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Slow, Lazy Sourdough Bread
I am lazy.
And because I am lazy, but also totally fussy about the quality of what I eat, I am always looking for that sweet spot where I can do the absolute minimal amount of work necessary to bake bread that still seems to me to be great bread.
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There are compromises from both sides. Milling my own flour is not lazy. It’s not a big deal to do, but it does take an extra 10 minutes and it means dealing with an extra component (my beloved Mockmill) and a trip down to the basement where it lives. Using store-bought flour would be faster, easier, more convenient, lazier; and that’s exactly what I did for the first few years of baking bread. But then one day a friend lent me their countertop mill to give home milling an experimental try and I was instantly hooked. The flavor of the bread from the fresh-milled flour was so much better than even flour from an artisan mill like Breadtopia (sorry guys!), that it was immediately obvious that home-milling was a necessity in terms of acceptable (to me) bread quality.
On the other side, though my Mockmill produces amazingly fine flour in one pass, I know that I could do any number of things to incrementally improve the flour’s texture, and thus performance, resulting in a nicer crumb. For example, I could double mill to get an even finer flour. Either in addition to that or instead, I could sift the bran and some of the coarser pieces of germ out of the flour, and either discard them (if I wanted to bake with a high extraction flour) or soak them in hot water for a period to soften them substantially and then re-incorporate during the mixing process (if I want whole grain – which I mostly do). I have done all those things and I’ve found that they don’t result in enough of an improvement of my bread that the extra hassle is worth it, to me.
During the first several years of baking bread at home, I was constantly adding to my repertoire of techniques to try to produce perfect bread. I tried everything I read about or saw on YouTube. Over the past couple years, I’ve been going in the opposite direction; simplifying my process, letting go of anything that seems unnecessary. I’m honestly not sure which way the causation runs here, but I am sure that my bread has improved quite a lot during this period of simplification.
Lazy Sourdough Starter
In an earlier post, Demystifying Sourdough Bread Baking, I wrote about how I understand the process of baking sourdough bread and how that way of understanding it leads me to a few unconventional methods. And in an earlier recipe, Whole Grain Sourdough Rustic Country Loaf, I detailed a specific process that I was using at that time for a basic country loaf. This recipe, Slow, Lazy Sourdough Bread, is the further evolution of the rustic country loaf. Both of those earlier posts include mention of how I manage and bake with my sourdough starter. Since those posts, my process with my starter has become simpler and lazier than it already was. These days, I ignore my starter almost completely. It’s a very small amount in a very small jar in my refrigerator and I feed it about once every couple months. When I feed it, I just scoop out 90% of whatever is left in the jar at the time (which is not enough to make a decent size pancake, so it goes into the scraps for my chickens) and then stir in about 1/2 cup of flour and 1/3 cup of spring water. I leave that out on the counter for a couple hours and then it goes back in the fridge. For everyone worried about maintaining your sourdough starter, I’d just like to say that it is a lot more forgiving than you probably think.
When I bake bread, I use an absolutely tiny amount of this starter, cold and unfed, straight from the jar in the refrigerator. I never measure how much I use; I just dip the tip of a teaspoon straight down, maybe half an inch below the surface and then mix whatever adheres to the spoon into my dough. if I had to guess, it’s probably something like 2 – 3 grams.
The result of this method is that after I have mixed up my dough, nothing at all appears to happen for a pretty long time; many, many hours. Most bakers would look at the dough and think it was a failed loaf that was never going to rise. But during this long period of apparent nothing, a lot is happening in there. One thing that is happening is that the dough is autolysing; the bran is getting softer, the dough is getting smoother. Another thing that is happening is that the population of microbes in the dough (the result of the small inoculation from my starter jar) is increasing exponentially. In an exponential process like that, for a long time, it doesn’t look like anything because two times hardly anything is still hardly anything for quite a while. Until it isn’t. And then all of a sudden it takes off and from that point on, everything happens at the same rate as most people are used to from more conventional sourdough methods.
On Slow Bread
After baking a lot of bread a lot of different ways, I (and others) have come to feel that bread developed slowly – with a long, slow fermentation period – tastes better than bread that is “pushed” to a faster schedule. I think about it the same way that I think about making cheese, or cooking a stew or chili, or maybe the traditional American south’s method of barbecuing pork. In all these cooking methods, one of the primary ingredients is time. Time for invisible good things to happen. Time for transformation. Molecular stuff. Magic.
So in addition to the long, slow bulk fermentation that results from my starter management and tiny inoculations, I like to give my dough an even longer, slower second proof. After shaping, I put it in the refrigerator to slow things down and stretch it all out even further. The exact timing of all this varies depending on a lot of different things, but mostly the temperature of the house. The initial bulk fermentation time will vary quite a bit between winter and summer. In winter it might be 12 – 16 hours. In summer it might be more like 8 – 10 hours.
The way I typically time it is that I mix up dough for a Saturday morning loaf on Thursday evening. Then it bulk ferments (at room temperature) over night and I start paying attention to it when I wake up on Friday morning. Sometime between mid-morning and mid-afternoon, it’s risen to about 2X the original volume and then I’ll shape it and put it in a proofing basket and then it goes directly into the fridge. Saturday morning, at whatever time works for me that particular day, I bake the cold dough straight from the fridge. Altogether it’s in the vicinity of 36 hours of slow fermentation, more than half of which is at 38f in the refrigerator.
On Bread “Recipes”
I think that there are about as many different ways to bake bread as there are bakers of bread. And I am of the opinion that due to the number of hard-to-control variables in bread baking, and the complexity of the interactions between them, that every bread “recipe” should be seen as a starting point for experimentation and not a stone tablet, guaranteed to produce a specific result.
The information presented here is a set of ingredients, measurements, timings, and techniques that one intermediate bread baker has developed for one particular style of bread loaf. It’s the result of several years of trying other people’s recipes and techniques, coupled with a lot of my own very free experimentation. I’m presenting specifics here, but please read them as a beginning and not an end. This is especially important for the length of the bulk fermentation period. Aside from the freshness and specific qualities of the flour you start with, the fermentation period is probably the single most important variable, but it’s also the hardest to pin down. And while I could tell you how long I did things for a particular bake, what I can’t really tell you is how I decided how long that would be; because it totally depends on my observing the dough and the intuition I’ve developed over the years of when done is done. If you don’t have enough sourdough loaves under your belt to have a sense of the proofing cycle, I suggest ending the bulk fermentation when the dough has just risen to twice its initial volume. That might be a little earlier than the perfect, optimal time, but it should be long enough and it shouldn’t be too long. Over time you can experiment with pushing the bulk proof longer until you develop your own sense of when done is done.
Slow, Lazy Sourdough Bread
Ingredients
(Note that volumetric measures are inherently inaccurate - especially for flour where 1 cup is going to be a very different amount of flour for you and for me and even for you one time vs. another time. You should get a scale.)
Instructions
Notes
Less lazy dough mixing
If you don't have a stand mixer or prefer to mix your dough by hand, that will work fine too. I would combine the starter with the water and the salt with the flour as described above, and then mix everything together in a large mixing bowl and mix by (moistened) hand until the liquid is fully incorporated into the flour and it's at the "shaggy mass" stage. Then let it sit for half an hour or so followed by 5 - 10 minutes of hand kneading until the dough smooths out and has some strength and elasticity.
Shaping
The amount of water you place on the work surface when you shape the dough matters. Too much and there will not be enough friction between dough and work surface to build tension. Not enough and the dough will stick. This isn't a particularly sticky dough (if you use the grains listed), so I suggest erring on the side of less moisture. If it's sticking too much, add a little more until you can move the dough around on the surface without it leaving residue, but not too much that it's slipping and sliding around.
*Baking
The instructions call for transferring cold (refrigerated) dough into a pre-heated baking vessel. I have found that this works fine for me in my Breadtopia Clay Baker, and also in my Romertopf Clay Baker. I think it would also be fine if you have an Emile Henry baking vessel, and it would certainly be fine in any metal vessel like a Dutch Oven. There are some clay baking vessels that do not have the ability to handle the temperature shock of cold dough hitting hot clay and they may crack. If the manufacturer of your baking vessel does not recommend such thermal shocks, or if you are in doubt, I would recommend substituting whatever pre-heating and baking procedure you usually do.
Lazy Mixing and Kneading
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Slow, Lazy Sourdough Bread