talk with me about sourdough, please

[cellio]

A pusher friend gave me some sourdough starter and I have been trying to learn to turn it into bread. In my most recent attempt I used this recipe, described as for beginners. I used the "bowl over the loaf in the oven" method, having tried the "pan of water" method with a previous loaf (but a different recipe, so no proper isolation of variables).

All of my loaves so far have been somewhat vertically challenged, like this one:

This is also the darkest loaf I've gotten so far. The recipe says 55-60 minutes so I pulled it out at 60. (Yes, I removed the bowl after 30 minutes.)

Should my bread be rising more? It's not producing hockey pucks; while the outside is pretty firm ("crusty", I guess?), the inside has regular bread consistency. The bubbles are small, not large.

That recipe says to start with starter, oil, and water and wisk them together first before adding flour. (This is different from my friend's recipe.) I've only just realized that I don't know whether that should be recently-fed starter or discard. Do any of y'all who know about bread have opinions? This loaf was made with discard; I'm wondering if that's my problem.

(The sourdough Internet tosses around lots of technical terms, but it's not always clear when which apply.)

I wonder if bad things would happen if I baked in a loaf pan to encourage more verticality (which would work better for sandwiches). All the recipes I've seen end with shaping the dough and putting it on a sheet or in a dutch oven; sourdough seems to be sculpture, not shape-assisted. But I might try that next.

I do not plan to buy, and have to store, a dutch oven just for this. I like bread, but not that much.

Comments

[gjm11]

Very recently-fed starter ~= small amount of older starter + flour and water, and will behave accordingly.

If you want your starter to leaven your bread optimally, you want it at something like peak activity. Exactly how long after feeding that is will depend on lots of details, but maybe 4-6 hours? It should be very bubbly. (Some people do a "float test": take a little bit of the starter, put it in water and see if it floats. The point is to get an idea of how much gas it's been producing.)

I think you can use pretty much any amount of starter at any stage in its development -- but exactly what you use will affect how long fermentation takes. More starter = quicker. More active starter = quicker. (Also, warmer = quicker.) Longer can be better -- it tends to mean more flavour. (Including, for sourdough loaves, more sourness; different people like different sourness levels.)

Sourdough loaves are seldom very tall. Things that might make it taller include: baking it in a dutch oven, especially if it's small enough to impede horizontal spread; using stronger flour; baking on a stone or steel to get more heat into the dough early; arranging for there to be plenty of steam in the air around the dough at the start of baking (a dutch oven will do this, as will your bowl-over-the-top method; so will an oven that can inject steam; there are other ways); developing the gluten more by kneading and/or stretch-and-folds in the early stages of fermentation.

Including oil in your recipe will weaken the gluten structure, which will probably mean a less-tall loaf. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, of course.

If you bake in a loaf pan you will get a loaf-pan-shaped loaf, which may or may not be what you want, and I would expect it to be substantially less crusty (at least the bottom and sides). Butter your loaf pan well before putting the dough in.

You almost certainly want your loaf to be darker than in the photo. If it looks like that after a full hour, perhaps your oven temperature is on the low side?

[cellio]

Thanks for all the helpful information!

I did try baking a loaf in a loaf pan (after posting this), and it was not a success. The sides and bottom were not crusty, and while the top was, the center seemed under-done. I had wanted the shape for better sandwich-making, but it still has to work as bread...

I think my oven's temperature calibration is good, just based on how other things cook in it. (And that it's not that old.) I guess the other variable to experiment with is how long to leave it covered. I've been doing the first 30 minutes covered.

[gjm11]

Typical dutch-oven timings are 30 covered + 15 uncovered, I think, so what you're doing sounds plausible on the face of it.

One obvious difference between dutch oven and metal bowl (if I'm understanding the metal-bowl process right) is that with a dutch oven you usually start by getting the dutch oven really hot, so that the space around your dough is very hot from the moment it goes in. I don't know how much difference that makes; metal mixing bowls are usually pretty thin and it probably doesn't take all that long for it to be at the same temperature as the air in the oven.

I think I'd stick with the 30 minutes covered and adopt the following super-simple algorithm for the uncovered part: cook it until it looks the way you would like your bread to look :-).

Of course the inside needs to be fully cooked too, but if you're cooking a loaf of that size for an hour at anything remotely like the right temperature I'd be super-surprised if it weren't properly cooked through. If you're in any doubt, the usual test is to turn it upside down, knock on the bottom, and see if it sounds hollow. (It should.) Or, if you have an instant-read probe-type thermometer, poke it in so its tip is at whatever bit of the loaf is furthest from the surface and see whether it's reached 190 degrees F or so. But, again, I bet this aspect is fine, and if you're happy with the texture of the bread you're producing then that's what matters.