Back to bread!
It has been a while since I last wrote about breads. Let’s go back to breads! I have updated my sourdough bread explanations with some photos and more details.
If you are still struggling with some aspects of the bread making, don’t be to hard on yourself, it takes time. I remember posting on FB a photo two years ago of a bread I found amazing. Looking back, it was not such a good bread, a beginner’s bread starting to get the hang of it! Keep perseverating!
Just for fun, here is a gallery of sourdough overtime, all mine.
More fun with 100% hydration breads
100% hydration bread is not to be confused with 100% starter hydration. I am not blaming you if you are not sure of the difference, I wasn’t onto it myself for a bit, I thought this only related to the starter. So, without being too technical, here you are:
100% hydration starter
This is when the starter contains exactly a ration of 1 to 1 of flour and water (by weight). So, if you are always using a liquid starter (for those who make bread every day or every two days), and feed it an equal weight of water and flour, you have a 100% hydration starter.
For those like me, who make bread from every two days to every week (or more), we would keep our starter as a stiff starter to ensure it doesn’t have a mega tantrum. That is 2:2:1 (starter, flour, water). In words: same weight of starter and flour, but half the weight of water. It allows a slower development of the yeast and thus keeps for longer. When I save my starter, I take away 50 g of the developed starter (the rest will go in the bread I am about to make), 50 g of flour and 25 g of water. I mix it all in a ball and put back in the fridge!
Une petite disgression sur les ratios…./ lets explore these ratios….
As a result, when I develop the starter, the ratio of hydration is slightly less than 100%. For a feed of 200 g water, 200 g flour, the starter is 25 g short of water to be 100% hydration (it is 90% hydration).
Does it make much a difference? It depends on the quantity of bread you make per batch. For me 25 g out of a total weight of water (starter and bread) of 620 g of water (25 g in starter, 200 g in feed, 420 in the bread, minus removal of new starter assumed 25 g water), is a 4% difference in hydration. In the end using the 90% or 100% hydration starter in the bread with the quantity I use does not make any difference. The type and origin of the flour will have more influence at that stage that your hydration ratio.
When I go on holidays for a couple of weeks or more (it has worked up to 3 weeks, I have not tried more), I feed it additional flour and water keeping the ration 2:1 (twice as much flour as water).
Have I lost you?
In brief, if you do a few breads at the time (750 g of flour or more), using a stiff or liquid starter before feeding it will not influence the end result.
100 % hydration breads, a trial
I have been reading blogs and following some keen bakers (Ca mia for example has great results with that method) working hard on 100% hydration breads. This ratio applies when you make the bread itself (using 100 % hydration starter or your normal fed starter of course). For those breads, water is used in the same proportion as water. This makes for a very liquid dough. Be assured, the process is completely different. Why do people do it? because of the bubbles! Big beautiful bubbles.
So, I gave it a go this week. I doubled my quantity of starter at the feed stage (just making 2 “normal” sourdough as a back up!). And I had this watery mix which sticks so much to your hands and can end up in a big big messy kitchen before you know! That time you need plenty flour to prevent the dough from sticking onto the workbench or onto your banneton (I use a tea towel shaped in a “U” shape in my roasting dish). When I baked it , I did not give it a chance to come back to room temperature thinking that the cold shape will be slightly firmer to move. Even so, it is really very soft!
And the result? Yum! In taste, much lighter, it is another bread! It is closer to the ciabatta. One bread was a bit flat, the other bread was quite high but had a big bubble in the upper section in one part of the bread. There is definitely a fault in my technique there.
