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<\/a>Anyway, so I tried making sourdough in the bread machine. My general impression was that most people who make sourdough felt that it was wicked (and\/or impossible) to try to automate such a messy human endeavor as making sourdough, but both of the recipes that I found said that it worked well.<\/p>\r\n
And when I tried them, I found that they \u2026 worked okay?<\/p>\r\n
One was from the King Arthur Flour website<\/a>, the other was from Reddit<\/a>. I tried the King Arthur one first, then tried the Reddit one half a dozen times, then the King Arthur one again. (All this was spread out over several months.)<\/p>\r\n In general, the results I obtained for both recipes tended to be too damp, too dense, not sour enough, and with an odd uncrustlike crust. And they would rise in the bread machine but then at some point they tended to collapse, leaving the top of the final loaf kind of flat instead of domed, and sometimes leaving the loaf quite short in height.<\/p>\r\n I tried a bunch of variations and adjustments, and I took a lot of notes. Over time, the results got somewhat better, but they were never quite what I was hoping for.<\/p>\r\n And despite the uniformity of the bread-machine process, it felt like there continued to be a lot of variables that I didn\u2019t understand. For example, I suspect that the air temperature in my kitchen has a big effect on how fast the starter grows during the part where I feed it and wait for it to be active before putting it in the machine\u2014when I first got the starter, the kitchen stayed well above 70\u00b0F overnight, and I would feed the starter at night and it would quadruple in volume by morning; whereas as the weather got colder, the kitchen usually dropped to 65\u00b0 overnight, and the starter grew much more slowly overnight. (I didn\u2019t know until much later that my oven has a Proofing setting. I still haven\u2019t used that.)<\/p>\r\n I also found articles talking about the differences in the kinds of sourness produced by various balances between yeast and bacteria\u2014a difference, said one source, between acetic acid sourness (like vinegar) and lactic acid sourness (like yoghurt)\u2014and about how to achieve more of either of those kinds of sourness. But I wasn\u2019t sure which of those I liked better or which I was aiming for.<\/p>\r\n So there were many variables, and mysterious-to-me processes that I don\u2019t have a lot of control over, and I had no clear sense of what the range of possible outcomes was nor even what my goals were.<\/p>\r\n So at some point a couple months ago, I told KTO about all this, and she made an excellent suggestion:<\/p>\r\n She would walk me through making sourdough the traditional way, in an oven, and that would give me more experience and a better understanding of what was going on, which I could then apply to improving the bread-machine process.<\/p>\r\n I hadn\u2019t wanted to make oven sourdough before then because I think of bread-making as a complicated and difficult process. (I think this perception is partly based on childhood memories of straining flour and endless kneading.) And I felt like people talk about sourdough in particular as something that you have to make a whole lot of in order to do it at all well. And more generally, I find most cooking to be a little bit anxiety-provoking. A big advantage of the bread machine for me is that I can just dump ingredients into the machine and it does all the complicated and scary parts for me.<\/p>\r\n But having an experienced cook guide me through the process made it feel more doable, and I reminded myself of the paradigm that my therapist has been trying to get me to adopt more often: approach new things with curiosity, and think of them as experiments so I don\u2019t get swamped with Must Do Everything Correctly So It Comes Out Perfectly anxiety.<\/p>\r\n So KTO and I talked about what equipment I would need. I don\u2019t have a Dutch oven, nor a banneton\/proofing basket, and I was hesitant about spending a bunch of money on those things if I was only going to be doing this process once. But KTO told me I could get by without them, and suggested alternatives. And I did buy a nice big Pyrex bowl that I could use for mixing and such.<\/p>\r\n And then we talked through a no-knead beginner-sourdough recipe<\/a> I found online, and she answered a bunch of my questions.<\/p>\r\n And then I tried the recipe.<\/p>\r\n Remarkably, almost everything went smoothly. In accordance with the recipe, I fed my sourdough starter and let it sit overnight, then did a few rounds of stretch-and-fold, then let it sit for a while longer, then shaped it and put it on a floured tea towel in a colander in the fridge overnight. (The colander was a last-minute substitution\u2014I had planned to do the refrigerated step in the Pyrex bowl, but I was poking around online for info about floured tea towels, and saw a recommendation to use a colander (if you don\u2019t have a banneton) to improve airflow, so I tried it.) And by the next morning, after the dough had been in the fridge for about 15 hours, everything seemed ready for the baking process!<\/p>\r\n So I put a half-sheet tray filled with water on the lower rack of my oven (to produce steam, because I don\u2019t have a Dutch oven), and preheated the oven to 500\u00b0F.<\/p>\r\n When the oven reached 500, I put the loaf on another (parchment-paper-lined) baking tray, and scored the top, and put it on the top rack of the oven for 20 minutes.<\/p>\r\n At the end of 20 minutes, the recipe said to turn down the heat. So I went to do that\u2014<\/p>\r\n \u2014and discovered that the current oven temperature was 250\u00b0.<\/p>\r\n Somehow, the oven had finished its preheating cycle and then turned itself off, probably before I put the loaf in. And I hadn\u2019t noticed that it had turned itself off, and so the loaf had been cooking at an ever-decreasing temperature for the past 20 minutes.<\/p>\r\n KTO advised me on what to do to try to fix the problem (and what not to do). But it turned out that I had also made another mistake: I had put the top rack of the oven too high in the oven.<\/p>\r\n So by the time I took the bread out of the oven, although the sides and bottom were a lovely medium brown, the top was pretty thoroughly burned.<\/p> I was disappointed and sad, but I figured it had been an experiment, and it had been too much to hope that everything would go well my first try.<\/p>\r\n So (after I let the bread sit on a rack to cool down for a while) I cut off the burned top and tasted the non-burned part\u2014<\/p>\r\n \u2014and it was delicious. A nice texture, a nice solid-but-not-too-crunchy-for-my-tastes crust (on the sides and bottom), and a just about perfect-for-my-tastes sour flavor.<\/p>\r\n (I kinda suspected that part of why this version was much sourer than the bread-machine attempts was that this version sat in the fridge for 12+ hours just before baking, giving it a longer time to slowly develop flavor. But that can\u2019t be all of it, because the next couple attempts weren\u2019t as sour; see below.)<\/p>\r\n Kam and I ate most of the rest of the unburned parts of that loaf pretty quickly.<\/p>\r\n So then I wanted to try again!<\/p>\r\n At this stage, I felt like there were kind of three downsides to all this:<\/p>\r\n Anyway, a week after that first time, I tried again. This time, everything went smoothly again, and I made sure the oven was still at 500 when I put the loaf in. And 20 minutes later, the top wasn\u2019t quite burned but it was kinda scorched.<\/p>\r\n That loaf, too, was tasty, aside from the burned-ish parts. But it wasn\u2019t as sour as the first loaf had been, even though it had been in the fridge for a comparably long time. On the plus side, the way that I had shaped it had accidentally left it kind of squared-off instead of entirely circular, which made for reasonably good slice shapes for sandwiches.<\/p>\r\n A week later, I tried again. This third time, I followed advice from Rowan and put a piece of aluminum foil over the top when it was nicely browned, so I could keep cooking it a little longer without burning the top. But I also tried tapping\/thumping the bread at the 20-minute mark, and it sounded hollow, so I decided to stop cooking it at that point instead of doing the turn-down-the-heat-and-keep-cooking thing. The loaf came out looking nice (the colander holes left little spots of flour, like a fawn\u2019s markings), and it tasted much like the second attempt: tasty but not as sour as I wanted. And when I got about 2\/3 of the way through eating the loaf, I came to a part where the dough wasn\u2019t entirely cooked near the bottom of the loaf. I made do, turning those last few slices into toast in order to cook them a bit more (and the toast was really tasty), but it wasn\u2019t what I had hoped for. But each try at this oven-baked sourdough thing had nonetheless been mostly better than the last.<\/p>\r\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>\r\n
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