Know-Hows of Baking Bread at Home

This is the sourdpough bread I make regularly. Follow the "stretch and fold" and shaping videos closely.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/4737/finally-100-whole-grain-hearth-bread-i039m-proud

Very good video to watch and learn the procedure from.
http://www.pbs.org/juliachild/free/baguette.html


A good video tutorial for shaping a sandwich bread which I will be adding later:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2461/video-tutorial-shaping-sandwich-loaf

There seems to be a lot of info on scoring here, though I haven't had a chance to go through the article yet. There are some videos on the bottom as well
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10121/bread-scoring-tutorial-updated-122009

Here are the search results for "video" grom the fresh loaf:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/keyword/video

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/searchresults?cx=partner-pub-5060446827351852%3A9bvu1n-clx1&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=ISO-8859-1&cow=video#914

Lots of good videos!

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter- Step-by-Step Finish

This is how the starter looked at the end of the 6th day... just after a few hours of some warmth!

Today I already used it for baking bread and it turned out excellent! The starter is really bubbling and active! Very healthy indeed :D

According to sourdolady:

Once your wild yeast is growing, the character and flavor will improve if you continue to give it daily feedings and keep it at room temperature for a couple of weeks longer.
After that time, it should be kept in the refrigerator between uses/feedings.

I will be making two more batches of bread this week using this new starter so it will get a lot of feedings.

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter: Step-by-Step (Day 4-5- on onwards)

My starter is not looking any more exciting. Just a few little bubbles. I have moved it to a warmer location... Let's see what happens. My kitchen is quite cold.
Sourdolady says:
"Repeat Day 4 once daily until -
the mixture starts to expand and smell yeasty. It is not unusual for the mixture to get very bubbly around Day 3 or 4 and then go completely flat and appear dead. If the mixture does not start to grow again by Day 6, add 1/4 tsp. apple cider vinegar with the daily feeding. This will lower the pH level a bit more and it should wake up the yeast."
So I will add some Apple Cider vinegar and hopefully the warmth with help a bit!
I have my fingers crossed.
Also I would say that adding the fenugreek & cumin seeds didn't really help. Also it would be better to crush them in a mortar next time, as they started sprouting in my starter :O ;)

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter: Step-by-Step (Day 5)

The First Signs of Life!

Yesterday evening I really noticed that the starter "slurry" was too wet. I added another quarter cup of flour to it to make the consistency like a pancake batter, before it was like a crepe batter! ;)

And by the night time I saw the first signs of life... little bubbles!

This is how it looked this morning:

It's alive!!!

IMPORTANT: At this stage it you will get a whiff of it that is so nasty that you might want to toss it down the drain! :O STOP don't do that. Eventually the good guys will win. When the starer is ready it will have more of a fermenty smell, which might repel you too. But you'll get used to it soon.

Day 5
Again I saved a 1/4 c of this and discarded the rest.
Added 1/4 c of flour and less than 1/4 of water (to make a panacake like batter.)

And let it sit again on the kitchen counter for the next 24 hours; stir it a few times.

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter: Step-by-Step (Day 3)

Day 3

2Tbsp wholemeal flour
2 Tbsp OJ
Same thing... Add it to previous day's batter, stir briskly and let it sit at room temperature. Remember to keep stirring whwnever you remember,

It doesn't look any different today... :(
Hopefully it will start bubbling soon.

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter: Step-by-Step (Day 2)

No activity noticed this morning! But that is normal.

Day 2
2Tbsp fresh wholemeal flour
2Tbsp fresh orange juice

Mix it to the previous day's batter. This is how it looked:
Not much different, I know.



Again, stir briskly this batter at least 3 times a day to beat in as much Oxygen as possible. Keep it at room temperature.

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter: Step-by-Step (Day 1)

It's a funny thing... After I bagan compiling these bread tutorial links for my blog, I felt that my own starter had started to look pretty aweful! It didn't perform at all when I used it two days ago!!!! I have tried to revive it the last couple of days (and it actually has come back stronger than ever!) but just to be on the safe side, I started a brand spanking new starter yesterday. I have learnt a lot in the past couple years of sourdough baking and hopefully I will have a bubbling and bursting with life starter in a few days!!!! :D

I have learnt from various sources that fenugreek seeds and cumin aid in help capture wild the wild yeast! This is what I want to experiment with this time. I am sure it will turn out fine without these seeds too as mine have in the past...

Day 1

2Tbsp fresh wholemeal flour (I am using spelt)

2Tbsp fresh orange juice

1/2 tsp each of fenugreek seeds and cumin seeds. (optional. This is totally experimental!)

Always buy your seeds and spices from the bulk section in the health food depatment if possible, specially for this purpose. The ones pre-packed in jars have been radiated and thus do not contain the much desired wild yeast on their surface.

Stir this mixture up thouroughly and cover it with some lid or serran wrap but never an airtight lid!. Let it sit on the kitchen counter at room temperature

It's very-very important to stir the starter briskly for a minute or two to stir in a lot of oxygen in the dough. Do this at least 3 times a day or as much as you can remember.

You could just buy freshly milled flour at the health food store and it would work just as well. The wild yeast is on the grains and you just need to provide the right conditons to wake it up.





Fenugreek seeds left

Cumin seeds right

The wild yeast we are trying to cature and utilize will become active when the environment is right. Mixing flour and water will give yo a neutral pH while the yeasts like it a bit on the acid side. That is why we are adding the acidic fruit juice. There are also some other microbes in the flour that like neutral pH. So by adding the orange juice we are making sure that only the desides yeasts and the lactobacillus will thrive. A war between the good and the evil is about to tae place in tha small container and only the strongest will surive. So we want to make sure that the environment is just right for wild yeast to win! The length of time it takes for this to happen varies.

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter

What is this starter / natural levain / natural leaven / wild yeast / sourdough?
Leavening itself is the process of "raising" the bread for it to become spongy/soft. This is brought about by CO2 (carbon dioxide) trapped in the dough. Various agents are utilized to generate this CO2 for us.

• Baking soda/powder. This is just a chemical Na2CO3 (sodium bicarbonate) which when either combined with acid or brought to a certain temperature in your oven starts bubbling by breaking down and producing CO2. This mixed in the dough when baking gets trapped in the dough and expands the dough thus raising it.
• Commercial Yeast. This is the Saccharomyces cerevisiae species of yeast which is cultured and is commonly available in granular form as Active Dry Yeast or Instant Yeast. Also available as Compressed yeast/Cake yeast. This kind of yeast when hydrated gets active and starts to eat the sugar in the flour and starts "farting" CO2! ;) Very desirable farts indeed!!!
• Wild Yeast. A sourdough starter is a stable symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast present in a mixture of flour and water. The yeasts Candida milleri or Saccharomyces exiguus usually populate sourdough cultures symbiotically with lactobacillus bacteria. The "farts" of the yeast are utilized the same way as above. So, in other words, sourdough refers to the process of leavening bread by capturing wild yeasts in a dough or batter, as opposed to using a commercial yeast.

So what is so much better about sourdough?

Sourdough likely originated in Ancient Egyptian times around 1500BC, and was likely the first form of leavening available to bakers. Sourdough remained the usual form of leavening down into the European Middle Ages.

The symbitic culture of lactobacilli and wild yeasts in the sourdough, give a distinctively tangy or sour taste (hence its name), due mainly to the lactic acid and acetic acid produced by the lactobacilli. I can literally eat sourdough bread all day long and not feel too "breaded out!" It somehow feels gentler on the stomach and guts and healthier compared to if I make bread using commercial yeast. But most importantly it's the taste and the aroma that I love!

Sourdough bread is made by using a small amount of the starter dough, which contains the yeast culture, and mixing it with new flour and water. A small part of the starter dough is saved for the next batch of baking bread and is fed on flour and water and goes in the fridge to slow down it's consumption of the food on the flour until the next bread baking day (which shouldn't be more than a week away.)

As long as the starter is fed flour and water daily, the sourdough mixture can stay in room temperature indefinitely and remain healthy and usable. It is not uncommon for a baker's starter to have years of history, from many hundreds of previous batches. As a result, each bakery's sourdough has a distinct taste. The combination of starter, yeast culture and air temperature, humidity, and elevation also makes each batch of sourdough different.

A fresh culture begins with a mixture of flour and water. Fresh flour naturally contains a wide variety of yeast and bacteria spores. When wheat flour contacts water, naturally-occurring amylase enzymes break down the starch into complex sugars (sucrose and maltose); maltase converts the sugars into glucose and fructose that yeast can metabolize. The lactobacteria feed mostly on the metabolism products from the yeast. The mixture develops a balanced, symbiotic culture after repeated feedings.

These symbitic starter cultures are very stable due to their ability to prevent colonization by other yeasts and bacteria as a result of their acidity and other anti-bacterial agents. As a result, many sourdough bread varieties tend to be relatively resistant to spoilage and mold.

The yeast and bacteria in the culture will cause a wheat-based dough, whose gluten has been developed sufficiently to retain gas, to leaven or rise. Obtaining a satisfactory rise from sourdough, however, is more difficult than with packaged yeast, because the lactobacteria almost always outnumber the yeasts by a factor of between 100 and 1000, and the acidity of the bacteria inhibit the yeasts' gas production. The acidic conditions, along with the fact that the bacteria also produce enzymes which break down proteins, result in weaker gluten, and a denser finished product.

There are several ways to increase the chances of creating a stable culture.

• Always use freshly ground whole-grain flour (wheat/rye/spelt) to make the starter.
• Use unclorinated water.
• Some people also use water from washing the skins of grapes/plums etc. (due to the wild yeast found on the skins of these fruits.)
• I have learnt from various sources that fenugreek seeds and cumin aid in help capture wild the wild yeast! This is what I want to experiment with this time. I am sure it will turn out fine without these seeds too as mine have in the past...

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Here are some starter tutorials... It will take 6-7 days to get your starter ready and performing! So get going :)

Sourdolady's starter: This is the method I followed for making my starter, except that I kept it whole grain/whole wheat throughout and didn't switch to white/All purpose midway through. An excellent tutorial.
It's very-very important to stir the starter briskly for a minute or two to stir in a lot of oxygen in the dough.


Another great Sourdough starter tutorial using rye, but again I would just keep to 100% whole grains.


Some more good articles:

When Yeasts Attack: A First Experience with Naturally Leavened Bread
More about Sourdough

Bread Lessons - Baking Bread at Home!

Internet and books have been my teachers in a lot of areas of my life, including art and food. I bake 100% whole grain breads, including sourdough(naturally leavened) and straight dough breads (commerial yeast raised.)


"Baking Bread at Home!" Sounds so intimidating... But no, it's sooooo easy, and so effortless once you get a hang of it and get your concepts clear!


I am putting together this compilation of articles and tutorials to help anyone interested to have good information readily available to them. If anyone local in Prescott, AZ would like to have a hands-on bread class with me, feel free to contact me.


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The Fresh Loaf is an excellent resource for learning everything there is to learn about bread baking. There is a very active forum on this site where you can have any doubts cleared right away. "Sign up" on it, they never send any spam!!!
They also have several lessons and Videos which I will be adding a link here on my blog as well.


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Books
I never bake breads from books anymore. I used to when I got started... They are really good for getting familiar with baking, learning the "physics" & "chemistry" of bread (yes literally!)
But now that I have gotten all that down, all I need is to add whatever I want to my bread. I don't need to look at any recipes. It's like looking up in a cookbook every-time how to make oatmeal!!! ;)
This is the goal of my collection of these bread-threads on my blog, so you can make bread with your eye-closed and it can become a second nature.
Anyhow, I will list some of the good books here. Go to the library and find these books and soak up the theory, not the recipes!!! ;)


The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread (very good book for theory)

Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor(good book for theory)

Crust & Crumb: Master Formulas for Serious Bread Bakers (good recipes if I remember right... good bagels)

The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking (very good book for whole grain recipes)


So I suggest find any of the first two form the library if possible and read them like a novel!!!