A Taste of San Francisco

 When I started making sourdough bread more than 20 years ago, I wanted to make bread like I used to buy in San Francisco. I have never come close to that taste...until now. I tried this recipe for No-Knead Sourdough bread from King Arthur flour. The taste is just what I had hoped for 20 years ago. I had attributed the difference in taste to the difference in strains of wild yeast where I live. I guess that's not the case. Let's get cooking.

The first step is to mix, but not knead all the dough ingredients. We end up with this sticky mess:

That gets set to "rise" for one hour, and results in a one-hour older sticky mess. Now, we go about stretching and folding the dough and set it aside to rise for another hour. I found the instructions in this companion blog from King Arthur to be very helpful. The wet-hands technique works well.

This process gets repeated every hour for a total of 3 hours. Each time, the dough gets a little smoother.

After the first hour:

After the second hour:

After the third hour:

Now, this is the best part. We cover the dough and put it in the refrigerator for at least 8 but up to 48 hours. That gives us a lot of flexibility for when we want to bake the bread. I finished the three stretch-fold cycles around noon. Then, I left the dough in the fridge until the next morning. It looks smooth.

This dough ball that is still rather sticky gets turned out onto a floured surface and allowed to warm to room temperature for about 15 minutes.

King Arthur tells me that I can shape the dough into a log to bake in a 13" pain de mie pan, put the cover on and let it rise for 2-1/2 to 3 hours. They did say that the dough would not rise vertically, but relax laterally. I was a little worried. This is a lot of dough for that small pan.

but it fits

and it didn't rise much vertically after 2-1/2 hours.

The instructions from King Arthur say to heat the over to 500°F one hour before baking. I thought that was a bit wasteful. My oven tells me when it has reached temperature, so I just waited until it got to 500.

Next, we lower the temperature to 450 and bake for 45-50 minutes. The instructions say to leave the lid off of a pain de mie pan, but use the lid if cooking a boule shape in a Dutch oven. Then, we are to remove the lid from the Dutch oven if we are using that (I didn't), and it is up to the baker to figure out what to do if using a pain de mie pan. We are instructed to bake for another 10-15 minutes, until the center of the loaf reaches 210°F. My loaf center never got past 200 degrees, but it appeared to be burning. I don't even think the last 10 minutes is necessary.

To my surprise, it appears that I made a popover!

There wasn't much rising going on during the dough preparation, but it sure poofed up in the oven. 

The upper crust is difficult to cut into and a little burnt. Other than that, the bread tastes great!

Next time, I think I will bake it for a little bit less time, and skip the extra 10-15 minutes. I'd like to see if I can adapt this recipe to use with my bread machine. I'm using the Zojirushi BB-PAC20. It has programmable modes that I've never attempted. Maybe this is the time to explore that feature.

Before I go, I'd like to explore why this bread tastes so much different from other sourdough recipes I've used. It could be the kneading. Maybe it is the proportion of starter to other ingredients. This recipe doesn't use my formula of creating a sponge from the starter. The sponge is just like a starter refresh, so how does that compare?

This recipe uses 227g of ripe starter. My sponge uses (all ounces are by weight) 4 oz. of starter, 4 oz. of flour, and 4 oz. of water. That's 12 ounces or 340 grams. Well, that's interesting. I'm using more starter and getting less sour flavor.

How is it in proportion to flour? This recipe uses 602 grams (or 21.2 ounces) of flour. My rye and whole wheat recipes use a total of 15.5 ounces of flour. So, I guess I am not using too little starter. Maybe it is the rise and rest times. It looks like I have some experimenting to do.