barney
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Posts: 119
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Post by barney on Jun 11, 2013 9:24:30 GMT
That sounds more like my style, but you must be getting through a lot of flour at 100g a day (most of which you throw away?), do you think it needs such constant nutrition?
I meant to start one of these as a trial yesterday while I was baking rolls, biscuits and cakes for the week, but it slipped my mind. Still thinking about last week's pizzas, not next! Must Try Harder.
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Post by spinal on Jun 11, 2013 9:31:49 GMT
I then either use the remaining to make something with, or just chuck it. Chuck it!? HERESY! A simple recipe for your leftover starter is sourdough pancakes Quite simple really... add a little flour, add a little sugar and put on a hot buttered pan... Slather freely with maple syrup; then don't tell anyone so you have them all to youself M.
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adm
WFO Team Player
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Post by adm on Jun 11, 2013 16:15:03 GMT
That sounds more like my style, but you must be getting through a lot of flour at 100g a day (most of which you throw away?), do you think it needs such constant nutrition? True - I am getting through a fair bit of flour, but it's cheap. What I should do really is to keep a much smaller starter alive. Maybe just feed 20g with 40g flour and 40g water or so - or even less. That would be less wasteful. I think if it is left out at room temperature, it does need feeding every day to keep it in tip top condition though. If it's in the fridge, then every week or two is fine - it just takes a couple of feedings to get back to full activity once you take it out the fridge, so you need to remember to do so the day before you want to use it...
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adm
WFO Team Player
Posts: 164
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Post by adm on Jun 11, 2013 16:16:23 GMT
Chuck it!? HERESY! A simple recipe for your leftover starter is sourdough pancakes Quite simple really... add a little flour, add a little sugar and put on a hot buttered pan... Slather freely with maple syrup; then don't tell anyone so you have them all to youself M. Nice plan - but pancakes every day would make me a fat boy!
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Post by faz on Jun 13, 2013 5:59:49 GMT
It's almost like keeping a pet. Except my dog wouldn't fit in the fridge. You don't get footprints in your butter either I have been doing a lot of sourdough baking (bread rather than pizza) over the last few months and to be honest, once you've got a viable culture up and running they are pretty tough. I keep mine in the fridge and I've found that as long as the starter is fed with 50:50 water flour mix then left out for 24 hours to ferment, it lives happily in the cold for several weeks. I then use a pre-ferment technique which allows the culture to wake up in advance of using it for baking. And those crust shots - wow they are the money shot!!
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adm
WFO Team Player
Posts: 164
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Post by adm on Jun 16, 2013 9:30:22 GMT
Here's yesterday's sourdough pizzas..... This time I used a dough recipe from Ken Forkish's book "Flour Water Salt Yeast". I was a bit wary about it as it specifies 10% starter - which is waaaaay more than the recipe I used the other week. Plus it has a room temperature overnight bulk fermentation. I chickened out of the overnight room temp bulk and went for a cooler temp of 12C. The dough was very well proofed the next day, but got knocked back a bit and balled easily enough and went into the fridge to proof again for eight hours at 13C. I used a 50/50 blend of Caputo "00" and Shipton Mill "Type 55" flours. Anyway.....knocked out a few pies with a stone temperature of about 350C. Bakes were all in the 4 minute range. It was very windy outside and I think that made the oven dome temperature a bit lower than normal. Also, with cooking outside and eating inside, I was doing a lot of running back and forward, so wasn't turning the pizzas enough - hence some rather uneven charring! Pizzas were all about 12" diameter from 280g dough balls. The crust came out really nice - great sourdough flavour, blistery and chewy. Sauce was San Marzano tomatoes with EVOO, S&P, dried oregano. Cheese was fresh buffalo mozzarella. Anyway - these all got eaten! As normal, the kids favourite was crispy duck with mozz and hoi-sin sauce. My favourite was mozz, parma ham, gorgonzola dolce and fresh sliced jalapeño. I ate all of that one myself.
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Post by tonyb on Jun 16, 2013 15:29:12 GMT
I only refresh my starter every couple of weeks, if I happen to have a period of no bread/pizza baking. I have left it much longer on occasion and whilst the surface may look horrible, once you scrape that off you can usually find some viable material underneath and it may take a coupke of feeds to get its vigour back but I've never ad a problem rejuvenating a starter.
ADM - those pizzas look fantastic. The recipe I prefer uses 20% starter. I'm not sure whether using 1% or 50% makes a lot of difference, other than for optimum proofing time (assuming we know what that is) which is also a function of temperature.
I think sourdough pizza is very similar to wfo in that the basic design of both is very forgiving although we tend to argue about minor design changes for which we don't have the experimental data to verify our 'improvement'.
By the way is it only me that likes the charred bits of dough?
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Post by bookemdanno on Jun 20, 2013 12:21:27 GMT
Oh no Tony, i love the crusts too! I'll always go round mopping up those bits and will never understand why they get left behind.
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adm
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Posts: 164
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Post by adm on Jun 20, 2013 13:38:41 GMT
ADM - those pizzas look fantastic. The recipe I prefer uses 20% starter. I'm not sure whether using 1% or 50% makes a lot of difference, other than for optimum proofing time (assuming we know what that is) which is also a function of temperature. I think sourdough pizza is very similar to wfo in that the basic design of both is very forgiving although we tend to argue about minor design changes for which we don't have the experimental data to verify our 'improvement'. By the way is it only me that likes the charred bits of dough? I love the charred bits too! I am reading a book called "Flour Water Salt Yeast" at the minute by a guy called Ken Forkish. His argument is that Time and Temperature should be considered as ingredients in their own right and altered to suit. I am lucky as I have a fridge in the garage that I fitted with a small heater and a digital controller to allow me to set it at any temperature I like and keep it withing half a degree. I use it for fermenting beer, but have recently been using it as a proofing box for bread and pizza doughs. Results have been pretty good! I just finished up a batch of sourdough pizza dough a minute ago. 2% starter and it will be left to bulk ferment at 18C for 24 hours, then balled and left at the same temperature until Sunday for pizza. I think the small amount of starter and longer time should give a nice tang to the dough from the acid bacteria breeding. We'll see on Sunday....
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Post by minesamojito on Jun 20, 2013 19:38:01 GMT
Wonderful pizza adm, and some cracking photograhy this really is turning in the pizza porn thread, love it Cheers Marcus
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adm
WFO Team Player
Posts: 164
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Post by adm on Jun 24, 2013 7:57:32 GMT
Not much pizza porn today as I forgot to take pictures until most of the pizza was eaten.... it was all pretty good though. The crust was particularly tasty, but didn't pop quite as much as last week. That gives me an excuse to try and dial my recipe a little over the week as my middle son has requested a pizza party for his birthday next weekend. So instead of pizza porn, how about some sourdough bread porn instead: This was a couple of boules baked yesterday. I'm going to do this recipe again this week......but I think I will add bacon to the bread too. Pain au Bacon! mmmmmmm
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Post by minesamojito on Jun 24, 2013 9:30:34 GMT
Wow, stunningly good bread mate, love the crust and crumb on it, and cracking pizza again Cheers Marcus
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barney
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Posts: 119
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Post by barney on Jun 24, 2013 9:58:22 GMT
I also failed to get any good pics before all the pizza went this weekend. Am thinking it would be worth my while inviting my brother and his partner over for a party, she's a professional photographer which is exactly what I'm going to need to compete in this thread. It is so difficult to find the time to manage a fire, manage the dough and actually eat something, let alone take pictures.
I managed to get something going from your technique adm, thanks for the tips. It did look like everything had died in the middle of last week (that nasty brown liquid laying on the top), but it came back to life before I got around to chucking it. I stiffened up the mix to try and ease it back a bit, 2:1 flour:water, more like an Italian madre for ciabatta, and that worked really well. Was a bit disappointed in the finished product though, lots of oven spring and good crumb, but not the tangy sourdough flavour I'm used to. Maybe it was from using white flour rather than wholemeal, I don't know, any ideas anyone?
That bread looks fantastic adm, exactly what I'm aiming for but rarely achieve. What was the oven temp when that went in? Is this another one of your exceedingly slow rises? How do you manage dough-slump on long proving? Anything over 50% water and mine ends up sagging all over the place. I cooked a whole bunch of sourdough on retained heat this weekend, but nothing like that! Thinking I may have to invest in a proving fridge, there was a refrigerated incubator kicking around my workplace a few weeks ago...
Thanks for the pics, even if they do make me as jealous as hell.
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adm
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Posts: 164
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Post by adm on Jun 24, 2013 10:41:11 GMT
:-) I have spent over a year trying to figure out how to get the sourdough loves to look like that! It's been fun and frustration in equal measures, but I think I have got it cracked now.
There's a few things that I have found critical:
The starter needs to be in good condition. I use it about 24 hours after I have fed it. I build a levain from the starter to ensure peak activity: put 50g of active starter, 250g flour and 200g water in a tub, mix it up and let it go for about 8 hours before pulling some of this as the levain for the bread itself. (essentially, this is just building a bigger starter....)
Autolyse. I mix (most of) the flour and water together and let it stand for 30 minutes before adding the starter and salt and then doing the full knead.
The dough must be properly developed. I have read lots of recipes and techniques that talk about "no knead" and "stretch and fold" and have tried most of them with varying results. For me, a good electric mixer does the trick though - I have an Electrolux DLX which works great for dough. Much better than the Kenwood that we also have - the dough just tends to get tied up around the dough hook in that and not get worked properly.
I now use a variation of the "wet knead" technique (Google Jeff Varasano pizza recipe) which seems to work really well for both Pizza and bread. 75% of the flour plus all the water, autolyse, add the starter and salt, then let it mix for 5 minutes before slowly adding the rest of the flour until the dough comes together. The gluten really gets a good workout while the mix is very wet. Once the flour is all in, I then let it mix for another 12 minutes. Seems like a lot, but it's done at a pretty low speed and the DLX gives the dough a very gentle but thorough workout.
I use a very wet dough - 75% hydration or more. This takes a bit of practice to learn how to handle, but the results are worth it if you want the big holes.
For proving, I have been mixing the bread dough in the evening then leaving it overnight at 13C, shaping the boules in the morning and then letting them prove for another 3-4 hours at room temperature before baking.
Baking is done in a dutch oven in my regular kitchen oven as I don't (yet) have a WFO! I crank it as high as it will go (230C), leave the dutch oven in there to preheat, then tip the boule out of the proving basket into one half of the D.O., cover it and give it 30 mins at 230C before removing the lid and giving it another 20 mins at 215C. The D.O. keeps the moisture from the dough inside - creating a steamy environment like in a deck oven with steam injection. This lets the bread rise well before the crust firms up.
In terms of timing, what I am doing now is feeding the starter one morning, building the levain the next morning, mixing the dough that evening, proofing overnight, forming the boules in the morning and then baking them around lunchtime. It needs a bit of planning but doesn't actually take much time - so if you want bread for Saturday, you need to make sure to pull the starter out of the fridge on Thursday morning and feed it, mix the levain before you go to work on Friday morning, mix the dough when you get home on Friday, form the boules Saturday morning and let them proof while you do the shopping or whatever, then bake them around lunchtime.
In a WFO, I would think you should cook in a cooling oven with maybe a pot of water inside for the first 30 minutes to create steam - door closed to keep it in there.
A couple of good books on the subject are: "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast" by Ken Forkish and "Tartine Bread" by Chad Robertson. I would probably recommend Forkish over Robertson at first - but both are excellent and use variations on the same theme.
Well....that's probably a bit more long winded than I thought it would be, but hopefully it's helpful!
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adm
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Posts: 164
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Post by adm on Jun 24, 2013 12:15:32 GMT
Oh.....one other important thing I forgot - the shaping of the boules themselves. I found this works best if you try to end up with a lot of surface tension in the loaf. It's difficult to describe, but in general, I do a pre-shape, then lets them rest for 20-30 minutes, then do a final shaping before letting them proof. There's a good video on bread shaping here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgqPli_sLLM&feature=player_embedded#at=330
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