Bread bread bread bread
Sourdough sourdough bread sourdough
Bread sourdough bread sourdough
Now as I'm here, there's no end to this.
While I was practicing the stretch and fold style in baking, I decided to make one test bread in a charcoal grill.
As most of the phases of this are dough, we have a bunch of dough-photos again!
The recipe is simple:
100g active sourdough
500g flours (only wheat this time)
300 grams of water
10 grams of salt (I used 20 to get this one extra salty, but it was too salty)
All the ingredients can be simply mixed as a very simple dough-mass, but if you have extra time, you can start by mixing only the flours and water and leaving it to an autolysis for 30-60 minutes, then adding the rest.
The autolysis gives the dough a better consistency, but if you're not too picky and you're in a hurry, then you should probably buy you bread from a shop. As this takes LONG.
When all the ingredients are mixed (no need to knead), you can leave the dough to rise for approx. 6 hours. During this time you can stretch and fold the dough 2-4 times. This is just extra and makes the dough better.
You can stretch and fold for the first time after 30 minutes, then after 30 minutes again as many times as you want. Then leave it alone for the rest of the 6 hours.
With 4 stretches it'd be like this:
30 minutes, stretch,
30 minutes, stretch,
30 minutes, stretch,
30 minutes, stretch,
4 hours of doing nothing.
This is a way to stretch the dough. You grab it, you pull it and then you fold it. Then repeat and repeat until the dough feels "stronger" and it doesn't stretch as well.
This photo was from the previous post I made, that's why the bowl is bigger in this one.
The dough doesn't turn too pretty while stretching and folding but it's OK. Photo taken after first stretch and fold.
This is how it looks after the 6 hours.
As I had to get the dough to fridge for 16 hours, I wanted to make sure I'll get the dough easily off from the bowl. I took another bowl and added a cloth on top of it. Then added some flours on the cloth and dropped the dough in the middle.
At this point the dough was inside the cloth in the bowl, the flour makes sure that the dough doesn't stick too much in the cloth. Rice flours are perfect for this.
16 hours later, we had just baked some pizza in the grill. The pizza stone was already hot, so I took the dough from the cloth-bowl and put it on the pizza stone.
Then I waited.
For a long, long time. Occasionally I peeked just in case the bread started to look ready but the crust was still super white.
Then I got bored and went to pick up my food thermometer. And it turned out that the bread was already baked! Because most of the heat came from below the crust didn't get much color.
The crust wasn't crispy, but still it was quite firm.
However... the bread had burnt from the bottom. It was stuck on the pizza stone and I had to use a bit of violence to get the bread out from the grill.
Luckily the bread was otherwise really good. It was soft and nice inside.
Too bad I both burned the bottom of the bread AND had too much salt in it, as it was almost inedible. Luckily it looks pretty in the photo, so I can pretend it was a success story.
