Goth Panda

I can’t believe I have finally made it to the Sourdough portion of the book. To tell you the truth, I was a little apprehensive, since I don’t have the best track record when it comes to sourdough.

I did not make my starter from scratch, since I already have a starter. I purchased some of the King Arthur Flour sourdough starter, and even the official KAF sourdough crock, many moons ago. But I did not get in the habit of baking with it regularly…or even feeding it regularly. Some time later, I got Rose Levy Beranbaum’s book The Bread Bible, and in it she describes how to turn a liquid starter to a stiff starter (and back again). I had been keeping my starter as a liquid starter, but the advantage of a stiff starter is that you don’t need to feed it as often. So I followed her directions and made my liquid starter a stiff starter.

And then I mostly forgot about it. But it continued to live on in the back of my refrigerator. Those people who say it is tough to spoil or kill a sourdough starter aren’t kidding.

Now, the Bread Baker’s Apprentice uses a liquid starter for the sourdough recipes, so I planned to turn my starter back to a liquid.

Here’s my stiff starter:

It doesn’t look too bad, right? Trust me, it has looked a lot worse.

I added flour and extra water to feed it and to get it to a liquid state, meaning approximately equal weights of flour and water.

I fed it a few times during the week, to help it get its strength back. Soon it was nice and bubbly.

Then I needed to use the liquid starter to make a stiff starter that would become my sourdough bread. So I took a stiff starter, made it a liquid starter…and then made that a stiff starter again. Does that make sense?

I accidentally left the stiff starter out way too long, and it got seriously puffy.

The stiff starter then gets refrigerated overnight, and the next day, flour, water, and salt are added. That’s it.

I let the dough rise until it had doubled.

Then divided and shaped. I decided to make boules. One boule got the banneton and the couche.

The other one had to make do with the dish towel and Pyrex bowl.

These rose well, too. I don’t remember how long they took to rise at each of the stages (because, surprise, surprise, I baked them a few weeks ago), but I feel like they were at the high end of PR’s estimates. For this whole sourdough section, I have been taking the schedule easy and waiting to make sure the dough gets doubled, since I am depending on my wild yeast. I haven’t really been experimenting with the whole no-knead bread phenomenon, but the one thing I have learned from reading about it is that time can do the work for you. So I am trying to be patient and let my wild yeast do its work.

I baked them with all the “hearth baking” rules observed. They turned out really tall and almost completely spherical, which I wasn’t expecting.

Look at that slash! I am proud.

These loaves were delicious. I love sourdough bread. I don’t know if it’s the recipe in particular, or just that my sourdough has been dormant for so long, but they had a really nice tangy, sour flavor without it being too overpowering. The texture was good, too. If you have a starter already, the recipe really wasn’t that complicated. It certainly is a long way away from my earlier, sad attempt. I’m going to give these 4.5 stars.

Pugliese is another bread that I had never heard of before starting this challenge. For the week or so before I was scheduled to bake it, I made a serious effort to find durum flour in the local stores that might carry it, but no luck. Mike would ask me why exactly we had to stop at that particular natural foods store, and I would hiss at him, “Because I need extra fancy durum flour.” I don’t think he knew what I was talking about half of the time.

In the end, I ended up using the semolina I had in the freezer from an earlier King Arthur Flour order. In the notes, Peter Reinhart says you can use it as up to one-third of the 10 ounces of flour, so I used three ounces of semolina and seven ounces of KAF bread flour.

I started by making the biga, and I cut the recipe like I have been doing by one-third, so it only made 12 ounces. Then I measured out the 10.8 ounces I needed and discarded the rest. I didn’t add any mashed potatoes either, since I didn’t have any this week any more than I had them the week before. I don’t think I have made mashed potatoes since Thanksgiving.

Since PR says that the wetter the dough is, the better the bread will be, so I also added the upper limit of 9 ounces of water. But I didn’t get any pictures of this. The first photo I have is after the first ciabatta-esque stretch and fold:

After the third stretch and fold, I put it in a bowl to rise:

I improvised two proofing bowls. One was an actual banneton, covered with a couche. One was a Pyrex mixing bowl with the smooth side of a dishcloth facing up.

My dough rose wonderfully:

I divided them with the help of my scale, and made two little boules:

PR specifies that you should put the boules in seam-side up, and pinch the seam closed if it opens. I did that several times, but it would not stay at all. It reminded me of pinching together the ends of my challah bread, which would not stay closed either.

Although it was easy to get the boules out of the bowl by just flipping it over.

I slashed them. I am really proud of the way my slashing has improved.

And then I baked them.

I liked this bread a lot. Probably because I used the semolina flour, it reminded me of the Pane Siciliano, which I also liked. You can see from the photo that I didn’t get a very open crumb with this bread, despite the wetter dough and the stretches and folds. So I am not sure that this bread really distinguished itself from the Pane Siciliano for me. Maybe the extra fancy durum flour would have made it more distinctive. In any case, it gets a solid four stars.

Oh, people. I have been pretty consistent with the bread-baking. With the bread-blogging, though, not so much.

OK, Potato Rosemary Bread. I am pretty sure I baked this at least three weeks ago.

You start with a nice biga.

And it rises overnight in the fridge.

Since you only need 7 ounces of biga for the recipe, I halved the biga recipe, and threw away the extra two ounces. Then I cut the biga into pieces.

Rejected Biga

I also didn’t bother to make mashed potatoes solely for this recipe. I just microwaved a potato, mashed it up, and measured out 6 ounces. It didn’t have any extra butter, milk, or seasoning, but I figured I could just add liquid in if it seemed dry. Since there was no particular mashed potato recipe that you had to use, I thought it couldn’t be that strict of a recipe. I have potato flour from King Arthur Flour, since a lot of their recipes call for it, but I wasn’t sure how you would go about substituting potato flour for mashed potato. Does anyone know?

The mixed dough looked like mashed potatoes, to me.

Then, knead!

I usually have roasted garlic in my freezer. I roast the garlic heads, then split up the cloves into little packages of two or three and wrap them in aluminum foil. Then I put the foil packages into a freezer bag. This makes it easy to pop them out and add to sauce and other good stuff. So I defrosted some of my roasted garlic in the microwave. I don’t think I had as much as the recipe called for, but I added it in. Next time, I might knead it for longer after this step, because it seemed like all of the roasted garlic was concentrated in one spot in the loaves.

Then it was ready to rise.

And it more than doubled:

I shaped it into two boules. I think now I might have preferred the rolls, though.

You can see the dark spots where the roasted garlic congregated.

They rose again:

And I baked them until they were done.

After they cooled, the crust got kind of wrinkly. Did this happen to anyone else?

But the crumb was beautiful:

I really enjoyed this bread. The one thing I would change if I made it again is to decrease the amount of rosemary. I felt it was almost overpowering. Mike seemed to like it as is, though. I mentioned decreasing the rosemary to him, and he said, “No way.” So I guess it’s a matter of personal taste. The bread did stay soft and fresh a little longer than usual, due to the potato. I would definitely make this bread again, especially if I really did have leftover mashed potatoes hanging around. I give it 4 stars.

When Mike asked me what this week’s bread was, he misheard my response as “Four Cheese Bread.” I wish! I am looking for a good cheese bread recipe. But after he tasted this, he was glad I made it. He thinks this is one of the best breads of the challenge so far.

I am pretty sure I have never had Portuguese Sweet Bread before, but I was willing to give it a shot. This is one of the rare BBA breads that can be made all in one day. You start with a sponge, and you wait until it gets nice and bubbly.

Like so. Then you put arrange all of your other ingredients. Seeing as how this is a sweet, enriched dough, there are a lot of other ingredients: sugar, powdered milk, shortening, eggs, butter, and three different kinds of extracts. Then you add in your sponge and flour, and mix it all together.

PR says this dough will take longer than usual to knead because of all the extra ingredients. I kneaded it for the proper length of time in the mixer, but when I took its temperature at the end of the kneading, it was lower than it should have been. Instead of kneading more, though, I took it out and set it aside to rise, which may be why it took FOREVER.

It was supposed to double after two hours or so, but that did not happen. I let it go three hours, and still only had this much rise-osity:

Not good. But I couldn’t let it go any more, since I had to get it baked before we went out on Saturday night. So I divided it into two little boules and put them in my Pyrex pie pans. After Thanksgiving, I have approximately 3,962 of these.

They did a little better on the second rise, but still didn’t get anywhere near “filling the pans fully” or “overlapping the edges.”

I washed them with the egg wash, which pooled around the bottom of the boules and turned into a crispy lace after they were baked.

I baked them for 50 minutes, but had no problem getting the right internal temperature. The crust got very dark, but it was relatively thin.

You can see where the egg wash hit and where it missed.

Now, when the bread came out of the oven, both Mike and Rob were in the kitchen. It was almost time to go out for dinner, and we were all starving. After sitting in the house filled with the sweet aroma of baking bread – complete with vanilla, orange, and lemon notes – there was not a lot of sympathy for my suggestion that we let the bread cool for 90 minutes before slicing it. The argument, “But Peter Reinhart says so,” did not exactly cut it.

So, yeah. I think this poor loaf might have lasted twenty to thirty minutes cooling before it was unceremoniously sliced into.

I liked this bread, too, but it wasn’t one of my super favorites. It reminded me a lot of the Artos. It had a nice flavor, but I think sweet, enriched breads just aren’t my thing. As I said, though, Mike loved it. It didn’t seem to stay soft for very long, but that might just have been because we sliced the loaf without letting it cool all the way. The crumb was already feeling a little stale to me just a few hours later. I haven’t done it yet, but I can see that the suggestion to make it into French toast is a good one.

I think this one gets four stars, but I am combining my opinion and Mike’s to lift it up that high. Without his rave review, I would probably give it 3.5 stars.

I realized after these were finished that I had made a mistake. The recipe calls for 7 ounces of poolish; the recipe for poolish in the beginning makes 23 ounces. Rather than have extra poolish lying around, I only made a third of the poolish recipe: 106 grams of bread flour, 153 grams of water, and 1 gram of yeast. I was a little worried about such a small amount of yeast, but it seemed to turn out all right. However, a third of the recipe was still a little more than 7 ounces, but I forgot to measure out the poolish, and instead threw it all into the baguettes. That said, I still think the recipe turned out fine, somehow.

The main difference between these baguettes and the ones we’ve done in the past was using sifted whole wheat flour in the recipe. I used (of course) King Arthur Flour’s Whole Wheat flour.

I sifted it with my fine-mesh strainer and ended up with a fair amount of wheat bran.

I just threw the bran away instead of saving it for the future, though.

I made this bread last week, and one of the sad, sad things about posting so late after baking is that I have forgotten some of the details of process. I don’t remember this bread giving me any trouble, though.

Unlike the Portuguese Sweet Bread, which I made a few days ago, I didn’t have any problem getting it to rise.

I think I am getting a little better at shaping baguettes, but clearly I still have a long way to go. Several of these kind of unfurled after baking, as you will see.

I did have a breakthrough of sorts with slashing. I realized that I was holding the lame facing in the wrong direction. Once I turned it the right way, my slashes were instantly easier and looked a lot better. Unfortunately I have now forgotten what the right way is. Help me out, readers. Should it curve like a “C” when you hold it, or the other way around? Like this: ( or like this: ) ?

Look at these loaves. I think I have to take back what I said above about progressing in regards to shaping. I think I need Remedial Shaping 101. Lucky for them they still tasted good.

This bread was yummy, and I liked the whole wheat flavor. It didn’t bowl me over with its awesomeness, like the bagels, or focaccia, or pain de campagne, but I thought it was a very good recipe for a whole wheat baguette and if I wanted a whole wheat baguette, this is where I would start. So I’m giving it 4 stars.

Meanwhile, I made the Portuguese Sweet Bread two days ago, and the Potato Rosemary bread is cooling on the rack while I am typing this. So I need two things: time to post about these two before I move even further ahead, and people to take these breads of my hands. I still have a loaf of Pane Siciliano in my freezer, for goodness sake.