Fornacalia: Recent Episodes
None
Around this time, as is customary, my little microbial helpers need a dash of tender loving care. The yoghurt has already had two quick passages and is much the better for it. The kefir is about to have its first. But with temperatures in the high 30s°C I wasn’t super keen to look after the bread starters. Of course I could have just refreshed them without actually baking, but where’s the fun in that, and in any case stocks of frozen bread were dwindling fast. So, yesterday I took a look at the stiffer starter.
It wasn’t good.
The top was dark and slimy, the driest parts powdery (with spores?) and a fair bit of liquid hooch. The smell wasn’t reassurring either. But I’m here to reassure you that all was well and that if you are ever faced with a neglected starter, there’s no need to abandon it.
Turning the lump over, the base was perfectly fine, so I dug out a small spoonful, trying not to break through to the other side. It weighed about 9 gm. I added 24 gm of water and 32 gm of wholewheat flour (preserving the 75% hydration) mixed it up and left it to get going.
One thing about the heat; it got going in a hurry. Three hours later it was light and well aerated. Time for a second build. A single loaf needs only 175 gm of starter, and there was no way I was going to bake two in this heat, so the feed was 75 gm of water and 100 gm of flour.
Again, three hours was about all it took to more than double in volume. After that, I made the bulk dough (50% Manitoba, 50% wholewheat, 2% salt, 70% hydration), gave it a quick knead and left it on the counter for an hour. One set of folds and into the fridge overnight.
This morning I took it out, nicely risen, gently shaped it, placed it in a banneton, and left it for about 90 minutes. Normally I preheat the oven and my Le Creuset casserole for 35 minutes before baking. Given the heat, no way. It has been a long time since I first tried baking from a cold start and only a couple of times since, but saving 35 minutes of oven blasting made it worth it. Lid removed after 30 minutes, baked for a further 20 minutes.
The result was very acceptable. Not as much oven spring perhaps, but plenty, and a nice, even crumb. If this weather keeps up, I will do the same sort of bake when I revive the looser starter.
A friend kindly gave me a copy of The Perfect Loaf, by Maurizio Leo, and very fortunately there was just about enough room in my suitcase to bring it home with me. The explanatory section at the start is very informative, even if most of it was pretty familiar already, and I did pick up a few new ideas. Still, the proof of the pudding and all that … so I resolved to make his Simple Sourdough.
My starter had been in the fridge for three weeks, so the night before starting I took it out and refreshed it so that it at least somewhat resembled Maurizio’s starter. Then I mixed up his leaven, 200 gm at 100% hydration. Normally, I don’t do much to adjust desired dough temperatures, preferring to adjust timings based on the leaven or dough’s behaviour. This time, I did try and adjust. It’s not easy, and I overshot by 2 degrees F. Also, because the house is pretty cold (19°C, 67°F), I stuck the leaven in the oven with the lamp on. Now to wait.
One thing already: if I pursue his methods, I may have to invest in some larger straight-sided Weck jars because they are so much easier to work with.
With the leaven approaching ripeness, I made up the autolyse as suggested. Dough temp ended up high (84°F), meaning that I made too much allowance for the very heavy glass bowl in which I make quantities of dough. And at 60% hydration, I didn’t really expect the dough to be “shaggy and loose” as forecast; it wasn’t. Wondering whether, when the time comes to mix in the leaven, it will be “firm yet sticky” before I start to strengthen. I doubt it. I’ll almost certainly need the full amount of the reserve 60 g of water.
Of course it was firm and sticky; silly me. Maurizio’s method is essentially a form of bassinage and even without the additional water, which I did add, incoporating the somewhat liquid leaven is a sticky procedure. I had completely forgotten how that worked, as I haven’t made ciabatta in a long time, so sticky it was, although now, after two stretch-and-folds it is much more manageable and the liquid much more evenly distributed.
At the end of the bulk fermentation the dough was certainly lively and jiggly, and also a lot more extensible than I am used to. Final dough weight was 1860 gm, which for 1100 gm flour (my leaven was 20g shy) gives a final hydration of 67%. All I can say to that is, it certainly didn’t feel like it. It felt more like 75%. I managed the shaping OK and got the loaves into my bannetons and into the fridge, but I’m honestly not convinced an absolute beginner would have managed.
When the time came to bake, this morning, the loaves spread somewhat alarmingly, but there was a clear skin and when I scored them I could see good bubbles. They baked up pretty well, nice blistering, though the spring, especially on the first one, was a little disappointing.
The second loaf, with a single long score, produced something I’ve not seen before. If you look closely, you can see a smooth area just inside the cut line, and then the usual thready area where the loaf actually split. I’m not sure why that happened. Maybe something to do with the way the dough spread after scoring and before I could get it into the casserole.
The crumb shot reveals what I suspected, that the dough was underproofed, probably in bulk. The eating, though, was very acceptable. Will I make it again? That’s the acid test, I suppose, and I think the answer is No. I don’t have any 100% white flour breads in my usual repertoire, although I have made Jeffrey Hamelman’s San Francisco Sourdough on occasion, and for me this one is not a keeper.
It isn’t fair to judge the entire book on the basis of this one effort, that’s for sure, and I will admit it was fun to try something completely new, like adjusting dough temperatures carefully. My hot-bread take, though, is that for an experienced baker, the simple sourdough recipe is perhaps going to be a let down. However, as I said, there is a lot of other information about sourdough baking that will, I am sure, prove valuable. For instance, I plan to use Maurizio’s quasi-lamination technique to incorporate inclusions next time I need to. Messing about with the amount of pre-fermented flour is also something to try. The other recipes are definitely a source of inspiration, although I may well use some of my own trusted techniques to produce them. As for the temperature-focussed process, I’ve concluded, on the basis of this single trial, that it isn’t for me. The house is too underheated in winter and poorly insulated in summer to make it worthwhile, and I certainly do not intend to invest in a heated proofing box, so I will just stick with my own advice and watch the dough, not the clock.
The post Making Maurizio’s Simple Sourdough first appeared on Fornacalia.
A couple of weeks ago, I read a fascinating post on The Fresh Loaf, in which Kendalman described his interesting approach to stretch and fold and offered an alternative explanation of what is going on, because he believes the conventional view is mistaken. As near as I can tell, he says that there are two […]
The post A new way to shape a loaf first appeared on Fornacalia.
More than a podcast episode, my visit to Ostia Antica last year with Farrell Monaco (@tavolamed) was bound to see me attempting a panis quadratus of my own. What better time to make the effort than during Fornacalia?
The post A real Roman bread for Fornacalia first appeared on Fornacalia.
A little while ago I started to be more methodical about restoring some of the posts on my main website that had become disconnected as a result of various changes in the site’s back room. A few of those are bread posts that predate this site. Some of those I have already brought in here, […]
The post Resurrecting the Heidelberg Rye recipe first appeared on Fornacalia.
Ave Fornax! A very un-Roman bread to celebrate the start of Fornacalia. Maybe I'll have something more appropriate for the quirinalia in 10 days time.
The post David Kaminer’s 100% rye sourdough with a sunflower seed soaker first appeared on Fornacalia.
A couple of summers ago, we arrived on Ischia in that dead time, too late for lunch, too early for an aperitivo, and famished. The tavola calda just down the road didn’t have much left, but we took some of what there was and then I noticed on the counter a jar of large circular […]
The post Neapolitan taralli first appeared on Fornacalia.
Many of the online food events that have sprung up during the pandemic take place at times that are not ideal for me. An honourable exception is the classes from the Colorado Grain Chain, which generally take place on a Wednesday morning, Mountain Time, an excellent early evening for me. In addition to Julie Zavage’s […]
The post 100% rye sourdough with sunflower seed soaker first appeared on Fornacalia.
Double hydration kneading to make a sort of ciabatta studded with currants and flax seeds.
The post Flaxseed currant “ciabatta” first appeared on Fornacalia.
It works. The colour is stunning and the earthy spice of turmeric comes through in the bread.
The post Turmeric bread;an experiment first appeared on Fornacalia.
If you want a decent bagel in Rome, especially right now, you have to be able to make them. Or have a friend who can make them for you.
The post Sourdough bagels first appeared on Fornacalia.
When you want pizza and all the pizza places are shut up tight, what's a poor boy to do? Make it.
The post Pizza night when the pizzerie are all shut first appeared on Fornacalia.
Twice a week, I wake my starters from their frigid slumbers and feed them up so they are ready to leaven my bread. Different people evolve different procedures that suit their way of working. Here’s mine.
Starter workflow, left to right. Original, freshly fed, active.
In the fridge I keep about 80g of the white starter, which I made myself more than 30 years ago, and about 40g of the wholemeal “100-year-old Tuscan” starter that was shared with me a decade or so ago. Two days before the bake, i.e. on Monday for Wednesday, I remove the jar of white starter from the fridge (that’s it on the left) and put 20g of it into a clean jar. I add 40g of water and 40g of flour, stir it up, scrape down the sides and mark the level with a rubber band. That’s it in the middle.
The next morning, it is good and active. If you look closely at the jar on the right, you can see it has actually fallen back a little from the high tide mark, showing that it is past its peak. I will now feed that again, and possibly a third time, to get the amount of leaven I need for the amount of dough I need to make.
The starter goes back in the fridge. The jar normally contains enough to create a leaven for four bakes. When I’m down to my last few grams, I do a couple of feeds specifically to build the starter, which then lives in the fridge.
For the white starter, everything is very easy because it is at 100% hydration, which means I add equal amounts of flour and water each time I feed it.
The brown Tuscan starter is a little trickier, because it is at 75% hydration. I begin with the whole 40g and add flour and water in the ratio of 4:3, which usually means 100g of flour and 75g of water for the first feed and 300g of flour and 225g of water for the second. At that point, I remove about 40g and pop it back into the fridge.
This is just my tried and tested approach. We discuss others during the one-day course in Rome. The next one is on 5 April at Latteria Studio.
The post The starter-leaven pipeline first appeared on Fornacalia.