I’ve been baking our own bread (and pizza as well as focacchia) for probably about a decade now.
Always liked baking, but had mixed results forever.
Finally got kick-started by Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeastbook and am still revolving around it. Results are stellar (IMNSHO).
Even simple white breads are gorgeous, but probably for the past … hm, five years at least? … I’ve been baking variants of a sourdough bread he calls the Country Blonde.
The Country Blonde takes a bit of wall clock time – I start on Friday morning at the latest, loafs come out of the oven around Sunday noon – but total actual work time spent on the bread is probably less than half an hour?
A simple white bread, his “quickest” bread (again just wall clock time) is about 5-6 hours. Actual time spent working on the bread: again less than half an hour. Tastes Just Great™.
I started cultivating sour dough during the pandemic when yeast was difficult to get where I was. I hardly use yeast anymore except when I need a fast rise or to make braided sundays brioche (Zopf).
Bread is quite consistent these days, with nice crust and tasty crumb. I usually start in the evening, refreshing the sour dough and use it the next day. Baking time is afternoon (when I’m home) or evening (when I’m out). What I have not managed to do is make a bread that keeps fresh for more than 2 days. Any ideas? Will check out your link for some inspiration!
The short answer is that I cut up the bread into slices and freeze them a few hours after baking (in air tight freezing bags).
Upon thawing, e.g. heated up in an oven, or even a toaster, these slices taste almost as nice as freshly baked bread.
The longer and complicated answer: both the Overnight Country Blonde and the Overnight Country Brown – as they are called by their full name – can be kept for a day or two if you only cut them the day after baking. They even develop additonal taste – something I would confirm – but they’ll still dry out rather fast after the first cut.
Forkish bakes a “big” loaf using 1000g of flour where he claims that it really only tastes better on day 2, but I haven’t been able to reproduce his results (mainly because my oven is too small).
Yeah, I started baking when I lived in the UK because the quality of the bread there is shocking, if you’ve grown up somewhere where bakeries are a thing.
Sourdough was one of two unconquered hills, I tried a few times without success, a shame for a biochemist, until it succeeded…and we realised we didn’t like it much compared with other breads we make.
My remaining unconquered hill is puff pastry, tried a few times without success and gave up.
Ditto on wanting the Zopf recipe, it looks fantastic!
I guess you were comparing sourdough to yeast. When I started out, my sourdough bread was far too sour for my gf. With refreshing/feeding it and baking bread less than 24 hours later, there is not enough time (or low enough temperature) for the lactobacilli to multiply to any meaningful acidity. The resulting bread is very mild and gf likes it.
For sure. For a while all our attempts were pathetic failures, nothing would rise and it’d taste like shit. Really like shit, which is probably because E. coli got into it.
When we actually got a proper, correct sourdough starter going we managed to make the phenomenal crust that’s the trademark of sourdough, but it was literally too sour indeed!
BTW, if anyone needs a sourdough starter, let me know? I am happy to slow mail dry starter samples which should get you going within a few days. I remember this – getting a working and active sourdough starter – being somewhat of a nuisance and at least one failed attempt and foul smell across the kitchen …
You should be able to take a dried dough sample, add some water, and then grow it into an active sourdough within a few days.
I’ve been producing these “backup” samples for years now with the main purpose of having a … well, backup: in case my “wet” sourdough starter goes belly up, I’ll grow a new one from the “dry” backup.
All your breads and Zopfs look fantastic! I’m not a good baker myself, I use from time to time a breadmaker machine (Panasonic Croustina) which really makes a good bread, but nothing compared to yours, probably. I will look at the links, maybe the recipe can be adapted!
Mix the milk, butter, crumbled yeast and 1 tsp of sugar (I use a Thermomix for that for 3 minutes at 37°).
Add flour, salt and another tsp of sugar and knead for 5-10 minutes until you got a smooth dough.
Form a ball and let it rest in a bowl covered by a wet towel for about an hour, the dough should double in size.
Cut it in half (or more depending on how many braids you need) and roll them into long snakes. Make braids → fantastic tutorial
Put the zopf onto a baking plate and cover it with a wet towel. Let it rest again for 30 minutes.
Squirl the egg and 1 tsp of sugar and spread it all over the zopf.
Put it in the preheated (200° “Ober-/Unterhitze”) in the bottom third for 30- 35 minutes. When you knock on the bottom of the zopf it should sound hollow.
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