Vermont Sourdough - the first try

Well its been a while since my last post. Keep thinking we havent been anywhere to speak of, but there have been weekends in the country (mostly visiting family) a long weekend in Daylesford, which was fabulous, definitely worth doing again, and Christmas in South Australia - love those wine regions!

Instead of big holidays, we have been cooking. The latest experiments are with bread. We decided making our own sourdough culture might be fun, so after some internet research, we went ahead and made some. We have been using this with varying degrees of success over the summer as our pizza dough (a regular weekend dinner!).

One of my husbands colleagues has since put him on to a fantastic book called Bread - a bakers book of techniques and recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. So when our copy arrived this week, we couldnt wait to put it to good use! The recipe we have been recommended is Vermont Sourdough (page 153 for those of you following from home!). So this has been our weekend:

Friday night - get out sourdough starter and make up the liquid-levain build. This is quite straight forward as we have a good 'live' starter already that has been developing over the past few weeks.

Saturday morning - inspect the levain. Its looking good, lots of bubbles - small and large. Culture has grown well overnight. Its a hot day, which is going to make things interesting.

• Flour - 79F
• Room - 81F
• pre-ferment (levain) - 79F
• Friction (mixer) - 26F
• Water - 39F
• Step 1 is to measure and mix ingredients - we mixed for 10 min, although re-reading the recipe, this should have been more like 3-4 minutes. Will see how things go.
• Rest for 1 hour
• Next, mix for 3 min - forgot to add salt, so added and mixed further 1 minute.
• Rest for 2.5 hours, folding at H1 and H2 marks. not sure folding action was quite right - have to work on this.
• Pre-shape - this went well.
• Rest for 20 min
• Shape - need to work on this action too, but looked OK.
• Cook - forgot to steam oven before putting in, so steamed about 10min in, not sure this added any value. Forgot to change oven from fan forced to conventional, so think this is what made the loaves a little lop sided (see picture!).

Outcome: Reasonable.

Texture is good, although bubbles are at the top of the loaf and is a bit dense at the bottom - didnt 'slash' the loaves deep enough before cooking, so this may have contributed. Crust is soft and chewy. Taste and smell are great - just what we would expect. Just have to get the overall look right and texture even.

From Blog Preparation

UPDATE:  We have since found out that by not lowering the temperature to compensate for the different distribution of heat from the fan forced oven, this is the likely cause of the 'top rising' of the bread.  The additional heat caused the dough to rise too quickly and not cook through as thoroughly, so by using the same temperature, but not the fan for the second try, we had a more consistent outcome.

From Blog Preparation