baked two sourdough loaves today :)

I baked two loaves today – my freezer stock has been depleted. One always need a decent home-made sourdough bread 🙂

Both loaves have been sightly sticky, risen at room temp for about 18 hours (at round 17 C). For the baton loaf, I used a pot to rise, whereas the other one was risen in a mixing bowl. The latter was slightly more sticky in the next morning and required quite a bit of flour to handle. I also needed to use a lot of flour to keep it from sticking to baking clothe while proving. This inevitably resulted in a pale looking loaf. I have risen the baton loaf on parchment paper between a couple of stuff to help keep its shape. 

The prove time was 4 hours for the round loaf and around 5 hours for the other. I baked them at 350F for around 55-65 minutes.

The end results are good with lots of air pockets. The big pockets in the round loaf are worrisome, telling me that I did not do a good job deflating the dough in the morning. The baton loaf had a much better crumb, which was very pleasing.

Bon appetite! 🙂

levain 🙂 happy and healthy

initial shaggy dough – I added 2 cups of levain. 9 cups of bread flour, 4 cups of water, 3 tbs of sugar, and 2 tbs of salt

after 5 stretching and folding, I have cut the dough into two – this is the slightly smaller half risen at room temp overnight

the bigger half: risen in the pot over night at room temp

the big half in the morning – risen well

the small half; nicely risen

the big dough formed into baton shape on parchment paper and supported by some handy kitchen items 🙂

the small dough right before the start of the proving step

small dough after 4 hours of proving

this is how it looked; note the flour on the surface – I had to use A LOT of it to prevent it from sticking to baking clothe

scoring was not successful this time, but good enough

the baton loaf after proving; nice and plumpy 🙂

scored; I was not very good at scoring this time, but that is okay

aaand the small loaf after 55 min at 350F – during the bake I sweeped the extra flour from the surface, but flour still stuck to the dough. as a results I ended up with a pale looking bread. oven spring is pretty good

this turned out to be a big loaf – I cut it into three pieces for freezer 🙂

the small/round loaf – not bad but not great either. nevertheless it will be greatly enjoyed 🙂

on the sides of the round loaf there have been many large air packets

this is the baton and my verdict is that its crumb has been way better than the round loaf 🙂