C. Keith Gierman

Ramblings and Observations

I thought for this post I would share some things I have learned so far during this journey. Mainly this will be about what I have discovered about what I like and don’t like and what I have found works for me. I am still experimenting and learning so what I post here could change over time.

First, I’ve discovered I like mild sourdough breads as opposed to “sour” sourdough breads. That means low inoculations of starter and a young leaven. It also means I keep my starter mild by discarding most of it each day and feeding it a lot each day. When I first open my starter each morning it smells very “wheaty”. There is no acidic or sour smell at all. On the rare occasions I have missed a feeding, the next day that sour smell is already there. It also means that my starter stays on the counter and not in the fridge. There are two acids that naturally form in starters, lactic acid and acetic acid. At room temperature mainly lactic acid forms (think milk). At refrigerator temperatures mainly acetic acid forms (think vinegar). That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t store my starter in the fridge if I was going away for a week or two. I would, however, leave it on the counter and refresh it daily for at least a week before baking bread when I got home.

I find I like the flavor of bread with slow fermentation, say 8 hours, compared to a shorter fermentation or 4 hours. Two main factors impact fermentation time. Temperature and how much starter is used. Some of the first sourdough breads I baked called for both a 3+ day old cold fermented pre-ferment plus a large amount of starter in the dough. While the flavor was good, my wife and I prefer the flavor of the Tartine Country Sourdough that gets all of its leavening from an overnight leaven that has a small inoculation of starter. We also prefer it with an 7 or 8 hour fermentation at room temperature, 67F, that a 4 hour fermentation in the proofer at 78F.

My longest fermenting bread dough, so far, was the rye bread I posted a few weeks ago. That went 6 hours in the fridge and 14 hours on the counter. That was also the highest hydration dough I have worked with at 83%. It was awesome tasting.

Bakers percentage is an interesting tool that makes life easier for the baker once they get used to working in grams. It simply refers to the total weight of flour in a formula as 100% and the percentage each other ingredients weight is of the total flour weight.

In the case of Tartine Country Sourdough the total flour is 1000 grams (100%), bread flour 900 grams (90%), Whole Wheat flour (10%), water is 750 grams (75%), leaven is 200 grams (20%) and salt is 20 grams (2%).

Where the percentage also comes in handy is when experimenting with converting a yeasted bread in cups and liquid ounces to a sourdough bread in grams. Once the original recipe is converted to grams, the bakers percentages can then be calculated. From that point a percentage can be chosen for the amount of starter or leaven, say 20%. Take 20% of the flour weight and that is the amount of starter or leaven to use. Either starter or leaven will be 50% flour and 50% water so we now know how many grams of each are in the starter. If we subtract the flour in the starter from the original amount of flour and the grams of water from water in the original recipe we should be left with a dough with the same amount of flour and water with no yeast needed for leavening. Not all yeasted breads can be converted to sourdough but a basic yeast, water, flour and salt recipe without too many other ingredients should work.

The other place knowing the bakers percentages can help is in scaling a recipe. For example, You have a sandwich loaf recipe that calls for a 4-1/4” x 8-1/2” bread pan but you only have 5” x 9” pan. The original amount of dough would bake up fairly flat in the larger pan. The first pan is roughly 36 square inches while the second is 45 square inches or 25% larger. So if we multiply the flour by 1.25 to get a new flour amount and use the bakers percentages to calculate the amounts for the remaining ingredients, we should have dough that bakes up to a nice height in the larger pan.

When I first started baking recipes from Northwest Sourdough, I observed that my dough when first mixed looked much stiffer than Teresa’s did. It finally occurred to me that since I was using different flours than she uses, my flour was probably absorbing more water than the flour she uses. I started adding extra water a few grams at a time until I got a dough that looked the the dough in the videos. I had much better results from then on. So now I know that if I’m going to make a new recipe from one of her courses that I need to add a couple extra percent of water.

That’s enough rambling for this post. I need to get working on a formula for this weeks bread.

This Weeks Bread

This week I finally got smart and mixed together 500 grams each of King Arthur All Purpose Flour and their White Whole Wheat Flour and put it in an empty container to use for refreshing my starter. That simple and now obvious act seems to have saved me several minutes a day when refreshing my starter. The time consuming part of that process is scooping out the discard starter and getting it into the wastebasket without making a mess.

This week I am making another variation based on Tartine Country Sourdough. This has become my favorite bread to make. The change this week is to substitute whole rye flour for half of the whole wheat flour. I want to see if that small amount of rye flour has an impact on the taste of the bread. I am hoping for some added complexity to the flavor.

The Formula

Ingredient	Amount	Bakers %
The Leaven
Starter	10 g	10%
Water	100 g	100%
50-50 Flour Mix	100 g	100%
The Dough
Starter	200 g	20%
Water	750 g	75%
Total Flour	1000 g	100%
Bread Flour	900 g	90%
White Whole Wheat Flour	50 g	5%
Whole Rye Flour	50 g	5%
Salt	20 g	2%

My Process

The night before mixing the dough add the 100% hydration starter to a bowl with the water and mix thoroughly. Add the flour mix to the bowl and stir until completely incorporated and somewhat smooth. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and leave on counter overnight, about 12 hours.
The next morning weigh out 700 grams of water and put in the dough mixing bowl. Weigh the remaining 50 grams of water and reserve. Weigh out the remaining ingredients, except the leaven. Experience has shown me that I will lose 10 grams between what sticks to the dough scraper and the bowl.
Mix the three flours together to get them blended as uniformly as possible.
Add the leaven to the mixing bowl with the water and stir with the danish dough whisk until uniformly distributed in the water.
Slowly add a scoop of the mixed flours to the mixing bowl using the dough whisk to incorporate the flours before adding the next scoop of flour. Continue adding and mixing until all the flour is in the bowl. Continue mixing until no more dry flour is in the mixing bowl.
Cover the bowl with a towel and let rest on the counter 40 to 50 minutes.
Add the salt and the remaining 50 g of water to the bowl. Squeeze the dough though the fingers to work the salt and water into the dough. It will get further incorporated during subsequent stretch and folds.
Cover the bowl with a towel and let rest on counter 30 minutes.
Stretch and fold the dough and try to incorporate any remaining water. Transfer the dough to the fermentation container and cover.
Stretch and fold fold the dough an additional 3 or 4 times on 30 minute intervals. Cover dough in between. Check the dough strength before the third stretch and fold with a windowpane test. Continue until a good strong dough is developed. I ended up stretching and folding this batch a total of 6 times at which point I was finding some large bubbles so I stopped there.
When desired dough strength is achieved, cover and let dough continue to bulk ferment. Total time should be roughly 6 hours. That is how long for my starter to reach its full height at room temperature. The dough changes in feel from dense an sticky to soft and less sticky when fermentation is done.
Dump the dough out onto a work surface and divide into two equal pieces. Close up the cut area on each piece. Pick the smoothest side of each and lightly dust with bread flour. Invert each piece of dough and preshape each piece into a ball. Invert on work surface and let rest 20 minutes.
In turn, tighten up each ball of dough. Place seam side up in cloth lined bannetons that have been dusted with a mix of rye and rice flour. Lightly dust seam side of loaves.
Place in plastic bags and place in fridge to proof overnight.
The next morning, place the dutch oven with the lid slightly ajar into the oven and preheat to 500F for 1 hour.
Remove the first loaf from the fridge. Invert loaf from banneton on to parchment paper that has been lightly dusted with rice flour. Brush excess flour from surface of loaf, if desired. Slash loaf with lame or serrated knife.
Using the parchment paper transfer the dough to the dutch oven and cover making sure the parchment is completely inside the dutch oven. Reduce oven temperature to 450F.
Bake for 20 minutes covered the remove the cover and bake for an additional 20 to 25 minutes. Remove bread from dutch oven to rack to cool. Wait at least 1 hour before slicing.
Return the dutch oven to the oven and increase the oven temperature to 500F and preheat for 15 minutes.
Repeat steps 16, 17 and 18 for the second loaf.

This loaf is delicious but I don’t think it was any better that the original version with just the white whole wheat flour. I have not been disappointed anytime I have made this bread in any of the variants I’ve made. It always comes out with a great crust, a tender moist crumb and large open structure. I like the fact that it gets baked straight from the fridge as that makes it easier to slash. And it still gets amazing oven spring straight from the fridge. The flavor is great whether eaten fresh the day it is baked or toasted the next day.

Rustic Sourdough Italian Loaf

This week I am making one of my favorite yeasted breads as a sourdough. It is based in Baking Illustrated by publishers of Cooks Illustrated called Rustic Italian Bread. I call this version Rustic Sourdough Italian Bread.

The original recipe calls for an overnight sponge. Instead I make a 24 hour sponge that I mix the morning before I am going to mix the dough. That then stands for 3 hours at room temperature to get fermentation going then into the fridge until the next morning. This allows for fermentation to continue slowly and for gluten development to occur.

At roughly 12 hours before I am going to mix I refresh my starter so it is nice active by morning. I do this by removing some starter from its container to a bowl and adding equal parts water and flour. I have gotten so I prefer doing that instead of doing the second daily refresh on that starter itself. The end result is the same and I find it more convenient.

Everything weighed out and ready to mix. The salt has already been mixed into the flour.

The starter after 12 hours on the counter overnight.

The sponge after its day and night in the fridge.

No need to have an autolyes with this dough. The sponge has good gluten development after 24 hours.

The starter has been mixed into the water and the sponge broken up before mixing into the water-starter mixture

The hydration level of this dough is 75% so it is a wet dough to work with. You wouldn’t know it however when trying to mix the last of the flour into the dough.

Only 2/3 of the flour is worked in. This is the stretch from the gluten developed in the sponge in 24 hours. The dough was fighting me all the way from here on.

All the flour worked in and resting until the first stretch and fold in 60 minutes

I did make one big mistake with this recipe. I was too lazy to get out a separate bowl for mixing the dough so I mixed in my proofing container. During my second stretch and fold I discovered hard lumps of dried flour in the dough. I had to pick out what I could and then moved the dough to another container. Lesson learned!

I did a total of 4 stretch and folds this time. Before I performed the fourth I did a windowpane test and wasn’t quite satisfied with the dough strength. Total bulk fermentation time was 5-1/2 hours at which time the dough was nice and soft and puffy with some large bubbles. The dough was then divided, weighed and preformed. After a 20 minute rest on my board the dough was shaped and placed in lined bannetons seam side up. Then it was into a plastic bag and into the fridge overnight.

Because it worked so well with the Country Sourdough Loaf I decided to bake the loaves straight from the fridge. The oven and stone were preheated to 500 F for 60 minutes. The roasting pan went in 10 minutes before baking.

The first loaf was taken from the fridge, inverted out of its banneton onto parchment, slashed, into the oven and covered. Baking time was 15 minutes covered at 475 F. The cover was removed, the oven temp dropped to 400 F, and the loaf baked another 17 minutes. After that the oven temperature was raised back to 500 F and the process repeated for the 2nd loaf.

This was the second time I made this recipe. There were two changes that I made from the first time. Change one was the switch to organic bread flour from non-organic. Change two was an additional 12 hours fermentation of the sponge.

I felt that this tasted much better than the first attempt. I do believe there is better flavor from the King Arthur Organic Bread Flour (I have no affiliation with them) compared to the regular bread flour. I also believe that longer fermentation also improves flavor. When you use the same four ingredients starter, flour, water and salt it is difficult to get a difference in taste except by changing the fermentation time. An change in flavor is going to be subtle.

The Formula

Ingredient	Amount	Bakers %
Sponge
Starter	25 g	9%
Flour	285 g	100%
Water	212 g	74%
Dough
Sponge	522 g	123%
Starter	75 g	18%
Bread flour	425 g	100%
Water	310 g	73%
Salt	13 g	3%

Dough weight	1345 g

My Process

Mix sponge ingredients 12 hours before planned dough mixing.
Cover and let stand on counter 3 hours.
Place in fridge until next morning.
Remove starter from fridge.
Weigh out dough ingredients.
Mix starter into water.
Pull small chunks off sponge and mix into water and starter until all of the sponge is incorporated.
Mix salt into flour.
Slowly incorporate flour into water. Mix until all flour is incorporated into the dough. Transfer dough to fermentation container.
Cover and let rest 60 minutes.
Stretch and fold dough a total of 3 or 4 times until a good windowpane test.
Total bulk fermentation time will be 4 to 7 hours.
Divide dough into two equal pieces, if making two loaves. Preshape and let rest on counter for 20 minutes. Lightly flour top of dough.
Flour banneton(s) with a mix of rye and rice flour.
Final shape loaf, place in banneton(s) seam side up. Lightly dust with rice flour. Place in plastic bag and refrigerate until next morning.
Place baking stone in oven and preheat to 500 F for 1 hour. Put roasting pan in oven 10 minutes before baking.
Remove one loaf from fridge. Invert loaf from banneton on to a sheet of parchment paper. Lightly dust loaf with flour for rustic appearance. Slash loaf.
Transfer loaf on parchment to oven and cover with roasting pan. Set oven to 475 F and bake 15 minutes covered.
Remove roasting pan and reduce oven temperature to 400 F. Bake for an additional 15 to 20 minutes .
Remove bread from oven and let cool on rack before slicing.
If baking a second loaf, place roasting pan back in the oven, raise the oven temperature to 500 F and wait 15 minutes before repeating the baking process.

Artisan Sourdough Rye Bread

In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day and having leftover corned beef, our bread this week will be a loaf of sourdough rye.

Rye bread has been my nemesis. I have tried a number of different recipes and not been satisfied with the texture I achieved. This is my first time making a sourdough rye loaf. I am using a recipe I found on the website www.breadtopia com It is called Artisan Sourdough Rye Bread. For flours I used King Arthur Organic Bread Flour and Hodgsons Mill Stone Ground Whole Rye Flour. I have no affiliation with either of those companies.

This is as close to a “do nothing” bread as I have ever made. It is a high hydration dough at around 83% hydration. It is 50% rye flour which makes it a very sticky dough. Those two things together make it difficult to work by hand so instead, it gets mixed with a danish dough whisk a total of 3 times over an hour or so. The dough then bulk ferments for 12 to 14 hours at room temperature. That works out well for mixing in the evening and then baking the next day. In my case I am tired by the time evening arrives so I like to mix earlier in the day. So I mixed the dough late morning and put it in the fridge until 8:00pm. Then it sat on the counter until next morning. I had expected the time in the fridge to slow down fermentation more but it was ready to go by 8:30am. I stretched, folded and shaped the dough into an oval loaf and placed it in an oval banneton with a liner that was well floured with rye and rice flour. Final rise only took an hour and into the oven it went. The aroma coming from the oven was enticing. With out a doubt this is the best loaf of rye I have ever made. Texture and flavor are spot on. I will be reluctant to make any other rye going forward.

The Formula

Ingredient	Amount	Bakers %
Water	400 g	82%
Starter	70 g	14%
Rye flour	245 g	50%
Bread flour	245 g	50%
Total flour	490 g	100%
Molasses	44 g	9%
Fennel seed	8 g	1.6%
Anise seed	2 g	0.4%
Caraway seed	3 g	0.6%
Salt	10 g	2%
Zest of 1 orange

The Process

Mix together the water, starter, fennel seed, anise seed, caraway seed and the orange seed.
Mix together the rye flour, bread flour and salt.
Slowly incorporate the flour mixture into the water mixture using a dough whisk or spoon. Continue until all flour is incorporated into the water. Cover and let rest 15 minutes.
Stir dough for 1 – 2 minutes, cover and let rest 15 minutes.
Stir dough dough 1 – 2 minutes then cover.
Let dough bulk ferment for 12 – 14 hours at room temperature. If mixing dough early in the day, place covered dough in fridge to retard fermentation until early evening. Then remove from fridge and place on counter overnight.
When dough is ready the next morning stretch and fold dough with we hands to minimize sticking. Let rest 15 minutes. This is a very sticky dough so make sure to flour surfaces and hands while shaping the dough. Preshape the dough. Let dough rest 15 minutes. Heavily flour a cloth lined banneton with a mix of rye and rice flour. I was making an oval loaf so I used a 10” x 6” x 4” oval banneton.
Final shape the loaf and place in the banneton. Cover with plastic and let rise for 1 to 1-1/2 hours.
Meanwhile, place baking stone in oven and preheat oven to 475 F. I use a roasting pan to trap steam so that goes in the oven 10 minutes before baking. Depending on the shape of the load a dutch oven or some type of clay baker could also be used.
When dough is ready invert out of the banneton onto a heavily floured peel or onto parchment. Transfer to the oven and cover.
Bake at 475 F covered for 20 minutes.
Remove cover, reduce oven temperature to 450 F and bake another 10 minutes.
Remove bread from oven and let cool on rack at least 1 hour before slicing.

Here is the reason for making rye bread this weekend. A grilled Rueben sandwich! What is better than corned beef with sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and homemade russian dressing on rye? Probably my favorite sandwich of all time.

Baking the Loaf

How a loaf gets baked is dependent on what type of loaf I am baking. If it is a soft sandwich loaf it is straight forward. Preheat the oven to the specified temperature. When the oven is up to temperature put the loaf pan(s) in the oven, bake for the prescribed time and remove from the oven. Easy.

If it is going to be a crusty loaf then it becomes more challenging. I want to hear the crust cracking (the song of the bread) as it cools. To get that the baking needs to start out with steam an be baked at a high temperature. Artisanal bakeries use steam injected deck ovens but they’re not practical for most home bakers. First is cost, then there’s the weight and finally the venting.

The internet is loaded with hacks to help the home baker to get results like an artisanal bakery. I have tried a number of them with varying degrees of success.

My favorite is to use an enameled cast iron dutch oven. This only works for round loaves so that is a limitation. The dutch oven we use came from L. L. Bean years ago. It is unique in that the handle on the lid is cast as part of the lid. No worries about a plastic handle melting at the temperatures used. It has stood up to 500+ F numerous times. Some of the newer enameled !cast iron dutch ovens I have looked at are limited to 400 F. I have also read reports of dutch ovens breaking in the oven at high temperatures.

My practice is to preheat the oven with the dutch oven in it with the lid ajar for 1 hour at 500 F. When the dough is ready to go I transfer it to the dutch oven on a sheet of parchment paper. If the dough is at 75% hydration or more the lid goes on, the oven shut and the temperature reduced to baking temperature, usually 450 F. If the dough hydration is less than 75%, I will spritz the loaf with water 5 or 6 times before closing things up and reducing the temperature.

A different method is needed for anything other than a round loaf. We have a pizza stone that we have had for years that pizzas and bread are baked on. My practice was always to spritz the loaf with water when it went in on the stone and then 3 or 4 more times during the first 10 minutes of baking. Results were just barely ok, but not always consistent.

This is the roasting pan used to cover loaves on a baking stone

Then I learned about using an inverted roasting pan over a loaf on a baking stone on Northwest Sourdough. This of course will work with both round and oblong loaves. Again, lower hydration loaves will need spritzing. While this works better than not covering, I prefer the results from the dutch oven. My wife prefers the results from the inverted roasting pan on the stone. I like the thicker, chewier crust from the dutch oven and she likes the thinner less chewy crust that results from the inverted roasting pan. My guess is that the dutch oven is trapping more steam than the inverted roasting pan.

Finally, this past week I tried a different method. This works if only baking one loaf of bread. It uses the dutch oven. The dough is placed in the cold dutch oven. The covered dutch oven is then placed in a cold oven. The the oven is turned on to baking temperature which in this case was 450 F. Timing starts when the oven reaches the set temperature. This time it was 20 minutes with the lid on, then 20 minutes with the lid off. This worked flawlessly with results equaling the preheat everything method. And with less fuss than worrying about burning yourself loading a loaf into a 500 F pot. Just take the loaf out of the fridge, slash it, set it in the cold dutch oven, cover the pot and put it in the cold oven and turn it on. No need for parchment paper but I did dust the bottom of the dutch oven with a little rice flour. There was no sticking at all when the loaf came out of the pot. This will be my method going forward if only baking one round loaf.

This Weeks Bread

This weeks bread is another variation of the Tartine County Sourdough Loaf with black olives and fresh rosemary added. This is the first time time I have made this combination.

Olive and rosemary country sourdough loaf

I wanted to use salt cured olives packed in olive oil. The only place we could find them locally was the olive bar at Wegmans, so that’s what I used. The fresh rosemary also came from Wegmans.

When developing a new recipe there is a guessing game on how much to use for each add in. In this case I guessed 3/4 cup of chopped olives and 1-1/2 teaspoons of chopped fresh rosemary. When I chopped and measured the fresh rosemary it didn’t like enough rosemary so I used 2 teaspoons (4 grams). The 3/4 cup of olives (120 grams) was too much and I could only get 96 grams worked into the dough. The next time I make this loaf I will use 1/2 cup or 80 grams.

The recipe and process for this bread is pretty much the same as the smoked cheddar cheese and jalapeño add-ins. The one change I made to the process is to add the olives and rosemary 15 minutes after the first stretch and fold. In the earlier loaf I added the cheese and jalapeños when the salt and remaining water were added. My reasoning was I wanted the salt to have a chance to dissolve and absorb into the dough before I added the salty olives.

This loaf turned out delicious, but not the most attractive loaf I have made. In retrospect, I probably should have spread out the chopped olives on paper towels to absorb some of the oil and dusted them with flour before adding them to the dough. I had an issue when stretching and folding the dough with olives falling out because the dough didn’t stick to them. The same happened as the bread rose in the oven. When we sliced the loaf many of the olives were loose in pockets inside the loaf.

I will make this loaf again with the changes I’ve noted above. I may try to get the 120 grams of olives into the dough when they are dusted with flour and see if that helps.

Tools 1

For this post I thought I would talk a little about tools I use. This is the first of several on this topic.

Victorinox Bread Knife with Rosewood Handle

Bread knives have been an issue since I started baking crusty sourdough boules. We started out with two different bread knives. One came from a long gone bakery called Montana Mills. It was fine for slicing there bread that had a soft crust. But the blade is very flexible and it just won’t cut a crusty sourdough loaf. The second, of unknown origin, works better but still not well. It particularly has issues with the bottom crust. So I read lots of online reviews of bread knives and decided on the Victorinox 10-1/4” bread knife with rosewood handle. What a joy to use. Sliced a crusty loaf with ease.

My favorite tool for mixing dough is a danish dough whisk. They are available from King Arthur (I have no affiliation with them) and various other sources. It works extremely well for mixing the starter into water and for mixing the flour into the water up to a point. Depending on the hydration of the dough there is a point where the best tool for mixing flour into the dough are the hands. Yes, it is messy and the dough sticks to the hands, fingers and between the fingers. I use a plastic dough scraper to get most of the dough from my hands, etc.

I had started out using a spoon for mixing the dough. I did not think the spoon mixed it all that thoroughly. I also found that as the dough got stiffer, using the spoon hurt my wrist. I don’t experience that with the dough whisk.

That will do it for this post. In future posts I will cover the various containers I use for mixing and fermenting dough and the various bannetons I use for proofing dough.

Starter update

This will be a quick update.

I tried reducing the amount of water and flour from 80 grams each to 60 grams each to reduce the amount of discard.

After several days I felt the started was weakening so I resumed feeding with 80 grams of each. This seems to be optimum for the amount of starter I retain before refreshing the starter each day.

Last Weeks Bread Update

This weeks bread is a retry of last weeks bread, with changes.

The first change was to bulk fermentation. Instead of putting the dough into the proofer it was left at room temperature. I was also bulk fermented until I felt it had fermented long enough. This was done by feel until the dough went from feeling dense to somewhat soft. This took 6 hours compared to the 3-1/2 hours fermentation went last week.

The second change was to proof the dough overnight in the fridge. In the morning the dough was removed from the fridge and placed in the proofer at 75F. The dough proofer 3 hours until a finger indentation in the dough slowly filled.

The bread was the scored and baked in a preheated oven at 360F for 37 minutes.

The bread came out of the oven much taller than last week. They weren’t quite the same size since I just eyeballed dividing the dough. Oops. The loaves felt nice and soft not the bricks of last week. The good thing with bread is you can eat your mistakes. Last weeks loaves were cubed up and frozen for a future batch of dressing.

This bread is delicious. We have been using it for breakfast toasted with jam and for lunchtime paninis. It’s been so long since I actually had a sandwich for lunch I have been truly enjoying having them again.

This Weeks Bread

Our bread for this week is going to be a modified version of Chad Robertsons’ Tartine Country Loaf. This bread has probably had more press coverage than any other sourdough bread. The New York Times has published the recipe and it has been documented on numerous web sites and blogs. It was originally presented in Chads’ book Tartine Bread. I was fortunate to find it online as an eBook for a really good price. I recommend it to anyone interested in making sourdough breads. The original formula for the Tartine Country Loaf makes two loaves of bread. That was last weeks bread. We enjoyed it enough that I decided it would be our go to bread for now.

This week will a single loaf with jalapeños and grapevine smoked cheddar cheese added. I have never tried this, so it will be a learning experience. And it will be documented whether it comes out or not. So let’s get started.

The leaven was started last night. I almost forgot to make it so it didn’t get made until 10:00 pm. The original formula calls for 1 tablespoon of 100% hydration starter for the leaven for two loaves. To me, that was a little vague. Is that of risen starter or stirred down? How does one actually measure 1 tablespoon of starter? It’s going to stick to both sides of the measuring spoon. In the end I decided to make a guess based on how much one cup of my starter, stirred down, weighed and divided by 16. That came out to 15 grams so that was what I used last week.

Leaven after spending over night on counter

This week, since I am only making one I decided to use 8 grams. So the leaven consists of 9 grams (I missed my target but decided close enough) of starter, 100 grams of Poland Spring Water, 50 grams of King Arthur Organic Bread Flour and 50 grams of King Arthur Organic White Whole Wheat Flour. That was mixed and left on the counter at room temperature overnight.

I should mention that room temperature is another variable that effects fermentation and proofing times. Our kitchen is 67 F during the day and 63 F overnight during the winter. This lengthens fermentation times compared to someone who might have a 75 F kitchen. I use that to my advantage in that it gives me more flexibility for when things happen. I am fortunate to have a Brod & Taylor bread proofer so if I need to speed things up I can put the dough in there at a higher temperature.

All the ingredients weighed out and waiting

The dough consists of 100 grams of the leaven, 450 grams of King Arthur Organic Bread Flour, 50 grams King Arthur Organic White Whole Wheat Flour, 375 grams Poland Spring Water, 10 grams fine sea salt, 100 grams of grapevine smoked cheddar cheese and 75 grams of minced raw jalapeño.

Leaven mixed into the water with the dough whisk

Everything except 25 grams of water, the salt, cheese and the jalapeños were mixed together in a bowl. I find it easiest to first mix the leaven into the water using a danish dough whisk. Then I slowly add the flour in and mixing with the whisk until the dough becomes too stiff to use. Then it it is time to switch to the hands and continue adding and mixing until all the flour is mixed into the dough. The dough will feel very dry at this point. The bowl is then cover and the dough rest to allow the water fully absorb into the flour for 45 minutes.

After its’ rest the dough feels wet and is very sticky. It’s time to add the remaining water, salt, cheese and jalapeños. I pressed the dough out added between one quarter and one third of each ingredient and then folded the dough in thirds. I then pressed out the dough and continued adding ingredients and folding the dough in thirds. I repeated this turning the dough a quarter turn each time until everything was incorporated. By this time the dough was very stiff from being worked. At this point I noticed I hadn’t added quite all the water. I let the dough relax for 20 minutes then added the remaining water folded a few times to work in the water. It didn’t all incorporate so I left the dough in the mixing bowl.

Dough with bits of cheese and jalapeño sticking out

At this point I was worrying that I added too much cheese and jalapeño. There were bits of jalapeño falling out of the dough every time I touched it. I kept pushing them back into the dough. This continued through the process of stretching and folding the dough to develop the gluten strength.

Stretching and folding was done a total of six times on 30 minute intervals. Normally I only do four sets but I felt this needed extra because of the cheese and jalapeños. After the first set of folds, the dough was transferred from the mixing bowl to my covered container for the remainder of bulk fermentation. Total time for bulk fermentation (after adding salt and other ingredients until preforming the loaf) was six hours. The last three hours were spent in the proofer at 74 F.

After bulk fermentation the dough was pre-shaped into a round, allowed to rest for 20 minuted and then final shaped into a round loaf. At this point I was still concerned that there were too many jalapeños as they kept breaking through as I was trying to get a tight round loaf. From here it went into a well floured, cloth covered 8-1/2” banneton with the seam side up. It then went into the proofer at 74 F for one and a half hours to begin proofing. The dough in the banneton then went into a plastic bag and into the fridge overnight to finish proofing.

The next morning a small enameled cast iron Dutch oven was placed in the oven and preheated to 480 F convection for an hour. The dough was removed from the fridge, inverted onto a sheet of parchment paper, scored, and transferred on the parchment into the hot dutch oven and covered. The oven temperature was immediately reduced to 450 F. After 20 minutes the lid was removed and the baking continued another 22 minutes. The kitchen smelled wonderful while the bread baked. We could smell the dough, the jalapeños, and the smokiness of cheese.

UWhen the bread came out of the oven and went on to the cooling rack you could hear the cracking of the crust, the song of the bread. Just what you want to hear from a loaf of sourdough.

I have to say this recipe is a keeper. My worries about too much cheese or jalapeño were unfounded. I wouldn’t change a thing. Without a doubt this is one of the tastiest loaves of bread I have made.

I must admit I didn’t get my picture of the interior of the loaf until it was half gone. And not only is it great tasting fresh, it also tastes great the next day for breakfast toasted and slathered with butter.