Baking Success!

Last year I made sourdough bread – which is bread made with naturally occurring yeast and it’s a task that takes practice and experimentation until you get the results you want, so I’d heard, but I couldn’t believe my beginners luck. The first batch of loaves came out perfectly. I gave up the bread baking though – I think it was mostly down to the quantities of loaves the recipe produced and when I tried to reduce the ingredients by a third in order to just make one loaf at a time, for some reason the dough refused to rise and my loaves got flatter and flatter until I gave up.

A few weeks ago I created a new sourdough starter [just wholemeal flour and water] and nurtured and fed it every day for a week until it got really frothy and bubbly. It was fermenting away quite nicely so I decided it was time to bake a loaf. The first loaf I made was super but incredibly small as I deliberately started off with small quantities, so as not to fall into the same trap as last year.

My first loaf:
Sourdough Bread Sourdough Bread

I thought I was onto a winner again, but decided to double the quantities of my starter and increase the quantities within my recipe and this is when it all went wrong. Last week I baked a loaf every day, but what came out of the oven were more akin to bricks than bread and I just couldn’t understand what was going wrong.

We have an unbelievable cold kitchen and I thought this was definitely playing a part. Maybe i wasn’t kneading the dough enough, or maybe I was kneading it too much. I started off using Mr Kenwood, so after a few disaster loaves I thought I would give hand kneading a go – I still got bricks though. So Maybe it was my maths [never been good at counting] and my quantities. So I did some online research and found a few folk using a 1:2:3 method – one part starter, 2 parts water and three parts flour, so I thought I’d try this and see if it worked.  It didn’t. I stupidly decided to mix this idea with a ‘no-knead’ method I’d also seen online and I think this was the reason for my downfall.

Sourdough Experiments Sourdough Experiments Sourdough Experiments Sourdough Experiments

But I did think this attempt was the most success I’d had all week as the bread did rise and was less brick like and looked more like a loaf. It was full of holes though and a bit of a flying crust – something you often get when you’ve not kneaded the bread properly.

So it was time to consult the expert – a friend of mine who lives a few villages away who used to be a baker. He challenged me to a bake off and I went round to his on Friday to go through the basics of bread making – quantities, mixing, kneading, rising etc. And came home with a piece of linen cloth, a plastic scraper and a beautiful loaf he’d baked and a head full of enthusiasm.

So today I got up early and mixed up my ingredients to make a dough and instead of bunging in all the quantities required. I mixed together the flour and the starter and gradually added the water until I thought I had the right consistency. I only added my salt after kneading the dough for a while as he had done. What I was doing wrong last week was adding everything at once and then having to compensate for a very wet dough by continually adding more flour and this resulted in my over kneading my dough.

I kneaded the dough and stretched it until it felt like the dough that Dan has made. I then put it in a bowl and covered it and left it to rise. In Dan’s tropical kitchen the dough rose really quickly due to the lovely warm temperature. In my artic conditions my dough had barely risen after two hours. So I put the oven on and placed my bowl on the hob and wrapped it in a scarf [I kid you not] and covered it with several tea towels. This did the trick as after an hour or so I got some rise out of the dough. I decided to bake this batch in a bread tin, so I got one out and greased it, shaped the dough and plonked it in and wrapped it up as before and left it for several hours.

It did rise, maybe not enough, but I was pretty patient with it and eventually bunged it into a hot oven for 10 minutes. then reduced the heat a little and baked it for another 30-40 minutes, turning it around occasionally.

When it came out of the oven it looked like a loaf – chuffed to bits and no-one to share my success with as Colin’s out with the dog, so here I am blogging about it instead. The bread looks good and tastes OK – I think it could do with more salt next time. As it was quite a wet dough and I was baking it in a tin, I couldn’t slash the top, so it’s got a big crack all around the rim, but who cares! I have success at last. Here’s to many more I hope.

Sourdough Bread Sourdough Bread Sourdough Bread

2 thoughts on “Baking Success!

  1. Norma Brock says:

    Loved your baking adventures….and your determination! There’s nothing more satisfying than home baked bread, especially when you’ve done it yourself!
    Congratulations!

  2. Milomade says:

    I’m making nettle soup next as hubby has just brought home two bags full of nettle tops. Will post about that tomorrow.

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