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Month: May 2020

Sourdough for lazy fecks!

Sourdough for lazy fecks!

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This is an email I started sending around to friends when I gave them some of my sourdough starter. I’ve had my starter for over two years now and we’ve been enjoying baking it regularly. I am thrilled to see people get more into old-timey crafts these days and I am always happy to share starter or answer questions

Welcome to sourdough baking! It seems like a lengthy email but I have put in a bit of troubleshooting and tips I’ve learned along the way in the email. Sourdough is often seen as super complicated but honestly, it doesn’t have to be! If you feed the beast once a week and keep it in the fridge it’s a super simple way to bake. Honestly, the best way to actually learn sourdough is to just do it. I know it seems daunting but at the very core, it’s just flour/water/salt once you get into the habit of knowing your starter (which is just something you pick up over time) it will take you 5 minutes a week to keep the beast alive.

Keeping the beast alive – tips and tricks:

Now that you have the starter, keep it in a glass or plastic container and keep it in the fridge. I use a 1L mason jar and put a plastic bag over it because I don’t want to explode a container with the gasses. By keeping your starter in the fridge you only have to feed it once a week & even then you can stretch that out. To feed it, eyeball the amount in your jar and add 1/2 water and 1/2 flour to the starter. So, for example, if you feel that it looks like there is 1 cup of starter in your jar, to feed it you just add 1/2 c flour and 1/2 c water (filtered or distilled is best. You can make distilled water by just leaving a bowl of water out overnight so the chlorine evaporates). Mix it up, stick it back in the fridge and let it sit for another week.

During the sitting period your starter will get a watery, greyish top on it. It should smell a bit boozy and a bit vinegary. That is the hooch and it doesn’t mean your starter is bad. Just mix the hooch back in before feeding your starter. If it smells mouldy, then it’s bad. If you aren’t sure, just feed it and let it sit on the counter for awhile. If it makes sweet smelling bubbles, your starter is fine.

If you haven’t baked in awhile but you’ve been feeding your starter, you may see your container getting too full. To manage this, you will want to mix in the hooch and then ditch a bunch of it before feeding it. That way you won’t overflow your jar and your starter will stay healthy. I usually will pour half into the compost bin. I keep my starter pretty full because we often will bake up to four loaves at a time, you obviously may want to make less.

If you are like me and have forgotten to feed your starter, oh, say, for almost two weeks by accident you will need to feed it a couple of days in a row before using it. I usually mix in the hooch, feed it, and then stick it in the fridge overnight & then repeat the next day (ditching half of the starter if your container is too full). By the third morning I feed it again, let it sit for 4 hours & then make my bread. You can sometimes get away with only two days of feeding but expect your loaves to be a little flatter (but still delish!). I can actually spread this out over a week as well if I realize I haven’t fed it in awhile. If I want to bake Saturday but realize on Monday I haven’t fed it in awhile, I will feed it, say, Monday/Wednesday/Saturday morning.

Often you will see recipes that say that on the day you want to bake that you should feed your starter and let it sit for four hours before starting your recipe. Since I am lazy AF, I usually feed the starter the night before I want to bake, stick it in the fridge & then the next morning take it out and let it warm up to room temperature (app 1 hour) before starting my recipe. I hate waiting so it’s nice to wake up, pour a coffee, take the starter out of the fridge and by the time I have finished two coffees, I am ready to start my bread before the day gets crazy.


White Sourdough

(I also do an 100% whole wheat using this same recipe)

I have always had success with this recipe from Patrick Ryan. I’ve added baking instructions below but if you need to create starter, click through and this link has all the info you need from start to finish.

I have made the approximate measures in cups/tsps but obviously it’s not as good as baking with a scale. Sourdough can be a bit more finicky based on the starter but I find the weights a bit more forgiving so it should work.

(Makes 2 loaves. Halve the amounts for a single loaf)

• 800g strong white flour (6 3/8 cups app)
• 10g salt (2 tsp)
• 460ml water
• 320g sourdough starter (1 1/4 cups)

• Add the flour to a clean mixing bowl. Mix the salt through the flour. Add the water and sourdough starter to the flour. Combine all the ingredients together to form a rough dough.
• Turn the dough out on to a clean surface and knead for approximately 10 minutes or until the windowpane effect has been achieved. The dough should be smooth, soft and elastic.
• When kneading, do not worry if the dough is slightly wet or sticky. Resist the temptation to add any extra flour. (important!)
• Return the dough to the mixing bowl, cover with a towel and allow the dough to prove for 4 hours at room temperature.
• After 4 hours turn the dough onto a clean work surface and knock the dough back. Knocking back the dough simple involves knocking the air from the dough which helps to equalise the temperature within the dough.
• Form the dough into a tight round ball.

To prove & bake using a proving basket (aka banneton):

• Prepare a proving basket by lightly dusting with flour. Place the dough, seamed side facing up, into the proving basket. Loosely cover the proving basket with a clean tea towel and leave to prove for another 3 – 3½ hours.

• Alternatively, to prove overnight for baking first thing in the morning, place into a fridge and leave overnight.

• Using a fridge reduces the temperature of the dough allowing it to prove slower and longer which allows for a greater development of flavour within the dough but also increasing its digestibility. As dough ferments or proves the gluten within the dough breaks down. The longer a dough is allowed to prove the more flavour it will contain and the easier it is for your body to digest. (this is my favourite way to prove the dough. I sometimes won’t start my loaves until late in the day, which allows me to finish my dough right before bed. I just stick them in the fridge overnight and let them warm up to room temperature – app 1 hour – before baking. If you need to quicken the pace, you can stick your loaves in the oven with a bowl of boiling water for 20 mins/1/2 hour and then taking them out before preheating your oven).

• To bake, preheat your oven to 230°C / 210°C fan assisted (445°F / Gas 8). Place a shallow baking tray into the bottom of the oven to preheat with the oven.

• Carefully turn your dough out from the proving basket onto a baking tray dusted with flour (the domed side with the indentations from the proving basket should now be facing up and the seamed side on the baking tray).

• Using a sharp knife cut the surface of the dough, this is what is known as the baker’s signature (I use sharp scissors, it’s not perfect but it works). The dough can be cut up to ½ cm deep. (This isn’t just for aesthetics, scoring the bread also helps control where and how it rises while baking). if your dough seems particularly flat/not as spongy, don’t cut it. That will give it a bigger rise.

• Boil a kettle of water then pour the boiled water into the dish that was preheated in the bottom of the oven, this will create steam in the oven while baking.

• Place the baking tray with the sourdough into the oven and bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a good crust has formed and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base.
Alternatively, if you do not have a proving basket, you can use a large glass casserole dish to prove and bake your sourdough. I also will often cover my boules with metal bowls and bake them for 25-30 mins and then take off the bowls and bake until the crust browns (10 mins). This traps the steam in and encourages the boules to rise a lot higher than they would otherwise.

To prove & bake using a Pyrex dish (this also works spectacularly with enamel cast iron):

• Line a 2.5l round Pyrex dish with a clean tea towel and dust with flour. Place the formed ball of dough into the Pyrex dish lined with the floured tea towel then place the lid (the inside of the lid lightly greased and floured) on the Pyrex dish. Leave to prove for another 3 – 3½ hours.

• Alternatively, to prove overnight for baking first thing in the morning, place into a fridge and leave overnight.

• The reason for using a Pyrex dish is that it acts like a proving basket. The dish acts as a support to your dough. It encourages the dough the take on the shape of the dish and to prove up and not just to spread out flat. The dough will also be baked in the Pyrex dish.

• Using a fridge reduces the temperature of the dough allowing it to prove slower and longer which allows for a greater development of flavour within the dough but also increasing its digestibility. As dough ferments or proves the gluten within the dough breaks down. The longer a dough is allowed to prove the more flavour it will contain and the easier it is for your body to digest.

• To bake, preheat your oven to 230°C / 210°C fan assisted (445°F / Gas 8).

• Flip the Pyrex dish over so the bowl of the Pyrex dish now becomes the lid. Carefully remove the tea towel.

• Using a sharp knife cut the surface of the dough, this is what is known as the baker’s signature. The dough can be cut up to ½ cm deep. (This isn’t just for aesthetics, scoring the bread also helps control where and how it rises while baking)

• Cover the dough with the bowl of the Pyrex dish and place the Pyrex dish into the preheated oven.

• By baking the dough in the Pyrex dish there is no need to steam the oven. Baking with a lid on the Pyrex dish creates its own steam which will allow the dough to rise and open up while baking. The Pyrex is very similar to the old style of Dutch oven baking.

• Bake for 25 minutes then remove the lid from the Pyrex dish and continue to bake, uncovered, for a further 25 minutes until a good crust has formed and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base.

• Once baked remove the bread from the Pyrex dish and allow to cool.

Notes: if you have a breadmaker I find using the dough-only setting makes it easy for the actual mixing/first proving . If you have a stand mixer, that works too for the mixing part.

In the end, just play around with it! Some loaves will be fantastic, some will flop. Add olive oil! Herbs! Cheese! Play around with making cinnamon buns and waffles. The options are really endless and once you’ve got the basics down you won’t lose the skill.

This took a year & life is very different now

This took a year & life is very different now

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Last year I made the decision to take the kids to Universal for spring break. The Sprout is a huge Harry Potter fan and as they age out of theme parks (and as we hunker down for more savings), I thought it was best to plan a last hurrah of a vacation as a Christmas surprise. Of course, booking during Spring Break was way too expensive and we found we could tack on a weeklong cruise in February for almost the same price as Universal during Spring Break. So of course, we ended up booking in February.

We all know how this story ends. By the time Spring Break came around, the government was telling Canadians to come home as soon as they could and things started to slowly shut down. I had friends who got stuck in foreign countries scrambling to get home and then we all ended up in lockdown.

And here we are now.

Truth be told, nothing really changed for Mr. Tucker and I in terms of our day-to-day life. With winter raging outside I generally am housebound during the winter months. The only thing that changed was that the kids were home. Since the order that schools were closing happened on the eve of March break, all seemed normal to them as we allowed unfettered access to devices as well as played games, read books, and watched Netflix – like much of the world was doing. Come the end of March Break I stuck up a schedule (hope springs eternal), signed them up for Khan Academy and we went forward into quarantine.

Of course, it’s now almost 8 weeks since we’ve been home and so much has changed. We now have masks we ordered from http://Starkers.com. Almost all of our purchases are delivery or curbside pickup, aside from Mr. Tucker’s monthly Costco run for medication and supplies. We go for walks but mostly stay inside, and our social lives (like all of our social lives) have moved to online meetings. Still – and probably hilariously – one of our New Year’s Resolutions was to not eat out at all in 2020 and since Covid-19, that hasn’t even been an option for us.

The thing is, when you have a pre-existing condition or disability your life changes dramatically. When the pandemic started the first thing I knew right from the beginning was: there is no way I will ever be prioritized for a ventilator. Even though disability rights advocates were starting petitions at the callousness of denying disabled people the same rights as able-bodied people, I knew that it didn’t matter. Even if the rules changed, the decisions wouldn’t come from a bureaucrat. Fates would be decided by overworked doctors and nurses facing down the difficult decision of who gets to live and who gets to die. We had already seen this play out in Italy and I knew that it was a real possibility that if things got bad enough here it would happen in much the same way.

So we hunkered down, found all our travel size bottles of sanitizer. Mr. Tucker wiped down every surface after he shopped, and we had a stringent protocol when he came home. Life just changed. Life changed for all of us.
I am grateful that we’re both not working full time right now. Mr. Tucker works for a company that hosts online meeting software and so you can imagine his workload right now. But the kids are home and need some guidance to complete the online work that’s assigned to them. Still, we’ve chilled out a lot more since the beginning. While we still limit access to devices to the weekends, they do their homework, classroom meetings, and Khan Academy online & we don’t restrict access to those things. There are books, art supplies, puzzles, and games for anyone to access at anytime so we’re trying to keep things as calm and laid back as possible.

We’re all exhausted and burnt out about being on top of each other all the time. While Mr. Tucker has his basement office & the girls had their rooms, I felt constantly like I had no where to go. So I found a recliner on a second-hand website which Mr. Tucker picked up for me for a song (whilst respecting social distancing rules), a friend gave me a reading light, and I carved out a corner of our bedroom where I could go and relax when the kids were in the common areas & I needed some peace. So things are working out.

As for us, we are happy spring is here and that this didn’t all begin in the fall, when the dark winter starts to close in. We’ve made sourdough for a couple of years now so I’ve happily become the purveyor of starter & I’ve have sent a long many an email of tips and tricks. We made the decision last year to buy as much of our food as locally as possible, so we’ve been lucky to weather all the hoarding (aside from toilet paper & sanitizer). We have freezers full of local meat, buckets full of flour and oatmeal, we get our eggs from the farmer up the street, and we have a weekly vegetable delivery. We had always talked about doing raised bed gardening so we’ve built beds and are looking forward to gardening with the kids all summer. As well, our pool will be open over the next couple of weeks so we won’t feel as confined to the house. So there are some things to look forward to over the next little while.

Of course, there are a million and one places you can go to hear the worst of the worst news and I am no stranger to the anxiety that comes from deep-diving into that quagmire. But now, I’ve resigned myself to just reading the headlines of major newspapers – informed but not too informed – and keeping busy at home. But I am not going to go into that here, preferring to focus on the positive. I love that so many people are taking up old-timey crafts now that they have the time, space, and boredom to tackle new projects such as baking, knitting, and gardening. I love that neighbours are helping each other with groceries, sourdough starter, and seed sharing. People are starting to see the value in supporting local farms and buying from local businesses that it looks like independent book stores are poised to take over market share from amazon. Even in the worst of times, the best of humanity shines through, and if the research is to believed, this is typical of humans when chaos hits. It may be a little while until things relax again but I’d like to think we’ll keep some of the good bits that came out of all this. One can hope.