The Likely Culprit Behind Inconsistent Sourdough Results | Proof Bread

the biggest Factor impacting your sourdough is probably temperature [Music] [Applause] [Music] mixing two batches of croissant dough quite large I'm going to kind of stack them up simultaneously and that way I'm making the most use of my time kind of doing two things at once right now making sure that water doesn't go over water goes in first mostly so that the flour doesn't end up sticking to the bottom of the bowl and clumping up just about at the amount that I need this water is temperature controlled and I think that's a an important thing to consider I made sure that it was the exact temperature that I wanted in order to keep the entire massive dough warm enough and it could go either way if you're in a really warm environment the variable changes the opposite and you might need to use quite cold water in our case we have pretty good temperature control in here but if I start too cold I'm going to have to push my mix further than I want to what I think is somewhat a key point there is that uh this idea of temperature is actually one of the keys to consistency so when we were first getting going with our baking I would have different results all the time you know one day things would work out a little bit better than the next and I would constantly be wondering why all right so we just have a full bucket of starter to add when we first started I didn't really consider temperature and I think part of it is how do you learn how to bake or how to cook reading recipes when it comes to recipes in general like often temperatures are somewhat omitted in baking recipes it's five tablespoons of this and more teaspoons of that it's interesting because it's nothing like what we do in in the way in which we get the mix going we're using scales and weight-based measures instead of volume based measures and then Additionally the other massive thing that we're always considering is how warm or how cold something is for instance the starter is cold and that's going to impact the overall temperature of the the starting mix and so I'm making decisions on how warm my water is which is something I can control with the lever one thing I did here was I added flour to my water not the biggest deal rust shows I should have added the starter first now I'm probably going to get the mix going before I add the starter to this bowl but I'm going to go ahead and add the starter to this bowl so ideal order of operations for this croissant dough mix is wet ingredients first there's no Auto lease so I'm saying starter is a wet ingredient and putting it right on top of my water then going ahead and adding the flour if I put the starter right on top of the flower in that other Bowl more than likely I might be all right but I also might create some extra clumpiness so now I can go ahead and add my flour to this bowl each of these mixes is two full bags and for this we're using a very popular flower called Artisan Baker's craft milled by a central Milling which is in the Western United States and serves a lot of artisan bakeries from San Francisco down you know throughout California Arizona and other places as well but the mill is located in Utah some of the best grains in the world by uh specification the wildly open sourdough crumbs we have an easier time making them because of just the protein and strength content of the flour all right so I have my flower in so moving on some more dry ingredients we have the salt you're sort of Performing two mixes in the efficiency of let's say one and a half uh by batching so you can see I'm kind of doing the same thing here I have two mixes to do and so I'm scaling for both at the same time as opposed to doing them completely independently which can also be done but then it's quite literally twice the amount of time scaling out a little bit more salt at the same time is faster than doing it all stopping going to another action doing another action then coming back and doing salt again so that is in many ways the most common way of gaining efficiency in a bakery is just looking for all of those places where you can batch so now I'm adding sugar just to throw a little context here this looks like a ton of sugar but this is a lot of croissants that we're making each of these mixes is about a thousand croissants so I'm okay with mixing the sugar and salt together and adding them at the same time to the mix with one exception that is that I don't mess that part up entirely and confuse the two so uh if you get that wrong you're going to end up with a wrong taste profile to be sure and you would definitely taste that amount of salt not to mention you would see it in the dough because the salt slows the fermentation process down so spiking your dough with too much salt would definitely change all the variables and your timings so this is my starter free Bowl I'm adding the sugar and salt in a way that it's basically sitting on top of the flour I'm going to do the same here I'm going to take an extra little measure and that is to combine sugar and water as they mix create this sort of slurry if you end up with that slurry in your dough it just stays through all stages you can't seemingly get rid of it at least I've never been able to figure out how so I just realized this is the one that doesn't have the starter I'm not going to take it to full completion I'm configuring the mixer in such a way as I'm going to get decent incorporation of the dough up until now and I can throw the starter on top and finish up the mix from there at the rate this guy's pouring out today we would be here for quite a while I haven't figured out a different way of doing this yet doing this kind of pumping action with my hands shoving sourdough starter down the the feeder tube it's a factor of consistency in the sourdough starters so you know over time we've actually over hydrated the sourdough starter that we have in here and that's okay we've learned how to deal with that but only to a certain extent meaning we still want to make the sourdough starter we want to make we don't wish to make the sourdough starter that the machine dictates for us to make you know that's that's part of the problem with the mechanization of a bakery is that you start to have to adjust everything to machinery and there's only so much that we're willing to do that because at the end of the day we still are a very human-driven business in the way that we operate it's through the human effort of of bread making that we are successful and yes we have to make a lot of bread for everybody on our team to you know be adequately rewarded for their time and effort for a business like ours we have to win on a certain amount of volume we have to make more because our margins are generally less and that's how we end up having enough Revenue to pay our staff to pay our overhead to have hopefully a bit of a return at the end so this is that croissant mix that's not all the way done it is still missing sourdough starter and you can actually tell notice how it's not one Mass together it's quite actually separated the sourdough starter adds quite a bit of hydration to the dough it's a 100 percent uh hydration in the sourdough starter equal parts flour and water so we're actually adding more moisture to the dough by adding the sourdough starter and you'll notice how the dough consistency changes as I add that to the mix so now I have my mix that does in fact have sourdough starter already and this one I'll handle a little differently because I'm going to take it all the way through the process foreign missing from that bowl and that's the butter which we incorporate at the very very end of the mix and now I'm going to take this wet sourdough starter and add it right to this bowl you can see that the sourdough starter is significantly wetter than the dough itself so it's going to make the dough itself more hydrated all right so I'm in the final stages of this first complete mix final stages meaning I'm adding the butter to the mix and so I've got my butter measured out for both mixes I'm just going to separate out each so I don't go over and I'm giving it a squeeze as I put it in it's supposed to be softened in this case it's uh partially softened and so I can kind of take it the rest of the way and that way it'll incorporate a little bit easier the mix is almost done and I'm not sure that I need any more time I'm going to give it a feel and make sure all the butter is really truly been Incorporated but I can already tell by the texture of the of the dough that uh the vast majority of the work has been done Logan came up to me and said good luck and I don't think I need luck in this case I think we're just past the line of risk I want to give this plenty of time to work its way in the dough and then at the end I'll kick it up into second gear and hopefully be ready for butter so right now I've got eight minutes on deck and I'm hoping that within eight minutes I have a nice cohesive uh dough that's ready to accept the butter like the like the previous one was so I just reached the end of that original eight minutes of programming and I'm both looking at the dough and looking at my mixer a mixer I'm wondering why it's doing this uh so I'm not used to seeing that motion I can spot issues but then actually going in and and truly diagnosing them when they're still small issues before they become bigger problems uh still long learning curve I've definitely learned one thing over time that most equipment failure happens in stages where you have sort of the small issue that's easy to resolve followed by greater and greater amounts of damage at a certain point it becomes more costly and takes your equipment out which is definitely the most costly when you can't produce on it [Music] so my teammate says this has happened to her before [Music] and essentially it's just like the way in which the ball came down and there there it is it's no longer doing the is something loose in the back that causes the uh head to come down unevenly because I can tell you that it worked a hundred out of a hundred times when it was first installed and now it seems rare but that's what I'm saying it's a small issue that doesn't take us out it's something that's easily ignored but what does it lead to what is the side effect of not tightening whatever needs to be tightened or fixing it at this stage is it a big deal is it a small deal I believe it's important to have some of this Diagnostics in your operation so as to avoid more expensive problems watch over your equipment don't ignore the little stuff [Music] now we've gotten to the point that it looks exactly like the other mixtape [Music]

Channel: Proof Bread

Views: 47,114

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough bakery, microbakery, proof bread, proof bakery, sourdough, bread, baking, cooking, food, gourmet, artisan, homemade, handmade, handcrafted, flour, recipe, how to, kitchen, ingredients, cottage bakery, rustic, small business, entrepreneur

Id: _ZABO4k66OY

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023