supervegan! vegan food blog

it is bread
a honking good loaf of sourdoug

February 21, 2024

by dozens

Guess what? I’ve been baking a bunch of sourdough at home. And by “a bunch”, I mean three loaves over about three weeks.

I’ve tried making sourdough before, but never got anything that resembled a raised bread. It was always super dense. Bad yeast I guess? Bad process, more likely. A good builder doesn’t blame their tools, do they?

Anyway, I wanted to try my hand at it again. But didn’t want to go to the trouble of making my own starter. So I posted online on my neighborhood group asking if anyway would give me some castoff the next time they fed their starter. And I got several responses! So I went and grabbed some starter from a neighbor, and here we are.

I think there are a couple things that are making a big difference in my bread:

  1. Don’t over knead it

  2. Lots of time in autolyse, proofing, and aging in the fridge. It can take up to 48 hours from when you start before a loaf is ready to put in the oven.

  3. Piping hot oven: start baking at 505, then reduce heat to 465.

  4. Lots of steam: I’ve been using the “baking tray full of steaming towels” trick and I find it gives a more consistent, more constant steam during baking.

  5. Let it completely cool before slicing it. Otherwise it’s not fully baked yet.

The recipe I’m using results in a nice, chewy loaf with good structure, and a nice crisp crust. It’s good enough that we haven’t bought any sandwich bread since I started baking. It’s not that sour though! I’ll try letting it age and ferment a little longer in the fridge and see if that helps. I wonder whether the starter I got doesn’t have a little bit of active yeast in it.

Recipe

Ingredients

Steps:

Footnotes

  1. I stopped using my cast iron skillet for this because it smokes awfully in the oven. The bread comes out wonderfully using just the steaming towels!