More sourdough bread recipes! This loaf is the perfect sandwich bread and it is what I used this year for our Thanksgiving leftover Turkey Reuben’s. This is the same process and almost the same recipe as my original sourdough recipe but with the addition of rye flour and molasses!
Here are some important notes about baking sourdough/alternatives for the necessary tools:
Dutch oven alternative:
Use a large oven safe stock pot with a lid! It works the same exact way. Or…
When you preheat your oven, put a cookie sheet on the bottom shelf. Bake your bread in some kind of pot/pan that helps it hold its shape. When you put the bread into the oven, put water or ice cubes on the pan on the bottom shelf. Close the oven up quick, and you have a steamy oven!
Banneton alternative:
Put a non-shedding towel in a colander and dust it with (a decent amount) of flour. Then put your dough in that for its final rise. Or…
Just dust any bowl with flour!
Now, time to bake!
Ingredients
This recipe will take about 8-12 hours to complete, but don’t worry, it is probably less than 30 minutes of active participation.
Mix the water, sourdough starter, and molasses together in a bowl with your hands or a spatula. Once thoroughly mixed, add in the rest of the ingredients above (minus the caraway seeds).
Kneading the Dough
Once the dough is mixed, let it sit in the bowl, covered, for 30 minutes (ish).
Next, you will start the folding process. I fold my dough (see video below for an example of dough folding) every 30-45 minutes for the first 3 hours after I mix it (4-6 times)
The caraway seeds (optional) will get added into the dough during the 3rd fold. This way the bread has formed enough of a gluten structure and you will continue folding the seeds into the dough with the next folds.
The initial mixture is a very hydrated dough. It is very hard to knead, but that hydration gives the big holes that everyone loves in the sourdough. Folding the dough creates the gluten structure that holds the dough together while it rises. You will end up with a less dense roll the more you fold it.
My kneading steps
Mix the ingredients, let sit for 30 minutes
Fold the dough, re-cover, and let sit for 30-45 minutes
On the 3rd fold, add in the caraway seeds (optional)
Repeat step two 3-5 more times
That is it!
Letting the Dough Rise
After you are done kneading the dough, let it rise in your bowl, covered, for 3-5 more hours. You do not need to touch it, just put it on top of your fridge and set a timer.
After the first rise is done, you will transfer your dough into your floured banneton (or banneton substitute) and cover it again. Before I cover it, I generally apply some olive oil spray on top just so it doesn’t stick to anything.
Then. let it rise on the fridge again for 2-4 more hours! I usually just base it on what time I need to go to bed/how it has rose until that point.
This is a larger loaf of sourdough! I purposefully made this a larger loaf, for easier sandwich making; however, I don’t have a banneton that large – so I used a colander and a floured cheese cloth as my banneton and it worked beautifully. Look how rotund it is after it’s final rise.
Baking the Dough
Preheat your oven to 450°. It is nice to preheat your oven for 30 minutes – 1 hour before baking, but you can just preheat it normally too.
This is where the dutch oven, or dutch oven alternatives, come in. I usually bake my loaf on a piece of parchment paper too, because I don’t love the mega crisp on the bottom of my loaf.
Baking steps
Transfer your dough from the banneton into your dutch oven. This is where you score the top of it. This is just cutting the top of it allowing the dough to rise. Put the lid on if applicable.
Bake at 450° for 25 minutes.
Reset the oven temp to 425°
Take the lid off (or remove the steam tray from the oven), and continue baking the loaf for 30 minutes (you do not need to wait for it to get to 425°).
Voila! You are done
Let your loaf cool for an hour at least before cutting into it.
Let us know how you like the rye sourdough loaf you created!
Most commonly, the issue here has to do with temperature (which is very important). If your sourdough starter is kept at a low temp, even 70°F (21°C), it will slow fermentation activity and appear to be sluggish, taking longer to rise and progress through the typical signs of fermentation. The solution: keep it warm.
Set the sourdough starter on the fridge. This warm location will kick start the fermentation and allow the starter to rise more. You can also add a bowl of warm water nearby to increase humidity. This may sound weird, but on the flip side, fridges are super warm on top!
it's almost always the same ratio. . there are lots of different sizes and shapes and flavours of loaves. but they almost always use this formula. 100% flour 20% starter 2% salt and 75% water.
It strikes a perfect balance of softness and structure, making it an ideal choice for various recipes. Due to its wide availability and affordability, all-purpose flour is often my top recommendation for creating and maintaining a sourdough starter.
Generally a more mature and well established starter will produce a more flavorful, sour loaf. Hydration of the Dough - this affects how long your dough will take to ferment. A slightly lower hydration will take longer to ferment than a higher hydration loaf, leading to a bigger depth of flavor and sourness.
Tip 4: The more rye in your dough, the more slowly it will rise. The loaf above is only about 28% rye flour, so it rises vigorously. Breads that include a greater percentage of rye may take hours to rise, both in the bowl, and once they're shaped into loaves. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: relax.
In fact, rye flour starters perform notoriously well. Rye flour will help to make your starter more sour. To boost your sourdough starter with rye flour, substitute half your normal flour with rye flour at each feeding for a few days and you should see a noticeable difference in your starter's activity level.
What Happens If You Feed a Sourdough Starter Too Much Flour? If you add more flour than water into your sourdough starter jar, it will be a very stiff starter. This is not always a bad thing, and sometimes extra flour is necessary to rectify a runny starter or make the starter peak at a later time.
A warm spot in your kitchen is the best place for bread dough to rise. Try to find a place that's between 75°F and 78°F (24°C and 25°C) to encourage strong sourdough fermentation.
Turn the dough over so it has more of a smooth ball shape. Then cover it back up, and leave it on your counter until morning(Or for at least 9-10 hours)! By the next morning, your bread should have risen significantly. It usually doubles in size, if your sourdough starter was active enough!
Compared to whole wheat flour, rye flour is said to be the most nutrient- and amylase-dense option for a sourdough starter. Overall, it has a lower gluten protein content than wheat flour, which means it produces slack, sticky, and dense doughs.
It would be best if you discarded some portion of your starter each time you feed it unless you want to continue to let it grow. Eventually, you need to discard the used “food” (flour and water) that's been used to sustain your starter during the last fermentation period.
Experts recommend feeding a starter twice daily. And at each feeding, you hold onto 1/2 cup of your original starter, discard the rest, and then add its same weight in water and flour. With this schedule, you'd discard almost a cup of sourdough starter every day.
In my experience, the shortest final proof (at room temperature) that I prefer to do is one hour. The longest final proof (at room temperature) is about 3 hours. When going past 2-3 hours in a final proof, the crumb tends to get very gassy and opens up large gas bubbles with a longer countertop proof.
Creating the perfect steamy, hot environment is essential to getting a rich, dark sourdough crust. As a home baker, using a Dutch Oven is the easiest and most consistent way to create the steamy environment needed to bake great sourdough bread.
Proper fermentation of bread dough requires robust yeast activity, especially if you want good oven spring and an open crumb. Adding small amounts of instant yeast to a sourdough is an easy and effective way to get there, and a practice any baker might want to add to their bread baking toolkit.
Introduction: My name is Clemencia Bogisich Ret, I am a super, outstanding, graceful, friendly, vast, comfortable, agreeable person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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