/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>4088205

For regular sourdough breads, it has been my experience that 30% starter and 2% salt, by weight in the final dough, produces the most consistent product. I think that's fairly well supported by other bread bakers, too.

Doing some quick calculations, assuming 100% = 100 oz:

100+92+65+3.5 = 260.5 total ounces of dough
92/260.5 = 35.3%
3.5/260.5 = 1.3%

So it's not dead on 30% and 2%, but it's pretty close.

The hydration is a little more complicated, since half of the starter is water, so of the 260.5 total ounces of dough, total water is 65 + .5*(92), which is 111 ounces, while total flour is 100 + .5*(92), which is 146 ounces. Therefore, ignoring the salt, the dough is 76% hydrated.

Yes, that is high, but I tend to prefer high hydration doughs in terms of crust and crumb. If you don't have experience with them, then they will be a pain in the ass, so you might want to back off on the water content. With that said, lower hydration takes longer to ferment/proof.

>>4025859

Looks like a great loaf of bread, to me. I tend to rely on baker's percentages because volumetric baking/scaled recipes bum me out. Try this recipe:

100% flour (90 bread/10 whole wheat)
60% water
10% buttermilk
2.0% salt
2.0% oil
0.8% yeast

Make sure to knead enough, and give it a good proof. It should produce a nice, delicate sandwich bread with good flavor and chewy and consistent crumb. Don't worry about the 10% whole wheat flour. It'll add flavor, and won't detract from the "white sandwich bread" goal.

>>4008417

Also, sadly, I live about as far away from DC as you can on the continental US. I'm in Los Angeles. If you ever take a trip to the west coast, let me know and we can hang and bake bread. Maybe I'll even let you buy me a beer.

>>3857078

Agreed. Bread is only as complicated as you want to make it.

Sure, it can get difficult if you're aiming for mastery, but it doesn't have to be like that.

I bake a lot of bread, and while there are certain techniques I have learned over the years, at the end of the day, the process is still simple: mix, knead, proof, bake. I throw in steps like autolyse, retarding, preshaping, benching, and use equipment like banneton and a baker's lame, but that's just icing on the cake.

Essentially, what I'm trying to say is take everything our friend RF360 just said with a big grain of salt. A lot of it is good information, but there are a lot of, in my opinion, unnecessary (and sometimes deleterious) steps for the first-time bread baker.

Bake bread erryday.

Pic related, it's bread.

Mo bread mo problems.

Pretty basic sourdough loaf with 15% whole wheat, 85% bread flour. Has approximately 4% (baker's percentage) golden flax seed, brown flax seed, and 12% walnuts mixed in.