I finally read Salt Fat Acid Heat it is, in many ways, a really excellent book. A thing that bothered me: Samin Nosrat repeats the idea that baking is quantitatively different from cooking. Like: cooking is a thing you can experiment with, while baking is something that requires precision. This is probably true in a commercial kitchen. Other things that are true in commercial kitchens: pervasive sexism, sexual harassment, drug overdoses. At home? Fuck off.
To prove my impulsive "fuck off" to myself, I decided to develop a recipe for sourdough bread that I could never replicate. I wanted to use as a base something I had never seen anyone do (and couldn't find a recipe for on the internet) and bring in the knowledge I gained from having baked bread maybe a half-dozen times, and sourdough only once.
What I decided on was to bake bread where roughly 75% of the volume of the dough came from discard. I had a grip of it sitting in the refrigerator, collected over about a month of uneven feedings, covered. I wanted to use it all.
Anyone reading: good luck. It baked off two loaves.
Recipe
- 1 month's worth sourdough Discard, unevenly distributed
- 1 1/2 heaping pinch salt
- 1 packet active dry yeast
- 1-2 heaping pinches sugar
- a grip of flour, whole wheat & all purpose
- water, hot enough to register on the inside of your wrist but not Hot
- Olive oil (whatever feels right)
Remove the Discard from the fridge (where you've been storing it, covered).
Bloom yeast - drop a packet in the hot enough water, add a little bit of sugar, and wait 5-10 minutes.
Add bloomed yeast, salt, oil and sugar to discard. Lightly mix together.
Add 3 cups whole wheat flour. Mix with a wooden spoon, greased. Add 1 cup All Purpose Flour. Mix for a fucking minute. It should be gross sticky, but no flour should be left.
Keep adding All Purpose Flour, about 1/2 cup at a time. Keep mixing. Go from sticky wet mess to weird messy sticky wet. To "is this right?" when it falls apart and recombines. Push through, continually adding flour, until it feels like bread dough. You're going to have some dough loss, and you're probably going to have to switch to your hands at some point. Be near a sink.
Cover with kitchen towel (or whatever), go to a friend's house, play Case 2 Day 1 of Detective. See the second Jumanji movie with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black. Go home.
It's been, idk, 9 hours? and this is way goopier than you meant it to be. Which means all that time you spent setting up a kneading station is worthless. That's fine. Add one heaping spoon (I mean literally a spoon you would eat with, not the measurement) at a time of All Purpose Flour and work it in. Get almost to dough, but it should be still sticky if you have to hold it while you talk or walk briefly. Bring it over the finish line by kneading it on a floured surface - I prefer the "fold in half, turn, shove with the palm of your hand, repeat" method.
Grease a bowl (drop some oil in & smear with your fingers), drop the dough in upside down, flip over, cover and put in fridge.
Wake up six hours later and fuck around for half an hour. Get up, pull dough out of fridge, divide. Shape two loaves. There are ways you've probably learned to shape dough for baking. Do those, or do some other shit.
Put the two loaves (rounds, baguettes, boules, whatever) on the tray you'll be baking them on. Set a timer for an hour.
Once the timer goes off, go in. Start preheating oven to 450F. Start boiling water in an electric kettle. Grab your cast iron & your oven mitts. This is going to take a half hour. More or less based on your setup.
Once the shaped loaves look good to you score them lightly with a knife then throw them in the oven, middle rack. Throw the cast iron in the bottom of the oven. Fill it with the boiling contents of the kettle. Do this carefully and with oven mitts on. Shut the door on the 450F oven. Wait 30 minutes. Your cast iron has probably given up the moisture it is going to at this point (or at 40 minutes), so pull it out when it does. Alternatively try an even more dangerous refill with boiling water, which might get you done a little faster and with a little less crusty crust.
Check in every ten minutes from that 30 minute mark. I have no idea how your oven works. I have no idea how mine works. If you have a digital thermometer, poke it in until it hits 190F (or a few degrees below). If not, poke a knife in until it comes out clean. Pull the bread out, place on a rack (or whatever you have; ideally it has airflow above and below, less than ideally it is on another solid surface - it's also fine if it's still on the baking sheet but the bottom may burn a little) and let cool for at least 10 minutes.
Serve this weird garbage bread. It's wildly tangy, even with a starter that is actively not aggressively sour. It's good as fuck.
Further Notes
- In the post on Seared Sourdough Crumpets, I referred to the starter as Reginald. She's Gina now.
- Butter, allegedly, complements this bread exceptionally well
- I've alluded to some longer, more theoretical posts in this series for a while now. I'm still piecing them together. They're frankly a bit farther out than I expected. I still want to do an overview of what media to look for when you're learning to cook, and the ideological underpinnings of food media. But I think I'm going to have to frame it more like a Freshman Year of Autodidact's Culinary School term paper. Even without having a ton of words down it's been influencing how and what I write about in these posts (and is partially to blame for why I've not been so good at keeping up with them month-to-month). Hopefully more from me soon on that front, though!
- I really wanted to bake some macadamia nuts into this bread but forgot to. I bet you could do some real weird shit with it. You could double down on the tartness with cranberries or cut it with nuts or blow it out into a whole other direction with pickled jalapeños.