You’ve made your decision. You’ve prepared for days. You’re rough and ready. It’s time… to make your first loaf of sourdough bread!
Take a deep breath; this recipe is so un-fussy that even the least experienced baker can get it to work. We’re working with 100% white wheat flour so that even if something doesn’t go quite right, you’ll still end up with a really nice loaf of bread.
You’ve got a starter, some math knowledge, and all your ingredients and materials pulled together. It’s time to learn the final step: how to build and bake a loaf.
When I start reading bread recipes, I was intimidated by all the special tools baking required. A peel? Sounds like something that should be on an orange. A lame? Rude.
As it turns out, baking bread requires little more than flour, water, and salt. Plus all the fancy stuff can be replaced by things you probably already have in your kitchen.
Now that your starter is bubbling away and you’ve learned how to write a recipe, let’s rest and take a day to practice some Baker’s Math. The answers and detailed explanations are at the bottom, so print out the worksheet, grab a pencil and a calculator, and see what you can figure out.
Inspired by practice problems from the Wild Yeast blog.
A. Focaccia with 550 g Flour
100% Flour
73% Starter
86% Water
10 % Olive oil
1 % Salt
Last post, we talked about all about the science of starters. While you’re nurturing your culture, let’s take some time to talk about all the recipes you’re going to tackle once you’ve for a healthy starter going. Ladies and germs (or, I should say, lacto-bacteria), may I present: Baker’s Math.
If you’re a math person, get ready to learn a new kind of percentages that just might drive you crazy at first. If you hate math, consider this a chance to finally master something that wrecked your GPA in high school.
Recipes for bread (and beyond) are often written in “Baker’s Math,” “Baker’s Percentage,” or “Flour Weight.” While it initially looks baffling, it’s actually a great way to convert recipes between English and Metric mass systems (ounces and grams) and increase or reduce the amount of bread you’re making.
If you’ve ever had store-bought sourdough bread, you’re probably used to a very particular flavor: tangy, pungent, in a word… sour. While this kind of San Francisco sourdough is famous for its bite, sourdough bread can taste as mild as a simple loaf of pain au levain. The wide range of flavors comes from the fact that “sourdough” doesn’t refer to a particular style of loaf so much as a way of leavening it. While modern store-bought loaves of bread are made with single species of commercial yeast, S. cerevisiae, sourdough breads rely on a process called lacto-fermentation to create a crisp, flavorful loaf.
To really understand what makes sourdough bread special, let’s take a quick look at the regular stuff: baked goods made with commercial yeast. Called baker’s yeast, brewer’s yeast, instant dry yeast, or active dry yeast, strains of S. cerevisiae are in all kinds of foods. Fermenting everything from wine to doughnuts, commercial yeast is convenient, predictable, and simple to use. Dry yeast can be stored at room temperature for months, making it easy to bake whenever the spirit moves ya. After adding water, the yeast instantly starts to grow and multiply. And because all commercial yeast belongs to the same species, we can take a pretty good guess about how it’s going to act in a dough.
With so many good reasons to use commercial yeast, why go to the trouble of messing with sourdough? It can taken a dozen more hours to rise, requires weekly maintenance, and can sometimes leave you with disappointing results. But when it works – and that is often! – making sourdough satisfies your palate, gut, and ego.
You know those recipes that your family has been making your whole life? This coffee cake is one of them. It’s always been known in my family as “George’s Coffee Cake” even though I’m 95% certain I’m not related to anyone named George.
When my mama and I sat down to add this recipe to our Drop recipe creator a few weeks ago, she decided that it needed re-christened and named it after herself.
Mamoot 