The Basic Sourdough

The Basic Sourdough
github.com

You can get very good results with minimal effort: I spend about 15 minutes on my bread, and I bake it every 3-4 days. 10 minutes to mix the dough in the morning, and then another 5 minutes to put it in the oven in the evening, for an hour. Put aside some dough before baking, feed it with some flour, and you're done.

350g type-2000 rye flour (full grain)

~170g any other flour (I use a mixture of bread-baking flours and some white flour)

1/2 spoon salt

starter (I use about 150ml to 250ml, but it doesn't matter that much)

Water: about 300ml, but this depends: experiment.

6-8h to ferment and grow.

This dough flows, so you need to bake it in a form.

This simple procedure reliably produces great tasting dark rye bread (darker than the one shown in the pictures). If you have lots of time, by all means, experiment and go wild, but if like me you deal with negative time, don't overcomplicate things.

This saves a lot of effort, mess, and prevents dough from becoming overworked. Effort that can later be expended in dough shaping steps ;-).

1. Ideally, for home baked bread, you always want to use a heavy dutch oven. A heavy dutch oven retains a lot of energy, which provides a consistent environment for the bread to bake in (opening an oven door, no matter how hot, rapidly lowers the temperature), but more importantly retains the steam that the bread emits. This both causes proper crust to form (look for the micro bubbles on the skin of the bread) and makes the entire loaf rise significantly more.

2. The hydration at 70% seems low. While low hydration makes handling dough easier, it also changes the taste - in my opinion, for the worse when it comes to bread. With a bit of practice, proper fermentation, shaping, proofing, and enough gluten formation, even a 78% hydration dough is not that hard to handle. I've baked a 1.8 kilo boulé without any shaping support on a simple pizza stone without having the dough "leak" (in general, if it is "leaking" post proofing, the dough has probably been overproofed and the gluten has weakened).

3. Fermentation time seems really low. Most sourdough types I am familiar with take overnight to ferment, and then 4 or so hours in the proofing basket to be fully ready. I've never baked after such a short fermentation period as described in the article, but I would imagine the resulting bread does not have the full airation, flavor, and texture that it otherwise would.

4. Technique - in my experience and as far as I have read, you do not have to knead at all. Most dough need only 3-4 rounds of "folding" during fermentation, where each edge of the dough is stretched and pulled over itself. That forms plenty of gluten. Shaping post-fermentation is similar, where after the edges are pulled over, the loaf is inverted on the seam and gently dragged around to create surface tension. _Definitely do not knead during shaping_.

For what it's worth, making your own bread is great. My first results were barely edible shame-disks with the texture of hardened gypsum, but after I got a handle on the correct techniques (and more importantly - patience) I have not purchased bread in a store for the better part of a year.