Claire Saffitz Makes Sourdough Bread | Dessert Person

shall we talk about how we're not at the cabin and it's not done yet and then cut to photos of the cabin been being built [Music] right we can do that just did it okay great hey everyone i'm claire welcome to my home kitchen i'm so happy to be back we took a little bit of a break so i could finish some major projects and now those are pretty much wrapped up and i'm so excited to be here for more episodes of dessert person and today we are starting with a sourdough bread recipe pretty much two years too late for that trend but for any of you out there still making sourdough it is one of my favorite pastimes and hobbies and i'm gonna show you my kind of like clean out the pantry sourdough bread [Music] why do people make sourdough bread why do people make bread okay well i think it's a personal journey for everyone who is into sourdough for a lot of people it's just about having delicious fresh baked bread which i certainly understand for other people it can be almost like a practice sort of like ritual thing that you do i love it i think it's a fascinating process and i do it because it's a great compliment to all the baking that i do and plus i love fresh bread nothing better i think one of the reasons that sourdough got really big early in the pandemic is that it's like time consuming in a good way you're sort of on the bread schedule for anyone that isn't familiar with sourdough it is a type of what we call naturally leavened bread so meaning that instead of using commercial yeast like active dry yeast or instant yeast we are using yeast and bacteria naturally colonized from the air around it it's you know all yeast and bacteria are everywhere and so we use something called starter the point of this bread is to like get rid of a whole bunch of loose flowers that i have randomly from all my recipe testing so it's practical and fun [Music] the most important thing well they're all important there's only four things flour if you want to just use red flour that's all you really need i have kosher salt i have starter and tap water if you have filtered water that's good the tap water will be fine you definitely need a kitchen scale for this because the proportions are very important you'll need a dutch oven and then a couple other little tools here and there like a bench scraper but overall it's fairly minimal hi maya hi kitty cat hi kitty hi kitty cat so before we get into the entire bread making process i want to thank made in our sponsor for this episode and i'm excited to introduce this brand new product from their line it is a five and a half quart dutch oven enameled cast iron is a super requested item and it took them years to develop and create it's made in france beautiful oatmeal colored interior navy exterior i love cooking and baking in dutch ovens because it's so versatile it retains heat it disperses heat it's perfect for baking bread it has this metal handle which you do not need to take off if you are baking it at high temps and on the bottom of the lid you'll notice these little beads this is so that when the lid is on condensation collects drips down kind of self-basting just really lovely features in this dutch oven so if you go to the bottom of the episode there's a link if you use the code clair15 you can get 15 off your entire order not just the brand new dutch oven i think it's one of the most versatile pieces of cooking equipment you can get so i highly recommend it and now we're going to get back to the episode and i'm going to show you how to make your bread dough and why i love baking bread at home and you need a dutch oven to do it [Music] so the first thing i want to do is weigh all my flours so when we talk about flour and you know all the ingredients you're adding it we use what we call baker's percentages so flour whatever your total quantity of flour is that is 100 and then every other ingredient is measured kind of as a percentage of flour so people might say like oh it's 80 hydration and that means that by weight 80 percent of the total weight of flour is what you add in water so i like to use a thousand grams or a kilo of flour total it makes percentages super easy and then when you add the water you know what the proportion is because you know if you add 750 grams of water 75 hydration and everything else is measured as a percentage of the flour as well so a standard percentage of salt is two percent so it just makes all the amounts really easy to follow [Music] i'm going to weigh all my flours and mix in sorry start over so today i'm going to do 500 grams of bread flour and then 500 grams of a mix of other flowers so i have 500 grams of my white bread flour i'm using odds and ends here so this was like i took out all of the random flowers that i have in my kitchen that are wheat flours spelt some i'll add the rest of this whole wheat flour you could do 100 bread flour if you wanted the more white flour you add the kind of lighter and more open your bread will be however it won't have as interesting a flavor so that's why i like to do a mix i want to kind of balance texture with flavor so now i'm adding spelt spelt actually has a slightly lower protein content so when we think about flowers and bread making we think about protein content a lot because protein content correlates to the amount of gluten development gluten which we've talked about many times are these like stretchy strands that develop when you mix wheat flour with water and this gluten network that develops is what traps like the gases that the yeast produces and gives you you know the holes in your bread and leavens it you want a decent amount of gluten development so that your bread is not just like super dense so spelt and rye don't actually have what's called functional gluten and they're not really true wheat flours but they develop great flavor the yeast and bacteria and starter love whole grain flowers like rye all i need to do is get to a thousand so i'm just kind of adding here and there freshly ground whole wheat flour you can see the differences in the flowers like this is a whole wheat flour it's kind of yellowish kind of golden this one is like a little more kind of grayish almost a little bit blue i'm actually going to add the rest of this oh but i'm almost at a thousand autolease is sort of an initial step in bread making where you mix the flours and the water and you let it sit that helps to develop a lot of gluten like right off the bat and can also decrease the amount of mixing you have to do in the final dough oh you guys it's actually a really good thing we haven't been shooting for the last couple months because they were doing asbestos abatement on the roof of the building next door which i'm on a floor the building next door is like stories so the people on top of the roof right outside i mean we could like have a conversation and it was so loud jackhammering it's like crazy blow torch thing so glad it's over here's 750 grams of water so 75 i'm also going to add more water later on when i add the salt so this is a bowl scraper because it's curved and flexible for scraping the bowl i'm not using any kind of electric mixer for this and it can get a little sticky so this is really handy to have it helps you work a little more clean for this quantity of flour we'll get two nice size loaves out of this now in goes my room temp water typically autolease is done without starter so i'm going to leave it out and just mix in the water and at this stage i want to hydrate all the flour i don't want any dry areas but i don't really need to mix it i just have to work the water through so i'm using the bench scraper so at this point the water is worked in but it's not evenly mixed so i'm going to switch to my hands it's a little deceptive because it looks dry but it really will loosen up so i'm going to just kind of pinch it in with my hands just until you see no more flowery spots and make sure you're kind of turning it and getting anything that's trapped in the bottom of the bowl because there will be some loose flour down there because i'm using kind of a different mix of flowers each time the dough takes different amounts of water just seems really dry so i'm going to add another 50 grams of water so that brings us up to 800 grams total 80 hydration so you just want to mix until everything is hydrated no no dry spots so at this point this is how this should look just like super almost kind of gnarly not like bread dough i'm going to cover this and grab a kitchen towel so i'm going to let this go for about half an hour and then we're going to come back in and mix in the starter and the salt and then we move on to kind of i think like the principal stage of sourdough bread making which is called bulk fermentation [Music] so see this little line that i drew right there that was where my starter that was its sort of baseline last night when i fed it when i put it in this container and overnight and this morning the yeast and bacteria fed on the starches in the flour and produced gas and lactic acid and it grew and bubbled up and here's what i have now so it grew quite a bit how you know your starter is at its optimal point of use it will basically be at a point where it has grown and it will be super bubbly i i sort of think about the bubbles as like it almost looks like little sudsy bubbles like from soap it'll be slightly domed and when you jiggle it it will look like it is about to collapse it'll have so much air in it that it is really at the point where the bubbles are about to pop and deflate a little bit now that has already happened here my starter is a little bit past its point there is like a high water mark right here and the starter has collapsed a little bit i want to hurry up and use this so i'm going to basically rush the auto leaves a little bit that is really where it would have been great to use probably like an hour or two ago what that it's telling me is that that those yeast and bacteria really need to be fed so i'm gonna do the float test so i have some water here in this bowl i'm going to use the spoon to scoop out maybe like a teaspoon size portion of starter now the thing is i know that this is over ripe so there's a chance it's actually not going to pass the float test because it's deflated but let's see all right it's floating if it floats it means there is kind of an optimal amount of gas that has been developed in your starter and you're good to go if it sinks most likely you need to go a little bit longer but if it sinks and you notice that you have this kind of like high water mark in your starter that means you're past the point and it's basically it was bubbling and then it deflated so you want to use it as soon as possible you can still make good bread if your starter is like mine and is a little bit past but it's just not optimal you want to really use it at that right time there's ways to slow and speed up your starter and it's all about temperature if you're like okay like you know i want to go for auto lease for a couple hours but my starter is looking kind of ripe put it in a cool spot that will slow things down a little bit the opposite is true if you're like well i got to get this bread going put it in a warm spot and it will start to activate we're going to weigh out our starter 200 grams now i'm not weighing it directly into the bowl although that would be easier but that's because with weights this high it's not super accurate so i'm going to weigh it into a separate container this is a starter that i fed mostly with white bread flour but with a little bit of rye as well i'm going to uncover so i'm going to start by scraping in my starter now when we talk about hydration it does not take into account the hydration of the starter that's considered separate here we have a very wet thing that i'm trying to mix into another kind of wet thing so it gets a little messy i like to use a pinching method so i use just thumb and forefinger and i pinch the starter in so you can see a little bit like the texture of what the flower and water mixture looks like it's definitely become stretchier more elastic i am now going to add my salt salt does a lot of things to the bread it of course seasons it like if you were to make bread with no salt it would taste terrible not good it just it seasons it it makes the bread taste like bread but it's also going to tighten up all of the gluten and to incorporate the salt really thoroughly i add additional water when i add the salt so i have this is 20 grams of kosher salt i weighed it out that's two percent you could use a fine sea salt i just wouldn't use table salt it looks like a lot but i really really recommend you use the full two percent 50 grams of water so this will bring the hydration up to 85 so i'm still using that pinching method it's a little squishy [Laughter] [Laughter] sorry not a great noise remember those shows on nickelodeon where they would like slime people oh yeah i would be so mad i guess you don't do that show unless you are prepared for that but like oh my god all right we'll cancel this good hair day the dough has mostly absorbed the water it's a little wet it still feels pretty tight like it's firm so now that i've incorporated the starter and the salt the next step is to work the dough a little bit i think it's easier especially for beginners to just keep it in the bowl and to just do this kind of lifting and turning motion so it is basically a kind of scooping down of the hand along the side of the bowl grasping onto it lifting it up i like to give it a little shake to kind of stretch it a little and then pressing it down toward the center kind of folding it onto itself i'm going to continue with this motion until i see a couple things one is just increased smoothness so a more uniform texture i will have less stickiness so there'll be more absorption of the water i will also see increased elasticity which is the desire of the dough to kind of spring back into its shape as well as extensibility so the ability to extend so when i grab the dough and i pull it up it breaks apart pretty easily so that is a sign that like it's not very well developed and i like to make two loaves at a time one because the math is really easy and two because people love getting it like i can give it away and i also freeze it all right can we do that one more time having a good time slow lift love bread okay turn that high i'll break off i think you could probably do this for you know 15 or so maybe 10. depends depends on your flowers depends on how long you did your auto leaves 75 all right we're still 74.75 so we're a little bit below the desired dough temperature so i'm going to try to mix it pretty vigorously so i can bring up the temp one thing i like about bread baking is it feels kind of like primal and there haven't been like there's been sort of an increase in understanding of bread making but fundamentally it hasn't changed that much over the centuries and so i like doing it by hand i feel like it's kind of meant to be done by hand [Music] i mix this dough a little bit more yes do i want to not really we're going to move into the stage of bread making called bulk fermentation bulk only because we are doing the full amount of dough all at once fermentation because this is the stage where the yeast that was in our starter is now feeding on all of its new food sources and is going to produce gas we want to maintain the strength in the dough that we developed some of that gluten kind of relaxes and can start to break down if you let it so to counteract that for us we're going to do a series of folds as it goes through bulk fermentation but it's looking kind of mottled it's looking pretty dense like there isn't a lot of air in it when i do this i'm not seeing a lot of like jiggling so we're gonna see some pretty noticeable changes as it goes through bulk fermentation but for now i'm gonna cover it we're at our you know in the range of desired dough temperature so i'm just gonna let it sit at room temp and we'll come back and check on it in an hour i'm going to uncover it first thing i notice the surface has settled a bit so it is a more the dough is relaxed and i have more of sort of a flat surface to the dough so here's how you do the folds dampen your hands and then i'm using a similar motion that i use for the mixing but i'm going to go in with two hands kind of on opposite sides of the bowl i'm going to lift and kind of fold the dough onto itself so i'll show you so i'm kind of gently stretching it upward see how it's pulling away and then i can fold it onto itself add a little bit of tiny bit of sticking but generally wet hands is really effective at preventing sticking then i gave the bowl a 90 turn i'm going to go in and do the same thing and i'm being gentle i don't want to deflate a lot of the gases that i'm building up currently at the same time you can handle it a little bit so kind of just doing one more for good measure the reason we're doing these folds is to continue to build and also maintain strength in the dough so that folding action is helping those gluten strands kind of link up and form these long chains and creating this internal network and that's what we want that's going to trap the gas that the yeast is currently generating as it ferments that was all you do so again in an hour we'll do that folds back off to the side i'm going to try to put it in a warm spot because the does cool down a little bit and then we'll just come back in an hour [Music] so an hour later we're going to look at our dough what i'm seeing here as i'm seeing some light bubbling across the surface it has settled a little bit but it has also sort of started to expand in the bowl i'm seeing bubbles around the sides it's dropping all right so i gotta warm this guy up so i have some warm water here i'm gonna turn my oven on pretty low and i'll have it sit near the oven so same thing with some wet hands using warm water i'm gonna come down and underneath the dough on two opposite sides i like to give it a little wiggle and fold it back on itself you can actually stay here rather than giving the dough er you can see here rather than giving the bowl a turn the point of this is to strengthen the dough build up those chains of gluten and make sure that we are maintaining that strength okay so now when i give the bowl a little shake there's a little bit more of a wobble to it so that's a sign that we are building up that gas and this is going to go back under the towel i'm going to put it next to the oven so i can warm up a little bit i just heard the oven kick on and then same thing in another hour and then we move on to what's called pre-shaping shaping and then proofing [Music] so i did an additional fold we didn't show it on camera i did it about an hour ago so that was fold number three so when i give it a little wiggle but it has a nice wobble so i can i see little bubbles on the surface so here i have my bread baskets these are called banatone if you don't want to do this you could do this in a colander you could do it in a bowl lined with a clean kitchen towel that's all fine this here is a 50 50 mix of white rice flour and regular all-purpose flour rice salt doesn't hydrate like regular flour and so it just prevents sticking to the cloth so i'm just giving a very generous dusting of this mixture into the baskets so i want to flour my work surface to prevent sticking i really want to let the dough kind of pull itself out of the bowl there's a decent amount of water in here and so it really should kind of slip out although i'm going to tip out any water that might dribble onto the surface okay so the dough is going to kind of pull itself out and onto the floured surface kind of go gently you don't want to pop too many air bubbles if you need to you can use a little bowl scraper but all that water was really helpful it did help prevent sticking so i'm going to quickly use my bench scraper to divide this in half so now i'm not going to weigh i just want to sort of roughly divide this in half i don't really care that much if the loaves are slightly different sizes just eyeball it and this part i think is a little challenging because the dough is does want to kind of stick when you start to divide it so i like to quickly kind of get my scraper in there press down and then give it a twist to kind of separate the dough wow these are wildly different sizes there we go so move one over you don't want them to touch as soon as they touch they kind of want to fuse back together and pre-shaping is a step that i do to help start to organize that network of gluten into the shape of the loaf so here i have the bottom floured and the sticky surface on top i'm going to kind of quickly gather all of the edges of the dough into the center like so into a little bundle like this then i'm going to flip it over so it's kind of smooth side up i'm working quickly because the longer it touches your hands the more it's going to stick and then you're going to use the bench scraper to work around the dough and basically tuck the edges underneath now it's important not to have a ton of flour underneath otherwise the dough won't really have enough friction to like hold itself underneath but you can see as i work it and turn it and rotate it gets nice and tight i have this little sort of tight ball and that is my pre-shaped bread this is just gonna rest here so we call this a bench rest and that is the step between pre-shaping and shaping so i'm gonna do the other piece so same thing i have all these kind of like rough edges i'm gonna just lift all of them up and bring them toward the center and the dough is really going to want to stick to itself any flowers any unflowered surface the dough will want to stick to including itself and then turn it over a little bit of flour okay this one can go right here now i'm going to cover these with a clean towel not the wet one because i don't really want to introduce more moisture at this point so i'm going to get a clean towel out these will bench rest for like 15 minutes or so i want the gluten to relax a little bit and then we're going to shape again and not only am i trying to reorganize the gluten into the shape of the loaf but the final shape is designed to increase tension and give you a final loaf that rises like really tall and evenly in the oven and just gives you the nicest shape [Music] so this part i like to do quickly it's just kind of like all in one motion so at this stage i'm going to kind of flatten out the dough a little bit and the way that i like to shape is basically i fold in the sides think about like making a burrito fold in the sides and then i roll it up from the end closest to me to furthest away so i should say that i'm going for a shape that's going to fit inside this banana tone it's called batard is the shape so i'm going to fold in the sides now this underside of the dough the dough is going to easily stick to itself so that makes it easier okay and you can give it like a little pinch now the idea here is to increase the tension of the dough and really stretch the dough over itself so that when you know the loaf is going to rest but when it goes into the oven it has this structure of gluten and tension so that it rises up nice and tall so i'm going to start from this end and just kind of roll it up like so and as i roll i'm kind of pulling back on it to increase that tension and you can kind of give the ends like a little karate chop a little chop and now i kind of have to do that same motion where this is now going to be the top of the loaf and it's going to go rounded side down into the basket so i'll stand over here so you can kind of see what that looks like if you need to you can give a little bit of flour on top just to prevent it from sticking to your hands you don't really want to use too much flour because you will end up drying out the surface of the dough more than you want to so bench scraper go like that see there we go so it's like a little a little baby tiny bit of flour on the surface so you can pinch any seams that you want to close and now i'm going to shape the other one just like this and to prevent the dough from drying out too much i'm going to cover it this is i mean i think it's literally a shower cap it's just a plastic cover with some elastic around the edge it creates this like nice closed environment for the bread we've already developed you know a nice amount of gas and air in the lobes and proving is a chance for the dough to relax a little bit for the lactic acid to continue its development of flavor this is really about developing flavor bulk fermentation is about developing you know all the air and the gas that you need in the loaves and this stage moving into proofing is about flavor development so i want to let the loaves relax proofing to me is like some one of the more kind of like inexact steps or parts of the process but what i'm looking for when the loaves are proofed they will have settled into their baskets you can see they're a little bit domed if they're riding a little bit high they'll settle in i'll also see a slight expansion in size and i'll do something called the poke test the dough will spring back but actually leave a slight indentation which is a sign that the gluten has relaxed when i poke the dough now it springs back immediately so these have a ways to go before they're proofed so unfortunately you're not going to be here for that stepping by you i mean my crew because i cannot keep them here all night so i'll take a little video show you what that looks like when they're proofed and then they're going to go into the fridge it could go for i would say maybe like between one and two hours for proofing we'll see see you tomorrow see you tomorrow the crew left about an hour ago the dough is proof i'm gonna show you what it looks like you can see the larger of the two has risen almost out of the basket the second one has totally filled it in the surface has settled so it's nice and flat i'm going to show you the poke test i also gave it a little more flour because i didn't want it to stick to the cover so i'm going to show you the poke test so see how when i poked it it slowly sprung back and then held the indentation that is a sign i'll do it again over here so see how it's slowly springing back and holding the annotation so that is a sign that these guys are proofed so i'm gonna cover them again and put them in the fridge and we'll bake tomorrow i woke up this morning with a little pep in my step because i get so excited every time it's baking day i'm not exaggerating like i literally wake up and i'm like i get to bake bread i'm so excited to see how it turns out it's always like a little different and kind of mysterious and fun and it's a discovery every time i bake bread so today's the day i have my dutch oven here so dutch oven bread baking is a really common method i think it's the easiest and most effective home method for baking bread and the point is that you're baking in this closed vessel for part of the time with a very tight fitting lid because you want to build up steam as the dough begins to bake so the point of that is to keep those starches in the bread pliable so that in the early part of baking when it's really really hot you're going to achieve maximum oven spring so what happens is all that gas that's trapped in the dough is going to heat up and expand and raise the dough and create all those holes in your bread and you want to keep some steam in there so that you can achieve this maximum sort of volume increase called oven spring then you take the lid off and you let the dry heat of the oven really create this beautiful golden brown crust i have this is like a kind of a fancy what's called a lamb lamb just means blade and french but it is the term for basically a razor blade on a stick this is for slashing the bread you could just use a razor blade if you don't have that you could use ideally a sharp serrated knife okay and then i have just that 50 50 mix of white flour and white rice flour for dusting a piece of parchment paper you know the dusting wand and this is just a little brush for removing flour from the bench not not required a very important step in bread baking is really preheating your oven thoroughly so bread ideally bakes at a super high temp most ovens max at around 500 degrees so that's what we're gonna preheat the oven to in my made in dutch oven it is oven safe up to 500 which is great i like to actually just preheat the bottom of the dutch oven rather than the whole thing it just to me feels like a little bit safer because you're handling this big piece of equipment that is literally 500 degrees and it's super hot so i'm gonna i have my oven rack in the bottom of the oven because you need some head space you want to preheat it for a long time you want to really really make sure that the dutch oven is like fully retaining this super high heat so i think it could take in my oven it takes like 45 minutes or so i would allow yourself at least that for the preheating stage so this is going to go in and make sure that you have like reliable and safe oven mitts or some kind of glove or just really thick towels these you are going to be handling this very hot piece of equipment so i use oven mitts sometimes not oven not all oven mitts are created equal and i have definitely burned myself through an oven mitt so just make sure you're using something that's really really heat proof this brush is not required i just think it's cute so i have it here for like dusting stuff why do we slash the bread great question the reason we slash it is so that we give the dough a predictable place where it can start to expand so you don't have to there are certain styles of rye bread where there's it's like a lower amount of oven spring that are just allowed to kind of naturally crack and they're beautiful and i love the way they look but with this kind of bread we're gonna slash it so as you saw from my vlog i let it proof last night for a couple hours and then stuck it in the fridge and here she is so i'm going to take off a little plastic shower cap so there was a little bit of condensation that gathered in the bag and then on the surface of the bread so i'm going to dust the bottom with a little bit of flour not a lot it could have a tendency to burn so i don't want to add too much but just enough to prevent sticking and i do bake this on a layer of parchment paper which is a means of lowering the bread into my 500 degree dutch oven so there's an extra little layer there so here's how i do it i have a piece of parchment paper it's not a very large piece i just need something that's about where the width of the parchment paper is about the length of the loaf and i have a couple of inches of overhang on either side so i like to very gently turn the bread out i think i sometimes handle the bread more gently than it needs to be like it's pretty resilient plus it's cold so it was sitting overnight in the fridge that helps to really firm up the dough and makes the stage easier so i do i almost 100 of the time bake my bread from cold you can feel you don't have to be quite this gentle and then i'm gonna slowly lift off the basket and the liner so one of the great things about rice flour i believe this is a chad robertson technique is that white rice flour it doesn't take on color the way that the wheat flour does so it retains this kind of snowy white color and then you get great contrast between the exterior of the dough and where you made the slash for this shape i like to do two slashes i just kind of like the effect that it gives and i curve the blade a little bit because it's flexible and i also hold it at what i would say is maybe like a 30 degree angle 45 to 30 and that is what is going to create this kind of ear but you just want to kind of go quickly and confidently that's all you need to do i'm going to grab my hot dutch oven and bring it out to the stove top good gloves i'm going to work quickly because i don't want this heat to really dissipate sides of the parchment paper to lift the loaf and place it inside so the lid goes on and everything back into the oven working pretty quickly oh that is hot okay that to me is the most nerve-wracking part i mean at this point i've done enough times that it's comfortable but for i would say the first 25 times i did that it felt like a little dicey don't worry i think it's more forgiving than you even think that is going to bake with the lid on for 15 to 20 minutes sometimes i split the difference and call it 17 or so but that is the amount of time that the loaf requires to achieve its maximum oven spring it happens early on in the baking process and once that's done we remove the lid and that allows that trapped steam so there's like all this moisture inside the dough it generates steam with the lid on that helps the dough to achieve its maximum oven spring before the crust starts to set then we take that off the steam kind of disappears and that dry heat from the oven is going to create a really well developed crackly like deep brown crust and that's what we want it's been 17 minutes or so i'm ready to pull the lid off so now we want to release the steam now that we have our oven spring our loaf is going to look really tall but it's going to be very pale so it doesn't take on color until the lid is off then we let it go for another half an hour or so and develop the crust so i don't need to take it out i just want to grab the lid oh she looks beautiful that's it another 30 minutes or so we'll start to smell all of these like toasty savory almost caramelly flavors it'll be like 30 minutes or so it smells like bread it also kind of smells like toasting nuts and popcorn and like all these really interesting aromas the bread is done i checked on it i like to let it go until it's very very dark brown not burned because that creates an unpleasant bitterness but i like a little bit of you know really well developed kind of bitter flavors and complexity in the crust so i'm going to pull the whole dutch oven out big blast of heat to the face okay oven off we do not need a 500 degree oven on in here remember when you take your dutch oven out that it's hot so be very very careful i like to sometimes put a towel around the handles just to remind myself it's so easy to grab it and forget so you know you can do something like like this just to remind you i'm going to use tongs because what you don't want to do is get your hand in there and then accidentally tap it against the side so i have the parchment paper which makes it really easy just lift it out i'm going to set it off to the side i think the shaping was relatively successful what i really like seeing are these little tiny blisters around the sides so you see these little tiny like little air pockets that you can pop that is a sign that there was you know good fermentation you can see them right there i love seeing that all over and also if you give it a tap like that it should sound hollow but you know baking at 500 degrees for 15 minutes covered and then half an hour plus uncovered you know that your bread will be done in the middle all right so we just want to let this cool it's really important that you let bread cool completely before you slice it i know there's a desire to like tear into warm bread and it sounds great and it tastes great but it really does kind of destroy the texture of the crumb the problem is that all the steam escapes and so rather than being reabsorbed into the crumb it just kind of goes into the air the bread almost then dries out you get almost a gumminess when you slice it because it sticks to the blade it's just not ideal so let it cool completely so several hours later the bread is cooled what you want to do is go ahead and feel the bottom of the loaf and it should be completely cool to the touch like no heat i mean a tiny bit of warmth is okay but really you want to let it thoroughly thoroughly cool that's going to give you the best interior texture so now it's time to slice it use a bread knife that's important because of all the whole wheat in here i expect to not have like a super open crumb it might be a little tighter but i still want to see i can tell like i can tell there's a lot of air in here so i'm very excited to look i just want to see wow i'm really proud of this it looks really good it's even a little more open than i thought it would be so you see there's like all sorts of different size holes from sort of bigger to small i love the flavor of it and i also like when i don't have like tons of really big open holes because when you're making toast and like all the butter and jam falls under the plate so this to me is ideal for toast you can do sandwich bread makes like the most incredible grilled cheese so good but my favorite way to eat bread is just with a little butter on it a little salt so i'm going to do that i'm going to cut a slice so we can taste it so the point of a bread knife or any kind of serrated knife is that it helps you get through something that has a soft interior and a hard crusty exterior because if you were to try to go through this with a regular knife you end up compressing it and there's like nothing that i hate more than like someone poorly slicing bread and just compressing the whole thing actually a really a well-baked loaf of bread will spring back but it's just like nails on a chalkboard so use a good serrated knife the bottom is well baked like it's biancui or well done but it's not burned and that's i think a testament to the dutch oven and the kind of evenness of the heat let's look at the profile this is called the profile it looks excellent it's like nice even shape so you know i'm i'm pretty adamant about not cutting into the loaf while it's warm if you want warm bread you can just re-warm it like and then you get the best of both worlds so this is only the tiniest bit warm so if you want a little melted butter on it just like stick it in the toaster or something now i think fresh bread really doesn't need much of a toast if at all a little flaky salt just really like bread a lot it's my favorite food bread and butter is like top five favorite food especially good bread and good butter it's pretty sour i like a sour sourdough not everyone prefers that and in fact i think bread makers often will kind of extol the virtues of like a less sour loaf where you're getting a little bit more of the wheat flavors in there um which i think has its bonuses for sure but i just love tangy bread so this is it's so good it's light tangy i don't think it's that hard to find sourdough starter these days ask a friend ask a local bakery and once you get your hands on it check out our episode where i make sourdough pancakes with discard so you can learn more about how to feed it and maintain it oh that comes that comes later stay tuned we're going to have an episode coming up where i talk a little more about starter how to feed it how to maintain it and we're going to show you what to do with the discard which is a normal part of the process of maintaining one it is like having a very low key pet feed it once a week keep it around and you can always have sourdough bread a day or two away it is one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen get yourself a dutch oven it is such a versatile piece of cookware you can use it for baking bread for frying and for doing everything in between stews soups all of that braising i want to thank maiden the makers of this beautiful dutch oven for sponsoring this episode and i'm happy to introduce this beautiful new piece of cookware that you can get check out the link below use the code clair15 for 15 off your entire order including their new dutch oven and i just feel like super restored from this episode i love making bread it is a practice it's like my version of doing yoga i feel amazing i'm gonna eat the rest of this loaf so thank you for tuning in i'm so happy we're back with dessert person can't think of a better way to return than by making bread thank you for watching and like and subscribe all right that's it great [Music]

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 648,741

Keywords: bread, sourdough, fermentation, baking, fermented, test kitchen, how to make, probiotics, sourdough bread, sourdough bread recipe, how to make sourdough bread, sourdough bread recipes, homemade sourdough bread, sourdough recipe, make sourdough bread, sourdough bread starter, sourdough starter recipe, baking sourdough bread, claire saffitz, claire, food, bon appetit, dessert person, claire saffitz dessert person, homemade bread, easy bread, how to make bread, claire makes bread, salt

Id: mV7tcR8PlIs

Length: 44min 49sec (2689 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/JW_Stillwater]

I have been waiting for this for a long time

[u/Brumplestiltskins]

I love all the little tidbits she shares that you can only learn from doing it over and over with a scientific bakers brain.