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How to Bake a Weekday Sourdough Bread
A lot of people are content to save their baking for the weekend when they can watch their dough and optimize every variable, but if you need a lot of bread, want it fresh from the oven, or have crazy weekends, then it’s a valuable skill to be able to bake on workdays (whatever actual days of the week that may be).
Of course, the first step in workday sourdough baking is accepting that these loaves are may not rank as your Best Loaves Ever. But they can be good…really good.
The sourdough loaf below is a blend of bread flour, and home-milled Ethiopian blue tinge emmer and white sonora wheats. The score did not open much, but I’m happy with it and especially happy to have it on a Tuesday.
The second step in weekday / workday sourdough baking involves getting familiar with your ingredients and your environment. This means trial and error, making observations and changing variables. Your goal is to have approximate answers to the questions below:
How much and when do you need to feed your starter for it to be active when you get up in the morning?
For example, if I feed my starter a 1:1:1 ratio of starter, water and flour by weight at 10pm and my house is in the mid 60s, then my starter is ready at 6am (a bit fallen past peak actually, which is fine for me). If my house were warmer, I might feed later, or use cold water, or use a 1:1.5:1.5 ratio. I don’t suggest aiming for a precise level of starter expansion, just the ballpark of peak. As the technique of @homebreadbaker reveals, if you have a proven sourdough starter and you bake with it and feed it somewhat regularly, you can make beautiful bread with even unrefreshed starter.
This starter was loosely covered and left overnight inside another container in case it overflowed. Instead it peaked and sank about a 1/2 inch.
How long is your typical bulk fermentation with the dough formula you want to use in the room temps you’re expecting to have?
Let’s say my typical bulk fermentation is about 8 hours for a 50:50 whole grain red fife and bread flour dough with 20% starter (80g starter for 400g flour), and my kitchen around 70F. If I want to stretch that to 12 hours, I might experiment with only 10% or 40g starter. Other options to lengthen the bulk fermentation include using cold water, doing a refrigerated overnight autolyse, and putting the dough in a cool basement. Lowering the hydration of the dough or reducing the amount of whole grain flour are additional options.
This dough has nice webby fermentation.
How will you insert dough activities into your morning routine and what do you want to prep the night before?
I suggest mixing the dough as soon as you wake up, so that you have time for one or two aggressive gluten development dough manipulations before starting work. Maybe you want to mill your wheat the night before. Maybe autolyse the flour and water…salt too. You might consider a refrigerated autolyse, which will slow your bulk fermentation because the dough will be colder. Maybe you have a stand mixer and can start mixing everything while you’re making coffee. For the bread photographed in this blog post, I mixed everything at once in a mixer, let it rest 30 minutes, and then did two back-to-back laminations on the very undeveloped dough. Then I let it rest another 30 minutes and did a stretch and fold before walking out the door.
White sonora and blue emmer wheat to mill in a Mockmill countertop grain mill.
How will you deal with over or under-bulked dough?
Ideally, the end of your workday will coincide with your dough being nicely fermented. You’ll preshape, bench rest, shape, and then you can either bake that evening or the next morning, depending on whether you want to do a final proof in the refrigerator or at room temperature. Realistically, though, you might come home to find your dough is blown out and overproofed (overbulked) or small, flat and underproofed (underbulked). Some options when the dough is too fermented include a doing a short bench rest, and a short and cold final proof, or even converting the dough to a pan loaf. If your dough is under-fermented, you might put it in a warmer place such as your oven with the light on for several more hours, or stretch and fold it (redistribute food and add strength) and put it in the refrigerator to shape and bake in the morning or even the following evening.
The pre-shape is a good time to feel how developed the dough is and adjust the length of your bench rest accordingly.
Are you willing to roll with the punches? Maybe one of your children suddenly needs a ride somewhere so your dough’s bench rest is over an hour long. My approach after this would be to shape gently and final proof a bit shorter. Or maybe your dinner prep heats the kitchen far more than you anticipated, and you have to pop your banneton in the refrigerator or even freezer (I’ve never done this for longer than 20 minutes) while the oven is preheating.
Dough can go in the freezer to slow down a runaway proof.
Try to be flexible and remember the bread is going to taste great even if in your multi-tasking haste, you forget to flour your basket and you end up having to cut the dough to extract it from your banneton.
Final Tip: I advise erring on the side of overfermenting if crumb openness is more important to you, and erring on the side of underfermenting if loaf height and score opening are more important to you. Of course, your mileage may vary with this advice, as going too far in either direction can yield the opposite results.
This is a good crumb for a dough with minimal intervention and “babysitting” as well as 36% whole grain wheats that aren’t gluten powerhouses.
Do you already have a workday baking routine? Please share your strategies in the comments and help your fellow bakers make bread every day.
How to Bake a Weekday Sourdough Bread