Ten sourdough baking tips for the COVID-19 era.
If you were to chart the explosive growth of home bread-baking over the past two months, it would probably match the curve of COVID-19 infections with uncanny precision. Social distancing and home quarantining provide an unprecedented opportunity for so many of us to finally learn so many of the skills we’ve always wanted (I’m working on knife sharpening at the moment).
I started experimenting with home bread-making more than a decade ago, toying with easy sweet and savory quick breads like zucchini bread and beer bread, and then moving on to pizza dough and other conventional yeast breads not long after that. When my wife and I bought our first house five years ago I cultivated my first sourdough starter as a way of symbolically staking claim to the property (“You microorganisms work for me now, hear?”), and not long afterwards I ramped up my work-from-home schedule — first to 20%, and then all the way up to 50%. More time for home-baking.
Many of you who are suddenly and unexpectedly finding yourselves homebound are discovering how well-suited bread baking is for that type of environment. The pacing, the slow complexity, the attention to detail, the long nights of introspection and self-reflection. I’m sure that it won’t take time for most folks to surpass whatever success I’ve enjoyed and whatever expertise I’ve acquired over the hundreds of loaves I’ve baked.
Nonetheless, I’ll offer a few bits of insight that may save you some trial and error where sourdough cultivation and baking is concerned:
1. Yeast are living things. Your sourdough starter is not a single entity, it is a community of wee beasties that are born, eat, grow, and die continuously over the period of a few days. The yeast reproduces every hour or two, creating a veritable Galapagos island of transformation — evolution in action. It changes over time in response to its environment. If you feed it once a week and keep it in your fridge it will become suited to that lifestyle, becoming slow and lethargic so that it can survive with a minimum of food and attention. But that slow and resilient yeast colony will also be slow to wake up, and your bread will not rise as high or as quickly. If you feed it twice a day and keep it in a warm place, it will become a racehorse, eating and reproducing rapidly. But it will also require a bit more attention to ensure that it doesn’t rise too quickly, and the flavor may not be as rich.
This leads to my second point:
2. Take your time. Slower speed generally means deeper and more complex flavors, especially during that second cold overnight ferment in the fridge. Eight hours is good. But you could just as easily do an extra 24 hours on top of that, or even two or three full days in the fridge, if you like a REALLY full-flavored sourdough. Where do you need to be, anyway? What’s your rush?
Speaking of flavor:
3. Feed your starter well. Yeast benefits from a balanced diet as much as we do. Don’t just feed it plain white flour, toss some whole wheat or rye in there as well. But at the same time, pay attention to how it responds to the type and proportions of flour, and don’t switch it up too frequently. Every yeast strain is unique, and they grow differently with different food sources. If you see your yeast responding well to a specific diet, stick with that for a while and the starter will calibrate itself to that diet. A sudden change in diet could change the fermentation speed and even the flavor profile of your bread dough.
Another note on flavor profile:
4. Let it bake a little longer. I’m not saying burn the bread, but don’t be afraid to get a little more color on there. What the French call, “bien cuit” — well done — doesn’t just result in darker bread, it gives it a bit more crunch on the outside, a reduced likelihood of undercooked dough in the middle, and a bit more caramelization to the flavor. Not saying you need to overcook your bread, but ten minutes too much is better than ten minutes too little.
In terms of finished product:
5. Use a Dutch oven (or a cast iron pot with a well-fitting lid). The moisture that gets trapped in there during the first 20 minutes of cooking is critical to both the softness of the interior and the crunchiness of the exterior. Outside of having an actual baking oven that injects steam into the oven while you’re cooking, there is no other substitution that works half as well. Hot pans of ice are a disaster waiting to happen. Misting the walls of the oven with a spray bottle works a little better but opening the oven door repeatedly means you quickly lose that moisture anyway (and a good bit of heat too).
If you do end up using a spray mister to add moisture to the oven while baking:
6. Don’t spray the oven’s internal light bulb. Just don’t.
A comment on quantity:
7. Make enough dough for two loaves. Double up the recipe and cook two separate loaves. That way you get two shots at a finished product. If the first one doesn’t turn out right, you’ve got a second chance. Maybe try two different loaf shapes, or two different baking techniques.
You have extra bread?
8. Let it cool to room temperature and freeze one of the loaves. Or make croutons. And if tomatoes are in season, make panzanella salad!
Did something go wrong?
9. Adapt or improvise. If it’s too dense, slice it super thin, toast it, and call it ersatz crackers. It it’s too dry or crumbly, make breadcrumbs. Too moist, toast it. If it’s just terrible, compost it or give it to the birds.
A final comment on patience:
10. Always let the bread cool to room temperature (unless you’re going to eat the whole thing all at once). If you start slicing a loaf while it’s still warm, it’s going to go stale quickly, and the texture won’t develop properly.
Learn something from every loaf, and have fun!
