TWO reasons your sourdough doesn't SPRING like this

Alright, two days of the

sourdough

process have led up to

this

moment, the most exciting part of baking

sourdough

, the oven

spring

where dreams are made and dreams are also crushed, so let's take a look at what happens Under

this

cover, oh yes, oh yes. beautiful oven

spring

nice light and fluffy turn it off now many first time bakers, beginner bakers,

your

bread may not look like this and I know it because thousands of people have sent me photos of their bread, especially at the beginning of their journey and their Bread just isn't perfect, it's decent but not great and they're looking to take it to the next level and I always recommend two things, two things that I've learned over the years that, once corrected, really improve bread. great and that's what this video is about.

I'll take you through the entire sourdough bread baking process, but I'll isolate two main steps, break them down in depth, and talk about the proper techniques you need to really get the most out of

your

decent to fantastic sourdough bread at home now again. in the oven to get it nice and crispy, so a few years ago I worked as an apprentice at a bakery in Brooklyn and I learned a lot about baking sourdough bread and when I was done they gave me some of their starter that they had been feeding me every day and farming for years and I went home and baked bread with it and it turned out amazing, it tasted just like the bread I had at the bakery and I realized at that moment how important it is to have a good-fed active sourdough starter is and to help you really understand why it's so important, I'm going to break down some very simple science about sourdough starter, so this is my sourdough starter and it's just flour and water mixed together to create a full colony. with yeast and bacteria that will naturally leaven our bread, so to do it right we start with some kind of container and, as I said before, we have water and flour together, these are the only two ingredients you need now Mix them in equal parts and we get a dough like this, but we still don't have much activation here, so the crazy thing about living here on Earth is that we have these microorganisms that hang everywhere in the air. flower and what we are doing with this sourdough is mixing the flour and the water, we are creating the perfect environment for two of them to really thrive, we have yeast here and we have bacteria and the reason they love this environment is because when we mix water and flour, yeast and bacteria, can feed on the sugars that are available in starch, they chew those sugars and the byproduct that they release, basically, their farts are CO2, which is the gas that is released and that gives our bread . air, but also as they eat the sugars replicate, so when we continue to feed them every day with flour and water, we start to bring in more yeast, more bacteria and our environment becomes a little more active and then the yeast and the bacteria run out of food we give them more flour and water they feed on the sugars more action they start to multiply and our colony becomes a little more active and this is the reason why we have to be disciplined with our starter when we make bread.

To continue to feed these microorganisms that use flour and water every day to get their food so they can thrive like humans, we are creating the perfect environment for them to really thrive and multiply to the point where their sourdough starter is nice and bubbly. . You're getting a big rise and it's practically overflowing from your container, so consistently feeding your sourdough starter every day and keeping up with it is what will give you that nice active colony of yeast and bacteria that will then lead to a loaf. really good. but if you're starting completely from scratch or just struggling to get a good active sourdough starter, you can click this link here and download my free pdf of my ultimate guide to sourdough starter, which will really help you through the whole process , so now To understand what a sourdough starter is, I have to feed it mine to activate it and make some bread, so I'm going to take 85 grams of my sourdough starter and give it 100 grams of sourdough flour. all-purpose bread and 100 grams of water.

I'm not very particular about getting the exact water temperature when it comes to making bread, but it's worth knowing the water temperature because it can drastically affect fermentation time, so I'll generally go by feel and some by the room. the temperature is a good controlled sampler for me now my preferred sourdough mixer is a large sized toothpick this thing does the job and once it is well incorporated it should look like this, almost a thick cake batter that is a sourdough of 100 hydration and I'm just going to use that toothpick to really scrape the sides so I have a good window into the activation process so that my starter is fully activated.

You can see that it is slightly rounded on the edges. Can you see there's some kind of ellipse there? I don't want it concave that means you're out of gas you want it right at the top and I started it at 7:00 am and now it's 11:30 so it's been about four and a half hours but remember that the starter motor could activate. completely different depending on how powerful it is and also the temperature of your house, the temperature of the water, there are a lot of variables to take into account, but we are ready to make some dough, you can do it by feeling, of course, I'm going to do it wear. a scale so you can better understand the measurements and I'll tar it with this bowl on top and start with some whole wheat flour.

This will be predominantly low white flour, so it will be nice and fluffy, but I like a little bit of whole wheat just for flavor, so I'm just going to do 100 grams of that and then add bread flour. This is all-purpose white bread flour and I'm going to take that measurement to 700 grams because I know that 700 grams is what two of my proofing baskets can handle since I've baked with these proportions before. The beautiful thing about using a scale is that once you have this flower measurement, all I have to do is choose my hydration levels, which I'm going to hit at about 80 percent hydration, so if I take that 700 and multiply it For 0.80, 560 grams is the amount of water I need to reach 80 hydration. batter Oops I didn't put tar so 700 plus 560.

Okay I need to get to 1260 since I didn't put tar I'm actually going to stop a little bit short of 80 hydration because this starter is one hundred percent hydration so I'll increase the percentage just a little. One quick thing I want to cover is car leasing, which you've seen me do if you've watched other sourdough videos. Now leasing is the process of mixing these two ingredients together without your yeast yet and just letting them sit and what happens is once the water gets into the flour, those gluten bonds start to develop and you're giving this dough a head start before the yeast comes in, but to be honest, I've been making breads recently without a car lease and they've been coming out great, so I'm going to skip that step right now and go straight to the sourdough starter tar to which I'll just add a lot of this, we'll see how much it comes out. to between 10 and 20 percent sourdough, that's 160 grams, that's totally fine, 10 to 20 of this number here everything goes outside that top number, the 700 grams now, finally, your last ingredient is your salt In fact, I'm going to use a better salt.

I prefer to use fine sea salt for this, it will just be much better to incorporate into this dough compared to a coarse crystallized salt like this, and to get the salt ratio, the salt is always around two percent of the flour again. Take that flour away, so I'm going to take 700, multiply it by 0.20. 14 grams of salt. Oops, they went a little overboard. That's totally fine, I made 18 grams and there's your baker's percentage. He will give me two loaves. You can follow this. exact recipe or you can adjust it to your liking right now this is a dough mixer a lot of people ask what it is it does a great job just bringing this dough together you just want to make sure all the water is hydrated in that dough so now that it's mixed, I'm just going to take a damp cloth that I like to use throughout this process to keep the dough moist and leave it for about 10 minutes to let everything relax and all those glutens.

Relax a little because this dough is super sticky. I'm going to start with just a few pats and folds and you'll see, I'll have this water bottle or water sprayer here, it really creates a beautiful non-stick surface. in your hands, where this very moist, high hydration dough won't stick too much to your hands, I mean it will stick a little, but I'll give it a few pats and folds right now since it's super loose and the gluten hasn't got it yet. It's come together a lot, but you can already see it's starting to get softer after a few folds and a bit of sitting time, so I'm going to let it set and do it again in 30 minutes from now. we're going to take 30 minute intervals to work this dough 30 minutes later you can see how much the dough has relaxed I'm going to go around my hands you can always give the dough a splash too I'm not really going to slap and fold I'm just going to make some folds spiral like that, just wrapping the dough and you can see that the structure is already improving, the dough is getting softer and the dough after a few folds will start to resist a little bit you don't want to stretch this dough too much you don't want to break it once It starts to resist, that's when you know you're ready to let it rest.

See how quickly the dough transformed? I'm used to kneading and overworking standard pizza dough dough, so it almost seems counterintuitive to be gentle with it, but only time and a little work will really transform this dough into something nice, so I'll give it another 30 minutes. . We'll be back soon, okay, let's spray. You can see that it continues to gain structure while holding its shape a little longer each time and this could be the final fold we need. Let's look so you can see that this dough is really soft. It hasn't gained much volume, it hasn't really shown it, but the feeling that the structure is progressing very well, so we are ready for the next phase, which is the massive increase, add a little bit of oil just to prevent it from sticking . the sides and then we'll just throw it right into the container, which brings me to the second biggest problem that I see all the time with sourdough bakers, especially beginners, when you use a sourdough starter for the first time and you get used to it, It takes time for the next process to actually kick in, which is the bulk augmentation process.

A lot of people are used to things like instant yeast or quick yeast, so the bulk rice process is when they tell you to let the dough double. size and when you use instant yeast, that process happens very quickly, so you can see it and practically see it happen before your eyes, so it's very easy to nail down. That's why people love instant yeast, it speeds up that process, but at the same time it speeds up. By speeding up that process, of course, you're losing flavor, which is the good thing about slowing down that process, but what I see is that when people first start using sourdough, they're just not used to that slow process. fermentation and they end up under fermenting their dough under fermentation, so having a container like this has completely revolutionized my sourdough baking, even for someone like me who has been baking forever, it's really nice to see exactly what's happening, so when it goes over a liter you can see the spout. it's just above the one liter mark when it's around the two liter mark the peak we know this thing has doubled in size and we can cut off this increase in volume so I don't know how long it will take again we have variables temperature of your dough temperature of your environment activity in your starter so many things so it's great to have a container like this to handle those variables so you can see I didn't hit the two liter mark, but that's totally fine, any increase between that kind of 75 and 100 will do fine for you and just like the starter we still have a rounded top so it's still growing, leaving a little bit of room for the next stage, shaping and proofing, so you can see a lot. of volume in this dough I'm going to keep it moist for this stage I'm not going to add flour and I'm going to divide it in two now what we're doing here is just preshaping it so I'm going to type We shape it into rectangles and we're going to make the same kind of spiral folds and then we'll just fold them and put them together, just give them a rough shape.

Now that's just the previous way, take a damp cloth and I. We're going to let them sit for about 20 minutes and give them the final shape, so notice that they're holding up pretty well, they didn't sink completely and that's just in the pre shape, so that's a good sign that structurally I'm. I'm in good shape, so this is the first time I'll incorporatea little flour because these are going to take shape and go to these dressers. I have two batard-shaped banana cans of the same size and they need to be floured so they don't stick, you can't put wet dough in here or you'll have a lot of problems, so I'll just sprinkle a little flour, now I'll move one to the side, not the I will use, I will use that.

A proper bench scraper for this is much better so I'll actually do the same technique here. Make a fold over a fold like that and now that we have a nice log we'll start making some of these crossovers, it feels nice and tight and then we'll roll it up, fold it up and start pulling with some tension and this is for practice, of course, don't expect to get that on the first shot. I continue to improve every time I make bread. Now I'm just tucking in those seams to get a nice rounded one. I have some sesame seeds here I am.

I'm going to sew down and then straight into that, so I'm going to lower the seam and then I'm going to dust a little bit of flour. This is very important. You have to make sure because you can dust this flower, but you have to make sure that when this comes out in the basket, it

doesn

't stick to the side, which is a common mistake and when I press it, it jumps all the way back, showing me, of course, that this

doesn

't It's proven, so you can leave those buns in the room. temperature and ferment for one to three hours until they pass the fermentation test and then bake them, but I like to let them sit in the refrigerator overnight for that long slow fermentation, you'll gain a little more flavor and also bake bread in the morning . waking up to that is one of my favorite things to do, so I'll check out those loaves in the morning as you can see they've fermented really well.

The best way to check if they are ready to go in the oven is a test, so I'm going to stick it in there and you'll see how it comes back but it still leaves a little dent, I'll show you again here, it comes back just a little bit but there's still a dent, so our pan has been preheating for about 45 minutes, whoops we're done! Ready to go, I have some parchment paper which makes it easy to transport to the pan. Very easy, let's see what we have here. Okay, let's see how it comes out because I used all that flour, but since there's a lot of excess flour.

I'm going to dust it off, do a little digging. I always like this part, just those big coagulated bits that we're going to dust off and then once you've removed the big bits, you don't want to bake that flour because it will burn. now I'm going to take it off the parchment, now I'm going to bring my pan, it's just the bottom half of course, and I'm going to put it right there instead of marking it on the side, I'm just going to mark it right in the center since it's a hydration high, it's easier to score right in the center, it's not the prettiest score but it will do the job and then I'll put the top on and put it in the oven and set the timer for the first part of baking. for 20 minutes and then we'll remove the top, this is what it's all about my friends, we made some good bread, the oven spring is very good, oh look it's a good pop, so I'm going to put it back in the oven. and I'm going to turn down the oven.

I've been going to 475 recently to get a little bit darker crust and I'll start with that for 20 minutes, maybe it'll last longer, we'll see, okay, let's see where we are in 20 more minutes. It's a beautiful looking bread so color wise it could go a little more toasted but I think I'm going to turn it twice oh no I left the lid broken that's not good omg that's okay that's it a mistake. I've never made it weird, puffy, but I mean, I really don't think it's home-baked sourdough bread without some kind of, to be honest, it's just part of the game and it's what makes the process so addictive.

I don't think I'm ever satisfied when I bake, there's always something I can play with, obviously this was a huge disaster on my part, but it shows you how important it is to have something like a Dutch oven because without that blocked steam. Look at the shape of this and look at the color, like, you really see the difference there, but let's cut the good one out and see what we have crunchy, crunchy, crunchy, crunchy, oh boy, can you feel good when you cut it. it's got a treasure inside, beautiful stuff right there, super, there's a moistness that you don't want the bread to overcook, that's something I've really been focusing on recently, I like a moist crumb and it will dry out the more time you leave it in the oven my friends my friends my friends that's a wet crumb taste test and we'll get out of here remember if you want to master your starter download my free pdf right there obviously there are a lot of variables at play when it comes to actually making something well sourdough, but the two I've highlighted today have definitely made the biggest difference in just troubleshooting so many breads over the last few years by all of you and all of my sourdough students, so I hope this helps, let me know if It's like that.

Help in the comments below and see you in the next video