Bread!

[slapo]

Yes, if it's not too much trouble, please post it. It may help others as well.
I've got bread baking books here, but the procedure seems a bit daunting..

As it turns out, I've written this down for someone else before, so I have it around.

Starter
Ingredients

• Wholegrain Rye flour
• Water (cold to lukewarm)

Starting the starter
Note that this method should work with any grain flour (possibly also teff).
Day 1
Mix 50g flour and 50g water in the fermentation jar and leave at room temperature (between 18 and 26 degrees) overnight.
Day 2
Add 50g flour and 50g water to the starter.
Day 3
Add 100g flour and 100g water to the starter. At this point, you might be able to see some initial signs of fermentation (bubbles in the starter).
Day 4
At this point, you should have a starter that has bubbles from the fermentation process easily visible. If you don’t, either discard half of it and replace it with 100g water and 100g flour, or start over.
If there are signs of fermentation, you can use half of the starter to make a flatbread (just chuck half of the starter on a frying pan and flatten the mixture on the pan) to check for taste or to try making a loaf of bread from it.
Add 120g flour and 120g water to the leftover starter and put it in the fridge until it’s ready to use (it’ll be obviously very bubbly and will have stopped rising for a few hours) or needs a refeed.
Keeping the starter
Keep the starter in the fridge between uses/feedings, unless you need to use it the next day, in which case you’d want to keep it at room temperature.
Use or discard at least half of the starter and replace what you used with an equivalent amount of a flour and water mixture.
Example 1
You keep a 440g starter and use 220g of it, so you add 110g flour and 110g water to the leftover starter.
Example 2
You keep a 440g starter and use 400g of it, so you add 200g flour and 200g water to the leftover 40g of starter.
Notes

• Use something like a fermentation jar that has a unidirectional valve vent in its cap (the vent is there to make sure the gasses wouldn’t damage the jar itself). Here’s an example: https://www.lakeland.co.uk/72471/lakeland-fermentation-jar-with-air-release-valve-14l
• If you’re keeping the starter in the fridge, it’s going to ferment more slowly than at room temperature, but its taste is also going to develop more slowly.
• Rye has always made for a more robust starter for me, but you can use rye, wheat (any - modern, einkorn, spelt…) or barley with bread making in mind.
• Keep the jar clean, inside and out. Make sure to remove any dried out starter
• Do check for mold contamination before any use of the starter.
• If you don’t use the starter for a longer time, water can start separating from the solids. This is fine - make sure to use the water along with the solid. Just mix them before use.
• The longest I’ve had a dormant starter was 1.5 to two months. At that point, the starter was a bit feeble, but I was able to make bread from it just fine, it just fermented for longer. It got its bearings after a single feeding, too.
• If the starter has lost its ‘peak’ (i.e. it starts losing air), the flour is getting spent a bit too much, so if the starter forms a large portion of the starter, you might need to use more flour and a longer fermentation time than usual.

Bread
Ingredients

• 400g rye sourdough starter (prepared as in the previous section)
• 100g water
• 200g wheat flour
• 13g salt

Method

1. In a bowl, add water and flour, in that order, to the starter. Pour the salt on top of the flour, and mix it all. Feel free to make fist squeezes to mix it initially, and then transition to kneading until it’s all well combined.
2. Cover the bowl with e.g. a towel and let ferment. Fermentation time is going to depend on the ambient temperature, but if you use a cold starter, it should be fine to let it ferment overnight.
3. In the morning, shape your loaf with damp hands.
4. Let rest at least while the oven’s preheating to 230° C with a dutch oven or a Pyrex casserole dish inside.
5. Carefully put it into the dutch oven/Pyrex casserole, moisten the top of the loaf and bake at 230° C for about 40 minutes. This is going to vary somewhat depending on the oven’s actual temperature, but 40 minutes is a good starting point.
6. After taking the bread out of the oven, let it cool down on a rack until it cools down to room temperature, as its insides are still cooking.

Notes

• If you happen to open the dutch oven/casserole dish before the loaf is done (will sound hollow when knocked), make sure to moisten the top with water before closing the lid again.
• You don’t need to use a dutch oven or a casserole dish, but you’re likely to get more consistent results when using one.

 

[slapo]

Here's my pizza recipe as well:

Ingredients

• 300g wheat flour (strong bread flour takes long fermentation better than most, I think)
• 200g water
• 10g salt
• Teaspoon of old dough (or yeast/sourdough starter to start with).
• Tomato passata
• Basil
• Aubergine or courgette slices that have been salted and peppered the night before making the pizza (to dehydrate them).

Method

1. Mix the flour, water and old dough (or yeast or sourdough starter if you don’t have old dough yet) in a jar.
2. Let the mixture ferment in the fridge until it peaks (i.e. stops rising). This can take up to a week.
3. Once the dough is fermented, take it out of the fridge, take a teaspoon or this dough and set it aside. This teaspoon of dough is going to be your old dough. Mix salt into the main bulk of the dough by kneading it in.
4. (Optional) Let the dough rest for 30 minutes or more.
5. Stretch the dough onto a baking sheet. Wet your hands if it’s too sticky.
6. Pre-bake the dough at 245°C until it gets just a little firm in the middle of the sheet. This can take up to 12 minutes.
7. Take the sheet out, spread a mixture of passata and basil into a thin layer over most of the dough. Rub salt off of the aubergines-courgette slices and put them on top of the sauce.
8. Bake again at 245°C. This can take up to 18 minutes.
9. While the pizza’s baking, you can prepare another batch for next week by mixing the teaspoon of dough you set aside earlier with 300g flour and water and putting the mixture into the fridge (i.e. you’re doing steps 1-2 here again).
10. Take the pizza out of the oven and serve.

Notes

• Mozzarella is a more traditional topping. If you’d like to use it instead of aubergines-courgette slices, consider only putting it on top of the tomato sauce for only about the final two minutes of baking time.
• Proper tomato sauce would be tomatoes cooked with fresh basil until the tomatoes are mush. I’ve never remembered to do this in time, though.
• In my experience, fermentation is faster in jars that are fairly tall and relatively narrow compared to their height.
• If you leave the dough in the fridge for a long time, you might not be able to shape it normally but might have to pour it onto a sheet and carefully spread it afterwards.
• This dough can also be used for flatbreads such as pita bread.

 

[Tonyschin]

Today's efforts.

Very nice.

 

[Tonyschin]

Wholemeal today, and very nice it is too.