Hi everyone, I have been baking sourdough for about 4 months now, after a bit of experimenting which is the best way to bake it, I think I have accomplished the Norwich white sourdough from the wild yeast website. I have found that i can not turn the fan off in my oven, so to get the best ovenspring out of my loaf I have found a clay roaster (roemertopf) which I use the base of, to place over my loaf in the first 15 minutes of baking, I place my loaf on the preheated pizza stone spray the loaf with a little water before placing the roaster over the top. i only have a round pizza stone and wish I could find a square one (still looking and not giving up). As you can see on the photo I have had good success with this. I now would like to move onto something more challenging, I love a rye bread and also my husband wants me to try baking a pumpkin sourdough.
Does anyone have any suggestions or recipes I could try out. I feel very daunted by making a wetter dough. have had somewhat of a success with the Rye recipe from breadtopia.com, although last time I did that one, It did not rise as much and I found it very hard to get it out of the linnen lined (plenty of flour) banneton. Any suggestions how to deal with a wetter dough?
Breadtopia sourdough rye
For some reason I can not upload the pictures of the white sourdough with the really good oven spring oh well
Replies
The rye looks great. So far I have only used rye as a minor proportion of the mix, but I want to go the whole hog. It will never rise as much as white flour of course, and that crumb looks pretty good to me.
I made a ciabatta, which is always a very wet dough - I found the best way to learn how to handle such a very wet dough was to watch it being done on YouTube. Seeing it done beats a thousand words!
Try this one, from Northwest Sourdough ("Working with High Hydration Doughs", if the link doesn't work):
www.youtube.com/watch
What sort of flour are you using with the banneton? I have found that rice flour prevents sticking, and I believe semolina does the same thing.
Not sure what to suggest for new recipes - there are too many! I just made a potato and rosemary couronne, which turned out quite well (though I have some ideas for improvement next time). Browse through the recipe section here, or do you have any bread baking books?
Kym.
I, too, had great trouble using bread flour in the banneton - and since mine are plastic, even though the instructions said to sprinkle it with water that just beads up on the surface so I didn't get a very even distribution of flour.
I now spray it with cooking spray oil-in-a-can and dust it with a fine semolina, and I don't have problems with it sticking no matter what hydration dough I use.
I love the look of your rye loaf! it looks so much like the usual Finnish rye bread that I can't buy in the states, I have to try that recipe now!