TWO reasons your sourdough doesn't SPRING like this 👆

all right so two days of the sourdough process has led up to this moment the most exciting part of baking sourdough the oven spring where dreams are made and dreams are also crushed so let's take a look at what's going on under this lid oh yes oh yes beautiful oven spring nice and light and fluffy turn that off now a lot of first-time bakers beginner bakers their bread might not look like this and i know that because thousands of people have sent me in their bread photos especially early on in their journey and their bread just isn't perfect it's decent but it's not great and they're looking to take it to the next level and i always recommend two things two things that i've learned over the years that once corrected really enhances your bread from good to great and that's what this video is about i'm gonna be taking you through the entire sourdough bread baking journey but i'm going to be isolating two main steps breaking them down in depth talking about the proper techniques you need to really take your bread from decent to fantastic sourdough at home now back in the oven to get nice and crusty so a few years ago i apprenticed at a bakery in brooklyn and i learned a lot about sourdough bread baking and when i was done they gave me some of their starter that they had been feeding every day and cultivating for years and i went home and baked bread with it and it turned out incredible tasted just like the bread that i had in the bakery and i realized in that moment how important having a really well-fed active sourdough starter is and to help you who really understand why that is so critical i'm gonna break down some very simple sourdough starter science so this right here is my sourdough starter and it's just flour and water mixed together to create a colony filled with yeast and bacteria which will naturally leaven our bread so to make it well we start off with a vessel of some sort and like i said before we've got water and we have flour coming together these are the only two ingredients you need now we mix these together in equal parts and we get a dough just like this but we don't have much activation in here just yet so what's crazy about living here on earth is we have these microorganisms that are hanging out just everywhere in the air in the flower and what we're doing with this sourdough starter is by mixing the flour and water we're creating the perfect environment for two of them to really thrive we have yeast here and we have bacteria and the reason they love this environment is because when we mix water and flour together the yeast and the bacteria well they can feed off the sugars that are available in the starch they munch up on those sugars and the byproduct that they release basically their farts are co2 that's the gas that's released which gives our bread air but also as they eat the sugars they replicate so when we keep feeding every day flour and water we start to bring in more of these yeast more of these bacteria and our environment gets a little more active and then the yeast and bacteria run out of food we feed them more flour and water they feed off the sugars more action they start to multiply and our colony gets a little bit more active and this is the reason why we have to be disciplined with our starter when we're making bread we have to keep feeding these microorganisms that flour and water every day so they get their food so they can thrive just like humans we're creating the perfect environment for them to really thrive and multiply to the point where your sourdough starter is nice and bubbly you're getting a great rise and it's pretty much overflowing out of your vessel so constant feeding of your sourdough starter every day really keeping up with it is what's going to give you that nice active colony of yeast and bacteria which will then lead to really good bread but if you're starting completely from scratch or you're just struggling getting a nice active sourdough starter you can click this link right here and download my free pdf of my ultimate sourdough starter guide which really holds your hand through the entire process so now that we understand a sourdough starter i have to feed mine to get it active to make some bread so i'm going to take 85 grams of my sourdough starter and feed it 100 grams of all-purpose bread flour and 100 grams of water now i'm not super picky on getting exact water temps when it comes to making bread but it is worth having an awareness of the temperature of your water because it can dramatically affect your fermenting time so generally i'll just go by feel and something around room temperature is a nice controlled sample for me now my sourdough starter mixer of choice is an oversized chopstick this thing gets the job done and once it's well incorporated it should look something like this almost a thick cake batter which is a 100 hydration sourdough starter and i'll just use that chopstick to really scrape down the sides so i have a nice window into the activation process [Music] so my starter is fully activated you can see it's slightly rounded on the edges can you see that there's a bit of an ellipse there you don't want it concave that means you've run out of fuel you want it just at the top and i started it at 7 00 am and now it's 11 30 so it's been about four and a half hours but just remember your starter might activate completely different depending on how powerful it is and also the temperature of your house the temperature of your water there's a lot of variables to keep in mind but we are ready to make some dough you can do this by feel of course i'm gonna use a scale to give you a better understanding of measurements and i will tar that with this bowl on top and i'm gonna start off with some whole wheat flour this is going to be a predominantly a white flour low so it's going to be nice and fluffy but i do like a little bit of whole wheat in there just for flavor so i'm just going to do 100 grams of that and then i'm going to go in with bread flour now this is white all-purpose bread flour and i'm gonna take that measurement up to 700 grams because i know that 700 grams is what two of my proofing baskets can handle since i've baked with these ratios before now the beautiful thing about using a scale is that once you have this flower measurement all i have to do is pick my hydration levels which i'm going to go at about 80 percent hydration so if i take that 700 and multiply it by 0.80 560 grams is the amount of water i need to get me to an 80 hydration dough oops i didn't tar that so 700 plus 560. all right i need to get to 1260 since i didn't tar that i'm actually stopping just a little before 80 hydration because this is a hundred percent hydration this starter so that will increase the percentage just a little bit all right one quick thing i want to cover is auto lease which you've seen me do if you've watched any other sourdough videos now auto lease is the process of mixing these two ingredients together without your yeast yet and just letting them sit and what happens is once the h2o hits the flour those gluten bonds start to develop and you're giving this dough a head start before the yeast goes in but to be honest i've been making loaves recently without auto leasing and they've been coming out great so i'm going to skip that step right now and go straight in with the sourdough starter tar that i will just add a big old gloop of this we'll see how much it comes out to anywhere from 10 to 20 percent sourdough starter that's 160 grams that's totally fine 10 to 20 of this number right here everything goes off that top number the 700 grams now finally your last ingredient is your salt actually i'm going to use a better salt for this i do prefer using a fine sea salt it's just going to have a much better time incorporating into this dough compared to a coarse crystallized salt like this and to get the salt ratio the salt is always around two percent of your flour again everything going off that flour so i'm going to take 700 multiply it by 0.20 14 grams of salt oops went a little over that's totally fine i did 18 grams and there your baker percentage is right there it's going to give me two loaves you can follow this exact recipe or you can adjust it to your own liking all right now this is a dough whisk a lot of people ask what this is does a great job at just bringing this dough together you just want to make sure all that water is hydrated into that dough so now that this is mixed together i'm just going to take a wet rag which i like using throughout this entire process to just keep the dough damp and i will leave that for about 10 minutes to just let everything relax let all those glutens chill out for a bit right because this dough is super sticky i'm gonna start off with just a few slap and folds and you'll see i'll have this water bottle or water sprayer here it really creates a beautiful non-stick surface on your hands where this really wet high hydration dough is not gonna stick too much to your hands i mean you'll get some sticking but so i'll just give it a few slap and folds right now since it's super loose and that gluten has not done much bonding yet but you can already tell it's starting to get smoother after just a few folds and some resting time so i'm just gonna let that sit pop this on and i'll come back to it in 30 minutes from now on we're going to be taking 30 minute intervals to work this dough 30 minutes later you can see how much the dough has relaxed i'm going to skirt my hands you can always give the dough a squirt too i'm not really gonna slap and fold i'm just gonna do some coil folds like that pretty much just wrapping the dough and you can see that the structure is already getting better the dough is getting smoother and the dough after just a few fold-overs will start to resist a bit you don't want to over stretch this dough you don't want to rip it once it starts resisting that's when you know you're good to go to just let it rest do you see how quickly that dough transformed we're so used to kneading dough and overworking dough from like standard pizza doughs that it almost seems counterintuitive to be gentle with it but just time and a little bit of work will really transform this dough into something nice so i'm going to give it another 30 minutes we'll check back in soon all right let's spray you can see continuing to gain structure holding its shape just a little more every time and this might be the final folding that we need let's see so you can see this dough is really smooth it hasn't gained much volume hasn't really proved but the feel of it the structure is coming along very nicely so we're ready for the next phase which is the bulk rise add a little bit of oil just to help it from not sticking to the sides and then we'll just toss that right into the container so that brings me into the second biggest issue i see all the time with sourdough bakers especially beginners when you're using a sourdough starter for the first time and you're getting used to it it takes time for this next process to really kick in which is the bulk rise process a lot of people are used to things like instant yeast or rapid yeast so the bulk rice process is when they tell you to let the dough double in size and when you're using an instant yeast that process happens really quickly so you can watch it and pretty much see it happening before your eyes so it's really easy to nail down it's why people love instant yeast it speeds up that process but while speeding up that process of course you're losing flavor which is the beauty of slowing down that process but what i see is when people start getting into sourdough for the first time they're just not used to that slow fermentation process and they end up under fermenting their dough under proofing their dough so having a container like this has completely revolutionized my sourdough baking even for someone like me who's been baking forever it's really nice to see exactly what's happening so when it goes from one liter you can see the peak of it is just above that one liter mark when it's up around that two liter mark the peak we know this thing has doubled in size and we can cut off this bulk rise so i don't know how long that's going to take again we've got variables temperature of your dough temperature of your environment activity in your starter so many things that's why it's great to have a container like this to deal with those variables so you can see i didn't quite make it to the two liter mark but that's totally fine anywhere between that sort of 75 and 100 increase is gonna do you just fine and just like the starter we still have a rounded top so it's still growing leaving a little room for the next stage the shaping and the proofing so you can see a lot of volume in this dough i'm gonna keep it wet for this stage i'm not adding any flour and i'll split this in two now what we're doing here is just to pre-shape so i'm going to kind of shape it out into rectangles and we'll do the same sort of coil folds and then we'll just fold over and link these together just give these a rough shaping boom now that's just the pre-shape take a wet cloth and i'll let those sit for about 20 minutes and we'll do the final shaping all right so notice that these are holding up pretty well they didn't completely sag and that's just on the pre-shape so that's a good sign that structurally i'm in good shape so this is the first time that i'll be incorporating some flour because these are going to get shaped and go in these vanities i have two batard shaped banana tins same size and they need to be floured up to make them not stick you can't put wet dough in here or you'll have a lot of issues so i'll just kind of sprinkle some flour now i'll move one to the side i'm gonna not use that i'm gonna use a proper bench scraper for this much better so really i'll do the same technique here do one fold over one fold that way and now we've got a nice log we'll start doing some of these crossovers it's feeling nice and tight and then we will roll this up and tuck and start pulling with some tension and this is going to take practice of course don't expect to get that on the first shot i'm still improving every time i make bread now i'm just tucking in those seams so i have a nice rounded got some sesame seeds right here i'm gonna go seam down on that and then right into that so i put the seam down and then i'll go around with some flour this is really important you want to make sure because you can dust off this flower but you want to make sure that when this proofs out in the basket it doesn't stick to the side that's a common mistake and when i push on this it springs all the way back showing me of course that this is not proofed [Music] so you can let those loaves sit out at room temperature and proof for one to three hours until they pass the proof test and then bake them but i like letting them sit in the fridge overnight for that long slow fermentation you're gonna gain a little extra flavor and also just baking bread in the morning waking up to that is one of my favorite things to do so i will see those loaves in the morning as you can see they've proofed nicely the best way to check if they're ready to go in the oven is a poke test so i'll poke in there and you see how it springs back but still leaves a little dent show you again over here springs back just a little bit but there's still a dent [Music] [Applause] so our pan has been preheating for about 45 minutes whoa oops we're ready to go i got some parchment paper which makes it easy to transport to the pan very easy let's see what we got here all right see how it slips right out because i used all that flour but since there is a lot of excess flour i'm gonna dust it off do a little excavation process i always like this part just those big clotted up chunks we're gonna dust off and then once you have the big chunks off you don't want to bake that flour because it will burn get it right off the parchment now i'm gonna bring in my pan it's just the bottom half of course and i'll pop this right on there rather than score it on the side i'm just going to score it right down the center since it's a high hydration it's just easier to score right down the center not the prettiest score but it will do the job and then i'll pop the top on and into the oven and i'll set the timer for the first part of the baking for 20 minutes and then we'll remove the top this is what it's all about my friends did we make good bread the oven spring really good puff there oh look at that that's a nice pop so i'm gonna put that back in the oven and i'm going to turn the oven down i've been going at 475 recently for a little darker crust and i'll start that for 20 minutes i might go longer we will see all right let's see where we are at 20 more minutes it's a beautiful looking loaf so color wise i could go a little more on the toasty side but i think i'm gonna pull it [Music] round two oh no i left the lid cracked that's not good oh my goodness all right well that's a mistake i've never made weird it puffed but like i mean i really don't think it would be sourdough bread baking at home without some type of to be honest it's just part of the game and it's kind of what makes the process so addicting i don't think i'm ever satisfied when i bake there's always something i can tinker with obviously this was a big a big mess up on my end but it does show you how important it is to have something like a dutch oven because without that steam locked in look at the shaping of this and look at the color like whoa you really see the difference there but let's slice into the good one and see what we have crispy crispy crispy crispy oh boy you can feel right when you slice into that we've got a treasure on the inside beautiful stuff right there super there's a moistness you don't want to overcook your bread that's something i've really been focusing on recently i like a moist crumb and it will dry out the longer you keep it in the oven my friends my friends my friends [Music] that's a moist crumb taste test and we'll get out of here remember if you want to master your starter download my free pdf right there obviously there's a lot of variables at play when it comes to making really good sourdough but the two i've highlighted today they've definitely made the biggest difference from just troubleshooting so many loaves over the past few years from all of you and all of my students in sourdough u so hopefully this helps let me know if it does help in the comments below and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 824,562

Keywords: sourdough bread, how to make sourdough, sourdough fail, fix sourdough, bad sourdough, sourdough troubleshooting, perfect sourdough, mike g sourdough, pro home cooks sourdough, beginners sourdough, sourdough science, make perfect bread at home, sourdough recipe for beginners, sourdough starter, how to make a starter, perfect sourdough recipe, bulk rise, flat sourdough, not rising sourdough

Id: 7W3TwaIAlLo

Length: 21min 29sec (1289 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021