Ah, sorry about that! Brian Lagerstrom has a great sourdough bread recipe for beginners on YouTube. It’s what I started with before I made this more complicated recipe.
I’m fluent in bread geek. Here’s some translations:
Tartine’s ratios just means they’ve adjusted the recipe from Tartine Bakery’s country loaf recipe for their batch size: tartinebakery.com/stories/country-bread
Autolyse is when you mix just the water and flour and let that rest.
Fermentolyse is an autolyse with the sourdough starter added.
Stretch and Fold is a process where you develop gluten by stretching and folding over the dough on itself a few times.
Bulk ferment is just fermenting the whole dough as opposed to separate pre-baked loaves.
Lamination is stretching the dough into a thin sheet and re-folding or rolling it to develop even more gluten strength.
I like homemade sourdough because it has a chewy, springy texture and more complex flavour, compared to other bread. I find most supermarket sourdough to be rather bland; small bakery sourdough tends to be a bit better.
Nah this was my thought too but the stuff you buy in the store straight up skips adding flavoring ingredients in exchange for a longer shelf life and less complicated manufacturing process. Having spent a summer working a temporary job at a local bread factory, I can assure you that the type of bread that they make is engineered for shelf life stability, not for flavor.
Sourdough is acidic and tangy and goes stale in three days. White bread has no taste and has a shelf life measured in weeks.
My wife and I generally eat my homemade sourdough over three days, as sandwiches and toast. By the third day it is a bit stale, but still OK for a sandwich, at which point I make some more. I use it for toast up to about five days, if there is any left (unlikely). It also freezes well, if sliced first.
I probably spend about 30 minutes every 3 days making it - obviously not including waiting time whilst proving/baking. Probably about 4 to 5 hours overall.
A lot of store sourdough bread has too open a crumb (bubbles are too big) for my preference, which makes them bland and too insubstantial to me. I prefer my bread to be a bit denser and with more substance, which equates to flavour.
Regular white bread tastes like nothing and is full of sugar. This is crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, nutty and roasty, slightly tangy from the sourdough, actually flavorful because they don’t underseason for your grandmother. Not to mention that if you blend different flours each has a unique flavor.
The bit of acid sourdough has makes it last a lot longer before molding, for one (without any other preservatives, which most store breads use).
But generally speaking, the longer and more complex fermentation of a sourdough starter (which is a bunch of different yeasts and bacterias, compared to mostly just commercial yeast in regular bread) creates a lot more by-products which then create more flavour. Which is something people like.
Add comment