Kates SOFT SOURDOUGH SANDWICH BREAD

foreign [Music] so in today's video I am going to show you how I make sourdough bread like sourdough sandwich bread in a loaf rather than the Artisan kind of sourdough bread so in 2020 when we were quarantined and had to stay at home I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon and a friend of mine gave me a little bit of sourdough starter and I fed it and nurtured it and I still remember the very first sourdough loaves that I made for the Crusty Artisan kind of sourdough Loaves and I was so proud and unfortunately my family didn't really care for that kind of sourdough bread and I went about for a while I went back to making my regular yeast bread because that's what the family was used to and then I found my friend Kate at venison for dinner and I will tag her Instagram account and I will also link her YouTube account in the description for you but she has developed this recipe for sourdough sandwich bread and even more so than any of the yeast bread recipes that I have used this bread stays soft and we put butter on it when we're done baking it so it's not crusty and the family really likes this so I am going to make Kate's recipe for soft sourdough bread today and I'm going to try to explain the steps very well but I will also link her recipe in the description so that if you do better with reading instructions you can go there and the one thing about the recipe that I realized when I was done filming is that the recipe on her blog makes one loaf so when I copied it down into my personal cookbook I doubled it for two loaves and I didn't realize that after all this time I was actually quadrupling her recipe so my recipe is written down for two loaves but when I make it I actually double my recipe which makes four loaves so that is a little bit of a mistake I made when I was filming I just thought I'm doubling her recipe so you'll hear me say I'm doubling her recipe but I'm actually doubling the recipe that I wrote down so um I'll link everything so that you can read her instructions and I'll be as thorough as I can with my instructions but let's make some sourdough bread so on Sunday night I get my refrigerated starter out of the refrigerator and set it on the counter and that is step one for making my sourdough sandwich bread okay so now that our starter has warmed up to room temperature and at this point you're not going to see any activity in the starter jar but the only point was for us to warm it up to room temperature and that happened overnight so I've got my scales here and you really don't have to have a scales the skills just gave me more confidence and I'll put the measurements down in units as well but I'm good I'm going to use all of this sourdough starter and it should be about 50 grams I gotta switch my scales to grams if it's not quite 50 grams we're not going to worry about it so I've got about 48 grams of starter but we're going to pretend it's six it's 50 grams because that's what I usually go with and then I'm going to zero my skills and because I want to make a double recipe of soft sourdough bread like the sandwich bread I'm going to add so I have 50 grams of starter that means I want 100 grams of flour so 100 grams of flour is about 3 4 cup but that can all change depending on how you measure your flour it can change a lot so and that's why most people use a scale is because it's much more accurate than you then using units to measure so now I'm gonna um zero my scales again and then I want 100 grams of water and 100 grams of water was about exactly half one half cup of water foreign [Music] so we're just going to Stir It until it's all Incorporated there's no dry spots of flour but it definitely does not have to be smooth so now that we've got that all mixed together we're just gonna put a little jar Bonnet on it and we're going to set it in a warm spot in the house um was I gonna say oh I always like to use a wide mouth jar a wide mouth cork jar works too but this is actually a jar that I use for yogurt but a wide mouth jar just makes it so much easier for me to get in and out and it doesn't have all these Corners to scrape out so now we're just gonna set it right beside the refrigerator so it can be nice and warm and the water that I used in here was about was a little warmer than room temperature it was between 75 and 80 degrees and that's not so warm that it'll kill your starter and it's just warm enough to really get it going and if I want it to be slower I'll use cold water but normally I use water that's just a little more than room temperature so now I just set it right next to the refrigerator here because the refrigerator is warm eight o'clock at night and my sourdough has been growing all day looks like or I should say my starter has been growing all day and the recipe calls for two cups of active sourdough starter so I'm going to use all of this and if I were to measure this I would only have about a cup because when I start stirring it it kind of goes flat and you really don't have that much but it normally doesn't matter or it rarely matters so all that's left in there is what I'm going to use to start my next batch of sourdough starter so I've got two cups of active starter and two cups of water warm water and again this is just a little more than room temperature and remember I'm making a double recipe so cups of all-purpose flour flat that one doesn't fit one two and three and this is my pre-ferment so I'm just gonna mix all this together until it's oh it's not gonna be smooth by any means but you're not gonna have any spots of dry flour so that's my preferment foreign this with some wax paper or a wax covering and this is a wax covering from Prairie B wraps and I'm gonna link them in the description and we're just going to let this set on the counter overnight and that's going to ferment so now so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take everything that's left in this jar which is it's just a little bit it's really not much but I'm gonna feed what's left in this jar I'm going to take about a fourth of cup of about a fourth a cup of flour foreign and a little less water than a fourth a cup and I'm just gonna stir that all around in there the sides down and then I'm gonna look at it and I'm gonna say that it looks just a little wet so I'm gonna put in a little more flour mixing it until it looks like what I want so this is the starter for the next batch of sourdough and I scraped all of the active starter together and I'm just going to put the cover back on there was enough active starter left in that jar to get this going so I'm just going to put the cover back on and put it right back next to the refrigerator until tomorrow morning good morning so the kids are off to school and I'm gonna get this bread dough started my pre-ferment is looking lovely look at all those beautiful bubbles in there I like to use a glass dish because it gives me a visual of how beautiful that pre-ferment is and then I've got my mixer out and I'll link this mixer this is the Bosch 800 watt and I've got some milk and honey and butter and we're gonna get started with the next step in making our sourdough sandwich bread so first of all I'm going to melt together my four tablespoons of butter [Music] and remember I'm making a double recipe so okay there's my four tablespoons of butter and you know what I'm just gonna use the rest of that just to finish that off and then I need about four tablespoons of honey one two three thank you and four so I'm going to melt this together and then I'll add my milk so I'm just going to add my butter I'm just going to melt my butter and honey together until it's smooth foreign 's all melted I'm gonna add my three cups of milk so there's two and three and now we just want to bring this up to about 100 degrees and the heat of this will just help your bread dough get a nice warm start okay you can tell that the butter is mostly melted and this is a good sign that my milk and honey and butter temperature is coming up there to where I need it to be and it's right around 100 degrees it looks a little off here in the camera but it's a little over 100 degrees so we're gonna call that good so now I'm gonna put in my lovely pre-ferment [Music] [Music] and then [Music] I'm gonna add my warm milk mixture foreign [Music] so oftentimes the pre-ferment and the milk mixture don't really mix well until I start adding some flour so if you can't get your pre-ferment and your milk mixture to mix in real well it's okay it'll get mixed together when you add your flour the other thing that I wanted to tell you about milk is I just use fresh raw milk today but I really really like to use fermented milk products when I have them on hand like buttermilk or clabber makes your bread so fluffy and it just makes your your bread dough so very very active and responsive and it rises and ferments so fast when you use a bit of fermented milk like buttermilk or cultured milk like clabber or buttermilk or sometimes I'll even put a little dab of yogurt in just to help it get fermenting so I need a total of about 10 cups of flour so first of all I'm going to add five I'm going to add about half the flour and then I'm gonna get it mixing until it's all smooth [Music] so now that my dough is all the flour is all Incorporated and the dough looks smooth I'm gonna add four more cups of flour I always go skinned on the flower at first because it's much easier to add more flour to a batter that is too wet than it is to take flour out of a recipe foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is the point where I realized that I forgot to add salt normally I add my salt to the honey and butter and milk mixture and let the salt dissolve in the warm milk but I forgot that so I'm putting it in now [Music] so I have about one cup less of flour and then the recipe asks for and we're getting close to the right consistency so I'm only going to add a little bit more flour and then I'm gonna let it knead for quite a while so I'm gonna sprinkle about a fourth a cup in there and then I'm gonna let it knead for about 10 minutes so anytime you think your dough feels too sticky always air on the side of more kneading rather than more flour because too much flour will cause a bread to be real dry and crumbly and more kneading really doesn't hurt and kneading is really where you develop the gluten and the gluten is what helps the bread stay nice and soft okay so this has been kneading for about 10 minutes and you can see how beautiful smooth and stretchy it is now it's a little sticky but I don't mind that I'm not going to add any more flour because it's beautiful and stretchy and when I stretch it it mostly stays smooth so I'm gonna call this ready for the first rise so when we add a liquid to flour we start the development of the protein chain which we also call developing the gluten so then when we need we break down this protein further which helps it develop an even bigger protein chain which is developing the gluten the next step in developing the gluten will be allowing it to rise [Music] so I've got my large stainless steel bowl I put my bread dough in [Music] foreign but that's okay I don't mind if it's a little sticky so I'm just gonna flour my hands a little and work it a little bit to keep it from sticking to the sides and also I like to practice feeling my dough when it's at this stage so that I know what it's supposed to feel like so that my brain remembers what a good bread dough should feel like the most what I'm looking for most is that it's nice and smooth you can see how smooth this is so you might end up adding more flour than I did and that's okay you add as much as you need to to get your dough to this point everybody measures flour a little differently and that is why I did I put Less in because I must have been measuring heavier but the key is practice because when you practice you really kind of stop counting cups of flour after a certain point and you just look at what your dough feels like like I count normally I count cups of flour up until about eight cups for a 10 cup recipe of bread and then after eight cups I just go by what it feels like and what it looks like for me so now I am just going to cover this bowl with my wax paper again and this is going to by sealing this you trap the moisture in there because bread needs bread dough or sourdough or yeast dough needs two things enabled to enable it to proof or rise and those two things that it needs are humidity and heat so by Try by closing this real tight you're trapping the humidity from the dough in there and then I'm gonna set it on our heated floor and that is going to be just the right amount of warmth that it needs to proof foreign starter [Music] that was the bits and pieces that I scraped together and fed last night it's nice and active so this is a good time for me to put it in the refrigerator until I'm ready to bake again and now I'm just going to tuck this right into the refrigerator until I'm ready to bake some more bread and then I'll get it out about 24 hours before I'm ready to make my pre-ferment and I'll start right away with step one which is just get it out on a Sunday night and set it on the counter to bring it up to room temperature so the only time I would continue to feed this starter is if I wanted to collect a lot of discard um to make recipes with discard but right now my discard jar is full so I'm not going to continue to feed this I'm just going to tuck it into the refrigerator and then when I want to bake bread again I will get it out and I will have zero discard so I ended up having to go to town for something and the bread dough was almost ready but I wasn't ready so I'm just gonna punch it down foreign and hopefully it'll stay nice and put until I come back and I'm ready to shape it into loaves I'm also going to take it out of the sunshine just to slow it down a little bit okay guys it is time probably would have been time about two hours ago but I wasn't ready so I punched it down and it has come back up it's a beautiful dough so what we're going to do is divide it in four [Music] so it's okay if it's a little sticky I'm just gonna dip my hand in the flour [Music] foreign all of these to kind of get them the same size [Music] foreign so I'm gonna get my pans ready I've got a little bit of melted Tallow I'm gonna put in each pan you can use any kind of any kind of oil so I'm just gonna spread the dough out as flat as I can foreign turn it into another triangle and then I'm going to roll it and I'm gonna make sure it's all pinched foreign [Music] foreign [Music] so now we're just gonna let them rest here again until they are double in size and really at this point I still have less than an hour of work into this bread that's of course not counting filming because everything takes me a bit longer when I'm filming but actual work time is less than an hour for these four loaves of bread so far okay so this is how I'm gonna test the bread to see if it's ready for baking so I poke it and if it comes back out pretty fast then I know that it's still Rising fresh hole in here see how fast it comes back out so once hey don't poke no more poking no more poking so once um I poke it and it stays in then I know it's ready and this is something that you'll learn with more experience too you can see how it bounces right back out that means that the dough still has more to give okay the dose definitely rising and you can see that now when I poke it it doesn't have near the spring left that it did earlier this one's still got some left because I think there was more dough in that one but it's staying indented longer and I don't know if I can get this clear now with the lights on but here you can see how this one has definitely done because when I poke it it stays in so I've got my oven preheating to 475. so now I'm just gonna score my loaves over the top and I know you can get fancy knives that are made just for this but I find a simple razor blade works just fine for my scoring [Music] so into the oven they go and Kate's recipe says to bake them at 375 but I find in my oven um that I like 475 better and it seems like it took so long to get the internal temperature to where I wanted it at 375 and my bread is softer when I bake it hotter and faster so your oven might be different but if you're not happy with how your Bread's turning out I would definitely recommend um playing around with the temperature and the thyme a little bit and I set my timer for 20 minutes and then after 20 minutes I rotate my Loaves and turn them all the other way just to ensure even baking so after I've turned the loaves I set my timer for 15 more minutes and then after those 15 minutes I take the internal temperature of my bread so my bread has been in the oven for 35 minutes now and I'm looking for the temperature to be between 190 and 200 degrees and that's how I'll know that the bread is done if it's not over 190 degrees I will put it back in and set my timer for another 5 to 10 minutes [Music] foreign [Music] so now as soon as they're done baking I'm just gonna flip them all out of the pans and set them on my cooling rack for them to cool [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so because my family does not like crusty bread I am gonna brush the tops with some butter while the bread is still hot and this will soften that crust and yes the bread butter does drip down onto my stove top but butter is not something that cannot be cleaned up a little bit of hot soapy water will wipe this butter right up [Music] [Music] [Music] so after a couple hours as soon as the bread is cool we are going to slice all of it I like to use my electric carving knife and we'll slice it all before we put it in the freezer you can see how nice and soft this bread is so we're going to take one loaf and put it in this beeswax bag from Prairie bees wraps and we are going to just put this one in the pantry for eating while it's still fresh foreign [Music] the other three loaves [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign so here you can see again how soft this bread really is and this is the closest thing to store-bought bread that I have gotten and that is the one thing that my family disliked about most of the bread that I made at home was the fact that it wasn't soft so now that my bread is all sliced I'm going to put one meal's worth of sliced bread in each freezer bag and that way by freezing it right after it's made we are preserving and locking in all of its goodness and freshness and then we will just grab one of these bags when we need them and it only takes an hour or so for the slice bread to defrost on the countertop and we will keep this sliced bread in the freezer for two to three weeks and when we get it out and defrost it it will taste just as good as fresh but the trick is to put it in the freezer when it's fresh [Music] so there you have it there is how we make our sourdough bread and please don't forget to check out the links in the description I have links to the Prairie B wraps and to Kate's blog where the written recipe is and then I also have a link for you to sign up for our email list I've been sending out emails with more detailed information than what I put on here or on Instagram where Instagram gives me just a limited amount of characters I can use and most social media platforms don't want to hear about some more conservative views on food and the way it's made so that is where email comes in and I can speak freely in those emails and anyway those links will all be the in the description thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Homesteading with the Zimmermans

Views: 160,948

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Id: B8o18K7ycuw

Length: 44min 1sec (2641 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023