Typically I'm making bread in a very similar way. Sourdough, water, wheat and maybe some other flour, salt, olive oil and bake it. The bread is getting better all the time, but it's kind of boring for posts.
Today I'm posting about a bit different kind of bread!
Not that it would actually be anything exciting, but it's just bread from a wet dough! Instead of the typical ~60% water ratio, I'm using 75%+ water ratio.
The recipe:
400 grams of sourdough starter
850 grams of flour (425g spelt, 425g wheat)
650 grams of water
20 grams of salt
A little bit of olive oil
This is my starter, it's in active state as it's very bubbly. The more active the starter is, the better it is for baking.
I added the sourdough starter, flour and water to my mixing bowl. Don't add the salt and oil yet! It might be better for the dough if you add the oil and salt after the first kneading.
No serious harm is done if you add everything in the start, but I personally recommend adding them later.
My trusted assistant handles the kneading, so I don't need to do that.
13 minutes of kneading
Add oil and salt
7 minutes of kneading
If you've added the oil and salt in the beginning, you can do the 20 minutes without pauses.
As my starter was quite wet too, after the 13 minutes of kneading I realized that the dough is just way too wet. I added a little bit of oats in the dough so it could absorb a little bit of the water in the dough. It helped a bit, but didn't do too much as I wanted a soft dough.
The dough was allowed to rest 4 hours. Or maybe it was 5. Not more than 6 though. Maybe?
But it was let to rest. This is pre-rest photo. The after-rest photo was approximately similar, so I didn't add it here, as not everyone is very interested in watching photos of dough in a bowl.
With the help of my magnificent 6 year old son, I got a photo of me handling the dough!
As the dough was super soft, I had small piles of flour to prevent dough from sticking to everything. I did my best to turn the breads into 2 beautiful, well formed bread loaves.
If I had been smart, I'd just used baking trays or a cauldron.
But noooooo. I decided to show how soft can a bread be.
This is what they looked like. And this is before I put them in the fridge to rise. The bread was left to rise for 1 hour in the room temperature, but then put into the fridge, temperature at 4 Celsius degrees.
12 hours in the fridge does wonders to the dough, giving it a slow rise and a wonderful flavor.
And this is how it came out from the fridge. To be honest, I did cut it a bit before taking the photo.
The dough did rise, but it didn't become beautiful.
200 C in the oven and I sprayed a lot of water in the oven before putting the bread in.
This is the result. The bread looks good, it gained a little bit of height in the oven. Now you can see much better where I cut the dough.
This bread was easiest to cut in squares like this. Not too bad at all, the bread tastes very good and it's really soft inside. You can see a lot of small, beautiful bubbles in the bread.
I have to admit, even though the bread had higher water content than I normally use, the flavor is pretty much the same. It's still good. A small lesson for everyone: Even if the dough doesn't seem perfect, it can turn into a very tasty bread. Don't stress.