I checked on my new starter this afternoon, and I was excited to see that things are continuing to move in the right direction. Here’s a photo I took today around noon. You can see that things have risen a lot, and more than they did the day before. I hope yours is rising more, too.
The texture is still a bit dense and stringy, but less so than yesterday. My amateur explanation for this is roughly as follows (again, don’t quote me on any of this): our starter makes gas by eating gluten. Gluten gives dough it’s structure, and the stringiness we’re seeing is basically just gluten doing it’s thing. So what this stringiness means is that our new starter isn’t doing as good a job as my old starter at breaking down gluten and turning it into gas, which makes sense and seems about right. Our starter is getting there, though.
I also noticed that the smell changed pretty dramatically from yesterday to today. While it smelled sweet and nutty just a day ago, my starter smelled rich and a bit funky today, almost like cultured dairy. My first thought, actually, was that it reminded me of mămăligă cu brânză, a traditional Romanian dish that my mom used to make us growing up. This might be because I’ve been thinking about her a lot over the last few days—tomorrow would have been her birthday—but that dish is a mixture of corn meal, sour cream, eggs, and feta cheese, and I swear my starter smells just like it. Maybe your starter is bringing back weird and unexpected memories, too.
For both my old and new starters, I discarded all but about a tablespoon and added equal parts flour and water. It’s what we did yesterday, and what’s what we’ll do every day this week until we’re ready to make some sourdough bread. We’ll see how things look tomorrow.
I was hoping to bake some no-knead bread on Friday, but things didn’t go according to plan. So I decided tonight would be a good time to get started.
The recipe I’m using comes from a massive five-volume bread book my older brother gave me for Christmas a few years ago, which itself is adapted from Mark Bittman’s at-this-point-pretty-famous recipe. As I mentioned in my first letter, this is the first loaf of bread I ever made, and it showed me that bread baking doesn’t need to be scary or hard (and for our purposes, it’s especially nice since it doesn’t require any sourdough starter).
What we need
Flour (565 grams, or 4 and a quarter cups)
Salt (11g, or about 2 tsp)
Instant yeast (1.5g, or a quarter teaspoon)
Water (425g, or 2 cups)
An ovensafe pot with a lid to bake in.
I encourage you to weigh these out if you have a scale, but volume measurements will work just fine (and we don’t need to be all too precise at this point). For the flour, you can use bread or all-purpose, it doesn’t matter all too much. If you want to be a little adventurous, you can replace the last 65 grams (a half cup or so) of flour with whole wheat flour (though, as with most things, I’d recommend holding off on the tinkering until you get the hang of it).
The recipe itself is really simple:
Add all of the dry ingredients to a relatively big bowl, and give it a quick mix to make sure everything is evenly distributed.
Add the water and mix everything together with your hands, just until everything is incorporated and there are no more dry bits of flour.
(Optional) Pull the dough out onto your counter, and shape it into a loose ball. Then move it to a lightly oiled (different) bowl. You can absolutely skip this step.
Cover the bowl and let it sit out for 12-18 hours.
I did this around 6 P.M. today, so if you do this sometime this evening, we can do the rest tomorrow tomorrow morning, let’s say around 10 AM. At that point, the steps are a bit more complicated, but still pretty easy:
We pull the dough out of its bowl and onto a floured surface. Using our hands, and without worrying about it all too much, we fold the dough onto itself and shape it into something approximating a ball. You can fold it on itself in thirds, like a letter, and then in thirds the other way before rounding it out. Something like this, but without the rolling. Honestly, this part isn’t super crucial, just do your best to get it ball-like. Anxiety and apprehension are going to do more damage, here, than overconfidence will.
Take a kitchen towel and cover your new ball with flour. It’s way, way better to err on the side of too much flour, so put on too much flour. Then, place our new dough ball on the towel, right-side up. Dust the top of the ball with some more flour. Again, err toward adding too much. We can always brush flour off, but having the dough stick to the towel is the worst thing that can happen throughout this process. That said, in the interests of minimizing anxiety, which is our enemy, the only problem we’ll run into is that the loaf will be a little misshapen if it sticks to the towel, and honestly who even cares it’ll still taste good.
Wrap the dough up in the rest of the towel (or put another towel on top) and let it sit for an hour or two. It should about double in size when it’s ready.
At some point in this process, preheat the oven to 475°F. Some recipes will say to preheat the pot, too. That’s not super necessary—it might help a little, but it pretty exponentially increases the risk of burning yourself. I have lots of burn scars on my arm to prove it, so judge for yourself how your attention to detail and general carefulness compares to mine, then decide whats best for you, accordingly.
When you’re ready to bake, flip the dough upside down into the pot. This means that the bottom, or the seam, should now be facing up. Usually we’d put that side down and score the top, but this more or less serves the same purpose. It should make some nice looking cracks and give the dough room to expand.
Put the lid on your pot and throw it in the oven. Let it bake for 45 minutes, then take the lid off and let it bake for 10 minutes more, or until it looks as brown as you want it to be. I’ve noticed that everyone always wants to take bread out too early, but this part is actually pretty forgiving. I prefer a darker loaf, but do your own thing. You’ll smell it if it starts to burn, and at that point it’s honestly still fine.
If you want some help baking, I’m going to start things off at 10 A.M, which means we should hopefully get the bread in the oven between 11 and 12, and it’ll be done around 1. Respond to this email if you want to join me live, and I’ll send you a Zoom link!
Until then,
vlad