This post originally appeared on the Cooking Manager blog as a guest post back in early February of this year, Cooking Manager is run by Hannah Katsman whom I first met over on Twitter. Cooking Manager has a lot of good, useful information, so check it out!

I’m not a long-time sourdough baker – I’ve only been baking sourdough (wild yeast) bread for the last couple of years. Since I don’t digest commercial-yeasted bread well, I use sourdough exclusively, which also means trial and error in converting recipes to sourdough.

One of my first breads was a sweet bread that I regularly made for breakfast. Problem was, while it tasted great, it didn’t consistently rise, even after 12 hours. Plus, even on occasions when it rose, it looked butt ugly. What was going wrong?

Turns out I was using too much sourdough starter in my bread recipe. After much research, I learned that a good amount of sourdough starter is about 10 to 20% of the flour weight in fermented flour.

Since I know that’s going to be confusing, let me use an example with easy math. I like easy math.

Let’s say you use this recipe to make bread:

• 1000 grams flour (about 10 cups, depending on how you measure flour)
• 650 grams water (2 3/4 cups)
• 20 grams salt (4 teaspoons)
• 2 packages dry yeast

And let’s say your sourdough starter is 100% hydration (that is, a 1:1 ratio of flour to water by weight), then, with a 20% fermented flour target in mind, I would use this:

• 800 grams flour (1000-200, since I want 20% or 200 grams of the flour to be fermented in the sourdough starter)
• 450 grams water (650-200 because the starter is equal amounts of water and flour)
• 400 grams sourdough starter (200 grams flour + 200 grams water)
• 20 grams salt

You can use less sourdough starter than 10% fermented flour for sure. It’ll take longer to rise, which is a benefit to some people, like if you want the bread to be more sour. But in most cases, I wouldn’t use more than 20%. I say most because I do have a recipe or two where I do exceed the 20% by quite a bit, but those are the exception, not the rule.

What happened to my butt ugly sweet bread when I reduced the fermented flour amount from about 26% fermented flour down to around 12% fermented flour? Ugly old lady butt dimples disappeared, and instead, I had smooth, lovely bread. And it rose! Consistently! Every single time!

And my husband sang to me, “Baby butt, baby butt, baby butt buns, oh gimme my baby butt, baby butt, baby butt buns…” But he’s a little crazy.

I’m sure the question “Why 20%?” must be occurring to someone. I asked it, too.

If you use too much sourdough starter in the bread, then there isn’t enough food from the fresh flour for the wild yeast to feed on. With insufficient food to feed on, the bread doesn’t rise since live yeast produces carbon dioxide as a biproduct, and what’s what gives bread its air holes.

As well, fermented flour has gluten that’s been overdeveloped (gluten develops naturally when flour becomes wet), which isn’t a problem when the fermented flour is used at low amounts, but when a lot of fermented flour is used, it can’t support the dough properly, hence the ugly dimples and inability to rise.

No doubt the majority of us have believed, at least at one time, that kneading bread dough for 5 or 10 minutes, or longer, was necessary if the bread was going to develop properly and rise.

Fortunately, especially for those of us with problem and painful joints, it simply isn’t true.

Personally, instead of kneading for minutes at a time, I’ll do one of two things:

1. After letting the dough rest for 20-30 minutes (autolyze), I’ll knead for 10 strokes, let the dough rest for 15 minutes, and then repeat twice for a total of 3 sets of kneading and resting. Then, after another 15 or so minutes, I’ll do a few stretch and folds. Then I let the dough rise until doubled in volume, then do the same old shaping and second rise that kneaders do.
2. After letting the dough rest for 20-30 minutes (autolyze), I’ll do a few stretch and folds, then let the dough rest 45 minutes, then repeat for a total of 3 stretch and fold then rest sessions. After the last rest after the final stretch and fold, I’ll shape it and let it do the regular second rise.

Even with my severely borked joints, I can do these, and it’s much easier and much less effort than using my rather, ah, sad food processor to try to mix and knead the dough for me.

Better yet, my bread turns out just as fluffy as bread made by those who knead.

Stretching and folding is something I learned from Sourdough Home when I was looking for easier kneading methods for me. There’s a much longer explanation of the stretch and fold method there, along with videos that demonstrate it. Well worth checking out.

Oh, yeah, and while you’re at it, check out this Panda Bread. Very cute!

We have a neighborhood bread trishaw. We also have neighborhood ice cream trishaws.

This bread trishaw goes through our neighborhood, and others, playing an annoying tune that everyone recognizes as belonging to the bread trishaw. Those who want to buy bread run out to the road with rupees in hand and buy… whatever.

I should mention that this frequently happens before breakfast so there’s fresh bread in time for breakfast, bread being a common-enough breakfast item.

They sell loaves of bread, sweet buns, fish buns, egg buns, and other such baked goods and pastries.

The last image is of a bread truck. Same idea as the bread trishaw, just bigger in scope.

You Canadians and Americans have drive thrus. We have bread trishaws.

Yeah.

The bread rose too much – I left it to rise overnight, and it grew about 5 or 6x in volume. Yikes!

I’ve had previous experiences with this particular dough not rising much at all overnight, so I didn’t think it would be this much of a problem. But no, it did. And it escaped.

That dough was making a run for it.

Tags: bread, dough, escape, rise

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about baking on the stove. You can see some previous posts:

• Baking on the Stove: Experiment 1
• Baking on the Stove: Experiment 2
• Roasting vegetables on the stove

Fahim and I have wild yeast (sourdough that’s not sour) sweet buns most mornings for breakfast, and as I’ve mentioned before, Fahim prefers them fresh-baked every day. And, hey, I try to keep him happy.

I started the baking-on-the-stove thing back in March of this year, so I’ve baked the sweet buns on the stove probably around 150 out of the last 200 or so days. That’s a lot of stove-top baking!

It’s worked out very well for us. Very very well.

In the first picture, you see the buns still in the baking dish I use. Okay, so I could have baked the buns longer so they were browner, but I was hungry, which means impatient.

In the next image, you see the setup I use. The baking dish goes on a trivet (came with rubber thingies on the legs, but I removed those) which rests on two aluminum lids. I originally used a cast-iron pan, but the high temperatures burned the seasoning off, so I put a kibosh on that. The aluminum lids don’t present any problems like that – they work great! I use two since they’re fairly thin and it gives me more even temperature inside the oven.

In the next image, you can see the rice pot I put on top of the aluminum lids so the baking dish is fully enclosed. The rice pot can’t be used as a rice pot any longer because it has a small hole in it, but for these purposes, it’s perfect!

And in the final image, you see the finished buns. Yum! Fresh buns every day – they’re great!

Tags: baking on the stove, stovetop baking, experiments

I made another batch of Kaiser Soze Rolls, this time with the no-honey substitutions, and it turned out beautifully!

Lunchtime came around, so I made myself a sandwich. Kaiser Soze Rolls with shredded curried chicken; bell peppers, cucumber, and onion; and of course homemade mayonnaise.

Yum!

Tags: lunch, bread, rolls, kaiser rolls, mayonnaise

I think "life is an experiment" is a phrase I take way too seriously.

I needed a recipe for buns – I’d been craving a Subway meatball sub, and since the nearest Subway is in India, I figured the only way I was going to get a meatball sub would be to make my own.

I have no idea why I opted on a kaiser bun recipe, except that a kaiser bun has a similar texture, crumb, and hole that I was looking for in a bun, so I figured, hey, why not? Like I said, I think I take "life is an experiment’ way to seriously.

The recipe was already in grams and already converted to wild yeast. All that was left for me to do was halve it and, well, make it.

Oh, yeah. In case you’re wondering about my sanity, Fahim’s the one who comes up with the crazy titles. Kaiser Soze Rolls is his creation.

Kaiser Soze Rolls

Makes 6 monster buns or 8 hamburger-sized buns

Ingredients

• 140 grams (1/2 cup) sourdough starter
• 125 grams (1/2 cup) water
• 1 egg (large, about 50 grams)
• 13 grams (1 tablespoon) olive oil
• 26 grams (1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons) sugar
• 335 grams (2 3/4 cups) flour
• 7 grams (1 teaspoon) salt

Method:

1. Mix the ingredients until they come together, then let sit for 20-30 minutes (autolyse). You can then do stretch and folds or knead for 5 minutes, cover the dough and allow it to rest for 5 minutes, and then knead for another 5 minutes.
2. Once the stretch and fold has been completed, or once the dough has doubled in size, divide the dough into 12 more or less equal sized pieces.
3. Roll the dough into balls as if you were forming little boules.
4. As you form the rolls, set them aside and cover them so they won’t dry out and let the dough relax about 20 minutes. While the dough is relaxing, put a sheet of parchment paper onto a baking sheet. Once the dough has relaxed, form into rolls or buns or whatever is the shape of the day.
5. Pre-heat your oven to 425 F (220 Celsius). I strongly suggest steaming the oven as you put the rolls into the oven. Just before baking the rolls, flip them over so they are cut side up. Bake for 15 minutes, turning the rolls half way through the bake. Immediately put the rolls on a cooling rack. You want a crisp and nicely browned crust. More than half of bread’s taste is in the crust, and it is developed by browning – don’t shortchange yourself on the flavor you can get out of the roll by underbaking it.

Fahim doesn’t like honey, and to him, the taste and smell of the honey in this bread is noticeable, so I subbed it out with water and sugar. Didn’t do that the first two times I made the bread, so I’m listing an untried-but-close-enough-that-I-feel-comfortable-posting-it variation on the recipe.

The first time I made this, I formed the dough into hoagie-type buns for sub sandwiches. I was, unfortunately, in a time crunch to get them done in time for a specific meal, so they didn’t rise as much as they should have, and given that my oven is still broken (that’ll be still broken until it dies enough to buy a new one), I didn’t get enough oven spring to compensate.

I served them as meatball subs with my pickled Nai Miris (cobra peppers – hottest in the world) on top. Yum!

The second time, I shaped these into round buns of roughly the same size, but not entirely, so I had a couple that were entirely a lot bigger than the others. All told, though, they were all bigger than hamburger buns. The two biggest were quite the monsters, in fact. Tasted good, nice and fluffy (I let them rise for the proper amount of volume increase this time), but huge.

This recipe is supposed to be for six 3 1/2 ounce Kaiser Rolls, which is also a great size for hamburger buns. Except, no. They’re much bigger than that.

The second time I made these, I made an oven-baked barbequed chicken, onion, & bell pepper dish that I served as sandwich filling. Oh yeah, baby!

Tags: wild yeast, sourdough, kaiser rolls, buns, hoagie rolls, bread

On the Bread Bakers Apprentice Challenge Twitter stream, there was a discussion about ciabatta breads and how the one in Peter Reinhart’s book wasn’t very wet, which also meant it couldn’t achieve the truly large holes that most people look for in ciabatta bread.

@misterrios said:

@LMAshton @gaaarp The one I normally make is the Jason’s Cocodrillo from TFL: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2984/jasons-quick-coccodrillo-ciabatta-bread which is 95% hydraation.

My response?

@misterrios Wow! I’ve seen ciabatta recipes as high as 80%, but 95%? It’s almost crazy, yet the pictures! Gotta give this a sourdough try.

So I’m giving Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta Bread a try. It’s already in grams – yahoooooo! – but I need to convert it to sourdough. Or wild yeast. Which is the same as sourdough, just a different name. And I halved it because – well, because there’s just me and Fahim and I gotta be realistic about the amount of bread that could possibly be consumed in this household.

And what’s the Coccodrillo bit about? No idea, other than it being French for crocodile. No matter – I’m making it anyway.

Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta Bread

Variaton 1

• 50 grams wild yeast starter (100% hydration)
• 250 grams flour
• 212.5 grams  water
• 7.5 grams salt

Directions

1. Mix all ingredients together (food processor or mixer if you have it) until roughly combined. Let the dough rest for 20 minutes (autolyse).
2. Still in the mixer/food processor, beat the heck out of the batter. It’ll feel like pancake batter to start with, but in anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes of beating the heck out of it, it’ll form itself into a very sticky dough. If it starts climbing too soon, switch to the hook. (Mine took 5 minute sessions x 3 sessions for it to form in my cwappy little food processor.)
3. You’ll know it’s done when it separates from the side of the bowl and starts to climb up your hook/paddle and just coming off the bottom of the bowl. It will definitely pass the windowpane test.
4. Place into a well oiled container and let it triple. (And he ain’t kidding about the triple part.)
5. Empty on to a floured counter (scrape if you must, however you gotta get the gloop out), cut into 3 or 4 pieces. Spray with oil and dust with lots o’ flour. Let them proof for about 45 minutes, which gives you enough time to crank that oven up to 500F.
6. After 45 minutes or so, the loaves should be puffy and wobbly. Stretch into your final ciabatta shape (~10" oblong rectangle) and flip them upside down (this redistributes the bubbles, so you get even bubbles throughout), then transfer onto parchment or a heavily floured peel. Try to do it in one motion and be gentle. It might look like you’ve ruined them completely, but the oven spring is immense on these things.
7. Bake at 260C/500F until they are 96C/205F in the center (about 15-20 minutes), rotating 180 degrees half way through. Some people like to turn the oven down to 232C/450F after 10 minutes.

Please note: I used my cheapo cwappo sucky food processor and it worked just fine. Not broken yet or anything. Which is really unfortunate – I keep trying.

In the cheapo cwappo sucky food processor, I had to take breaks every five minutes to not burn out the motor. Yeah, I know, trying to break it, but still, I gotta be realistic, too, right? So I beat the dough for 5 minutes, took a break for 2 minutes, beat the dough for 5 minutes, took a break for two minutes, and then beat it for a final 5 minutes. At that point, the dough was visibly formed and climbing the, uh, centre thingie. Definitely formed. Defintely coming off the bottom. Definitely off the sides and clinging into a center mass vaguely resembling an amoeba-like ball.

And yeah, it had no problem passing the windowpane test.

The tripling part, for my wild yeast dough, took about 3 1/2 hours. And it was definitely triple! And very, very fluffy and bubbly!

I didn’t empty mine onto a floured surface. Instead, I emptied mine into a glass cake pan, 9×13", that was lightly greased. I didn’t want to add more flour to it, especially flour that might not be completely absorbed into the dough and would leave flour streaks in the bread. Turns out that it worked perfectly fine.

And, since I halved the recipe, I left it in one piece rather than cutting it. I could have cut it and had two narrow flat loaves instead of one huge flat loaf. Meh. Either way is fine, really.

For shaping the loaves, I dumped it onto a floured cookie sheet. Next time, I’ll use a lightly oiled cookie sheet instead. I’m not a fan of the raw-flour-on-the-outside-of-the-loaf look. And, really, oiled surfaces work fine, too. It may be less traditional, but it works better for me.

The result? This bread turned out exactly as advertised. Oh yeah, baby!

I should mention that I don’t get as much oven spring with this bread as other people do – my oven is broken, it doesn’t reach over 425F, blah blah blah. Still, we like it fine.

I’m also submitting this post to Yeastspotting. Yeastspotting is a weekly showcase of truly drool-worthy breads. In addition to this being part of Sourdough Saturday here on my blog.

Tags: ciabatta bread, high hydration dough. bread, wild yeast, sourdough

I live in a tropical country. It’s always hot. So, if there’s a tiny amount of something to be baked, I tend to do it on top of the stove – it saves on the amount of heat that gets released into the kitchen, which saves on me sweating to death, and it also saves on the cost of gas.

I’ve baked bread on the stove many times as well as roasted eggplant and beets. It works great!

To roast beets, I removed the leaves, leaving about a half inch of the stems behind, and  scrubbed the beet to remove dirt and other ickies while leaving the peel intact. Then I wrapped the beets (I did two this time) in foil and placed them in my handy-dandy baking-on-the-stove contraption which consists of two aluminum lids placed on the fire with a trivet on top of the lids so that whatever I’m baking doesn’t burn due to direct heat. Then I put whatever I’m baking, in this case beets, on the trivet.

Then I put an old rice cooker pot (which can’t be used for rice cooking any more due to a small hole in the pot) over that. Cheap (used materials from around the house), pretty much ugly, but effective.

And in the picture above, I put eggplants that I needed roasted for a dip into my round aluminum cake pan, covered that with a lid, and put that on top of the rice cooker lid. The fire is on medium high.

This is effective enough that my double-deckered beets and eggplants were both done around the same time, in about 45 minutes. And it used a fraction of the amount of gas it would have taken to bake in the oven.

Would roasting/baking like this save you money and, well, sweating in the summer? Can you think of materials you have around your house that you could use?

Tags: stovetop baking, stovetop roasting, experiments, cooking, baking

I have a lot to learn about bread baking and, more specifically, sourdough bread baking. One thing I learned about a while ago is autolyse.

Autolyse is a fancy word for the stage in the bread-making process where you combine the flour with the liquids (water, milk, etc.) and then let it rest for twenty minutes or a half hour. This lets the flour fully absorb the liquid, so dough is less sticky when kneaded (if you knead, that is. ) It allows the gluten to more fully develop with a lot less kneading.

In some recipes, salt, oil, and sourdough starter are added after the autolyse stage. Oil, from what I’ve read, will coat the flour, preventing the flour from absorbing the liquid, and will in turn inhibit gluten from doing its thing. We want gluten to do its thing.

The next time you make bread, why not allow the dough to autolyse – that is, set the dough aside for 20-30 minutes – and see how much kneading (if you knead) your dough requires compared to how much the dough requires when you don’t autolyse. Let me know your results.