Ingredients: 200 gr. of whole wheat flour 200 gr. of normal white bread flour 200 ml. boiling hot water 1 teaspoon of salt Olive oil (I don’t know how much. Not a lot, anyway) ca. 50 gr. sourdough starter at it’s peak (not sure what else to call it. Folks who do sourdough know what I mean. And if someone doesn’t, I’ll gladly explain. Later. In another post. Cause sourdough is involved, and this is a bread recipe and not a sourdough tutorial) 2 tablespoons of white flour or some type of starch.
Now for the complicated part:
Mix 100 gr. of whole wheat flour with 100 gr. of bread flour (so only half of the flour)
Make sure that the water is boiling. Add it to the flour and mix with a wooden spoon. Or any mixing utensil of your choice. Just don’t touch it with your hands - it is boiling hot after all. I tend to boil more water first and then measure it hot before adding it to the mix.
2.5. mix until everything is combined. It doesn’t need to be a homogeneous texture, but you shouldn’t be able to see the water anymore.
Let it sit at room temperature until it cools down enough that it can be touched with bare hands without getting burns (ca. 30 minutes)
Incorporate the rest of the flour, but don’t fully knead it yet. Just loosely mix it in.
5 let this whole mixture stay for another 20 to 30 minutes. (If anybody is confused about steps 4 and 5: Google “autolysis”. I swear it reduces the amount of kneading required later on greatly… And you’ll be kneading)
Mix in the sourdough starter and the salt.
If you’re doing this by hand, start your favourite podcast, or some long YouTube video essay. The next step is going to take a lot of time.
Knead the hell out of this thing. You should get to a dough like texture pretty quickly. Though it should also feel quite sticky initially. Continue kneading, until you can take pieces of the dough and stretch them so thin that light shines through without the piece ripping (I think it’s called windowpane test). Before I had a kitchen aid, this step took 40 minutes easily. Often longer.
When kneading is finished, the dough should still feel a bit sticky, but also somewhat firm. Take it out of the bowl, then cover the bottom of the bowl in olive oil, then put the dough back in.
Now comes several iterations of stretching and tugging. Let the dough rest and relax covered at room temp for ca. 20 minutes, then pick a side of the dough, pull it out, stretch it over the rest of the dough and tuck it back under again. Turn the dough by 45 degrees, and repeat the stretch and tug for that side. Repeat a couple of times until you’ve stretched and tugged the whole dough.
10.1 this whole stretching and tugging over this and the next few steps will also incorporate the oil into the dough. 10.2 if the dough is too sticky during this stretching process, make your hands wet.
Let rest for another 20 min. Repeat stretch and tug procedure.
do that whole thing another 3 times. You can increase the wait time to 30 min for the last iteration or two.
Let the dough sit covered at room temp for at least another 5 to 6 hours. (Bulk fermentation.) Sourdough variance kicks in here, so the time required may be vastly different depending on the starter used.
Shape the dough. Take it out of the bowl (it shouldn’t be sticky anymore at all at this point). Pick one side, pull it, stretch it and fold it onto the middle of the dough. (Similar to the stretching and tugging from before, but without the tugging). Repeat for all sides. Then turn it around and lightly pass it between your hands on the table. This movement should lightly knead the newly created folds together so they stay in shape, but don’t use any force here, cause that might deflate it.
Lightly flour a bread basket or a clean bowl with the final 2 tablespoons of flour or starch.
Place the shaped dough into it, bottom side up. You should be able to see the folds created during the previous step, while the smooth top side you created there should stay cozy in the flour/starch.
Cover it, and wait for another hour or two.
If you can use a closed container for baking (Dutch oven is ideal, I’m using a pyrex), put it in the oven.
Preheat the oven to 230 degrees Celsius.
Wait until your container (Dutch oven/Pyrex) is at temp. This can easily take another 30 min.
Take out the base the container (if you have one), place a piece of parchment paper in it, then take out the bread from the basket, and place it carefully on the parchment - flour side up.
With a sharp knife or a razorblade, cut a cross into the top, across the whole bread, but only 2 or 3 mm deep.
Take the other part of your container out of the oven, and cover your bread. If you don’t have a Dutch oven/pyrex, do all this stuff on a baking sheet, and try covering the bread with a dome made out of aluminium foil.
Bake covered at 230 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes.
Lower the oven temperature to 210 degrees Celsius, and bake for another 20 minutes.
Take away the cover, and bake for another 10 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius.
Take it out of the oven, remove it from the container, and let it cool down completely.
Done.
…this went longer than expected. And I still feel like I rushed some details. Well it’s sourdough. I warned that it would be involved. I’ll gladly explain more, if somebody actually wants to try to recreate this, but for now, this is enough.
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