, which actually turned out to be quite a concern, since I had nothing large enough to store it in until a few slices were consumed and I was able to squeeze it into a rectangular baking dish with a cover.

Notes for next time:
-use a bowl or something else to provide structure to the final rise, but still do it on the sheet pan
-don't wait too long to bake!
-perhaps try a longer, refrigerated fermentation as Peter Reinhart recommends... but if I'm too hungry, perhaps not
-figure out if there's a way to avoid the burning
-slash dough JUST before baking, not while oven is just starting to preheat

Second Bread

Nearing the end of my first sourdough, and anxious to see if my refrigerated culture was surviving, I decided it was time to bake another. I took one of the cultures out, fed it, and let it sit in room temperature overnight.


Yesterday morning, I found another of those wonderful explosions, and quickly pulled together the same dough as I did for my first bread. My plan was to let it do its first rise all day, and then I would start the second rise at around 6pm, leaving me plenty of time to bake it before bed at around 9:30-10pm. Since the first bread was quite sour, I decided to experiment this time by reducing the amount of culture I used. I went down to 230 grams from 250. Otherwise, everything was exactly the same. Here are a few pictures of everything coming together:

Short ingredient lists are important for a healthy lifestyle

Before first rise

After first rise

Another adjusment I decided to make was to use a smaller bowl with a bottom that was not as flat as the one I used last time. This was a great idea, but great ideas with bread are so dependant on a multitude of other factors. I did not flour the cloth napkin nearly as much as last time, which resulted in the dough sticking, and when the time came to bake I had to fiddle with the sensitive risen dough so much that it deflated quite a bit. NEXT TIME I WILL DO IT PERFECTLY!

Before second rise

After second rise

I preheated the oven for what seemed like forever (we estimated it to be about an hour) until the temperature in the pot was around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. No more low temperatures for me. Next, the struggle to separate dough from napkin ensued on the hot terracotta saucer, and then I quickly inserted the probe into the dough, which had indeed fallen but was definitely larger overall than my last loaf. Just spread out more. I put the pot in place, and slid the assembly back into the hot oven. The air in the pot did not take long to get back to 400, which was a big confidence boost.

Actually taken near the end of baking, but you get the idea

The bread came out a lot different this time, at least in terms of crust. I did not presoak the pot, I made sure everything was hot, and I used less starter. One or all of these factors got me the attractive loaf below.





Noticeably tamer than my previous bread, this one was actually somewhat disappointing at first taste this morning. The lack of sourness was not the issue, however; rather, it was the lack of smell. This turned out to be a personal issue caused by allergies (or perhaps the bread improved with age), because later in the afternoon when my nose had cleared, this bread had a taste that seemed an instant classic. Tonight we will have it with some tri-colored pasta with mushroom sauce from Terra Cotta Pasta (best in our region for sure). Should be nice.

Notes for next time:
-flour the napkin
-flour the napkin
-see if I can get a baking stone instead of using saucer
-if I get the stone, get a peel
-or maybe just bake in loaf pan?
-use all 250g of starter, me likey tang

Is it winking angrily?

Field Tests

The process of caring for and eventually baking sourdough is very intense and educational, but the whole point of baking bread is to eat and enjoy it. My first NZ Sourdough may not have had much oven spring, but it made up for it in several ways. I noticed that the sourness was not nearly as tangy after 24 hours, which I've read can be the case with any breads containing whole wheat. The flour kind of settles in to its environment, and when the grains are comfortable, so is the eater.

I quickly want to note that I chose to store this loaf in an unclosed zip top bag. I probably would have used a paper bag instead, but we did not have any large enough on hand. This seemed to be good enough for the duration of the loaf, providing the option of sealing the bag if staleness becomes an issue. Normally I stow bread in the fridge in a sealed bag, but I don't like the constant need to toast, microwave, or wait for bread that isn't cold. Sometimes I just want a regular temperature snack, you know?


And now onto some applications of my new friend. I think that this bread is actually good enough to just munch on solo, but in chorus the flavor harmonizes so well with a lot of other foods. We tried it with eggs, butter & jam, and a fresh herb and tomato bruschetta (ideal with a tangy sourdough). Pictures:

Eggs love sourdough (so do strawberries!)


We ate the bruschetta with some fresh pasta in pesto with seared chicken, a perfect dinner

Fresh basil and oregano courtesy of our back porch

Day 8: Earth Meets the Oven

Finally, I'm just about caught up with the blogging here. I'm actually writing about Day 8 on... Day 8!

So, today was pretty much the day I'd been waiting for. All I had to do was work the dough a bit, let it rise again, and then throw it in the oven.

Nice expansion in the preceding 12 hours

Sounds simple, but as you may have learned by now, I juggle a lot of variables when cooking. I don't really know why I do it, but I always do.

Let's go over the variables I dealt with in the final few stages of the bread baking process:

1. Following three different sets of instructions.
2. Not thinking about the wetness of the dough until the day of baking.
   
3. Using a DIY cloche made out of a 7" terracotta azalea planter with saucer (without proper usage instructions at all).
4. General lack of knowledge and unpreparedness.
   

I decided to skip out on Ed Wood's instructions for the rest of my baking, since he only required 1 minute of "mixing" in the morning, then more proofing and then immediately baking, all in a bread machine that I am staunchly opposed to using. This left me with King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking and Peter Reinhart's The Break Baker's Apprentice. Each has excellent instructions with great detail, so I pretty much borrowed from both of them.

The first thing I borrowed was folding on a floured surface. Since my dough was already fairly dry and stiff, I should not have added any more flour. But hey, it happened.

Then, following the lead in KAF's book, I waited 20 minutes and folded again. I excitedly tried the windowpane test, but the dough failed miserably, tearing almost immediately. So I stretched and folded some more, waited a bit, stretched and folded some more, and then did the test again. Getting there. I continued with the folding and stretching until I finally got a good enough result. Amy woke up in time to help me out by taking a picture.

Amy saved me a lot of annoyance by taking this picture. I had been trying to hold the stretched dough to the light with my left hand and take a picture with my doughy right, which, I swear, is impossible.

The moment was rushing at me, now. I set up a makeshift proofing bowl (opaque pyrex with a cloth napkin dusted heavily with flour) and plopped my best pal in.

Pre-final rise

My three sources recommended a final rising time of between 2-4 hours, but I ended up going a little too long into the fifth hour because of some work I had to do for my job. Oop, there's another variable: real life. I'm not sure if this extra time caused any issues, but I don't think I'll wait nearly as long with my next bread, since there was not much growth between the 3rd and 5 hours.

Post-final rise

I preheated the oven with my terracotta pot (soaked in water experimentally for 10 minutes) and saucer inside, up to around 450 degrees F. This is where Peter Reinhart became an influence in this bread. Ed Wood specified 375F, but that was for a bread machine. I was trying to recreate a brick oven with the terracotta, and brick ovens are HOT. So I went with Peter Reinhart's temperature and hoped for the best. Then I had to be very gentle and cautious. I had to handle this risen dough more delicately than I had handled anything before in my life (I've never held a newborn, so...). Real bakers use a peel and slide the dough onto a baking stone, but I don't have either of those; I just have a terracotta saucer with an inconveniently sloped edge. Why didn't I think about this darned edge when I was in the gardening store? These kinds of questions were pointless at this stage, so I overturned the bowl and let the dough slip into my left hand. Since the dough had technically been rising in the bowl upside down, I had to shift the dough to my right hand to get it onto the saucer upright. This was not an issue, but I feel that the risen dough lost some of its height in this process.


Another factor I never considered was the insane amount of heat loss that must have been occuring while the above picture was taken. I let the bread cook for about 10 minutes and then removed from the oven again for two reasons. One was to check and make sure nothing horrible had happened, and the other was so I could thread my probe thermometer through the hole in the bottom (now top) of the pot and make sure the bread reached the proper internal temperature. I hated myself at this moment, because I knew there was a massive amount of heat dissipating from the dough at such a crucial time. Next time, I will either not use the probe or I will stick it into the dough first thing.

Back in the oven, the probe gave me some upsetting readings for the oven temperature (which was actually getting the ambient temperature within the terracotta pot). It was not budging past 250F. I had made obvious mistakes that caused this problem. First, I didn't make sure the pot reached 450F before getting the dough in there, and second, I opened the pot up partway through the cooking. I decided to crank the oven to its highest setting, which was surprisingly all the way up to 550F, and managed to get the external reading to around 400F. I sat in the kitchen with my laptop and did some more stuff for my job, waiting for the Polder to beep when the internal temperature of the bread reached 205F. I'm not totally sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say this happened after approximately 50 minutes of total baking.


I had no idea what to expect when I lifted the pot off of its saucer. My biggest concern was that the dough had grown too large and would be stuck to the uncovered walls of the pot, and my second biggest concern was that the bread would be totally burnt. Luckily, neither of these atrocities occured.


The crust was leathery and strangely smooth on this first New Zealand bread of mine. The smell was a mix of nice fresh bread and earthy terracotta, and really, it was not a bad combination at all. Earth meets the oven; it summed up my hopes in baking sourdough quite nicely.

I was immediately disappointed by the visible lack of growth, no doubt due to the low, inconsistent temperature, but that was not the true concern I have with this bread. I sliced a piece and observed the expected lack of open crumb with a slight shake of my head. But I figured that it couldn't be too bad, since I had made a lot of breads in the past that didn't rise too well and they all tasted fine.

I took a bite, expecting the hear choruses of angels from the windows and trumpets blasting at my from the cabinets, but instead felt my tongue quiver under the intense sourness of something that surely was not bread. Never had I tasted a baked good so sour. Very comparable to the sourness of sour cream and nearly that of lemons, I was struck into a still despair. At first, I was downright repulsed, but with each bite I felt that it could possibly just be another of those adult, acquired tastes. I certainly love coffee now, even without sugar.


Perhaps I will acquire the taste of this bread, too. After all, I expect that I will be the one to eat the bulk of it, and I just polished off a nicely buttered second slice that turned out to be intensely pleasurable, with an air of forbidden pleasure I don't usually experience with food I've made. Maybe if I made a sandwich next...

Notes for next time:
-fully preheat terracotta and leave it closed the whole time
-don't let dough rise too long
-read more of what the King Arthur Flour kitchen, Peter Reinhart, and a few good websites have to say on sourdough, and really learn a method
-keep experimenting, regardless of weird results!

Day 7 (Evening): Chrysalis

In order to be totally certain the the culture had fully fermented, I fed the culture in the glass jar at 6pm on Day 7, and if it rose 3 inches by 9pm, I would put together the dough and move even closer to the final goal. And let's just see what happened...

6pm (Before)

7:16pm (getting there!)

8pm (2 inches is good enough...)

8:38pm (BINGO)

My culture was officially ready! Really, ready, in fact. I scaled and measured the wonderfully short list of ingredients from Ed Wood's partial whole wheat sourdough:

• Culture
• Whole wheat flour
• Unbleached white flour
• Salt
• Water

One issue I did not take into account with the ingredients was the consistency of my culture. I had been pretty much throwing in a somewhat random amount of water with each feeding, achieving a varying consistency. Ed Wood stated that it should be a thick pancake batter, but there was no way to really tell if my version of a thick pancake batter was the same as his. So, figuring that all will work out without giving it a second thought, I used the exact amounts for each ingredient as specified.


This time I let my mixer do some of the work (score one for the bad guys). The result was a strong dough with a pleasant feel. It seemed firm, despite the warnings of wet dough in King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking, but I didn't worry, and let the dough grow for the next twelve hours into Day 8. I was reminded at the time of the simple stages of the life of a butterfly. My dough had been a creeping caterpillar for the past several days, slowly growing and preparing for a change, and now it had undergone a dramatic, temporary change, with a completely different future to behold the next day.

Day 7 (Morning): Man vs. Machine

Ah, confidence. I was brimming with it. Even though this was technically over Ed Wood's estimated 3-5 days of activation (it was 5 days, 12.5 hours after I started, to be exact), I was invincible on the morning of Day 7. Here is what awaited me in my room temperature proofing box at around 9am:

This has about 1 1/4 inches of net growth since the last feeding 12 hours before, but I've found that after a culture it reaches peak frothiness, it falls back into itself somewhat

Admit it, you kind of want to dive in

Just wanted to try and capture the consistency here

I decided that I'd better officially check to see if my cultures would pass Ed Wood's test of 2-3 inches of volume increase within 3 hours, so I set an alarm for noon and started another feeding frenzy.

Come on, yeasties! Dinner's on!

Note the pink line. This is the "before" shot.

While I waited, I started to peruse my other bread resources, Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice and King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking. I was greatly disturbed to find that the method's in both books were much different than those provided by Ed Wood. For example, in the KAF book, there were a series of steps to take every 20 minutes for the day of baking. Pulling, folding--stuff I vaguely remember seeing in the bread episode of Good Eats, but had for some reason totally dismissed from memory. How had I forgotten to study! All I had was a little booklet that wasn't even that well written! In Ed Wood's now seemingly poor instructions, there were just FOUR steps total. I will sum them up now:

1. Mix all the ingredients together and wait 12 hours.
2. Mix the dough again for a minute and then wait 3-4 hours.
3. Bake.
4. Cool.

It seems that the recipes in the booklet are aimed at bakers using bread machines, so of course the steps can be simplified as there is a machine to do the bulk of the work. But I found it rather annoying, since A) I don't have a bread machine and B) I'm trying to create a legitimate, back to basics kind of bread here, and relying on technology seemed, to be frank, pathetic. Ed Wood, as grateful as I am to him for having a site where one can obtain a great variety of cultures, had pitted man against machine, and seemed okay with the idea of just letting the machine win. So, without a bread machine, or even instructions on how to proceed with my soon to be born dough, I decided to wing it. Instead of studying Peter Reinhart's book, a renowned source for all things bread, I skimmed the basic steps and images in the KAF book and spent the remainder of the 3 hours getting some work done for my work at home job. Everything would be fine, I kept telling myself.

And so, it seemed, everything would. Taken around 12pm: