The art of lazy baking

Seems that life rewards the lazy.  Well, at least it did today. 

So, last night I was feeling daring.  I decided to risk it all.  I measured out 1/3 cup of starter, filled the rest of the cup with whole rye flour and dumped it in a bowl.  Then I added my 2 cups of my bread flour and the rest of the ingredients, so salt, honey and water all at once (1 tsp salt, 1 heaping tbsp honey, 1.5 or so cups water).  I added a bit more water, to make the dough softer than the normal “shaggy”, but I covered it and set it aside, overnight (so about 12 hours).  In the morning, it had risen beautifully.  I scooped the dough onto a floured surface, and decided to be even bolder.  After letting it rest for 15-20 minutes or so, I scooped it up (it was running away from me a bit), and I plopped it into my baking pot (which I first generously sprinkled with flour).  I put the pot, covered, in the oven (cold) and let it rise for 15-20 minutes.  Then I turned my oven to bake at 450, no preheating, just left the pot in there.  When it beeped to let me know it was at 450, I peeked under the cover, and it was rising so nicely.  I set the timer to 15 minutes.  At 15 minutes I took the top off. It had risen and split, looking fantastic. I could hardly contain myself. I let it bake another 15 minutes.  (Note: next time I’ll do it for 10 minutes, it was a bit too long and the crust was a bit dark, but I bet it depends on one’s oven or pot).  It looked like this:

It wasn’t perfect, it took on the shape of the pot, but it tastes awesome!  Seriously, it’s better than all earlier versions.  Moist, chewy, with a great crust.  Just heaven. 

I’m making no claim I’ve invented or even re-invented this recipe.  I just discovered it for myself, and it’s so satisfying to find a way to bake amazingly tasty bread at home without having to put a lot of effort into it.  Next I plan to try different flours and see what turns out.

First things first, or let’s start with the starter

I’ve been meaning to translate and share the recipe I used for growing my starter.  I lifted it (with his gracious permission) from the author of the Polish Moja Piekarnia blog.  I asked him whether it would be OK if I translated and shared his recipes through my blog, and he said that he was all for it. 

So here it is, the “how to grow your own starter” recipe.  A word of warning, it’s not for the impatient or easily discouraged.  It takes trial and error (although I succeeded on my first attempt, and most people do), and time and time and time and did I mention time?  The key is not to give up and to let nature take its course, it will (most likely) be alright.  I personally used whole rye flour, but that’s because I did not have any medium rye flour on hand.  It is available in the United States, but as far as I have found, only if you order it online.  I haven’t seen it in stores.  Rye flour is way more popular in Eastern Europe than in the Unites States, where most bread is made out of wheat.  The reason why rye is a good flour for starter (and especially someone’s first ever starter) is that it is less refined and there’s more for the happy bacteria and yeast to digest.

For starters (ha!), if you don’t already own one, buy a kitchen scale.  The recipe is in milligrams, not cups and volume measures.  I did my first starter without one, and it was way more challenging than necessary.  You’ll want a flat one with a surface on which you can set a bowl and tare it to subtract its weight as you go.  I bought mine at Target, since they happened to have a sale, but even IKEA sells them.  A scale will run you $20-25 ($30-35 if you pick something fancy).

What is starter?  Well, if you want to be blunt about it, it’s really “spoiled” flour, or flour that has been mixed with water and left to ferment, meaning to be subjected to digestion by friendly bacteria and yeast from the environment.  Yes, that’s what is “sour” in sour dough.

You’ll need 3 ingredients:  flour, water, time… 5 days, to be specific.

You start by mixing 50-100 milligrams of rye flour with an equal amount (by weight) of water in a bowl and set it aside, covered, in a warm spot (77-86 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal to make bacteria and yeast happy).  If you have a server, put it near he server.  (Our computer room now smells like yeast, but we don’t mind.)  The other option is to set it near a vent (if you’re heating your house) or near your stove in the kitchen.   You repeat this process for 5 days, every 24 hours adding another 50-100 milligrams of flour and water.  It’s OK to stir the mixture once in a while to help the bacteria.  Your mixture may smell “funny” (as in, not pleasant), but that’s normal, and trust me, the bread will smell awesome.  As long as you don’t have mold, the starter will have its unique smell, depending on the balance of your homegrown beasties and yeasties.  The mixture should bubble and look something like this (since we’re using whole grain rye flour, it will be darker).

 

Young starter is likely to bubble much less, but don’t feel discouraged, over time it will get stronger.  Mine was seriously kicking behind by the third “generation” (3 loaves of bread later).   At the end you’ll end up with sufficient starter for more than one mixed flour bread. 

This is the basic recipe.  The rest is up to nature.  So don’t get discouraged if it takes longer or doesn’t go that well the first time.  If I succeeded despite the million kid related interruptions, delays, “oops” situations and such, then anyone can do this.

Attempt number two is a success (not unqualified, but a success for sure)

So, since a couple (OK, maybe three) people actually asked me how the bread turned out, I am updating.  Like I said in my earlier post, the results were more than encouraging, the salt SNAFU notwithstanding. 

I have refined the recipe some more this time, and tonight’s result (oh, and I made sure to add salt early in the process this time) is quite nice.  Still less of a rise, but I am sure it’s partially caused by the fact that I definitely let it rise too long (I was at the zoo with the kids all day instead of baking bread), so it had gotten a bit too moist and soggy (yeast ran out of stuff to “chew on”).  Still, it turned out really nice, which makes me feel good about the resilience of the recipe.

This time I used 1/3 cup of my whole rye starter, 2/3 cups whole rye flour, 1 teaspoon salt (original recipe calls for 1 1/4 teaspoons, but I don’t like salty bread, so it’s up to your palate), 2 cups bread flour and a total of 1.5 cups (approximate) of lukewarm water and 2 tablespoons (optional) of honey. 

The process I followed was to let the starter “wake up” at room temperature for about 45 minutes (it was in the refrigerator).  I added 2/3 cups of the rye flour and 1/2 cup lukewarm water to the starter along with my salt, mixed well, set aside (covered) in a warm spot (in this case on my microwave, close to the stove and my always hot water pot) and let it rise for 3 hours.  You want to see nice bubbling action, the starter will start looking like a sponge.  I will try to edit with a photo next time I do this.  Sorry, didn’t think about it this time.

I added my 1 cup bread flour along with 1/2 cup water and the honey at this stage, mixed well and again, let the mixture (covered) rise for 4 hours in a warm spot.  At that point I added the last cup of flour, another 1/2 cup of water (you want that shaggy dough, just a tad wetter).  I let that rise overnight, and should have baked then and there, but didn’t…

I will post a photo once my husband (who took the car that has the diaper bag that has the camera in it…) comes back.

ETA… And here it is:

So, it’s not pretty, but it tasted great.  Marc had some and commented on the complexity of the flavor, it’s the sour dough, giving it that “zing”, I said.

My plan is to keep playing with staging and hydration to see if I can get more oven spring and whether I can simplify the recipe further, adding all the bread flour at once.  I think my starter is strong enough to handle this.

Next I want to try to make some wheat starter and attempt a mixed bread like that.  More ambitious plans involve finding some flour ground more the flour for Polish bread.

Experiment update

Well, so the results are mixed, but it’s all my fault.  The bread rose, not as much as “regular” no-knead-bread, but nicely still.  It looks great and would taste great too except… I forgot to add salt!  Well, I have a great excuse – with one 3 3/4 year old and one 3/4 year old running (or crawling) around in the background as I was doing this, I got distracted.  So, I set that bread aside, and have started a new batch of dough with starter rising, this time paying more attention to time and amounts so I can record it.  I am sure I’ll keep tweaking.  If this loaf turns out, next I want to try adding all the flour in two steps instead of three to reduce the “fuss” and time spent on preparation.  I’ll post photos later on.  I promise.

The great no-knead-bread-with-my-own-starter experiment

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted.  I haven’t stopped making bread at home.  Au contraire, I’ve been playing around with the no-knead recipe and I successfully baked several loaves with my own starter, perfecting my technique.  I am happy to report, that as far as the no-knead-bread goes, it doesn’t get any easier, because it’s so easy to begin with.  The basic change that seems to work regardless of flour type, is to substitute one cup of bread flour with one cup of whole grain flour of your choice (I’ve tried spelt, rye and whole wheat so far) and double the yeast from 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon and add honey (if you want).  Those have come out great.

But I’ve grown more ambitious in my experiments, and are currently trying to use home-grown whole rye starter instead of commercial yeast in the no-knead-bread recipe.  So far, so good, for Experiment #1, but I have a feeling it will need refining.  I used 1/2 cup starter, 1/2 cup whole rye flour, 2 cups of bread flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 tablespoons of honey (I used Sage) and I didn’t pay much attention to how much water, since I was looking at the consistency of the dough.  I added the flour over time, not all at once, along with a bit of water each time.  It rose beautifully and is in the oven, we’ll see what comes out.  So far the biggest difference is that the dough was stickier (I needed more flour to keep it from sticking to the working surface, my hands, and the towel) and it does not have the “oven spring” of the no-knead-bread made with commercial yeast.  I have added 15 minutes to the clock with the cover on, and will check every 5-10 minutes.  I will post results (good and bad) later, along with photos, if it turns out presentable and palatable.  In any case, it’s the first time trying this, so I don’t expect complete success right away.

Dark rye bread turns out OK

I was hoping to post sooner, but life intervened.  My daughter had a bad asthma attack over the weekend that sent us into the Emergency Room on Sunday.  I think she plans these to always fall on weekends.  Seriously.  I still managed to bake bread, just not report on the results.

So, 4.0, which was two parts (two cups) whole rye and one part white bread flour turned out alright.  It was dense, but I didn’t get pumpernickel-like consistency, like I worried.  Next time I plan to use more water and a smidgen more yeast to get a bit more pop.  My dough was not wet enough, so it didn’t rise as much and the loaf was compact and chewy (but not too hard).  The yeast was working hard though, when I retrieved the dough at 18 hours, it was crackling like pop rocks.

The final result looked like this:

This is the bread that used the slightly less coarse, but still whole grain rye from Bellingham’s Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill.  In this loaf I also used aromatic Desert Mesquite Honey from Trader Joe’s.   My daughter enjoyed it very much (her standard breakfast consists of one slice of bread with honey smeared on it and one scrambled egg), and even my husband, who is not into “European tasting” (meaning, having a more complex flavor) breads liked it.

Goodness in, goodness out, or the common sense of using quality ingredients

I promised in my earlier post to talk a little bit about ingredients.  Keep in mind that’s I’m a total newbie here, so this is probably the first of many discussions on this subject as I learn more about the process of baking bread.  But it’s common sense (at least to me) that the best ingredients will produce the best bread.  The main ingredient in bread, of course, is flour, and there’s a whole world of flour out there.  Flours are made of various grains, but the bread grains I have used to date are wheat, rye and spelt.  I will not get here into a detailed discussion of the differences between the grains, I’ll save that for a later post.  I’ll just say that wheat is the most common flour grain used in the world.  Rye is the second most common, and it’s most popular and grown in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe where “heavier” breads like pumpernickel are consumed.  Spelt is a hardier relative of wheat that is becoming more popular lately because of its sweeter, nuttier flavor, higher nutritional content and easier digestibility as compared to wheat.

Flours differ by how finely they are ground (from coarse to very fine) and also how refined they are (from whole grain, like whole wheat to just the core, starchy part of the grain, called endosperm, which produces the whitest flour).  In Europe flours are graded by how much ash is produced when a pre-set weight of flour is burned.  The more ash, the higher the grade (and the more  “wholesome” nutritionally speaking the flour is).

I will honestly say that I chanced upon the King Arthur brand of flours that I now use for my baking.

It was on sale.  I bought it.  And I was impressed with how much more my bread rose as compared to the run-of-the-mill all purpose flour I used before.  So for kicks I looked at their website.  It was an education.  Turns out that the King Arthur Flour company is the oldest flour mill in the United States.  They started milling flour when George Washington (yeah, that George) was elected to his first term as President.  Pretty cool, eh?  Also, and that matters for bread baking, King Arthur’s  Bread Flour has a higher protein content than the competition.  And the more protein (gluten), the more “pop” (meaning, your bread will rise more and will be chewier and fluffier).  Gluten is the culprit protein that gives so much trouble to people with Celiac Sprue.  Gluten can be bough separately and added to flour, but it takes a more experienced baker to know how much to add, so it will be a while before I go there myself.

The other flours I have used so far are rye flours.  I like Bob’s Red Mill Dark Rye Flour, it’s really heavy though, very unlike the fine rye that is used in Polish baking (as I found out by trying to use it to make light rye bread)

Bob’s Red Mill does make a fine, lighter rye flour though, and I’m hoping to try that one next.

The spelt flour that got into “Whoops” (3.0) was also by Bob’s Red Mill.

I also just finished baking a bread (let’s call that one 4.0) using a local whole rye flour, from Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill.  I like to buy local ingredients.  There’s something so appealing about knowing that what you eat was made by someone who is (almost) a neighbor.  On that note, the honey I used in my last two loaves was from Eagleman Farms.  I used mixed flower honey, but really look forward to baking with their outstanding buckwheat honey.  Yummy!

Unless you’re growing your own starter and growing wild yeast (doesn’t that sound romantic?), you’ll also want to buy a nice quality commercial yeast.  I haven’t looked into that much, but have been using the Red Star brand of dry yeast and it’s been working nicely for me.

OK, off to check on 4.0 which is looking awfully pumpernickel-like… I hope it’s tasty, at least.