Baking Sourdough Bread at Home | Step by Step Guide

welcome back to the kitchen today we are doing a most requested video we are making a sourdough bread some of the basic things we're going to be covering today is what a sourdough starter is how you can get one started the care and maintenance of a sourdough starter and of course making a sourdough bread so maybe you like sourdough bread or maybe you don't but I think we all have a pretty clear understanding of what sourdough bread is it's that bread that has a nice crunch and has lots of air bubbles on the inside and a really tangy flavor with that being said you may wonder what sourdough actually is and sourdough in a simple terms is wild yeast and bacteria that converts sugars into alcohol and acid when we're thinking of fermented foods there's a lot to name right we've got pickles sauerkraut kimchi kefir wine beer all of those those are all done by the process of fermentation I hope by the end of this video to have convinced you to want to make a sourdough loaf because sourdough is totally magic its water and flour and you get this amazing product from it let's go ahead and talk about the most important ingredient with sourdough bread and it is your sourdough starter so when you're looking up a sourdough recipe you're probably gonna see sourdough starter or maybe even the term leavin used which is also starter this is our starter that Eric and I made about a year and a half ago we made it from scratch I will go ahead and include the link in the description which is the instructions how we made it it takes about a week to get an active starter but here's the key it actually it takes a lot longer to get a very flavorful starter a few other options are buying a dry starter that you can have mailed to you you can pick up at a store or if you have a friend or a family member they can actually divide this starter and give you some of it to share right away I recommend that option the most because you will get a really incredible flavor right off the bat for your breads at the end of this video I'm going to talk about care of a starter feeding it maintaining it and what you can do if you need a vacation from your starter 2 but we want to get started on the loaf so I have to review a few terms first the first term I find useful to know is ferment and there are three different ways that fermentation occurs first one is lactobacillus which is a bacteria converts sugar into lactic acid so that is one way things ferment the other way is alcohol fermentation and that's where yeast ferments sugars or starches and turns it into and alcohol lastly there's acetobacter turns alcohol into vinegar the first two types of fermentation is how sourdough is made when we're making the right I'm going to be talking a little bit about gluten or protein chains that are formed during this process gluten is formed by two proteins that are found in the endosperm of wheat and gluten is responsible for giving bread that really chewy texture it's also what forms that web and makes it so you can get those nice bubbles in your bread two more terms that are gonna be helpful for today is extensibility and elasticity elasticity means the ability for something to hold its shape and extensibility pretty much means the opposite it's basically the ability for the dough to extend or stretch another term that's relevant is hydration and really what that means is the flours ability to absorb water the hydration of the bread is important because it directly affects the elasticity or the extensibility so without further delay we are going to get started on our first step so this is our sourdough starter and I fed it last night so it has not been recently fed I did that intentionally because I wanted to show you guys what it looks like so if you take a close-up look you'll see it's very bubbly there is a demarcation on this mason jar so what's happened was when we fed our sourdough starter it rose to a certain level and then it fell down lower though I'm going to be taking half of the volume of this jar and putting it in a mixing bowl now we're gonna add water and flour to this to make our levain or our active starter i'm going to be using 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour i'm gonna go ahead and mix that up first and then we'll add 100 grams of flour I like to use multiple types of flour for our sourdough I love using wheat I love using a white unbleached flour and I also really recommend using a bread flour bread flour gives it a much more chewy and crunchy texture today I'm just gonna be using white flour and bread flour how many of you putting this in this mixture I'm going to go ahead and set this aside by the wood stove until it gets bubbly it did use warm water when making this mixture so hopefully it happened sooner than later we're back with our levain and it is totally ready it's nice and bubbly we're gonna be adding 200 grams of water and 300 grams of flour it's a blend of the bread flour and the all-purpose white flour I'm gonna start with the water first and this next phase that we are going into is called the auto lease and it is one of the most important steps of sourdough bread pinking auto lease is basically when the water and flour combined and that flour is able to hydrate let's add in our flour and so what's so important about this stage is that enzymes come in to do some work the first enzyme breaks down gluten bonds and the second one helps turn the starches in this flour into sugars for the yeast to feast on this stage is really important for the protein to break down that's going to increase the extensibility of the dough therefore making it easier for us to work with at this point some people add insult to their recipe I'm gonna wait on the salt and the reason is because the salt is a little bit counterintuitive to what we're trying to achieve right now what the salt will do is actually strengthen the gluten and we're working on breaking it down we now need to let this dough sit for 30 minutes to an hour I'm gonna put it back by the wood stove all right it's been a little bit under an hour and we are ready for our final mixing we're going to be adding in 200 grams of warm water with one tablespoon of kosher salt and I'm just kind of winging this one and I like to mix that in first at this point it helps to use your hands just a little bit and then we're gonna add more flour in and that was 300 grams of again a mixture of bread flour and white flour so even though this is pretty messy I prefer to do it with my hands because then I get a good idea of how the dough is coming together and I don't accidentally add too much water this is the consistency I'm going to leave the dough for now and we're going to get it back by the wood stove for half an hour and then we're going to be doing our series of folding or stretching the dough it's been half an hour that our dough's been resting and what we're going to do is our folding so we're going to grab the dough and just stretch it over itself I'm going to rotate the bowl and continue to do the same thing I'm just gonna repeat this four times just like that I'm gonna put this back by the woodstove and I do have to do the same process every half an hour for the next two and a half hours so we're gonna be doing it a total of six times by repeating these folds we are organizing those long gluten chains and forming a tighter web so we are increasing the elasticity of the dough during this bulk fermentation or first rise phase we also have carbon dioxide and alcohol that's being produced by yeast and that's where those air bubbles that were familiar with in sourdough come from and at the same time there are sugars that are converted to lactic acid and acetic acid which give bread that's our distinctive flavor now that the dough has risen about one and a half times we're gonna shape it what we're gonna do is grab a corner and put it in towards the inside and to be flipping the dough on the other side now we're gonna create some tension by cutting around the edges there we go that's perfect so we have two different options we can let this rest for half an hour and then go ahead and bake the bread today but what we're going to be doing is putting this in the refrigerator or our cooler for 12 hours and what that does is it slows down the fermentation and gives the bread a really nice flavor I'm just gonna flour a bowl and put this dough in there and we'll get this in the fridge okay so it has been 12 hours and this is what our bread looks like looks pretty much the same maybe a little poop here what we're going to do now is bake the bread so we're gonna preheat our oven to 450 and we're going to be cooking this bread in our Dutch oven that is our favorite way to cook it it keeps moisture trapped inside so this bread will expand at an even rate and then near the end of the cooking process we actually take the lid off so it gets a really nice golden crust we've got about 20 minutes where we're gonna let this bread heat up to room temperature and we're gonna be putting the Dutch oven in our oven to heat up ahead of time while we're waiting for our Dutch oven to heat up in the oven at 450 I wanted to go over some considerations of sourdough bread and talk about some of the troubleshooting if you're not getting a great low so you may have already guessed it there are lots of things that are influencing the bread all the way down to the flour every temperature water temperature the water quality you're using how you're mixing the dough and of course your sourdough starter is your sourdough starter really active all of those factors are really important and can have a pretty big impact on your bread and I know that can seem kind of overwhelming you can have a bread that's over poofed under proofed over-hydrated too little of hydration but through our experience i have found two of those things are most important and the first is definitely want an active sourdough star so what this means is you really need to have it bubbly and it's even better if you have one that is really strong and you may be fed it two days in a row so you know it's reliably bubbling up if you're not getting a good rise that's where I would always start sometimes that is the issue another thing that's crucial his air temperature and so that one's a little bit tricky for us because we have a wood stove so things can get cold in here then they can get hot and for bread like this you really want a constant 75 degrees or warmer with that being said sometimes if you have this process at a very high temperature the fermenting will happen very quickly and you won't get a lot of those awesome flavors so sometimes it is nice to have things a little bit cooler that's actually why we put this in the refrigerator or cooler we wanted to develop some more of the flavors but in general that's key you want to keep that room temperature at about 70 to 75 degrees I'm pretty happy with the way this particular loaf turned out we tend to add too much water and they spread out they're usually a higher hydration this one you can tell is holding its form which is easier for me to work with so I'm happy with that and it did form those really nice bubbles when it was rising but another major factor that I don't always do is weighing my ingredients weighing your ingredients makes a tremendous difference and I think that's what happened with this bread if you're not weighing your ingredients and you're just going by volume that's not very accurate and that's because different flours are different not just in quality but their protein level so a wheat flour can quite literally weigh twice as much as a white flour which would mean that you should go by weight and not volume anytime you're having issues with getting a good lope I would also recommend making sure that you are really paying attention to your measurements our Dutch oven is ready and it's very hot we like to put some cornmeal down at the bottom of the pan just in case there's any sticking and then we're gonna go ahead and try and get this dough out of the bowl so you can reshape it at this point but I like not to because that will leave more of those air bubbles in there I don't have the correct tool for it but we use this little processing knife and it works very well we're just gonna do one cut about half an inch deep that's gonna cook for 20 minutes with the lid and for 30 minutes with the lid off one thing I wanted to go over is care of a sourdough starter and maintaining it this is how we keep our sourdough starter it's just an amazing jar with a cheesecloth doubled up on top so I stole out of this starter yesterday and I didn't feed it and that's because I wanted to show you guys what is forming on top which is called hooch and it's a layer of liquid and that's a sign that our culture needs to be fed so they have exhausted their resources and that's because I neglected them so having a starter is much like owning a pet on a simple level you want to feed it at least once a day that's a pretty good rule and that's what I use if you want it to be active so we're gonna get to that in just a second so what I'm going to do is stir in that hooch and we're going to pour out half of it and half of it is going to become what we call discarded starter so that step is crucial you have to separate that and that is where you could give a gift to a friend if you wanted to make a new sourdough starter but what we're gonna be doing is now feeding our current starter it's very simple you just put in the same ratio of water and flour to however much starter there is so I'm not going to get too mathematical on this one I'm going to add about a third of a cup of flour and same for the water but with the water I like to start mixing it in and see how thick I want it and that's what we're ending with it's still a little bit chunky but it's about pancake batter consistency may be a little bit thinner and this is ready to go for another 24 hours before it will need to be fed again so you may be thinking what do you do with discarded sourdough starter well there's lots of options we generally compost it we have given it to our chickens or our animals another way we commonly use it is in other rust you can use this in pizza crust you can use it for waffles pancakes you can even just go ahead and use this for your next bread so it just depends on how you want to use it but again composting is one of our main ways that we use it if you remember when I first pulled from the starter yesterday when you would want to feed a starter is when they start to look not as bubbly so when they rise or at their most active point and then I'll start to decrease from there you really would want to feed it at that time but again for this video I just wanted to wait to show you guys what happens which is the hooch so let's talk about that what if you want to go on vacation or what if you're not home to feed your sourdough starter everyday well if you remember before fermentation works best with heat so we do have the option to slow this process down significantly by putting it in a frigerator generally it's not advised to do that for long periods and what I mean by that is more than a few weeks you'd want to take it out give it some new food let it bubble back up and then again put it back into storage we've done it for as long as six weeks and we were totally fine so you have that option if you're flying through too much flour and you maybe don't want to make a sourdough bread all the time a lot of folks will store it in the fridge for the week and it'll just pull it out for the weekend and get some loaves made and lastly the volume that I have is about one cup lots of people have really big jars and for me that's more to feed that's more cost more flour so if I know that I want to make something and I have an active starter I can just prepare a few days in advance and get my flour and water ready that's why I keep this pretty small we're gonna go ahead and get this put away and we just store this on our counter at room temperature I believe it's been 20 minutes so we are going to get the lid off of our Dutch oven we just checked our bread and it is done so we're gonna pull it out oh it's gorgeous beautiful loaf I don't think we could have asked for a better lobe so I'm really happy with this we're gonna let it cool down in there just a little bit and we are going to wait for the bread to cool entirely before we cut into it that's crucial with sourdough bread you can cut into it right away but if you do may get a little bit of a gummy texture so you can see now why the slow fermentation gives you such an awesome bread and I wanted to take a moment just to talk about the difference between commercial yeast and wild yeast or a sourdough starter when Eric and I first got into bread making a few years back we just started with commercial ease and I'd highly encourage that if you're new to bread making there's a few benefits to that and one is the time so it's very quick and it's very reliable you're gonna get breads that are going to turn out the same every time if you do the same thing whereas sourdough is really influenced by minor factors like we mentioned earlier so I'm a big fan of commercial yeast but because sourdough is more economical for us we have switched everything over to sourdough we just use our sourdough starter for pretty much any bread product that we're doing that you would use yeast in and it's not always comparable if you use sourdough but we have learned how to make it work for us so a sourdough would not only do get that awesome flavor but it's actually a healthier more nutritious bread and the reason for that is because of the fermentation process itself enzymes make the gluten more digestible and some of the minerals and vitamins more readily available to us so we're getting more nutrition from it bread like this some folks who have gluten sensitivities can even eat a bread like this because of that fermentation in the video description we are going to be including some links that we have found helpful for us and if you get a chance to take a look at them you may find that people make sourdough bread in all sorts of different ways I think it's really important that you don't let any sort of math terminology or the science behind it you know stop you from trying because it really is a simple thing as flour and water combining to make this and yes it is a skill and there's quite a bit more to it so I know there could be a lot of confusion behind it but in our minds there's no better way and then to try we have been making bread for a few years and it takes a while to learn but that's just it you have to learn to understand it another thing you may see is some of the equipment you can have for bread making and although I do recommend a Dutch and we've been making breads without proofing baskets without the scraper and without you know the correct knife or blade so you really don't actually need that stuff to get a good salary loaf so with that being said I hope that you will be encouraged to get started and make a sourdough loaf we're gonna go ahead and get this loaf cut open you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 179,799

Rating: 4.9379601 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, cabin life, life in alaska, off grid cabin, a day in the life off grid, winter cabin living, winter in alaska, alaska homestead, sourdough bread at home, sourdough starter maintenance, baking sourdough bread, feeding sourdough starter, homemade sourdough bread, making a sourdough starter, beginner sourdough baking, tips for baking sourdough, sourdough basics, sourdough bread dutch oven, sourdough bread recipe, sourdough guide, sourdough tutorial

Id: 2JnSMjSjbxg

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019