Understanding Sourdough Bread Start to Finish | hydration, autolyse, bulk ferment, proofing, shaping

Bettie I am the baking instructor here on this channel and I also teach over on BakerBettie.com and here in Chicago through workshops in the area. now this video is going to be an addition to our sourdough series so if you're new to the series I actually created this to walk you step-by-step through the whole process of how to create a sourdough starter from scratch and then how to start baking with it. so in this video I'm going to assume that you already have an active sourdough starter ready to bake with and if you do not I will leave links for the other videos down in the description box so you can go back and watch the previous videos and get to this point now today what I really want to do is kind of talk through the whole process of a sourdough bread recipe because I know that can be really confusing for people there are literally a million different ways to approach sourdough bread so this is going to be more of a description of all of the different components of a sourdough recipe now a sourdough recipe is actually less a recipe than it is a combination of a formula and a timeline and like I said there's a lot of different ways to approach this so let's talk through all of the different steps so that you can have a really good understanding of it so you can create your own formulas and timelines or you can better understand other people's now the first important thing that you need to understand about sourdough bread is how to use Baker's percentages now I don't want this to scare you off because it does involve some math I'm gonna try to keep it really simple here but bakers percentages or Baker's math is used really commonly in bread recipes to calculate the bread formula now when you're calculating a baker's percentage no matter what quantity of flour you have in your recipe that quantity of flour is going to be set at 100% so for the purposes of talking through this let's say the flour in our recipe is 1000 grams of flour so that 1000 grams of flour is going to be our 100% total now every other ingredient in your recipe is going to be calculated as a percentage that relates to the flour so when you go down through a sourdough recipe the next ingredient is typically your water so the water in the recipe can vary widely in the amounts or the percentages that you're going to use in your recipe you might be anywhere from as low as 65% and you can go up a very very high in the 90% or even up to a hundred percent if you're working with a lot of whole grains so that variation is really big so just for the purposes of talking through this we're gonna say our water for this recipe is 750 grams now when you compare the 750 grams of water compared to the thousand grams of flour that is going to put our water at 75 percent now you might also hear this referred to as a 75 percent hydration dough now bakers frequently talk about the hydration of their dough because it is one of the biggest factors in changing the texture now moving on to the next ingredient that is going to be your active sourdough starter now again this can vary widely and how much you're going to put in your dough, bakers percentage-wise, sometimes you might go as low as 5% sourdough starter and you can go up much higher than that so for the purposes of talking through this recipe we're going to put the sourdough starter at 200 grams which would be 20% now the salt typically lies around 2% and that can change a little bit if you have preferences and you like a little bit of a less salty bread you can reduce that a little bit but 2% is pretty standard now that's really it for most sourdough bread recipes flour water sourdough starter and salt now it's also important to note that your sourdough starter is usually a 100 percent hydration starter which means it is half flour and half water so if we put 200 grams of that starter into our loaf of bread 100 grams of it is flour and 100 grams of it is water which means if you're trying to calculate true final baker's percentages you do need to calculate those in your total flour and your total water amounts but for the purposes of just getting started with sourdough baking I would not worry about that too much so now that we hopefully have a general understanding of how bakers percentages work I want to talk through two bread formulas to show you some different things with each because depending on the hydration you do kind of work with different dough's a little bit differently so a batch of dough that starts with a thousand grams of flour is enough to make two really nice sized loaves so for these recipes we're going to start with 500 grams of flour so that each one makes one loaf so for the first recipe we are going to start with 500 grams of flour which puts that at our 100% and I want to make a 65% hydration dough for this first loaf so we're going to use a 325 grams of flour and then I'm going to keep my starter at the same 20% so I'm going to use 100 grams of starter and then again I'm going to keep the salt of the same at 2% so we're going to use 10 grams of salt now for our second loaf we are only going to change the hydration and for this one we are going to go up to 75% hydration so again we're going to start with 500 grams of flour which is our 100% we are going to add to that 375 grams of water which puts us at 75% and then again 20% for our starter which is 100 grams and 2% for our salt which is 10 grams okay now that we have both of our dough formulas that we are going to work with today let's go ahead and get started on the process of making our sourdough bread now the very first step in your bread process is you need to feed your starter so hopefully you already have an active sourdough starter and you need to get it ready to bake with you need to have your starter at this stage where it's really bubbly and vigorous before it goes into a dough now after I feed my starter it usually gets to this point around the six-hour mark and it will stay there up to about the 10 or 11-hour mark before it starts falling and I would need to feed it again because it's not going to be active enough to go into a dome now if you have followed my whole sourdough series you have seen me feed my starter and I do that same feeding when I am prepping to bake a loaf of bread now there are a lot of different ratios people use to feed their starters but the most common is to keep it a 100% hydration starter which means when you feed it you will use equal amounts of flour and water by weight now I also feed my starter a-133 feeding which means however much starter I keep I feed it three times that amount in flour and water by weight now this is just a personal preference I find that it keeps my starter fed long enough that I can wait a full 24 hours before I feed it again so since I am making two loaves of bread for this tutorial and I needed 200 grams of total starter to go into my dough I decided to start with 40 grams of start and I found that 120 grams of flour 40 of that being whole wheat flour and 80 grams of that being all-purpose flour and then 120 grams of barely warm water now that gives me 280 grams total starter and 200 of that is going to go into my dough and then I'll have just about 80 grams left over for my next feeding and you just want to stir that up really well and let it sit at room temperature until really bubbly before putting it in your dough now the next step is technically optional but I highly recommend not skipping it because it can really make a huge difference in the quality of your bread and this step is the auto lease now this is just a fancy word for mixing your flour and water together before you add your other ingredients now there are a lot of things that are happening during this auto lease stage but the main thing that's happening is you are allowing your flour to fully hydrate because the salt is not there to prevent it from absorbing all of the water the second thing that's happening is your gluten structure is going to start developing without you having to do any work so I'm going to go ahead and add Elise both of the flowers for my dough and I'm actually going to use 450 grams of bread flour and 50 grams of whole wheat flour to get to that total 500 for both of my dough's I really like a little bit of whole wheat flour in all of my breads not enough that it makes it taste like a whole wheat bread but just a little bit of whole grain it can give so much flavor now for my first dough again like I said I'm adding 325 grams of water this water is at room temperature and for my other dough I am adding 375 grams of water now I'm going to mix these together I'm not trying to knead the dough here I'm just trying to fully hydrate and saturate the flour now at this stage if you try to pull on the dough and see if it has any stretch to it it is just going to immediately rip because we just hydrated the flour there is absolutely no gluten development at this point but after we rest this mixture or let it auto lease you are going to see such a huge difference in just giving it a little bit of time to rest now if you are going to do this step you want to give it at least 20 minutes for it to really do some work for you and you can let it go much longer up to two hours I typically go about an hour and i watch my starter to see when it's almost ready to use in about an hour before that I will go ahead and auto lease my flower now to check if your sourdough starter is ready to put in a dough you can do what's called the float test and all you have to do is take a glass of water and very gently scoop out a little bit of your starter be very careful not to push the bubbles out when you do this and just drop it in your cup of water now if that floats your starter is vigorous enough to go ahead and go into a dough it's going to work great to help your bread rise but if it sinks down to the bottom you either need to let it rest for a little bit longer to get more active or you maybe have waited too long and it has started to fall in your jar and it's starting to get hungry so it's probably not going to work very well at that point to leaven your bread dough now it's been about an hour for both of these dough's and I want you to see how much this has changed you'll see that the texture of this dough is so much different from when we first mixed it and if you start pulling up on it and trying to stretch it there is so much more extensibility to the dough and that is the gluten structure that is starting to build just from letting it rest without the salt so since our starter is really nice and active we can go ahead and start mixing that into our bread dough so I'm going to add 100 grams of this starter to both of my dough's and to start mixing it in I like to take my fingers and kind of dimple it in all over my dough and then I'm gonna fold the dough over itself to sort of encase the starter in and start getting it mixed in now we can go ahead and add our salt and I'm just going to sprinkle that 10 grams of salt over the top of each of my dough's and then to mix it I like to use what's called the pincer method so you're going to take your hand and literally start pinching your dough all over to start working that salt and sourdough starter in more after you've done a bunch of pinching motions you can also start folding the dough and then continue pinching and folding some more until your dough is really cohesive and all of those ingredients are really well mixed in I like to do a good two minutes of mixing just to make sure everything is really really well combined now that our dough is a really well mixed we are going to move on to the next step of the process which is building our gluten structure now if you have seen my no need bread video I did not mess with this dough anymore after I mixed it until we were ready to shape it now for that recipe we were just letting time build our gluten structure for us and that is a somewhat effective way to work with a bread dough time is going to build that gluten structure somewhat but if you're working with a higher hydration dough or you want a taller more structured loaf doing some work on the dough is going to give you a better structure so for our 65% hydration dough we are actually going to knead this dough this is a low enough hydration that it can tolerate us kneading it by hand so I'm going to work on kneading this dough by hand for about 10 minutes now if you do have a stand mixer with a dough hook you can also do that but I just personally prefer to knead by hand now for our 75% hydration dough we are going to do what is called the stretch and fold method now this method is used typically for higher hydration dough's it is a more of a gentle process of building our gluten structure especially when your dough is too wet to knead it by hand so for our 75% Shindo I'm actually just going to set that aside I'm going to let it rest for about 30 minutes before I start my first stretch and fold so I'll show you that when it's time now one thing I didn't mention when we were talking about bakers percentages is when you might want to use a lower percent hydration and when you might want to use a higher percent hydration now a lower percent hydration is going to give you a dough that is workable enough that you can knead it now the benefit of this is after you knead the dough you have a really long period of time in which you do not need to touch your dough again before you shape it now in our higher hydration dough's when we are going to do our stretch and fold method there's not a lot of work you need to do for the dough but you do need to tend it to it for a few hours after you have mixed it so if your schedule doesn't work out for that method that's when you might want to go with a lower hydration and just go ahead and knead your dough upfront so you don't have to tend to it for a few hours now there are a few different benefits of a higher hydration dough if you really like working with a lot of whole grains those grains are going to absorb more water and so it's more beneficial to have a higher hydration in order to have still a really nice texture of your dough also higher hydration dough's can just tend to have a more moist and nicer crumb it's also a little bit easier to get that really nice open structure crumb that sourdough bakers are always after when you go higher hydration but if you're just starting out you definitely don't want to push the hydration level too much because it's really hard to work with really wet dough's if you're new to that so I would say start at a lower hydration and just kind of work your way up as you get more experienced okay so I am done needing my 65% hydration dough here you might have noticed that I did not use any extra flour with kneading I really wanted to keep that hydration level true to what it was and so I just worked with it I worked through the stickiness and it got really smooth and elastic and a check if dough is done being needed I'm just gonna do what's called a windowpane test here so I'm gonna cut off a piece of dough and I'm just stretching it to see if I can get it really nice and thin thin enough that I can see some light through it and that's just a sign of a really nice and solid gluten structure so now that I'm done kneading it I am going to just put it in my bowl and cover it and it is going to move into our bulk fermentation phase okay so now for our 75% hydration dough we are going to do our first round of stretch and folds so this is a super easy process all you have to do is get your hand damp and then you're going to scoop underneath the dough and pull a section of it up stretching it as far as it can handle it without ripping and then you're gonna fold that piece of dough over the top of itself now turn your bowl about 90 degrees and go ahead and repeat this process going all the way around the bowl now as you do this you will start to see that that ball of dough is starting to tighten up and kind of hold its structure better so you want to continue doing this stretch in folds until it is holding into a pretty tight round ball and then you're gonna cover the bowl and let it rest again now as you can see after the dough rest for 20 to 30 minutes it will have sort of flattened out again and relaxed so it's going to tighten back up again as you do those stretch and folds now this process is achieving the same thing that kneading our dough does we're building strength and a strong gluten structure in our dough so that it can trap in all of those gases that the sourdough culture is creating as it feeds in our dough now I like to try to do about four rounds of stretch and folds to build the structure of my dough for most dough's that is enough now you want to do this about every twenty to thirty minutes within about the first two hours after you mix the final dough so after you've added your starter and your salt then you're going to go ahead and do your stretch and folds now I'm going to show you here how you can kind of check to see if you need to continue doing more ten folds you're going to do the windowpane test just like we did with our kneaded dough kind of towards the end of your stretching folds maybe on the third or fourth round you can check it and see how much your dough has developed and then you can decide if you need to add another round higher hydration does sometimes need a few more rounds sometimes I'll do five or six rounds but you'll just have to see how your dough is developing now after the gluten structure is built both dough's are going to move into the bulk fermentation phase now actually this phase starts after your starter and salt is added so technically your dough that is going through stretch and folds is already in the bulk fermentation stage as you are building the gluten structure so those two steps kind of coincide as you're building the gluten structure now your kneaded dough gets needed immediately and then it goes through bulk fermentation now the bulk fermentation phase can vary widely and how long it needs to go for and it depends mostly on the temperature of your room and also how much starter you decided to put in your dough now for this dough we put 20% in with our Baker's percentages and I usually let a dough like that go for about six hours now depending on how much you put in some people will put much less in and it might bulk firm it up to twelve or fourteen hours and that is going to give you a dough that's a more sour and flavor so that's something you can kind of play around with when you are working on your own dough formulas so I'm going to let these dough's finish bulk fermenting for about three-and-a-half to four more hours now remember we are already partway through that six hour time period because we were doing the stretch and fold during the first few hours so the way you can check to see if your dough is finished bulk fermenting is you want to look to see for signs of fermentation so hopefully you will see some bubbles on top of your dough your dough should be larger in size it's probably not going to be quite double in size the way a dough that is made with dried yeast might be but it should be larger in size and it should look like it's filled with some air now you can also do the float test just like we did with our sourdough starter so for this test we're going to very gently cut off a piece of dough and drop it in a glass of water to see if it floats and if it does you are good to start shaping if it doesn't give it a little bit longer now again you need to be very gentle when you do the float test don't press the air out of the dough otherwise it will never float so now that we're done a bulk fermenting our dough we can go ahead and move on to shaping now there is an optional step right before the final shaping that is called the pre shape now I always do this if I'm not in a rush and I highly recommend you doing it this is where you very gently shape your dough slightly round it into a ball and then you let it rest for another 15 to 20 minutes now what this does is it just lets the dough start forming into shape but then let it relax so that when you do your final shaping it doesn't want to fight you and it works with you to get in that shape and hold its structure really nicely now when you dump your dough out of the bowl to do your pre shape you do want to be really careful that you are not deflating a lot of air out of it you want to preserve as much air in it as you possibly can this is a little bit different from other yeast dough's where you often press all of the gas out of it before you shape it we do not want to do that here we're trying to preserve as much as we can now when I do my pre shape I do basically the same thing I do with my final shape I just don't build quite as much tension so I'm going to do what's called a letter fold where I sort of stretch out the dough on one side bring it in towards the center stretch it on the other side bring it in towards the center do that on all four sides of the dough flip it over and then very gently around it into a circle then I let it rest for about 15 to 20 minutes before I do my final shape now that our dough has rested for about 20 minutes after our pre shape we can go ahead and move on to doing the final shape now it's really important when you're shaping dough that you don't really have a lot of flour down on your counter top because we actually want the dough to stick slightly to the countertop so that you can build some tension as you are shaping now again I like to do the letter fold method where I give a little bit of tension on each side of the dough bringing it into to the center and then flip that over and round it into a nice taut ball this takes some practice especially if you're not used to working with wet dough's you can see that my 65% hydration dough is actually pretty easy to shape I really don't need to struggle with it too much but my 75% hydration dough is definitely a little stickier you can put some flour on top of the dough you just don't want that flour on the counter top so that can help you shape it a little better but this is just something you're gonna have to practice now that my dough's are shape I'm going to dust my banneton basket with some rice flour and if you're new to working with banneton baskets I have a whole video about how you can work with them how to prep them how to care for them so I will link that below as well I'm going to flip my dough over upside down so that the steam side is up and that nice rounded side is down in the basket and I'm going to cover them with my shower caps to let them move into the proofing phase now our next step is proofing and this is where our dough rises again it gains a little more volume before it gets baked now hopefully if you were really careful in preserving as much air as you could when you did your shaping you don't really need to gain that much more volume in your dough so depending on how well you did that you might have 30 minutes up to a few hours of proofing before you go in the oven now to check to see if your dough is finished proofing you can get a little bit of flour on your fingers press in on the dough about a half inch in and see how quickly that hole fills in if it very very quickly fills in kind of springs back up you need to give your dough a little bit more time to gain some volume now if that hole really slowly it fills back in the you are good to go it is ready to bake now there is another optional step that you can add in this process and that is retarding your dough now you can technically do this at any point in the bread making process but I really like to do it right before I bake my bread so after I shape it I let it sit on the counter for maybe about thirty minutes usually it only needs a little bit of time to get some more air in it and then I go ahead and put it in the refrigerator to retard now the cold temperature is really gonna slow down that yeast activity so it doesn't overproof and get too much air in it but it does let the bacterial activity continue which is what creates all the acidity in your dough and gives you that really delicious sour flavor so typically after I have proof my dough I put it in the refrigerator I let it retard for about 16 hours this also really firms up the dough so that when I turn it out of my banneton basket to go in the oven it's going to hold its shape really nicely so now that we're almost ready to bake our bread we need to prep our oven and my favorite thing to bake bread in is in a Dutch oven now the reason why a pot is really nice to bake bread in is that seal on the lid is going to trap in all the steam from your dough which keeps the crust moist and allows it to rise as much as it can before that crust sets so you're going to put your duct oven or oven safe pot in the oven and preheat it to 450 degrees now you want to let this preheat for a good 45 minutes to an hour that's going to give your oven enough time to get completely hot and to really really heat up your Dutch oven so I like to use a piece of parchment paper and I'm just very gently going to tip my dough out onto it and then I'm going to use my bread lame to score it now a bread lame is a razor blade on the end of a stick it helps you get really nice precise cuts in your bread and scoring your dough serves the purpose of allowing the dough to really open up and get tall in the oven it also tells the dough where to open up if you don't score your note it's going to open up anyway and it's going to just pick a spot to do that so scoring it tells it where to go and it allows it to get that really nice rise on it now once I scored my dough I immediately put it into my hot Dutch oven being very very careful not to burn myself and I put the lid on it and go right into the oven I like to bake with my lid on for about the first 30 minutes then I take the lid off and let it finish baking until it gets a really really nice dark golden brown I like a really nice dark crust but you can go as light or as dark as you like now the last step in the bread baking process which some people think is optional but I'm going to tell you it's not optional is letting your bread cool completely before you slice it I know this is a very difficult step it's so tempting to cut into hot bread it smells amazing you just want to taste it but I promise being patient and waiting until it cools is so worth it letting your bread cool completely is going to help trap all of the moisture in if you cut into it while it's still hot it's going to release all that moisture it's going to stale really quickly the texture of your bread is also going to be pretty gummy and you actually release a lot of flavor out of your dough if you don't let it cool completely so I say at the very very minimum let it cool an hour but really it's much better if you at least go for hours I typically try to schedule my bakes to where I bake in the evening or afternoon and then I'm gonna slice into it the next morning for breakfast now I want to cut into both of these breads to show you the difference between that 65% hydration dough and this 75% hydration dough now remember the only thing different about both of these breads is the amount of water in them and the way I built the gluten structure so all of the other ingredients are the same and the timelines are exactly the same now you can see that 65% hydration dough it's a beautiful bread but it has a little more of a closed structure than my 75% hydration dough my 75% hydration dough is a little more moist it has a little bit more of an open chrome structure now I really really hope this video was helpful for you I know it's a lot of information I know the sourdough world can be a little intimidating but just take it one step at a time and continue experimenting that is the best way to learn and I'm always happy to answer any of your questions you can leave those down in the comment section make sure and give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and if you're not subscribed hit that subscription button and ring the notification bell I'll see you all next time with another video bye

Channel: Baker Bettie

Views: 616,148

Keywords: sourdough, sourdough starter, sourdough bread, artisan bread, beginner sourdough bread, autolyse, baker's percentage, baker's math, bulk ferment, proofing, how to make sourdough, scoring bread, josh weismann, bake with jack, sourdough intensive, sourdough masterclass, sourdough hydration, stretch and fold, how to make sourdough bread, sourdough process, sourdough process explained, kneading sourdough, baker bettie, baker bettie sourdough, sourdough science

Id: Qf1mHXKNDHc

Length: 31min 25sec (1885 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020