Weekend Cooking: Making Bread from Starter

One of the things I learned from the Netflix series Cooked is that bread was not originally made with little packets of dried up yeast you buy in a grocery store and mix with warm water. I know, DUH. I may have wondered what people did before yeast packets, but I didn't wonder hard enough to look it up.

Anyway, before handy dandy little yeast packets, people made bread with starter–basically water and flower allowed to sit until yeast and bacteria started to grow. A little of the starter was then used to leaven, or puff up, the bread.

Why is this important? Because starter leavens bread more slowly than commercial yeast, giving the glutens in bread time to ferment and break down. Some think that the reason so many people have problems with gluten now is because commercial yeast doesn't break it down enough to be easily digestible.

Before watching Cooked, I had been thinking about getting back into the bread baking game, for the simple reason that the closest place to buy decent bread around here is an hour's drive away. However, I wasn't sure I could call my previous adventures in bread baking "decent." While they were mostly edible, the loaves of bread I made were invariably salty and dense, with a clump of dough in the middle that was honestly fairly unappetizing. Add to that the fact that I'd have to: 1. go to the grocery store and buy yeast; and 2. dig my pizza stone out of storage, and surprise surprise I never got around to baking bread.

BUT. Making bread from starter doesn't require buying yeast, or any other special ingredients. And it's healthier for you! So I decided to try making completely all-natural bread with starter.

I bought sourdough culture from Cultures for Health via Amazon (about $13 for one packet–a bargain when you consider that, if you take care of your starter, you'll never have to buy another culture again), but you can skip this step and just use flour and water.

The Cultures for Health starter came with directions for both activating the starter and baking sourdough, but they were a little confusing, so I was not feeling confident when it came time to bake my bread. I eventually decided to go with this recipe from The Kitchn, because it said I could just use a colander and not have to buy a proofing basket.

The Kitchn's recipe is much more complicated than the one from Cultures for Health. It's not difficult in terms of technicality or physicality, but it is time consuming. I basically felt like I was babysitting this bread dough for two days. If you do decide to go with this recipe, make sure you have two whole days blocked off for it, because you will need it.

That said, as a reward I got the best loaf of bread I had ever baked in my life! It tasted like something a legit professional baker had made. The crust was crispy as all get out, the dough was super holey and spongy, but not too wet (although maybe a little wetter than it should have been–I erred on the side of damp dough since I live at high altitudes), and the flavor was superb.

So, the tl;dr version:

Pluses of making bread with starter

• Healthier
• Cheaper
• More delicious
• No kneading–With starter bread, kneading isn't necessary because so much gluten is built up through the starter. All you have to do is stretch out the dough a half dozen times and you're more or less done.
• I want to say it's more fun?

Minuses of making bread with starter

• TONS of time and attention.
• Messiness–At one point my dad said to me, "That's a *EXPLETIVE* *EXPLETIVE* mess," and he wasn't wrong, friends. Starter has the consistency of wallpaper paste, so just imagine it getting... well, anywhere. Now imagine it exploding out of its container and running all over the counter.
• If you're not already a well-equipped baker, you might have to buy some stuff like glass jars big enough to hold your starter, big bowls, a measuring scale, and a Dutch oven-type pot.

Conclusion
At the end of this process/experiment, do I think making bread this way is worth it? YES! However, given the energy required, it's not for everyone. I have the luxury of working from home most days, so it's not that hard for me to pop into the kitchen every thirty minutes to stretch dough. Even given that I probably won't bake bread any more frequently than once a week.

People who bake bread at home do it more as a hobby, out of a love for baking, than for economical reasons. If you're one of those people, I would definitely recommend looking into getting your own starter. There's certainly a learning curve, but it will improve your bread baking game by 1000%.

Weekend Cooking is a weekly meme hosted by Beth Fish Reads. To learn more and find links to other recipes and foodie posts, click here.



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Weekend Cooking: ARTISAN BREAD IN 5 MINUTES A DAY by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois

The Beginning:

Starting last semester, I became obsessed with baking my own bread. I'm one of those people who eats massive amounts of bread, and I spent a ton of money buying baguettes from Panera. Then I thought to myself, "Hey, maybe I could make my own baguettes?!?" I knew I could save a lot of money if I made it myself because flour is cheap, yo. At the same time, though, I wasn't sure I could because it seemed like homemade bread required:

• kneading (I'm a weakling)
• lots of time
• precise measurements and other things that bore me
• special equipment and tools that I don't have and don't have the money to buy

Then I found this book! And I have to say, it does exactly what it claims to: makes baking bread at home very accessible to the average person. There are some caveat emptors to go along with that, but as someone who needs bread in their diet, I feel liberated now knowing that I can make my own bread any time I need or want it. The recipes in this book don't require kneading, have a very reasonable rise time, and are fairly flexible as far as the equipment required.

The Deets:


The first loaf of bread that I successfully made!

The heart of Artisan Bread is Hertzberg and François' French boule recipe. While I definitely wouldn't call it an authentic French boule, it's close enough for a home kitchen. It has the crackly crust and slightly sour dough filled with holes that one associates with French bread. It takes about ten minutes to make up a batch of dough that will last two or three weeks, and you can put leftover dough in the fridge or freezer for when you want it.

Aside from the ingredients for the bread itself, there are only two things you'll need to buy that you probably don't have already: a baking stone and a pizza peel. I found a good baking stone at Target for $15, but the pizza peels tend to be more expensive, starting around $20.

Two things I should mention: one, the authors say the dough is moist, and they are NOT kidding. If you underbake this bread, it feels like you're eating a wet sponge. Not appetizing. Second, I've found that the dough is also really salty, especially if the bread is a few days old. For me, the salt content is way overboard, so I tend to cut back on it.

Don't Do This At Home:

I've been making the boule bread regularly for about four months, and now it seems fairly easy. But when I first started, it was a disaster! Actually, I wound up in the ER. Yes, that's right, only I could wind up in the ER after trying to do something as innocuous as bake bread.

Here's what happened: part of the baking process requires that you pour water into a hot dish that's placed in the oven--this makes the bread rise with the steam and causes all those holes in the dough. Unfortunately, the only oven-proof dish I had was Pyrex. I poured water into the dish and it exploded in my face. I got some glass in my eye, which I didn't realize until later. And since this was at, like, midnight (when do I ever do things at a normal time of day?), I had to go to the ER to get it taken out. To add insult to injury, the bread got hit with most of the water and glass, which meant I had to scrap it and start all over.

Lesson: DO NOT use glass when baking! Only use a metal bowl.

Other Breads:


Brioche rolls I make with chocolate chips.

Artisan Bread has many other bread recipes besides the French boule. Some of them use the same dough as the boule--baguettes and pain d'epi, for example--while other use a different dough. There are whole wheat, flatbread, and pastry dough recipes. Every dough can be used to make several different types of breads--for example, the olive oil dough can be used to make lavash, pizza, focaccia, and other types of flatbreads. The only other type of bread I've made from this book so far is the brioche.

Brioche is an "enriched" bread kind of like challah; it has eggs, honey, and butter in it instead of just flour, water, and yeast. It's said that when Marie Antoinette declared, "Let them eat cake," what she actually said was brioche--which would be a healthy thing for peasants to eat, but it's considerably more expensive than regular bread. Anyway, the reason why I started making this bread was pretty much for the same reason I started baking the boule bread: I love having a pain au chocolate (aka chocolate pastry) from Panera for breakfast, but they are freaking expensive! Again, I wondered to myself if there was a way I could save money by making something similar.

Pain au chocolate is made with puff pastry, something I know I cannot make from scratch, nor would I want to if I could. But I figured brioche was close enough. It's usually made in a loaf, like regular bread, but I baked it in muffin tins so that I could grab one in the morning and take it with me. Then I added chocolate because everything is better with chocolate.

The brioche muffins turned out great, and I highly recommend you try the brioche dough if you get around to buying this book. There are plenty of other types of bread recipes, including beignets, that you can make with it.

Take-away:

If you've ever wanted to bake your own bread, but thought it would be too complicated, you really need to check out Artisan Breads. I was amazed at how simple it made baking bread.

Weekend Cooking is a meme hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Every weekend, you can share your reviews of cookbooks, food writing, foodie novels, and movies that make you hungry.

review, book, baking, bread, jeff hertzberg, zoe francois

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