Reading Time: 4:00min | What has been reconfirmed to me from my involvement with bread baking is that timing is often as crucial to the outcome as the participants. And sometimes you have to be patient.
First: I am an absolute amateur in bread baking. My knowledge is mainly acquired by browsing the internet and then further developed through practical involvement. I can confirm most of what I read there. However, the recipes often seem a bit arbitrary (which, on closer inspection, they are usually not).
Bread consists of three ingredients: flour, water and a little salt. These are mixed so that a soft, kneadable dough is formed, which ideally isn’t sticky and tastes slightly salty. Then the dough is shaped to a loaf and exposed to heat until it is baked through. The result is a stone we’ll have a tough time with. What has happened?
Like a brick stone, which is made of sand, silt and clay combined with water to create a dough and then baked (burned), with bread, the flour particles and their protein mix with the water and form a firm bond in the heat. Depending on the type of flour, the bond becomes so tight and firm that the bread becomes a dry stone. It lacks the air and flexibility that real bread has in its crumb, and that makes it edible in the first place.
As with some other foods, e.g. sauerkraut, wine or black tea, fermentation is the key to success. Bread dough also needs to ferment to become usable bread later on. Yeast fungi are the chosen method because their enormous growth rates lead to good results quickly. Depending on the temperature, the yeast needs less than 2 hours to ferment the dough, filling it with gas and making it ready for baking. The industry produces many tons of yeast every day. They find their main buyers in the brewing and baking industry, and a million private customers, including me. But bread baked only with yeast does not taste full-bodied. It lacks sourness and depth of flavour, and besides, rye flour baked with yeast only works more badly than well.
That’s why sourdough is coming into play. With sourdough, yeasts are not manually added; they develop in the dough through the air. However, many other things are produced in the process, such as lactic acid, which gives sourdough its name and makes rye bread bake-able.
Breeding sourdough is easy. We take some flour, say a heaped tablespoon (any flour will do, rye and spelt work particularly well), add half the water weight, and mix the two into a dough. Then we wait a day at warm room temperature. Then we add another tablespoon of flour and add half the weight of water and wait another day. We do this for a week. The dough has now grown properly, smells sour and blisters. The sour scent comes from the lactic acid, the bubbles from the yeast. We now test the dough by taking two tablespoons and adding about 200g flour and 100g water. After 10-14 hours, the dough must have doubled in size, show abundant bubbles and smell pleasantly sour. We take 250g of that sourdough for baking and put the remaining sourdough in the fridge for the next round.
Which brings me to my quarter rule: 1 part sourdough, 2 × 1 part flour and 1 part water. For a recipe for a mixed rye bread that would be 250g active sourdough, 1 × 250g wheat flour, 1 × 250g rye flour and 1 × 250g water, which in the end is approx. 1 kg of bread dough. Add 15-20 grams of salt, depending on taste, and bake for about 50-60 minutes. The bread always turns out well this way. If you replace the rye part with wheat, you get a wonderful rustic wheat bread, provided the sourdough was fed with wheat flour.
We determine the fermentation by the resting time and the temperature. I get the best, reproducible results when the dough rests for 2 hours in the dough bowl covered with a lid at warm room temperature (doubles its size). Another 45min — 60min rest are added after kneading in the so-called proofing, e.g., bread loaf dough on the baking tray nicely covered and protected from drying out with foil. The hope that an extension of the resting time at the same temperature would improve the fermentation leads to worse results.
However, at cool temperatures, such as in the refrigerator, completely different rules apply. In low temperatures, doughs can ferment slowly for 24 hours and develop wonderfully. This is good for pizza dough, for example, or a nice baguette on a Sunday morning.
Lastly, a word on kneading or working the dough. It’s one of the core tricks of bread baking. Working the dough into a round shape is about firming up the dough after the first rest and then bringing it into the planned form for the second rest/proofing. Working the dough is the repeated pulling, placing and turning of the dough until it has become firm and elastic. Depending on the dough, this is a thing of a minute, especially if you are a proper baker (they can do it with two dough pieces simultaneously).
Ok. Here, my standard recipes in my quarter rule (as with any rule at some point breaking it may be meaningful).
Rye mix bread:
- 250g wheat flour (whole grain)
- 250g rye flour (whole grain)
- 250g active rye sourdough soft
- 250 g(ml) water
- 1 teaspoon of dry yeast (if you don’t have faith in your sourdough)
- 15-20g salt
- 50-60min baking time, 10min 250 degrees Celsius with a little water in the oven (approx. one glass), then bake out at 200 degrees.
Spelt bread with pumpkin seeds
- 500g spelt flour, preferably dark
- 250g active spelt sourdough
- 250ml water
- 1 teaspoon of dry yeast (if you don’t have faith in your sourdough)
- 15-20g salt
- 2 handfuls of pumpkin seeds
- 50-60min baking time, 10min 250 degrees Celsius with a little water in the oven (approx. one glass), then bake out at 200 degrees.
Country-side wheat bread
- 500g wheat flour (darker type)
- 250g active wheat sourdough
- 250ml water
- 1 teaspoon of dry yeast (if you don’t have faith in your sourdough)
- 15-20g salt
- 50-60min baking time, 10min 250 degrees Celsius with a little water in the oven (approx. one glass), then bake out at 200 degrees.
