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]

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.