- Moin and Gluten Tag. Are you tired of baking Frisbees? Let's fix that. (mellow music) - Are you ready for it? (pops crispy blisters) (laughs) - In this video I'll
show you my favorite list of seven countermeasures against
baking Sourdough frisbees. They will help you achieving
that beautiful oven spraying and that nice looking ear
on your sourdough bread. To make things easy, I
will show you the process step-by-step having one good
dough and one bad dough. That way you can more easily spot your own improvement areas. Bye bye frisbees. Countermeasure Number One. Sourdough Starter Acidity. We have to make sure that
our sourdough starter is not that high in acid. The acidity is coming
from the bacteria part of your sourdough starter,
that's why it's called sour. Over time that acid is going
to damage the gluten structure and this way your dough
pretty much collapses. Imagine tiny balloons inside
off your sourdough bread. Those we are trying to
inflate and well yes, the acid has gone to
attack them, destroy them and this means that our
dough is not going to rise as much in the oven as we want it to. And for this, I recommend you to have a
look at the feeding ratio of your sourdough starter. I always recommend a one to
five to five feeding ratio. That would be 10 grams
of sourdough starter, 50 grams of water, 50 grams of flour. I like to use a whole wheat flour and I prepare my sourdough
starter the night before. And let me show you what
that means in practice. To visualize this, I will be
making two sourdough starters. I will be making one with a
one to five to five ratio, and then I will be making another one with a one to one to one ratio. I will show you the
acidity in the morning. I'm marking both with the rubber band so that I can see how much this starter is growing overnight. Red rubber band, green rubber band. Let's get back in the morning. Those are the two stutters in the morning they look similar, right? But I'll show you how much
different they actually are. I got myself the small PH measuring tool and let's have a look at
the different PH values to check the acidity of both the starters. 4.1 something And now the more sour starter. Now you might be thinking, this is not that much of a difference, but this difference is
going to have a major impact over the period of the bulk fermentation. This brings us to a
Countermeasure Number Two. Picking the right amount
of water for your flour. I will be setting up two doughs. One which has around 75% hydration and one with 90% hydration. Now 75% means 75 grams of
water per 100 grams of flour. Bakers call this Bakers Math that way they can easily scale up
the quantities of bread they want to make. I will mix both the doughs together and let them autolysis overnight. So that's just flour and
water and then that will sit. And at the same time, I'm also going to be preparing
my sourdough starter. So then in the morning,
directly in the morning, I can just mix everything together and start the fermentation process. You might be thinking only 75% of water, well you can get amazing
crumps too from breads that are not that high in hydration. So yes, if you have issues with frisbees, I definitely recommend you
to start a little bit lower, go for something around 65% in hydration. That just makes things so much easier. But just to make things
a little more challenging in this video, I'm opting
for even a little bit more so that yeah, things work for me then they should definitely
be working for you. Last note the amount of water
really depends on the flour that you have at hand. You can test your flour and for this, I made a separate video
showing you exactly how to figure out which levels of water are working for your
flour and which don't. So please don't just follow
blindly hydration percentage from the internet, this is something you have to
figure out for your own flour. And now I'm just going to be
setting up my main doughs, I'm doing this in the evening. I want everything to autolysis overnight. One of them has 75% hydration and the other one is 90% hydration. After adding the water you
would just wanna start stirring with your hands for a little bit. You don't wanna do any
strength development. And yes the left hand dough
already feel so much stickier than the right hand dough. Then I'll let this sit overnight and we will be back in the morning. This is the good dough. Nice, beautiful window pane effect, after this overnight autolysis. I can stretch it quite a lot before it starts to tear, perfect. And now the dough had
roughly 90% hydration. Hmm, also not too bad window pane effect, but when touching this dough,
it just tears so much faster. So this is a little bit off, a lost course working
with a dough like this. You could probably do this, but it would require
really a lot of expertise and a lot of skill, you would need to have
excellent technique. So I would say this is even a
little bit too much hydration. This is nothing I would
recommend you to do, especially if you just get
started with sourdough baking, the other dough was going
to be so much easier. So just to have a fair comparison, I'm going to be adding
a little bit of flour, this definitely something that you can do and then we have the same base hydration on both of the doughs. This brings us to
countermeasure Number Three, Excellent Dough Strength. I will be showing you
the same dough again, one is with good strength development and dough without strength development. On both the doughs I'm
using 20% sourdough starter calculated on the flour mass. This is what I like to do when
I have time during the day when I'm doing an overnight bread, I like to go for a little
bit less five to 10% roughly. Next step I'm going to be
incorporating this with my hands for around five minutes. There's not really a technique, you can do everything you like. It's going to be sticky that's for sure, I just like to rotate
like this stretch and fold and yes, I will be doing
this for roughly five minutes on both the doughs, the one
where I added additional flour could eventually take
a few minutes longer, but that's pretty much the technique. You will see that your dough
tears here a little bit with a starter added,
that's completely normal, nothing to worry about. You might be thinking this
destroys my beautiful autolysis. Yes, it does a little bit, however, the autolysis was
also mostly about breaking down the flour and that's something
that's still happened. The flour is now much easier
to ferment for your sourdough. So just keep going like this. You see it starts to stick
with my hand and yes, five minutes roughly on both the doughs. Just to specify one more time, I'm doing this until I
see that the sourdough has been incorporated evenly everywhere. So this is already looking quite good here but if you look here for instance, then there are still
some patches of sourdough where I see, okay, I need
to knead a little bit more. This is not really about adding strength, we will be adding strength
in a little bit after. Took the measurement, it's
been exactly three minutes. What I like to do is I just
like to round this dough up a little bit, that's
going to make it easier. Now with my hand at
around a 45 degree angle, I'm just pushing below the
dough and I'm rounding it up, I'm using the tension of the pot. This is a good thing to practice because your dough is
very likely and sticky as mine is right now, and you need this for later stages. So give this a shot,
great way to practice. This is going to rest
for 15, one five minutes, and then we will be back. I'm just going to be
prepare the other dough now. Aah, what a mess (laughs). So adding flour seems to
be a little bit tighter than I thought (laughs)
it's a German in me. So let's keep kneading this. Just trying to incorporate all the flour, those hands (chuckles)
I'll take the timer again until when I'm done. (munches) So sticky. (slums dough) I've been needing this though
for around six minutes by now, and it's somewhat coming together, but it also just feels so
much more sticky on my hands than the other dough. Let me try to also round this up and you can see this is not even possible. It's very likely because
I just added the new flour and it didn't have the
chance to develop that well. So yeah, you see how much I'm struggling with this dough already? (laughs) Awful, let this one rest one, five minutes and then continue working this dough. Aah, I'm struggling. (laughs) I'll just leave it like this for now. For a strength development, I did the initial kneading and I always do the bench kneading. Sometimes I like to do the lamination, but in this case for
this level of hydration, I feel that it's not required. Just to have a look at
the two different doughs, do you see how sticky this one is? Slightly when I touch it, it already starts sticking to my hand. And here, look at how
smooth the surfaces is and also sticks, but not as much. So yeah, this is already a sign that
something here might be wrong with this dough, but I
would be giving both of them the same amount of benching. I will not be adding as
much strength on this dough, I will be adding the
correct amount of strength on this dough and I'll show you. For this, it's always good to
have some water next to you, some water and start with wetted hands, that way the dough simply
won't stick as much. First up, the proper dough. Remove it from the container
by going around it, Then I'd like to do a
few stretch and folds in the container. This is just going to help
me to remove the dough from the container and you can see how the dough starts to lift, it's no longer stuck, very easy. Place it on your counter. For this step we're using
the tension of the surface and we just go below the dough, we pull it out and we fold it over. Pull out, fold over. And this only works because we did not use any additional flour. I'm going to be doing this
for roughly one to two minutes until I see that the dough
stays in this ball shape figure. And actually it almost does, but just to be sure because
I'm not going to be laminating this, which is another technique, I will just be giving this
a little more strength. Just note how I'm always taking the dough and I'm folding it over and then I'm touching it down here so that the sticky side sticks to itself. This is creating superb
amount of strength. Get modern workout for somebody who doesn't like to do sports like (chuckles) (slams dough) (laughs) And now I just like to
round this up a little bit using my hands, same thing
we did pretty much in the pot at a 45 degree angle going
inside rotating this dough. And this is when a dough
scrapper can be handy because then you don't lose
that much flour on the surface. (slams dough) It's still relatively sticky I would say, but I'm just going to let
this sit here for five minutes until I take care of the other dough. Same thing again, but
at least the window pane is now much more stable than before. So this is looking much better. (slams dough) (chuckles) And I already note how the dough just does not want to let
go of the container as much. (slams dough) Same thing again again, strength development, but not as much. All right, so let me also round this up. And because I did a little less kneading, I didn't tear the surface so
much, it doesn't stick as much. But just looking at this dough, this dough is already spreading
way faster than this dough. So I mean, now they're
roughly the same size, but this one has been sitting
here for five minutes. So yeah, this dough could require
more strength development, but I'm not going to do it now
because I wanted to show you how this is going to turn
into it a cascade of failed. And now remember the exercise, we will be rounding this up one more time, and then this is going to
start the bulk fermentation. And you see, this is where
a dough scraper is handy, but I'm not going to use it today, I'm just doing everything with my hands. Dough number one. 45 degree angle, push and pull, we are using the tension of the surface. Guess and I can already
see how this is flattening a little bit more, so this does not have as
much strength as this. Now this just simply goes
back to the container, to the pot where it will
continue bulk fermentation. With gentle hands take
your dough like this and place it in your container. No, I lost a little bit of dough there. Note how the bad dough, the one where I didn't add enough strength already spread like this and
compare it to this dough. Also, I'm not so happy
with the surface here, it's not so nice and
round compared with dough, very smooth surface already. Countermeasure Number Four. I always have issues with a number four. Bulk Fermentation On Time. The bulk fermentation
process starts the moment you mixed in your sourdough
starter into your dough. The yeast and the bacteria are starting to ferment your main dough. Now bakers typically do
many breads at the same time that's why they call
this bulk fermentation. Now when is the bulk
fermentation stage over? Yeah, that's the hard part about this. Well, now it's complete when
your dough doubled in size. This however sometimes there's
a little bit hard to measure, especially if you can't clearly
see it in your container. And for this I always like
to extract a small sample and that sample will show me exactly when my bulk fermentation is complete. Just take as much as is required to cover the bottom of the jar. I'm just going to spread
that in a little bit, then I'll Mark the jar. Same thing here. Don't worry about this, you can just bake this
as a nice English muffin with a little bit of butter,
very, very, very delicious or you can put it into
your, this cart starter jar. If you bulk ferment for too short, well then your bread won't
be as fluffy as it could be. If you bulk ferment for too long, then you end up with a
very, very sticky dough. That's because the acid broke
down your gluten structure inside of your dough. So it's all about hitting that sweet spot. Those are the final two samples so you can see that I used
a little bit more dough here on the left hand side,
but that's not a problem. I'll wait on all this double in size. Very interesting. The left hand dough, that's the one where I had
the less acidity starter and the right hand side is the sample where I had the starter
which has more acid. Sorry, the left hand sample
definitely increase in size much more than the right hand sample. So I didn't expect that, I expected the right hand
symbol to increase in size a little bit faster because
yeah, there is more yeast, there's more bacteria inside, but maybe on the right hand sample, it's actually the fact that the bacteria, the acid is preventing
the yeast from working. I'm just giving both the
dough and other coil fold and the dose just already
feels way different and you can also smell the acid. And this is going to be the last coil fold that I will give the dough. Then I will switch to shaping
just from a consistency point, this dough feels very, very,
very, very fluffy already. I would say this though
was actually ready, but the sample is saying something else. So yes, I will just
wait a little bit longer this is the bad dough. I want it to run into some
over fermentation issues here anyways, but just based
on how this dough feels, I would now proceed and shape it. So this is why I recommend
you to use your hands, you need to develop a
little bit of a feeling for the dough that you're making. The samples definitely look ready, the right hand side even
increased a little more than the left hand side. If you have issues with your
dough becoming too sticky towards the end of the bulk fermentation consider not going for a
hundred percent size increase, but maybe more for something around 75%. I definitely know that
that high gluten flours, allow for a longer bulk fermentation, and if your flour is
not that high in gluten, then it could be better to
go for a little bit less, but as always, you always
have to experiment. This brings us to
Countermeasure Number Five, A Good Shaping Technique. Yes, shaping is hard. I'm also still struggling with it. This is where everything comes together. Shaping is important because we give our dough that structure, we pretty much glue our doughs together. You wanna hit that sweet spot
between shaping very tight and shaping not too tight. If you shape too tight, chances are that your dough might tear. If that happens, just let
you dough sit for 15 minutes and then try again. Shaping also evens out
the crumble a little bit, so you also don't wanna be
too drastic on your shaping because then you will
have a very even crump. If you don't shape too tight, your dough does not
hold together that well. And this means your dough
cant expand that much in the oven. Now, if you're looking for that airy crumb that are not too tight,
shaping is advised. However, the tighter you shape, the more oven spring you have. So again, it's all about
hitting that sweet spot. If you fermented on time,
then this is possible, if you over fermented, then your dough might
now be overly sticky. Whatever you do, it's
not going to get better you have to use more and more flour. Yeah, just give up, use a loaf pan, toss it in and you're done. Let me show you a good
dough and a bad dough again. Let's proceed and start
shaping the good dough. Using wetted hands, I will take this dough and place it on my surface. (drops the pot) Now it's not ready to be shaped yet because it doesn't have a good shape, you can see it's not very round here. So I will be preshaping and
I will just be doing that using my hands at a 45 degree angle and pushing around this dough. And now I'm using the
tension of the surface to round up the dough a
little bit and that's it. That's all the preshaping that we need. I will let that sit a little
bit for the gluten to relax and then I will continue
with the actual shaping. If you're the kind of
person that has issues with sticky dough, I
recommend a banneton like this using a linen. This just absorb so much excess humidity and make sure your bread doesn't stick. The worst thing that could happen now is if you're German, you'll
see what I did there. The worst thing that could happen now is that our dough in the end
sticks to this bannenton. Rice flour for this works excellent. Just sprinkled your bannenton
with some rice flour to the good shaping. I'm just sprinkling some
flour here on the dough and a little flour here on the surface. I know this dough is stuck, so I'm flouring my hands
to be able to remove it and then I will flip it over. Just like this, no bench scraper needed. Now I'm flattening out
the dough a little bit so that this sticky
side, this is very sticky and it's becoming a little larger. This makes it easier for me
to tuck together the dough, shaping is pretty much all
about gluing the dough together and we'll take the side,
fold it into the middle making it stick here on this
sticky side, just like this. And now I will take the other side and I will take the other
side and flip it over make it stick right here. You can do this in multiple iterations, no need to do everything at once. Now we have roll like this and now we need to start rolling this up. With floured hands, go
inside, roll this over. I'm putting my thumbs here,
pushing thumbs inside, rolling this over. I'm starting to notice it
sticks a little bit too much. So I'm flouring my hands one more time and I'm using the tension
to push into the dough. Now this is pretty much
my shaped dough already. I'll be covering the edges here this works easier because I
did not use that much flour a little bit like this, where
you're going to correct this same thing from the other side just like this. Now if it's hard because
you used too much flour, then just add a little bit
of more additional water and it should be okay. Now I'm using the tension of the surface to direct the dough a
little bit over the surface, to round it out and give
it some additional tension. Now, the more I do this, the
more I also even out the crap. So don't do this too
much, just a little bit. Because my shaping has
been a little bit poor' I noticed some sticky parts here. So what I'm going to do is I will be placing some additional flour. Here, give this a good rub
with some additional flour, so it does not stick. Now if you do this and your
dough is not too sticky, you actually don't need
the linen that much, but just to be safe, this is good. Going in with my hands, flipping the dough over and placing it in the bannenton like this. Now, if you didn't use too much flour, you could actually be doing
something like some additional stitching inside of the bannenton, pulling the edges here
and folding them over a great way to just add a
little bit additional strength. I like to use the flour
that I have left here on my kitchen counter. I Just sprinkle the edges of this dough. Aah, good looking dough. Yes, yes, yes, yes. (chuckles) And just to have a look at
this other bad jiggly dough, which I started with too
much acid right away. Look at how nice and jiggly this is such a smooth dough, but I'm
just going to, it hurts me, but I will let this run
into over fermentation. This would actually be just perfect now you see how I can touch this dough, it doesn't stick to my hand. What a little bit of a shame
to let this go like this. But yeah, we will let this ferment for another two or three hours or so and I'll show you into
what kind sticky mess this is going to develop. I kept this one in our cold, just because it sprouts so much, so that's what I typically do. And just, just confirms one more time how important fermentation is even after not building all that strength this dough has inflated so nice and you see how it stays together. Really, really, really good looking dough. And this is the (laughs) dough,
look how puffy it is now. Touching it is definitely
going to collapse. I'm surprised that they actually
didn't feel that sticky. I would have expected it
to feel even more sticky. Oh no! But now it does, just
based on how it feels here. Just one quick coil fold to
remove it from the container. Hmm. And also based on the scent, I can already feel that this is more sour. Let me try to appreciate this. Aah, wow! I actually did not expect
this to work so well. But it also starts to tear here. So yeah, I'm just going to let this sit for a few more minutes and then I will try to shape this dough. Just based on how it feels, it's already feeling more
sticky than the other dough, but not as much as I expected even after... Oh no! (chuckles) Okay, I should not have done that I guess. I will just let this sit here now (laughs) for five minutes and then I will shape it. So I was out for more than four hours, so it bulk fermented for
more than a four hours than the other dough and
yeah, you can see here, the surface is now tearing. This is not how it should look like, but we will wait and then shape it. And back to our dough and you're
gonna see me struggle now. I have to use a lot of
flour for this dough. Aah, its so sticky. (laughs) It just won't hold its shape
and it starts to stick. Nooo! I need to use more flour. So what I would normally do is I would just take this dough
and toss it into a loaf pan. (laughs sarcastically) This is not gonna hold the shape at all. (laughs) What an Epic fail. (laughs) So an over fermented dough
like this definitely awesome, that's not have to over proof. So I'm just going to be placing
this in the fridge as well, no room temperature proofing, then I'll bake both at
the same time tomorrow, well, one after each other. Countermeasure Number Six. Proofing. Proofing is the stage
that starts after shaping. I have a full video on this and I'll be linking it right here. Proofing will inflate that
dough that you just shaped with additional gas. Imagine a wrinkly balloon and
we're now trying to inflate it to the maximum. If we inflate it too
much, it's going to burst. If we don't inflate it well enough, then it's just going to stay all wrinkly. So again, it's about
finding that sweet spot. An easy way to check whether
your dough is done proofing is to use the finger poke test. And here the finger
poke test on this dough, you can just see how quickly this dent is recovering right now. Leave your dough at room temperature and finger poke your dough, there is going to be a dent. If the dent recovers very quickly, then you need to wait a little bit longer. Now if that dent recovers
very, very, very slowly, then your dough is ready to be baked. If the dent doesn't recover at all, then you are oven is better heated up, you wanna place that dough in the oven, as soon as possible. At room temperature proofing
for me typically takes between one and a half and three hours. A great trick to simplify
proofing is to take your dough and just place it in the
fridge for at least 16 hours. Again, this also depends on
the temperature of your fridge. In my case, it's between
four degrees Celsius and six degrees Celsius. In fact, you could also place
you're dough in the fridge for a longer period of time, but then you might run
into the same issues as with over proofing, you
might over proof your dough. The fridge makes it very easy to make the bread baking schedule work with your own schedule. Now you need to ask yourself,
when do you want to bake this? What is your schedule? In this case, I want to
bake this tomorrow morning, but it's already around 5:00 PM here. I would typically opt for 16
to 24 hours in the fridge, but I wanna bake this
tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM. So this is gonna be too short. So this case I'm opting for
around 30 minutes proof here at room temperature,
which allows the dough to increase in size. And then I will be
moving this to my fridge until I'm ready to bake it in the morning. The fridge allows me to
slow down the process. At the start, it's still relatively quick, especially if you're in hot environments to just make sure that
the schedule matches your own private schedule. So yes, try 16 hours then
work your way up to 24 hours. You can even do a little bit longer this is something you have
to experiment yourself with. Countermeasure Number Seven, Steam. You need lots and lots of steam during the first half of the bake. If you don't have steam a crust
forms on top of your bread, and then your bread is not able to expand anymore in the oven. It tries to find a spot where it's weakest and it's likely on the side. So it's going to expand on the sides. You can achieve this by using
a Dutch oven for instance. Now, if you a cheap German like me, then you're going to like this method which I'll be linking right here. Pretty much your own Dutch oven with just two trays and
a bowl of hot water. And actually that method made me my most amazing bread so far. Let's finish this up with
some more a not safer award bread footage. (mellow music) - Are you ready for it? (laughs) - This brings us to the end of this video. If you wanna see the full process including the recipe, I recommend you check out this video. It's my full Engineer's Guide
on Baking Sourdough Bread. It covers everything in detail including it has many scientific
explanations as possible. Now I would be very curious to know what's your personal
frisbee countermeasure. If you have issues with your dough, please also drop a comment, I'm sure one of you or me
is going to be able to help. As always happy baking and
may the gluten be with you.
