How To Make The Best Sourdough Bread | Dear Test Kitchen

it looks so good right now do you ever just take a bite out of it wrong no but I would love to see you do that [Laughter] welcome to the food 50g Test Kitchen my name is Josh I'm here with Sara Owens James Beard award-winning author of sourdough we make some bread today in a previous episode we were talking about sourdough starter but today we're really gonna focus in on bread how to proof it how to bake it any questions that the food 52 community has about sourdough bread we're going to answer it today and then we're gonna taste some bread today we're gonna make a basic sort of I call it a table look it's a recipe that sort of it's very versatile for different applications you can make a sandwich with it you can make toast with it you can make croutons with it so I went ahead and prepared for us some leaven so it's nice and ripe and ready for us to go I know it's ripe and ready because I can see fermentation bubbles sort of breaking the surface I can smell it and it smells right I can see a fermentation bubble sort of from the side so I know this is ready to go so we've already got our Dutch oven preheating cuz we're gonna bake a loaf of our pre-prepared to a little bit later but what we're gonna do now is add our lemon to the bowl so Josh do you want to start yes so go ahead and add 60 grams of your ripe and ready lemon cake I'm gonna do the same and now it's time for us to add our water 300 grams of water does it matter what the temperature of the water I encourage people to use room-temperature water to be consistent in the summer if you find your fermentation is going really fast then you may want to use a little bit colder water but in general you know room temperature around 75 degrees is great we are using stone ground organic flour which is gonna be a little more thirsty than a conventional flower that's been roller milled like a flower you would buy at the store so that's just something to keep in mind if you're using that type of flower you might want to hold back a little bit on the water okay now that we've got our leaven and water in the bowl we're gonna go ahead and either use our hand or a spoon to just kind of stir it and break up the leaven so I think it's really nice if you can get into the habit of using your hands because right now I'm really surprised at how warm this water feels to me so in doing this part I know that the fermentation already is off to a flying start okay okay once we get our leaven sort of dispersed without throughout the water we're gonna go ahead and add our flowers we're going to use 310 grams of bread flour and we're gonna use 80 grams of the whole wheat this is a pretty basic loop it's not super high in whole grain but you could also alter how much whole grain you use as well if you do that you just need to keep in mind that the more whole grain you add the thirstier the flour is gonna be you're gonna want to add a little more liquid if you're adding more whole grains once you get used to making this recipe over and over again you will be able to see the differences once you start tweaking sure you can adjust accordingly learn the basics first exactly when we're ready to mix our dough basically our goal is to get the flour fully hydrated right and we're gonna do do that again using our hands so just plunge your hand right into the center of the bowl and squeeze and kind of turn your fingers your your wrists and your arm what we're doing right now is really just kind of working this kind of slurry into a nice sticky mass you want to make sure you get all of that dry flour off the bottom of the bowl into the top of the mix so this is a look at three to four minute mix you're really just feeling for any dry lumps you want to make sure and get those fully hydrated and the dough is gonna be pretty sticky at this point yeah yeah yeah so a lot of people if they're used to using like conventional yeast to make bread the dough is usually a lot more stiff and kneadable we never really need this dough so already I can feel like this dough is really starting to kind of come together mm-hmm this is what I call this shaggy mass stage so this is before we've added our salt right but the idea of holding back on the salt is to allow the flour to fully hydrate right because salt draws the moisture out of things yeah salt has a lot of different effects on the behavior of dough sure so one thing is it makes you know salt mixing this tastes salty but it also has this osmotic effect of pulling water away from the flour right and what we want right now is for the flour to start that conversion process from starches to sugar right and the only way we can do that is by allowing it to become hydrated so allowing the water to penetrate into the flour I hold back on salt sometimes when I'm cooking vegetables uh-huh a vegetable is here how wait to add salt until the last moment because if you add salt too soon and it draws the moisture out of a vegetable and it Kings to you I learned something today thank you sure so once you squeeze the dough through your fingers and if you it rests for 20 minutes yeah go ahead and cover it so it doesn't dry out let it rest and relax and the flower fully hydrate and then you're ready to add your salt okay this is also a really good time to feel how the dough is performing so this is the moment where if the dode felt dry you would add a little bit of water yeah or it may not feel dry it may just feel kind of stiff and like resistant to you actually squeezing it and mixing it okay also you know adding a little bit of water at this point where the salt also kind of helps the salt dissolve into it yeah so it's just something to kind of keep in mind sure so we're gonna go ahead and add 8 grams of salt when we add it we just want to kind of sprinkle it over the surface of our dough if we want to we can add a little bit of water I like to just kind of do this little number and then it's basically it's the same process as when you were combining the flour with the water you're just kind of squeezing and working the salt into the dough one thing you don't want to use is any kind of salt that had if it's been iodized or has other sort of things added to it because that can affect the fermentation now I can already feel a difference in a dough it's not sticking to the bottom of the bowl uh-huh so that's the water is absorbing the flour is absorbing the water exactly it's not so sticky though yeah and also the gluten is starting to form so gluten is made up of two proteins gliadin and glutenin and when water combines with flour those two proteins start coming together and forming bonds and the more you work the dough the stronger those bonds become the whole goal of this part of the bread making process is to leaven the dough leaven the bread and then in order to capture the gases of fermentation that do the leavening we need to create a stretchy Network and that stretchy network is gluten okay so this feels good to me I can feel that the salt I don't feel any more granules of salt and I do say I feel like it's it's ready to enter into bulk fermentation both fermentation is gonna take about three to four hours okay maybe like three to three-and-a-half during the summer maybe four to four and a half during the winter okay and we'll talk about the queues of when it's ready to shape yeah accuser fermentation is a fermentation exactly we're gonna cover it and if you're like me and you forget that you need to come back to it you could set an alarm every 30 to 45 minutes you are going to do something called a stretch and fold okay okay I got a bowl you got a bowl mine looks different than yours right so it's been about 30 minutes with your bowl after we've added the salt and now it's ready to do the stretching fold again this is just a process that we do in lieu of needing to further strengthen the gluten network in the dough and this stretching fold you you keep doing it every 30 45 minutes until you're ready to bake the bread until you're ready to shape the bread right this dough has already gone through a stretch and fold so what we're gonna see yeah there's more definition and has a little more cohesive appearance we're gonna see your dough as you perform this step go from this to more of this okay so I'm just gonna demonstrate demonstrate really quickly yeah how did you a stretch and fold I like to wet my hand first to keep the dough from sticking to my hand I'm gonna kind of reach underneath the dough and release it from the bowl and gently just turn it to the toward the center I'm gonna rotate my bowl and I'm gonna perform that same step all the way around the dough mass until I get it all to the center and that's it so once you've done your stretching folds you just want to cover it back up to keep it from drying out 30 to 45 minutes but the idea is to really get it from that shaggy mask to some more of a strong cohesive looking ball of dough okay yeah and so then how will you know when it's ready to shape okay because that's the next phase exactly this is actually pretty close to being ready it has been fermenting and in bulk fermentation for about four hours now now what I'm looking for what I would like to see I just stretched and folded it so I'm not gonna see it as much but I would like to see some bubbles sort of breaking the perimeter of the dough ball maybe I might see it on the on the surface I can also kind of use my wet hand to kind of poke and see if I see that little bubble so I can see that gases are being trapped within the dough and I know that that's a cue that okay it's ready to be shaped now we have these we have these this is a bread basket yeah it goes by different names most people call them a proofing basket these come with a liner which I like because I like to do fancy scoring you can also use them without the liner and that picks up once you flour the interior it picks up the pattern of the basket so some people prefer that what we're gonna do is throw down a little bit of flour onto your surface don't be afraid to use flour now the trick to getting this dough out of the bowl without deflating it is to use your bowl scraper I also like to make sure my hands are nice and floured you're gonna tip the bowl and as you tip you're gonna encourage the dough to release from the bowl you go that way you're never like pulling or tugging now this is enough dough for about two loaves so we're going to shape these loaves using a two-step process a pre shape and then a funnel shape all right so to pre shape we're gonna kind of pull our dough from the top to the middle the bottom to the middle and then the two sides and once I get those I'm gonna pull it in the corners to the middle as well so have a rough round shape I'm gonna use my bench knife to pick it up and plop it over and then I can also kind of use my hands to tuck but at this point I'm not really fiddling or fooling around when I do very much I just want to kind of suggest to it what shape I want it to be so our dough has been resting it's kind of visibly relaxed and we're ready to move into you final shaping the goal of this part of the process is to gain a little more tension as we work and so you get it into the basket see in the side up seam side up yep so let's talk about the basket for just a second yeah the point of the basket is to provide support for the dough as its resting in the refrigerator overnight okay so if the bowl is too large for the size of dough that you're using then it's gonna kind of spread out and sort of flatten you want to just be kind of aware of what size your basket is with what type of dough you're using for our final shaping again we're just gonna throw down a little bit of flour we're gonna use our trusty bench knife to pick up our dough and flip it over if there's a lot of flour on the underside we want to just brush that off that's going to keep our dough from sticking to itself so sometimes I'll just like tuck in the top just a little bit to get me started and then I'm basically going to stitch the sides of the dough toward the middle and overlapping fashion okay sort of looks like a little mummy when I get to the bottom what I'm gonna do is roll and tuck and as I go I'm gonna kind of try to tuck in some tension to the lip sort of stretching it as you yeah so I'm just tucking and rolling and tucking and rolling and tucking until I get all the way over okay can see had some nice fermentation bubbles and then I'm gonna flour the top of my loaf really well push my bench knife into the scene so right now the seam is going this way I'm gonna push it in and that just kind of helps to seal the seam a little bit flip it over into my hand and then cradle it into the basket and that's it this is a just sort of a typical way of preparing a loaf to go into the refrigerator great we're gonna cover this up I like to cover it with a cloth and then like a plastic bag the cloth is gonna keep the condensation that gathers on the plastic from dropping back onto the dough while it's in the refrigerator this formula this recipe can hang out in the fridge I recommend a minimum of eight hours but you can let it rest in the fridge for up to around 24 hours before you bake it there's a bread changed depending on how long it's in the fridge for the longer the bread sits in the fridge the more digestible it's going to become so that's one thing another thing is you get this increase of flavor from the acetic acids that are building up under the cooler temperatures and you'll get a little bit of rise sometimes it's kind of imperceptible it depends on how cold you keep your refrigerator we're back there's a little bit of a weird noise now that we don't know why just roll with it it's New York City we've got these two loaves they've been in the fridge since yesterday morning so quite a long time yeah I pulled them from the fridge so that they could do their final proof before we prepare them for the oven and I can tell that they're almost ready they could probably sit out for a little bit longer I want to kind of gently poke on them I don't want to push so hard that I'm gonna deflate the dough they're just sort of want to gently poke it should feel sort of like an inflated water balloon so that's gonna tell us and I can also see like there's some kind of some bubbles breaking the surface I'd like to see a little bit more of that before I turn it out onto the parchment and score it but especially this one I know it's you can see it's a little more swollen inside the basket yeah I know it's it's gonna give me a beautiful loaf of bread now we're gonna bake it in a Dutch oven with the lid on for the first 20 minutes because we want to capture that steam in the baking environment Moisture is a big component yes especially in the first stage of baking we want in order for the loop to achieve its full potential of size we want the outside of the loop to stay nice and moist and supple until it's fully expanded interesting so that'll help it expand exactly all right yeah if the crust sets too early then it's gonna hinder the loaf from expanding locked in its yeah exactly and it's gonna affect the crud the crust the crumb and also the shape of the loop yeah so you would still have an edible loaf it just wouldn't be as attractive so these are just two examples of loaves of basically the same dough that I've scored in different ways this dough is a little looser you can see it's a little lower-profile visto had a little more oomph to it so it had a little more spring but basically when we're scoring we want to just imagine where this loaf is gonna open up if we didn't score it then it would really it would just open up wherever its weakest points were I love this sort of crackle pattern it appears I think that's a really rustic way of the dough saying this is what I do there's different tools you can use to score with you're gonna want a razor blade that is pretty thin so I use these double sided razor blades they come in packs what we're gonna do now is just turn this out onto our prepared parchment sheet I like using parchment because it gives you a handle to transfer the load into the really hot Dutch oven okay so I'm gonna go ahead and turn it out seam side down I'm just lightly flour the surface of the bread I'm gonna kind of gently massage that into the skin of the bread and I'm gonna dust off any excess nobody likes a mouthful of raw flour but I'm gonna score it and a similar way to the loaf you just showed us sure so I'm gonna go about 3/4 of the way across the Louvre trying to do this in a swift even motion I don't want to saw at the bread I don't want to hesitate confidence is really key at this point the loaf is starting to open up a little bit I want to kind of work quickly to get it into the oven but I may want to add some decorative flourish okay just for fun sure so I'm just gonna do some more like superficial cuts down the length of the bread and this is going to be kind of like yeah so as the loof expands in the oven these cuts are also going to expand as the steam releases and hopefully we'll get a nice pretty little breath so good right now thank you so do we want to put it into the oven yeah let's do it this is extremely hot it's like the surface of this Sun so I'm go ahead and take the lid off all right so why not act kind of quickly so that we don't lose too much heat we're just dropping it into the pan putting the lid back on okay so we're gonna set a timer for about 20 minutes once the lid comes off we emancipate with steam the loaf is fully expanded and we're allowing the crust to set depending on your home oven and also what type of Dutch oven you're baking in will depend on what you're gonna do next so some people have an unalloyed Dutch oven and that black surface transfers the heat in a really intense way so my suggestion if that's what you have to work with is after the crust sets which takes about five to seven minutes go ahead and use a spatula or just tip the loof out and remove the Dutch oven and continue baking on the middle rack and that's going to keep the bottom of the loof from becoming too dark before the top of the loaf and the crumb has set if you're baking in a really nice enameled yeah that's Evan lucky here but you may not need to remove the loaf from the Dutch oven to continue baking so if you don't have a Dutch oven and you're using say like a pizza stone right on the middle rack then what you need to do is introduce steam into your baking environment and one way to do that is with a spray bottle yeah another way to do that is to preheat a roasting pan with your hearth stone yeah when you're preheating your hearth stone you want to pre-heat your roasting pan I suggest using a heavy-gauge roasting pan maybe not glass even if it's Pyrex because you're gonna pour water into the roasting pan after you load the scored loaf onto the preheated baking stone right and then once you close the door you're gonna bake with steam for 15 to 20 minutes and then after that time if you still have water in your roasting pan you're gonna take that out and essentially that's setting the crust where that would be the same as taking the lid off I love that there's this practice is so different depending on this is a bread that you made earlier mm-hmm and it's nice and cool now it's completely cool when a brick comes fresh out of the oven and it's really really hot like a new a new bread baker would think like I want to eat this right away how long do they need to wait it's a great question um there's different answers I suggest people allow it to cool as much as you can to allow the crumb to fully set interesting if you cut into a hot loose yeah the steam hasn't completely escaped the crumb yet yeah and what can happen is the crumb can get really gummy yeah you want to let it cool completely so that you can maintain the integrity of the crumb all right if you want to just taste you know the the grain right I suggest doing just start with them yeah I can feel it has like a little bit of like a almost like a stickiness to it it's hacking the moisture yeah amazing yeah that's kind of a hallmark of sourdough it's what also just keeps it fresh for a long time yeah there's so much nice toasty flavor mm-hmm this is delicious first of all thank you thank you a lot of information I get a sense that the real way to sort of internalize all the stuff we learn today used to just do it a few times and once you have that experience in your hands of having done it a lot of the words that you said will start to make a lot more sense yes I gets it almost doesn't make sense to just try and absorb everything off once it's just the process of doing it you got to practice you have to smell it you got to feel it yeah taste it yeah yeah absolutely yeah thanks so much this is great we gotta end this video so we can eat more bread exactly if you like videos like these like and subscribe and we'll see you next time

Channel: Food52

Views: 1,806,800

Rating: 4.859149 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, bread, recipes, sourdough, sourdough bread, sourdough bread recipe, sourdough bread dutch oven, bake sourdough bread, bake sourdough bread in oven, bake sourdough, bake sourdough in dutch oven, bake sourdough bread at home, sarah owens, sarah owens sourdough, sarah owens sourdough recipe

Id: sZP3TKWlGnA

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019