Troubleshooting "Simple Sourdough" and FAQ

howdy folks i'm ben starr the ultimate food geek welcome back to my messy kitchen and it has been just over four months since i published my simple sourdough for lazy people recipe the response has been overwhelming i have received hundreds of photographs and thank you notes from folks who are discovering that they can produce delicious artisan quality sourdough bread super easy with about five minutes of effort a day on the flip side of this i'm receiving so many questions and comments that it's taking me hours a day just to try to respond to them all so i decided to create a follow-up video to demonstrate and answer some of the questions and concerns people have and address some of the very common pitfalls that are repeatedly being brought up in the comments on these videos based on the comments one of the most common pitfalls people are running up against is that their dough seems to be too wet for them to easily work with now this recipe sits at about 63 hydration which is slightly higher than your normal commercial yeast bread dough recipes which sit at about 60 hydration it is going to be slightly more sticky than what you're accustomed to working with if you've been baking with traditional bread dough recipes however it's definitely not too sticky to work with and if your dough is just absolutely so wet that it just slops around and will not form a loaf there's a different problem here but the first thing i'm going to do is quickly mix up a batch of this bread and let you take a very close look at how it behaves with your hands so we're gonna do four ounces of starter we'll talk about starter here in a second because it's entirely possible that your starter is too wet 12 ounces of filtered water get the starter dispersed into that water one pound four ounces of flour and three quarters of an ounce of salt i'm going to talk about salt later because i do get a lot of questions about the salt content in this recipe and the salt content is actually intentional all right we're going to get this stirred around here okay at this point as i start to meet resistance with my spoon you'll see there's still quite a bit of flour left in that bowl if you're seeing that your dough is a lot more liquidy than this that's an indication that you added too much water either you mismeasured or your sourdough starter is not at 100 hydration with equal parts of flour and water that is the most common problem i anticipate people are experiencing but now we're going to get in there with our hands and kind of bring this dough together into its final state and you can see i still do have some little bits of flour here that are going to have to be worked in manually this dough is not incredibly sticky but as we get the rest of that flour incorporated and the moisture starts to move evenly throughout the dough you start to get a little bit of tackiness the dough will stick a little bit to your hands it shouldn't be crazy crazy sticky but it is entirely possible that you'll get some of this stickiness on your hands as you're kneading that's very common this is a somewhat sticky dough however if your dough looks something like this which is just really too sticky to be able to work with using normal techniques that is an indication that your sourdough starter is at a higher hydration than 100 that means you're adding more water than flour by weight when you feed your starter and this is actually fairly common but a typical sourdough starter should be maintained at 100 hydration to be compatible with most recipes i'm going to take both doughs out and work with them a little bit here on the countertop so that you can get an idea of what i'm talking about you never want to add too much flour to your countertop when you're shaping your loaf because you actually want the dough to stick to the countertop a little bit that provides the tension that allows you to get a really nice tight perfect bowl now keep in mind these doughs are just freshly made they are not risen so they are not going to have the gluten structure of doughs that have already had their first 24 hour rise but you'll see this dough is sliding right around on the countertop i actually have too much flour on the counter top it's more important that you put the flour right on your hands and on the outside top of the loaf so that the loaf is only sticking to the countertop as you move it around and not to your hands now this is a properly hydrated dough at about 63 according to our recipe and it's pretty much easy to work with when we move over to the dough that's a little bit higher hydration this one's about 68 percent you can still certainly work with this dough but you have to have had a little bit more experience and this recipe is not going to produce a loaf of that hydration if you've made it properly but what you want to do is make sure you've got plenty of flour on your hands and plenty of flour on the top part of the dough and then as you move it around if the dough starts to stick to you more add more flour to your hands and more flour to the loaf itself but here that extra flour is preventing our dough from sticking to the countertop which makes it harder to form that final loaf but if you just use plenty of flour on your hands and on the top of the loaf you'll eventually now i'm starting to get stuck down there more flour you'll eventually be able to form even a really sticky tacky dough into a really nice loaf just like that if you end up with a really sticky loaf the solution is super simple just add a little bit more flour and work it in until your dough is stiff enough to properly work with easy as that so how do we fix a starter that's overly hydrated pretty simple measure out eight ounces of your starter and discard the rest of it got eight ounces here in this bowl now we're going to give a feeding that's heavier on flour than on water and we always want to at least double our starter and if i've got eight ounces of starter here a traditional feeding would be four ounces of water and four ounces of flour or eight extra ounces of feed to double the weight of the starter but today what i'm going to do is feed four ounces of water and six ounces of flour okay so i've actually added a total of 10 ounces of ingredients and it's always fine to feed more than double the weight of your starter it's just never fine to feed less than double the weight of your starter so now i'm going to give these a nice stir here and you'll be able to see that thicker texture happen almost immediately see that it's almost stiff as i get in there to stir it that is actually the kind of texture you should be expecting after a normal hydration feeding of your starter if you notice that it's considerably more liquidy after that feeding let it sit for a couple of hours on the countertop divide it in half and give it another one of those stiff feedings of four ounces of water and six ounces of flour until you start to get a nice thick starter just like this the next common problem that people report is that their bread doesn't rise very high it spreads out kind of flat still has a nice crumb on the inside has incredible flavor but it just doesn't bake up nice and round and perfect like the loaves that you see other people getting well there can be multiple reasons for this first of all your starter might not be as robust as it should be regular feedings will bring it up into a nice healthy cycle but the whole point of this recipe is that you don't have to have recently fed your starter in order to create a proper loaf so let's talk about the baking so let's talk about the size of the baking vessel for a bit now i normally bake this bread in a five to six quart dutch oven just like this the recipe it's a three pound loaf does really really well in this particular size some dutch ovens are actually a little bit larger than this and as your bread is rising if it doesn't have enough strength to hold itself in a perfectly high loaf it can spread out just a little bit and that's what results in those wider flatter loaves well the easiest solution to that is to get a smaller dutch oven these little 3 to four quart dutch ovens are actually cheaper you can find them on amazon for pretty cheap and the overall interior diameter of these pots is smaller which means that as the bread rises the walls of the dutch oven are supporting it so that it can achieve a really nice lift so that's one really easy way is to just give your bread extra support in the vessel that it's baking in but the most common cause of a loaf that doesn't rise nice and beautifully is that the bread is either underproofed or overproofed now underproofing isn't really likely with this particular recipe because we're looking at a 12 to 24 hour initial bulk fermentation followed by a two to four hour rise before it goes into the oven it's not really likely that your bread is under proofing unless your starter is just really really weak and wasn't particularly strong to begin with overproofing is the more common reason for loaves not turning out nice and round and tall over proofing just means that your yeast have run out of simple sugars to eat in the dough and they can't make any more carbon dioxide also the acids that are produced by the bacterial colonies in the starter begin to weaken the gluten structure over time once that gluten structure becomes slack it can't hold in that carbon dioxide and result in a nice puffy loaf so if you're discovering that your bread is consistently not rising very well it may very well be that you're over proofing your loaf and you need to shorten that initial bulk fermentation time from 24 hours down to 16 or even 12. and if your starter is crazy robust and rare to go you might only need to ferment for eight hours for the first rise it really just depends on your starter so if you're getting flatter loaves the first thing i'm going to tell you is to reduce your rise time by six hours on the first fermentation and see if that helps and if you're going a full four hours or longer on the secondary fermentation that second rise just before the bread goes into the oven you can try backing that down a little bit as well all of this is going to teach you how to interact with your starter over the course of its life now again if my starter has been in the fridge for two or three months without a feeding i'm going to let it go a full 24 hours for that first bulk fermentation and probably a full four hours for the second rise if not a little bit longer but if my starter's been fed in the last week or two and i can see five or six hours after i formed that loaf it's already starting to rise and put carbon dioxide in my ziploc bag starting to inflate like a balloon i can probably shape that into a loaf and two hours later it can go into the oven so it really is about practice makes perfect getting to know your starter and what timing cycles work best for both of the fermentation stages on occasion people contact me and say my bread is stuck in my pan i can't get it out what do i do this issue typically results from one of two errors the first is that the pot was not preheated enough now i'm going to confess while i'm making these videos i'm taking a few shortcuts every now and then and one was to only preheat the pan for 30 minutes this pot was not hot enough to make sure that the bread did not fuse to it when it first went in preheat your pot for a full hour at 500 degrees fahrenheit or as high as your oven will go and that will help reduce the risk of the bread sticking inside the pot second if your hydration rate is too high it's also fairly common for your bread to fuse to your pot during baking now if you recall me showing you that bread that was a little bit too wet and sticky to work with i didn't actually correct that bread's hydration rate because i'm accustomed to baking with higher hydration loaves i went ahead and stuffed that bread full of red jalapeno peppers and extra sharp cheddar cheese and baked this beautiful loaf here but of course it did stick to the pen so here's what you do do nothing for an hour you need to be able to hold the pot and you don't want to be working with a pot that is super hot also when that loaf is very very warm it's delicate it tears easily you want the bread to be as resilient as possible so you don't just tear the crap out of it while you're trying to get the bread out of the pan so once your loaf and pot have fully cooled at least one hour the first thing you want to do is sort of go around the edges to make sure that you don't have any extra sticking that you can easily ameliorate with a knife then get yourself the widest flattest wooden or metal spatula or plastic that you can get get in there and start to pry and typically the bread will lift right up now if you try to do this while the bread is hot it's just going to tear open but this gorgeous loaf and you cannot believe how good it smells right now now let's chat for just a minute about salt because my favorite comments were posted almost immediately after i published the recipe people saying your recipes got way too much salt in it i'm not an idiot people i've been studying and baking bread for two decades yes most bread recipes call for a ratio of salt that is 1.8 to 2.2 percent of the overall dry weight of the flour and in my recipe the salt is at 3.4 percent this is intentional it is the reason the recipe works and is so idiot proof and is so flexible in terms of your rise times the salt is why the recipe is functional so bread rises because of a compound called gluten that is made up of subproteins called gliadin and gluten now i want you to imagine in the bread dough these two proteins are a little bit shy and they look across the dough matrix at each other and they think oh you're kind of cute i might like to hold hands with you just a little bit but it takes time or excessive kneading to really force these proteins together to form the gluten structure gluten and gliadin they're a little bit shy enter salt because salt acts like a love potion for gluten and gliadin when salt is in that matrix in a high enough quantity they just grab each other and start making out in fact salt almost acts like a handcuff bonding these two lovers together it forms a much stronger gluten network which holds in the carbon dioxide that's being produced by the yeast and that is why bread rises so yes i have upped the salt ratio in this loaf and that is specifically why the recipe is functional it's why you don't have to immediately shape the dough into a loaf the instant the first rise reaches double in volume you can wait another two or three or four hours it's the reason why you have a two three four hour window once that loaf is shaped before it has to go into the oven it's also the reason that you can chunk that bread in the fridge for two or even three days before you bake it and it still isn't going to over proof so dispense with the comments about the salt if you've baked the bread and tasted it and you can check the other comments it's delicious it's not too salty unless you happen to have a european accent because overall the european diet has less sodium in it than the american or australian or asian diets so yes if you're a european viewer you may find this bread a little bit too salty for your palate or if you're an american that never dines out only cooks at home and cooks on a very sodium restricted diet you may also find that this bread is slightly on the salty side the easy fix is to lower the salt take it down to half an ounce or even less if you need to the bread won't be quite as flavorful and you're gonna have to be a little bit more vigilant about your rising time as soon as that bread hits double on the first rise you need to shape it into a loaf and then you need to watch it as soon as it doubles in volume it needs to go into the oven then or it can overproof if it sits out on the counter for an extra two or three hours whereas in the original recipe those extra two or three hours probably isn't going to lead to an overproofing of the dough now there are a few people who genuinely said this bread is so salty that i can't eat it and after going back and forth with them a little bit i realized what they actually did was translate my recipe from weight measurements into volume measurements and said oh well it said uh you know three quarters of an ounce of salt is really about three teaspoons of salt so i used three teaspoons of salt you can't do it people get a scale three quarters of an ounce of salt is the same amount of salt whether it's morton's kosher salt or diamond crystal kosher salt or finely ground sea salt or even iodized table salt three quarters of an ounce is always the same regardless of the type of salt but if you have three people measure out three teaspoons of this morton's kosher salt you will get three different weights and if you have one person measure out three teaspoons of morton's kosher salt as opposed to three teaspoons of table salt you will get different amounts of salt so the only way to properly make this recipe folks is to weigh your ingredients and the salt is the key to it all happening one of the really lovely things about this recipe is that on the second day after you've shaped your bread into a loaf if something comes up and you won't be ready to bake that loaf in the next two to four hours or so you can chunk the loaf in the fridge to slow down its fermentation and the loaf is going to taste better at the end if you do that but a lot of people are asking well if my loaf is in the fridge and i'm preheating my oven does it go straight from the fridge into the oven or do i need to put it on the countertop for several hours first and the simple answer is i don't know i do it both ways just sort of depending on how i'm feeling or what my schedule is like i had never done a direct comparison of a loaf that was baked straight from the fridge as opposed to one that was left out on the counter top for a couple hours to warm up before it went in the fridge so i performed an experiment here we have a loaf that had absolutely no fridge time it was started on day one it was baked on day two we're going to compare this loaf to these other two that were started on the same day from the same batch of dough and baked both ways to test now these are not full-sized loaves they are two-thirds the size i doubled my recipe and made one batch of dough divided that dough into three loaves to produce this so that we had fairly equivalent results they all started from the same starter same flower same water this loaf went straight from the refrigerator into the preheated dutch oven that had been in a 500 degree oven for an hour this loaf sat out on the countertop for two hours before it went into the 500 degree preheated dutch oven now visually there are some noticeable differences that we can see before we even slice into them this loaf that was made only over the course of the regular recipe with no refrigeration time is a beautiful perfect loaf it's perfectly proof there was no busting or anything like that it's just a gorgeous gorgeous loaf of bread these two loaves that spent time in the refrigerator are gonna have a more intense flavor that's just the way it goes when those yeasts slow down and have longer to do their work a lot more flavorful byproducts are produced now the loaf that went straight from the fridge into the oven shows signs of bursting right here across where we scored it you can see that now that's not a very pretty loaf even though i'm sure it's going to taste good but part of this happened not because of over or under proofing but because the refrigerator is a very dry environment and so the outside skin of the bread had dried out significantly and when i cut through it it kind of broke some of that can be moderated by covering the loaf with plastic wrap in the refrigerator to hold in the bread's moisture so that outside part of a loaf doesn't desiccate the thing that's interesting is that the loaf that spent two hours at room temperature didn't have nearly as much busting as the loaf from the fridge did and that is simply because as that loaf sat out at room temperature moisture from the inside of the dough migrated and rehydrated that skin so the skin wasn't so rough and didn't crack open but any kind of cracking like this does tell us that there is at least some amount of under proofing in the loaf and clearly it wasn't the first rise because these all had the exact same first rise duration which was 12 hours and this loaf had no cracking this means that the underproofing step happened in the refrigerator in essence these loaves went into the oven too soon they needed a little bit more time to proof or to rise so that that outside skin was large enough to accommodate the expansion of the inside of the bread what this tells me is for visual sake the longer the bread is out of the refrigerator at room temp the more it can expand and reduce this breaking or cracking in the outside of the loaf again that really is probably purely cosmetic and as long as you don't mind the look of a kind of janky loaf that's split open a bit going straight from the fridge into the oven is perfectly fine but if you're aiming for a perfectly beautiful loaf it looks like you should probably leave the loaf outside of the fridge for three to four hours before it goes into the preheated dutch oven now let's slice into all of these and look in the interior crumb here's our loaf that did not spend any time in the fridge and it's actually a day old because i baked it yesterday while these other two were spending time in the fridge so it's got a fairly nice crumb to it nice and moist springy smells delicious now to our loaf that went straight from the refrigerator into the oven the crust is nice and shattery of course because it was baked an hour ago and slightly more open crumb than the bread that was baked on the second day but otherwise not too much of a difference and now for our bread that warmed up for two hours outside the fridge before it was baked and honestly only slightly superior crumb to this other one that went straight in from the fridge we'll line these up right next to each other actually a fairly noticeably more open crumb than the loaf that came straight out of the fridge so it looks like our experiment proves that the quality of the bread is definitely going to improve if you let it sit outside of the refrigerator for at least two hours and i'm betting a full four hours outside of the fridge like you have on the normal schedule of the bread if it's not refrigerated is probably going to yield the best loaf of all another question i get asked a lot is can i add other things to this bread and the answer is absolutely actually very rarely bake this bread without adding something yummy to it my favorite thing to add is chopped up fresh rosemary from my garden but the sky's the limit you can stuff it full of garlic cloves either roasted or raw chopped up or whole one of my favorite things to do is pickle jalapenos with sharp cheddar cheese some people like to put chocolate chips olive bread pimento bread different seeds and nuts can go into the bread as well so there's really no limits to the modifications you can make to this recipe in terms of additions if you're mixing in additional ingredients you want to mix them in in the very beginning stage when you're mixing together the flour and the salt into the water and the starter you don't want to add your extra ingredients later after the first rise because as you're working them into the dough you're going to press out all that wonderful air that's been created by the first rice so add them in the very beginning the only thing i need to caution you about is if the ingredient you're adding to the bread is particularly salty like olives or very very salty cheese or jalapenos or anything like that then that can take the saltiness of this bread over the top because we already have an increased salt content intentionally because that helps us with flexibility in our timing so if you're going to add olives or anything else like that to the bread knock down the salt content to about half of an ounce instead of the three quarters of an ounce that'll help you balance it out also if you're adding an ingredient that's particularly moist like olives or artichoke hearts roasted green peppers hatch chilies or anything like that you might also back off just slightly maybe half an ounce on the water portion of the recipe because your wet ingredients are going to contribute extra moisture to that dough also keep in mind that many ingredients are going to contribute their own bacterial and yeast profiles to your dough especially if you're taking an ingredient in from the outdoors from the garden or something like that if you'll take a look right here this is the loaf of bread we started with sourdough starter that had not been fed in three months and you'll see it's not particularly boisterous but i started another loaf of bread with the exact same starter and you'll see quite a considerable difference in the rise and this is because this bread has sharp cheddar cheese in it and that sharp cheddar cheese is produced with its own bacterial and fungal profiles and it's contributing some of that to my dough and this long 24 hour rise that we've had has allowed the unique bacterial profiles and yeast from that cheese to really flourish inside the dough and we have a higher rise than we do on the other loaf that was made with the exact same starter which has really been starving for the last three months pretty interesting little side-by-side comparison there the last couple of questions i get deal with starter and the first one is answered very clearly in the video but a lot of people still ask do i need to feed my starter before i bake the bread no that is the entire point of this recipe it is supposed to be easy and you don't have to plan ahead for it you pull your starter out of the fridge even if it hasn't been fed in several weeks or even months and you measure out four ounces and you bake bread now if your starter is super sleepy like that yes it's gonna require a full 24 hours maybe a bit longer for the primary fermentation and it's going to take the full four hours or maybe five or even six before it goes into the oven that's fine but you do not need to feed your starter before you bake this bread you feed your starter when you get low on starter that way you're not discarding a bunch of starter which is super wasteful but a lot of people send me pictures of their starter and say i think i killed it it's covered in this nasty black goo this gross smelling liquid on top of it and i'm sure i need to create a new starter right no this is actually also a perfectly normal state for your starter to be in all this black liquid means is that your yeast are slumbering quite peacefully they've already chewed through as much food as they can go through and they're chilling out waiting for more now you don't even have to feed your starter at this state before baking bread all you need to do if your starter is in this state is to stir it back together to evenly distribute that water throughout the matrix measure out four ounces and you're good to go for baking bread now if your starter has gone to sleep like this you will achieve faster rise times if you'll go ahead and give it a feeding in this state but you don't have to now i don't want you to confuse the liquidy nature of this starter here for being a starter that's not at 100 hydration if your starter is this liquidy immediately after feeding it then yes you're feeding your starter a higher ratio of water to flower but over time the acidic component of the starter actually chews through those gluten bonds and it renders a texture that's a lot looser than it is immediately after you feed starter with fresh flour so don't think that you need to feed the starter extra flour when it has this texture after it's been in the fridge for several weeks or months that's perfectly normal just give a standard feeding of equal parts flour and water to at least double the weight of your starter now to prove that you can bake a great loaf of bread with starter that hasn't been fed in three months we're gonna do it so four ounces of this super old starving starter 12 ounces filtered water 1.4 ounces of flour had to open a new bag and three quarters ounce of salt now see how nice and stiff this dough is even though our starter was really liquidy that's because the starter had definitively equal parts of flour and water even though the gluten bonds and that starter had long since dissolved away due to the acidity all right it is 4 30 p.m here i am going to put the starter in a gallon size ziploc bag and we'll be back tomorrow to check out how it looks it has been 24 hours and as you can tell our loaf made with that starving starter that hadn't been fed in three months has definitely doubled now this is not the robust kind of a rise that you will see from a very mature starter that's been fed recently take a look at what that looks like right that ziploc bag is puffed up almost as tight as a balloon but i know from previous experience that this bread is going to bake up into a perfectly acceptable loaf and it's going to have a much richer more intense flavor because that starter is so old and that yeast have been fermenting for so long and breaking down all of their byproducts into flavorful compounds so it's time to form this into a loaf it feels nice and light and spongy which is really a good sign lots of good aeration in that loaf okay i've got it nice and tight here transfer it i'm using a small rising vessel because i'm actually going to bake this loaf in my smaller three to four quart dutch oven that's going to give it lots of support as it rises to give it as much you know strength around the edges as we possibly can if i knew that i was baking with a really robust starter that's been fed in the last several weeks i'll use my larger dutch oven now we'll take a look at this loaf in four hours and see if it's ready to be baked four hours later i have had an undisclosed amount of wine and look at our loaf it is absolutely gorgeous you guys this was made from starter that had not been fed in three months all right i've got my screaming hot dutch oven right here i'm going to go ahead and score the loaf with scissors carefully transfer it into that screaming hot dutch oven and get that in the oven and so we're going to pull it out of the oven and here we go gorgeous this is as beautiful a loaf of bread as it possibly gets and this is from a starter that has not been fed in over three months this is one of the starters that we created on my sourdough starter series back at the end of april it is now the end of august that's almost four months it's really really extraordinary i can tell that this bread is going to be unbelievably delicious because every time i have baked a starved loaf like this it's been utterly extraordinary but we're going to wait just a little bit to cut into it because i don't want it to get all gummy when we run the bread dive through it all right so i've got both loaves here that have fully cooled they were both made with that starter that had been starved for literally three months now we're going to cut into them and see how they look first off the pure loaf with no additions and that is absolutely gorgeous oh my god it smells so incredible and i know from previous experience exactly how delicious these loaves taste that are baked with those starved starters still can go ahead and take a bite just to tease you anybody that tells you you got a feed your starter every single day has no clue what they're talking about now i want to introduce you to a friend this my friends is 50 pounds worth of scientific knowledge about bread baking this is the world's foremost compendium of knowledge about the science of bread baking if you are willing to part with 600 of your hard-earned dollars which i gladly was and do not regret you too can own the world's vast and most comprehensive knowledge about the science of bread now these genius folks at modernist cuisine up in the pacific northwest literally spent years testing every single control factor in bread baking way more sophisticated than the sad that i do here in my kitchen right and from those years and years of research they created this there is no information more comprehensive about bread baking anywhere on planet earth but if you read this compendium and you should if you are very very serious about bread baking you should buy it and you should read every word i should know i've read it twice but if you read this the scientific knowledge contained herein will tell you that this recipe that i've shown you today contains too much salt it will kill the yeast and the yeast will not be able to produce a good loaf of bread within these volumes it will also tell you that you must feed your sourdough starter every 36 hours for to go longer than 36 hours between feedings will produce an inferior loaf this ladies and gentlemen is not inferior it is actually completely and utterly divine and all i did was ignore my sourdough starter for three months in the fridge and now for our final loaf also made with that starved starter which is chock full of pickled red jalapenos and extra sharp vermont cheddar cheese aged three years you know what i'm gonna take this baby to bed and nobody wants to see that i'm ben starr the ultimate food geek hit up my website at benstar.com my facebook at the ben star and subscribe to my youtube channel for more genius just like this have a great night

Channel: Ben Starr

Views: 193,758

Keywords: Do I have to feed my starter, Bread sticks to pan, bread sticks to Dutch oven, bread doesn't rise, sourdough doesn't rise, dough is too wet, sourdough is too wet, when to feed sourdough starter, easy sourdough

Id: zWGkUvS6ZCI

Length: 36min 57sec (2217 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020