
The Basic Sourdough - hendricius
https://github.com/hendricius/the-bread-code/blob/master/basics/basic-sour-dough.md
======
Syzygies
I wouldn't call this "An engineer's guide". It's a lay guide written by a
German using metric. If one wants an engineering level of scientific
expertise, look at "Advanced Bread and Pastry" by Michel Suas.

For example, we grind our own flour, sieving out the bran but including fresh
germ, for a spectacular difference in flavor. However, bread flour needs to be
aged, or else the loaves will fail to rise properly. However, aging home-
ground flour will turn it rancid and grey. The search keyword for this issue
is "green flour". Suas has a solution: Add 30 parts per million of ascorbic
acid, as a dough conditioner.

How does one reliably add such a small quantity of ascorbic acid, in a
commercial bakery or at home? A true engineering problem. Thoroughly mix
ascorbic acid 1:20 with white flour. Now take some of that mixture, and
thoroughly mix it 1:20 with white flour. One now has a 1:440 mixture one can
actually weigh.

This made all the difference in the world in my sourdough bread baking.

We grind using a Wolfgang Mock KoMo Classic Grain Mill, and sieve using a #25
Gilson 12in Round Test Sieve in an 8 quart Vollrath steel bowl. We hydrolyse
overnight; an hour is just genuflecting. We add 350g of water for steam, as
popularized by Thomas Keller; a few spritzes of a spray bottle is an
ineffective 10g of water.

To convert that much water to steam takes a lot of mass. Indoors, we use a
Vollrath Company 68369 Bake/Roast Pan filled with several spools of stainless
steel chain. I plan to add pieces of aluminum plate to increase the mass
further. Outdoors, in a Komodo Kamado ceramic charcoal cooker, we use a giant
cast iron skillet with the handle sawed off, also filled with chain. I use a
slab of ice outdoors, to buy time.

It takes 80 calories to thaw a gram of ice, 100 calories to bring that gram to
the boiling point, and a whopping 540 calories to then turn that gram of water
to steam. By weight, steel holds about 13% as much heat energy as water. These
numbers explain why one needs so much metal to boil the water, and why it
hardly matters whether the water starts out as ice or hot water.

For example, to turn 350g of cold water into steam, using metal heated to 450
F (132 C above boiling) takes about 28 pounds of metal. To turn ice into steam
(giving one a slower fuse) takes about 32 pounds of metal.

What does the steam do? It isn't simply keeping the crust damp, or one would
far more easily spritz the dough. (In grade school a teacher tried to tell us
that candle wax slowed down the burning wick; similar skepticism is called for
here.) The dough is the only thing in the oven cold enough to condense steam
back to water. The energy used to turn water to steam is delivered to the
bread as the steam turns back to water. Physics abounds in conservation
principles, and this is one: The energy has to go somewhere. As a thought
experiment, imagine bashing the bread with a baseball bat, with all your
force. Then imagine spritzing with a plant mister. Trust your intuition; which
is more force? As a second thought experiment, imagine spritzing your bare
hand and sticking it into the hot oven for a few seconds. Now imagine sticking
in your bare hand as you turn 350g of water into steam. In which scenario do
you then imagine a visit to the emergency room?

Scale matters.

~~~
hendricius
Great feedback. Why not open up a pull request and add some of your findings?
That would be great additions.

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ryannevius
All of this information (including part #1) is missing a key element:
temperature. Temperature should be considered to be an "ingredient" when
making sourdough bread. It's not as simple as "do X on day Y, and you'll have
sourdough". You may end up with tart/acidic dough...but not proper sourdough.

For a great introduction to making sourdough, I recommend reading the book,
Tartine, by Chad Robertson, and browsing Maurizio Leo's amazing sourdough
blog: [https://www.theperfectloaf.com/](https://www.theperfectloaf.com/)

~~~
MegaDeKay
I found Tartine to be frustratingly vague at times, but Maurizio's blog is
phenomenal.

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jwr
I've been baking my own dark rye sourdough bread for several years now and I
think this guide really overcomplicates things.

You can get very good results with minimal effort: I spend about 15 minutes on
my bread, and I bake it every 3-4 days. 10 minutes to mix the dough in the
morning, and then another 5 minutes to put it in the oven in the evening, for
an hour. Put aside some dough before baking, feed it with some flour, and
you're done.

350g type-2000 rye flour (full grain)

~170g any other flour (I use a mixture of bread-baking flours and some white
flour)

1/2 spoon salt

starter (I use about 150ml to 250ml, but it doesn't matter that much)

Water: about 300ml, but this depends: experiment.

6-8h to ferment and grow.

This dough flows, so you need to bake it in a form.

This simple procedure reliably produces great tasting dark rye bread (darker
than the one shown in the pictures). If you have lots of time, by all means,
experiment and go wild, but if like me you deal with negative time, don't
overcomplicate things.

~~~
MegaDeKay
Rye starter or white flour starter?

My favorite rye sourdough is this one from Breadtopia: it goes kind of crazy
on flavorings (caraway, anise, fennel, molasses, orange zest) but the results
are spectacular. Plus there is a video to take you through it step by step -
great for people new to sourdoughs or ryes. Plus plus there is an instant
yeast version if you don't have a starter.

[https://breadtopia.com/sourdough-rye-
bread/](https://breadtopia.com/sourdough-rye-bread/)

~~~
jwr
Rye starter, but after the first bread the starter is whatever you mixed for
the bread, plus feeding every 2-3 days with rye flour.

Here again, keep things simple: don't worry about salt in your starter, as
long as you feed it every 2-3 days, the effective salt content will go down
and things will be fine.

The current starter I have in my fridge also has sunflower seeds, because
that's what I mix into my bread. Who cares?

Again: you can go as complex as you wish with your bread, but the advantage of
rye sourdough is that it can be dead simple to make and take very little time,
with excellent results. This is what makes it great in my book!

------
hendricius
This post is a followup to this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946178).
The other post is part 1. The post is about making your sour dough.

This post however is about how to use the made sourdough to actually bake a
sourdough bread. I hope it's not too confusing.

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EllenChisa
The title of this caught my eye - I feel like more and more engineers are
baking bread as a hobby (the way photography used to be). So much so that
there's a fiction novel about an engineer who gets started in sourdough:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XC41K6G/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XC41K6G/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

I love the format of breaking apart the starter recipe and then the baking
steps. Thanks for sharing!

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kzvezdarov
Anyone looking to make good sourdough (or any other kind of) bread should read
Ken Forkish's "Flour. Water. Salt. Yeast." Including the OP - there a few
things that could use improvement in both their method and recipe:

1\. Ideally, for home baked bread, you always want to use a heavy dutch oven.
A heavy dutch oven retains a lot of energy, which provides a consistent
environment for the bread to bake in (opening an oven door, no matter how hot,
rapidly lowers the temperature), but more importantly retains the steam that
the bread emits. This both causes proper crust to form (look for the micro
bubbles on the skin of the bread) and makes the entire loaf rise significantly
more.

2\. The hydration at 70% seems low. While low hydration makes handling dough
easier, it also changes the taste - in my opinion, for the worse when it comes
to bread. With a bit of practice, proper fermentation, shaping, proofing, and
enough gluten formation, even a 78% hydration dough is not that hard to
handle. I've baked a 1.8 kilo boulé without any shaping support on a simple
pizza stone without having the dough "leak" (in general, if it is "leaking"
post proofing, the dough has probably been overproofed and the gluten has
weakened).

3\. Fermentation time seems really low. Most sourdough types I am familiar
with take overnight to ferment, and then 4 or so hours in the proofing basket
to be fully ready. I've never baked after such a short fermentation period as
described in the article, but I would imagine the resulting bread does not
have the full airation, flavor, and texture that it otherwise would.

4\. Technique - in my experience and as far as I have read, you do not have to
knead at all. Most dough need only 3-4 rounds of "folding" during
fermentation, where each edge of the dough is stretched and pulled over
itself. That forms plenty of gluten. Shaping post-fermentation is similar,
where after the edges are pulled over, the loaf is inverted on the seam and
gently dragged around to create surface tension. _Definitely do not knead
during shaping_.

For what it's worth, making your own bread is great. My first results were
barely edible shame-disks with the texture of hardened gypsum, but after I got
a handle on the correct techniques (and more importantly - patience) I have
not purchased bread in a store for the better part of a year.

~~~
hendricius
Great feedback. I agree 70% hydration might be low. But it is a good way to
start baking. I highly suggest that everyone should A/B test this variable and
see which loafs he likes more.

------
awinder
One of the better techniques I’ve picked up (pretty sure I got it from
[https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-
Fundamentals/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-
Fundamentals/dp/160774273X)) replaces the kneeding steps with folds during the
first 2-3 hours of bulk fermentation. Basically after mixing in starter
transfer to large fermentation vessel, reach under the dough from 4 corners
one at a time, grab and pull over the top of the dough to opposite corner.
Wait an hour and repeat, wait 2 hours and repeat, then let fermentation do
it’s thing.

This saves a lot of effort, mess, and prevents dough from becoming overworked.
Effort that can later be expended in dough shaping steps ;-).

~~~
hendricius
Yes this works with strong all purpose flour. What happens if you use rye
dough? You can't stretch and fold it. The rye has too weak gluten structure.
It will mostly fall a part.

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siavosh
If you like this kind of stuff, you'd enjoy this:
[http://girlmeetsrye.blogspot.com/](http://girlmeetsrye.blogspot.com/)

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cangencer
For those interesting in fermentation in general, I can recommend the book
"Wild Fermentation" by Sandor Katz.

