Couche – StewsCat

Aside from regular sourdough bread, I had been kind of wondering what else to do with my starter. Luckily one of my FB groups are full of cooks and someone shared a sourdough ciabatta recipe they liked. I figured I’d give it go. The original recipe is here: https://breadtopia.com/sourdough-ciabatta/

I didn’t have the requisite 550g of starter ready but had 300g of starter so adjusted the recipe accordingly. When I was transcribing from the internet to a piece of paper (yes I’m still old school and typically don’t just look at a screen for my recipes but actually write them down on paper), I accidentally wrote my 2 so it kinda looked like a 7. So when I was weighing out the water, I accidentally did about 50% more than I had anticipated using. I then had to do a bunch of math to try to even things out. I’m not even going to try putting the actual recipe values on here (just go look at the original recipe). I’ll just go through my process and how it came out.

IMG_20200523_143645 — Sourdough on top of rest of mixture

IMG_20200523_150153 — After initial mix before adding in the extra water (after about 20 minutes of kneading)

IMG_20200523_151059 — Added the extra water and tried to incorporate

Continue reading “Sourdough Ciabatta” →

In a yet to be published post, I am currently creating my own sourdough starter. I felt bad discarding 1/2-2/3 of the starter everyday so started looking up recipes on what I could do with that discarded starter. One thing people recommended was using it for the taste (“sour”) component prior to it being strong enough to act as yeast. Therefore you still had to use some yeast (active dry in my case) to help the dough rise.

So I decided to try my hand at baguettes. I have not attempted this type/shape of dough yet so this was more an experiment than anything.

I found this recipe online and decided to run with it.

Flour 100%
Water 66%
Salt 2%
Instant yeast 0.36%
Poolish: 33% of the above total.

Poolish (done the night before and allowed to sit overnight at room temp):

60g Sourdough starter (100% hydration)
103g AP flour
58g Room temperature water

IMAG2891 — *Poolish made the night before*

In the morning the poolish had spread out and developed the requisite bubbles to let me know it was working well.

IMAG2892 — *Poolish in the AM (~12 hours later)*

To the poolish I added:

267g AP flour
176g water
8g salt
~1.5g Active-dry yeast

I mixed the above with the poolish until it was well incorporated and let it auto-lyse for an hour.

IMAG2893 — *Mixed dough after auto-lyse*

I followed this with slap&fold kneading for about 15 minutes until I obtained a nice formed dough. I let this bulk ferment for another hour and then did 2 stretch and folds separated by 20 minutes.

I divided the dough up into the individual baguette sizes and bench rested them for 15 minutes.

Then I set about shaping the dough. I followed the video as seen here. I definitely need to practice rolling out the dough to get an even product. As you can see below in the final pictures, the baguettes came out a little lopsided.

I don’t currently have a baguette bouche so looked up ways to create a homemade one. What I ended up using was a sheet pan, parchment paper and rolled up table placemats.

I let these proof for 40 minutes and then turned them out onto my baking system (upside down sheet pan with parchment paper). Other options I read include transfer to a pizza peel and putting on pizza stone in oven (I can see myself messing this up) or if you have the metal couche, you can bake directly in those. I scored the baguettes with a sharp razor and did a terrible job of it (I also read that scoring is one of the hardest skills to master).

I placed the baguettes in a 450 F oven, sprayed the inside with my trusty water spray bottle and closed the door. I sprayed the oven walls/bread again at 1 minute and 5 minutes in. After 6 minutes I dropped the oven to 400 F.

I wasn’t sure exactly how long to bake it for as some recipes I read said 12 minutes while others said 24 minutes. I ended up going closer to the 24 minutes. The baguettes never developed the deep brown color I was looking for but they were definitely cooked and done. The wife noted the crust was a bit hard – though from what I read of classic baguettes they are supposed to have a very crispy outside. All in all not a bad effort for a first try.