Simple Sourdough for Lazy People

hey all you cool cats and kittens I'm Ben Starr the ultimate food geek welcome to my messy kitchen and we are currently in the very middle of the social distancing stay-at-home quarantine of the corona virus pandemic here in the United States and apparently all y'all are now making sourdough and as somebody who's been baking sourdough bread since I was a little kid and been giving away sourdough starter for the last decade or so I am thrilled to welcome you to the sourdough community but I have learned that every time I gift somebody sourdough starter they're super excited they make a couple of loaves and then they don't ever make sourdough again and I blame all of you wonderful professional bakers and super serious amateur bakers that have these YouTube videos and websites that are teaching folks the modernist high hydration sourdough technique which is way too hard year got all of these terms from auda Lee's and levan and the slap and fold and strength thing and all these steps where you have to interact with that dough every hour or so for literally 24 to 36 hours to produce a loaf of bread and folks sourdough bread has been around since before there was electricity or thermometers or scales or temperature controlled fermentation chambers sourdough bread is actually really really really easy to make I don't have time for all that that those people are telling you so today I am going to teach you how to make a very very simple loaf of sourdough bread it's gonna require no more than five minutes on the first day and then no more than 10 minutes of your actual active time on the day you bake the bread to get it to the point where it is ready to go in your mouth I like to have sourdough bread almost every single day and this is my technique for those of you who like me are super lazy and have better things to do now if you're the kind of person that's like hurry quick get to the recipe just show it to me get the hell off my youtube channel I am the food geek and it is my responsibility to teach you the chemistry and physics behind cooking so that you stop being a recipe follower and start being somebody that true understands cooking and does not need recipes all right to that end I am first going to talk about our four ingredients for sourdough bread so that when I begin actually starting the loaf you'll see start to finish exactly how quick and easy it really is okay first things first your starter starter is the most important part of your sourdough recipe and I'm guessing since you're watching this video you already have a starter either you started it from scratch or a friend gifted it to you got it from a local bakery if you don't yet have a sourdough starter they're actually super easy to make and I'll teach you how to do that in a separate separate video but for now we've got sourdough starter mine will start at about ten years ago from organic rye flour and water and it's been going ever since there's no commercial yeast in here at all now folks tend to get really picky about starter and say your starter has to be mature before you make loaded for bread that is also bold fit the best loaf of sourdough I've ever made I pulled my starter out of the fridge after had been in the back of the fridge for two months while I was road tripping out west it had that layer of brown dark liquid on top of it it smelled weird not bad but weird I baked the most exquisitely flavorful loaf of bread without having even fed the starter I just start it back together and measured out my four ounces to make my recipe so don't get all crazy about your starter has to be freshly fed or mature or all that malarkey just take it out of the fridge stir it if the water has separated from the top of it and it's gonna be ready to go all right trust me on this second ingredient salt don't use iodized salt iodine's goal is to kill microbes and East is a microbe a fungus to be exact so you want to make sure you're using a sea salt kosher salt something like that as long as it is not iodized you'll be good to go because you're measuring by weight water filtered water is what I always use to produce sourdough bread I just get it from my filter in the fridge now there are plenty of my friends that make the bread using my starter that say tap water is completely fine but most tap water does contain chlorine or chloramines and their goal is also to kill microbes and what is yeast and lactobacillus the bacterial colony that's in our starter from the air and from our hands these are microbes and your water system from your public water supply is designed to kill them so I recommend you use some type of filter - bottled water but as I've said my friends say water from the tap works just fine now flour you get a lot of folks saying that the type of flour you use is crucial this is a regular organic unbleached all-purpose bread flour that I get at Costco it's the flour I use most frequently but I've used plenty of other flours you don't have to be particularly picky about which flour you use use what you've got a lot of folks also really like to make whole-grain and I will tell you that you will not have great success making sourdough with high percentages of whole grain flours you'll see all those professional folks on YouTube that use a slight amount of whole-grain in combination with black bread flour and all that other stuff to get that perfect crumb I recommend you substitute no more than eight ounces of whole grain flour in this recipe and if you are gonna use whole grain flour you're gonna add a little bit more water because whole grain flour absorbs more water it takes a little bit more water to get a perfect loaf out of that we'll get there in just a bit so I'm going to show you how simple it is start to finish to get this bread started on the first day the only special ingredient you need to make sourdough bread is a kitchen scale if you don't have one shame on you order one right now you cannot bake without the scale no matter what anybody tells you all right so I'm going to zero out my scale with my bowl on top and I'm gonna add four ounces of starter that's two point seven three point eight and four point two fine I'm gonna run with it twelve ounces of water I'm not going to be picky about the temperature the water this water just comes straight out of the filter on my fridge we're gonna add 12 ounces of filtered water and one thing I would recommend is not using warm water you don't really want to jumpstart the fermentation too quickly all right 12 bounces of filtered water now I'm going to stir my starter into my water get it kinda distributed evenly now I'm going to add my flour one pound and four ounces total now if you're substituting some whole wheat you can do eight ounces of whole wheat and then make up the rest of it with an unbleached flour that's particularly fine if you're going to do that though I'm going to ask you to add an extra one ounce of water if you're adding 8 ounces of whole wheat flour because that will give you a slightly better texture alright we are at one pound and four ounces of flour and finally about three fourths of an ounce of salt that's somewhere between point seven and point eight on my scale now stir that together technically this is a no need recipe and you really don't have to touch the dough if you don't want to but there's a final step here I'll show you that'll just make it a little bit nicer for you get that stirred around well scrape the sides of the ball just want to make sure all of your flour gets moistened also helps with the final cleanup and at this point it becomes a little bit harder to use the spoon so I like to finish this process with my hands and yes technically this is kneading but we're going to do it for less than ten seconds just gonna kind of get that dough nice and cohesive together in the bowl it's a little bit sticky too your hands don't worry about that alright that's it now I can cover this with plastic wrap or if you're making multiple loaves and don't want to take up so much space on your countertop you can spray as one gallon ziplock bag with a little cooking spray transfer the loaf into it either way that's all you got to do the first day set it on your countertop and twelve to twenty-four hours later you'll be ready to bake let's talk for just a bit about sourdough starter this is nothing more than a paste of flour and water that is alive with some biases between bacterial colonies in yeast colonies yeast are technically a fungus and you've got these wild geese that were living on the individual kernels of wheat as they were growing in the field that's a naturally occurring relationship between those wild yeasts and the the grains that they are eager to ferment and get a hold of and then lactobacillus bacteria these are bacterial colonies that live all over our skin everybody's got their own unique lactobacillus colony on their skin it's also floating around in the air in our kitchen so your sourdough starter is going to be unique to your kitchen doesn't matter if you've got the starter from somewhere else as long as you've been feeding it the flour from your kitchen and it gets exposed to your hands and the air in your kitchen that is your sourdough starter and it is chemically different from any other starter on the planet you've got something very very special that you're working with now folks tend to treat starter as a very finicky thing I remember my mom used to feed her starter multiple times a day she named it Willy and it required so much attention but it turns out sourdough starters not really as finicky as people say it does as long as it is not completely dead which would take months without a feeding or in improper conditions like extreme heat to actually kill that starter and as I mentioned before the most delicious loaf of bread I've ever baked was with a storm that had not been fed in two months so don't get super crazy about making sure you have to time the feeding of your starter before you bake this loaf of bread in fact the only time I ever feed my starter is when I run out a starter so I'll keep it in there for several weeks as I bake bread and my starter diminishes and diminishes and then when it looks like I've got less than about half a cup of starter left I will feed it by adding typically 8 ounces of flour 8 ounces of water stirring it let it sit on the countertop for an hour and then chuck it back in the fridge but do not be concerned about your starter don't think that you've killed your starter just because it's been in your fridge without feeding for a month or two it's probably gonna be fine people say to let your nose be the judges if your starter has gone bad y'all your starters not gonna go bad if you nourished a healthy colony of yeast and bacteria in here they're gonna fight off invasion by any bad bacteria so unless the thing is completely covered in mold and smells like pure rot it can go through a whole array of unique smells because this fermentation process does produce ethyl alcohol otherwise known as booze or technically beer right so there are many smells that can come out of your starter and unless you've been baking for several years and you're accustomed to all those smells it might be unusual enough to make you concerned don't be start together and use it welcome back it is day 2 and as you can see my dough has basically doubled in size which means it's ready to bake now this can take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours and it does not have to be precise this bread was actually ready to bake about 6 hours ago I've just let it continue to sit nice thing about sourdough is that it works slowly now if your starter it's been five or six weeks since it's been fed it may take a full 24 hours for the dough to get to this kind of doubling in size but don't get too paranoid about making sure whether it's exactly doubled really this bread is very forgiving so just go ahead within 1224 hours and proceed to the next step now before I shape the dough into a love I want to talk a little bit about how you're gonna bake this bread now a lot of folks really do love to do the Dutch oven baking method which you don't have a Dutch oven we'll talk about a loaf pan in just a second I like to use this regular 5 quart enameled cast iron Dutch oven I've picked up 425 bucks on sale and that produces a really lovely kind of oval rustic old-world sort of a shape I also have these little 3 quart dutch ovens and sometimes I really like to use these as well because that gives me a nice high and tight loaf with a bigger more open texture but basically whatever size if you've got a cast-iron Dutch oven whether it's enameled or not it's gonna make a really superior loaf of bread because of the way that it holds in the steam during the initial baking part of the face mimics those wood-fired old-world ovens the only catch here is that what your rising vessel means to sort of approximate your cooking vessel in size right so I've got this silver bowl that's approximately the same size as this Dutch oven if I was baking in my smaller Dutch oven I would want to use a much smaller bowl than this because this bowl is clearly much too large for this particular baking vessel but today I'm going with this guy so I'm going to use this shape all right you want to line your bowl with a soft kitchen towel they call these flour sack towels you can get them in packs of five for five or six bucks at the market but if you don't have that you can use any soft kitchen towel in a pinch you could use paper towels perhaps but just really kind of avoid the terrycloth kitchen towels because those tend to kind of grab onto the doughnut gets really stuck now you want to flower this flower sack towel very heavily with your flower I'm gonna set that aside and you want to flour your surface that you're going to shape your loaf on very lightly just a little bit of flour I can gently remove the bread from the bowl now when you're baking with commercial yeast they tell you I'll punch it down and knead it again before you form your love don't do this with sourdough you want to use as light a hand as you possibly can that wild yeast is not nearly as robust as commercial yeast so any nice aeration or air bubbles that you've been able to create in that dough you don't want to put out so treat it gently now this is the only part of the entire process that it's going to take you a few times to get accustomed to and that is shaping this into the loaf so you want to flour your hands nice and then kind of start to tuck the edges of that loaf underneath itself using the bottom part of your hands you're going to scrape along the table or the work surface to kind of continue tucking the ends you can kind of move around in a clockwise motion and pull towards yourself and you'll notice that this is starting to give us a nice smooth loaf continue to flour your hands you don't want that bread dough to stick to your hands and once you've done this four or five times kind of brought it into a nice tight bull I'm just the French term for it it's ready to go into the rising bowl so you want to dust it very nicely and generously with flour top and bottom and then we're gonna set that beautiful little bowl right there in our rising vessel cover it and now it needs to sit on the counter for probably two to four hours it'll be ready to bake when it is almost doubled in size you don't have to get too precise with that but if your starter is robust and has been fed recently maybe ready to go into the oven in two hours but realistically for is about what you're looking for now for those of you that don't have a Dutch oven and are gonna be baking this in a regular loaf pan I do want to show you how to form the loaf for that just make sure you spray your loaf pan really good you can also rub it with butter or oil if you don't have cooking spray and I've got a second loaf that I started in secret behind your back and I've kept here in this ziplock bag so again I want to treat this gingerly don't want to bash it around and lose some of that beautiful aeration that we have allowed to happen and once that dough is out onto the surface flour your hands again you don't want them sticking and kind of arrange the dough carefully to where it's in a rectangle approximately the length of your loaf pan now we're gonna gently begin rolling that loaf up and now it is time to just transfer it right into the loaf pan now there are many different ways to shape a loaf of bread your mom and grandma probably have a different way sealing and tucking the ends under when you're working with sourdough again we want to de gas that loaf as little as possible so that we retain all those beautiful air bubbles inside there now we're going to cover this look with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel and same thing two to four hours in the countertop until it's about doubled in size and then it'll be ready for the oven now most of us are very busy humans and more times than I can count life has intervened in my sourdough baking plans so if unbaked a once you've formed that loaf you determine that you're really not going to be around to get that loaf into the oven in that two to four hour window no worries just put the loaf in the fridge as quickly as possible after forming it and it will sit there quite happily for one or even two sometimes up to three days before you put it in a oven now if you happen to delay the bread baking using a refrigerator as an accident time will reward you because the longer that dough sits in that cold fridge where the activity of the microbes is slowed down you develop all sorts of delicious complexity of flavor in your bread so if you have the luxury of beginning you're planning for a special loaf two three four days in advance I will often intentionally start my bread for a weekend dinner party on Monday or Tuesday and let it rise in the fridge very very slowly this is called retarding the fermentation and it definitely produces a significantly noticeably more superior loaf in terms of flavor it does quite often hinder the texture just a little bit low tends to be a little bit more dense if you spend extra time in the fridge before baking but the return that you get in flavor is often quite worth it in my opinion about an hour before you make your bread you want to pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit it's pretty hot also if you're baking in a Dutch oven if you want that Dutch oven inside your oven as it premiums and ideally we are looking at rack placement of the second to lowest rack you definitely want to make sure that your Dutch oven isn't making any contact with the elements at the top of the oven and if you have to use the very lowest rack you'll discover you're getting some some burning and scorching on the bottom of your loaf of bread so the second to lowest is ideal if the handle on your Dutch oven is anything other than metal it's probably the best idea to go ahead and just remove that handle you can still lift the lid with oven mitts from the sides but you don't want to deal with a melting stinky plastic handle and at 500 degrees there aren't really any materials other than metal that are particularly oven safe at that temperature now if you're baking in a regular loaf pan don't worry about anything just a nice 30-minute preheat of your oven to 500 degrees will be completely sufficient so from here on out things are going to move pretty quickly my ovens been preheating 500 degrees for about an hour and I've just pulled my screamin hot Dutch oven out it is time to score the bread now you'll notice a lot of the fancy folks on YouTube use a French device called a LOM some people mispronounce it lame but that's just lame and that's completely unnecessary they'll talk about different scoring angles and depths but for all intents and purposes you can produce a spectacular loaf with just using regular kitchen scissors or any type of scissor so I'm going to give this particular loaf a triple score I got to make two cuts in the middle because it's so large and it's ready to go in the pot be careful Dutch oven is excruciating ly extremely hot this next part takes a little bit of practice but by the time you've done three or four of these loaves you'll be fine you want to make sure you kind of anchor your towel underneath the bread and hold the bowl securely in your non-dominant hand you take your dominant hand gently lay it on to the surface of the and you're gonna invert this bread into your palm gently pull off the towel and gently set the bread into the hot Dutch oven don't work so quickly that you forget to put your kitchen gloves back on then the lid goes on top of the Dutch oven and it goes into the 500 degree of it immediately turn the oven temperature down to 425 and set your timer for 30 minutes now if you're baking in a loaf pan gently remove the covering got a very nice rise here on this log and we're going to score as well using our kitchen scissors here just three cuts across the top you'll start to notice some deflation that's completely fine now this is going to go into that preheated 500 degree oven for 30 minutes and the renal check alright it's been 30 minutes so it's time to take the lid off the Dutch up I can see my loaf is doing quite well it'll probably be done in another 10 minutes or so I'm taking the lid off of our Dutch allows us to get a nice kind of deep browning on the remainder of that bread now the Dutch oven bread is going to go 15 more minutes uncovered at 425 but something tells me that loaf of bread is gonna be done another 5 minutes or so so I'm gonna take its temperature pretty quick and see what's going on now it's only been about 5 minutes but I really want to get an internal temperature on that loaf that I'm baking in the location now sourdough is done between 205 and 210 degrees Fahrenheit I'm at 204 right now so I'm gonna go ahead and pull my loaf it only needed about 35 minutes to be fully baked I ain't gonna turn my loaf of bread out here onto a cooling rack and if you don't have an inch to read thermometer like this you really should but you honestly don't need it when bread-baking it's a very important tool especially for cooking meats you can really pretty much rely on sight in terms of the color of the loaf in order to determine if it's done got a nice kind of hollow thump when I tap it it's deeply browned and golden and that that's gonna be delicious now do not cut into your bread the incident comes out of the oven that will gum up your bread knife and give you a really gummy kind of texture you always want to slice after the bread has cooled a little bit and if you just can't get away from that strong gripping desire for a fresh warm bread right out of the oven at least give it ten minutes before you start to cut but ideally let it cool fully and that will let the structure firm up and solidify you won't have any that gumminess then slice it put it back in the oven or even in the microwave for 30 seconds to rewarm it for serving at the table alright it's been 15 minutes uncovered for a total baking time of 45 minutes for my Dutch oven loaf here I'm gonna dump that out notice we haven't gotten any burning here on the underside which is a good thing and that is a gorgeous gorgeous loaf of bread now no offense to the folks that like to build a levan and then otto Lee's their dough and add their salt at a later point and do lots of flipping and folding and strength building in their dough's yes that loaf of bread they're making is better than this loaf of bread but see how much effort I put into this practically none I wasn't spending every hour doing something else to my dough so if I can produce this kind of loaf of bread multiple times a week with practically no effort as compared to this Herculean task of babysitting this dough throughout a 24 to 36 hour process before you can finally eat it I'm gonna choose this method I'm gonna let this guy sit for about an hour and I'm gonna come back cut it open and show you how beautiful it is time for the moment of truth we're gonna cut open this beautiful loaf after it has fully cool nice and crunchy crust and there we go now that texture is not as open as the sourdough recipes you will find with high hydration but if you are the type of person that began to read that recipe which said at 8 a.m. build your levan and at 9:30 a.m. start the auto leaves and then watched it progress an hour to 2 hour increments for the next 48 hours this is the bread for you it is moist delicious incredibly full of flavor with a super crunchy thin crust hmm just bag this for some salted butter or fresh olive oil let me tell you 5 minutes on day 1 10 ish minutes and a little bit more work on day 2 can provide you with a loaf of homemade sourdough there's every bit as delicious as any you will get a local artisan bakery so I hope you have enjoyed this lovely little expose on sourdough bread my name is Ben Starr I'm the ultimate food geek hit me up at Ben Starcom we were in the middle of a pandemic stay home stay safe and I'll see you next time have a great day

Channel: Ben Starr

Views: 734,949

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Id: x1EBQclnVYU

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020