These are my notes on sourdough bread. It both contains my attempts as well as a generalized version of the process that I use. Sourdough bread is a bread that is leavened with a wild
yeast created from what is known as a sourdough starter. This starter is not as strong as a regular yeast so to get the most out of it, sourdoughs
tend to have a higher level of hydration and as such need to be handled differently from a normal dough.
One major concept when you start to get into baking is the idea of baker's math. A lot of recipes, especially in the US will use volumetric units to measure how much stuff goes into
a recipe. However, with baking, to get the best resutls you have to do things by mass instead. This does a couple of things, first, it makes sure that you are actually adding the
correct ratio of ingredients. One cup of flour and 1 cup of water are not necessarily the same. It also eliminates issues with volumes not being as precise for something like flour
where a cup can differ based on how fluffy the flour is, how dense it gets packed, or even if there are gaps you don't realize are there.
This all ties in with baker's math because when you are making bread you will generally use percentages to express the amounts of ingredients as a ratio to the amount of flour. So
for example, if I have a recipe with 1000g of flour and 500g of water, the percentage of water would be called 50%. This seemed a little counterintuitive at first because by
regular percentages, that would be 33% water (from the total of 1500g), but bakers are apparently loose cannons that play by their own rules. However, this does mean there is a
uniform language when talking about bread recipes so that I can give you the baker's percentages and you can replicate my recipe at any size.
I have yet to find a sourdough recipe that calls for lower than 70% hydration. At this level of hydration you get a VERY sticky dough. So sticky that you will be very tempted to add
more flour to it to make it stick less. Resist this urge. The techniques used with sourdough are tailored to deal with or mitigate the stickiness WITHOUT adding any additional flour
and that will serve to keep the dough from getting weighed down too much and prevent the water from being too absorbed to give a good oven spring.
After a few different attempts with varying levels of success, I find that this process generally produces a tasty loaf. I'm going to avoid using any direct amounts, but will list
baker's percentages of the various ingredients to give you an idea of the ratios being used.
So this is my first recorded sourdough bread that I've made. It isn't necessarily the first one I've made, I think I made 1 or 2 before this one, but I wasn't writing anything
down yet, so this is the first recorded one. Of note, this is AP flour instead of bread flour. Also, also, this bread was done using a stand mixer rather than using stretch and
folds, I'll talk more about that below in the results. So here we go:
| Sourdough Ingredients | ||
| Ingredient | Amount | Baker's Percentage |
| All Purpose Flour | 500g | 80% |
| Whole Wheat Flour | 100g | 20% |
| Salt | 10g | 2% |
| Water | 350g | 70% |
| Sour Dough Starter | 100g | 20% |