flour – StewsCat

D found this recipe from the King Arthur flour web site about a no-knead sourdough. Since I just made a starter again (see this post), I figured this would be a good first try. I followed this site’s directions relatively closely and will put my slight alteration.

Ingredients

225 g fresh sourdough starter (it wasn’t exactly fresh as I had fed it around 7 am and didn’t make the dough until about 7 pm…most things I read said you should start your recipe about 4 hours after feeding your starter)
395 g luke warm water
598 g bread flour
15 g salt

I took all the ingredients and mixed them in a large metal bowl (I typically use a metal bowl for my baking…I know a lot of places say you should use wooden or plastic but I haven’t had any issues with rising). I made it into a cohesive moist dough, covered it with my plate (that fits almost perfectly as a lid) and let it sit for 1 hour.
Next I lifted the dough and then folded it over on itself (I just grab a piece from the edge and fold it to the center and then go around the edge of it to fold on itself). I covered it again and let it rest another 1 hour.
I repeated step 2 another 2 times (total of 3 hours) and folded it one more time after the last hour wait. I then covered it and put it in the fridge.
The King Arthur site says you can let it sit in the fridge for as little as 8 hours and up to 48 hours. Since I started it on one of my work days, I was going to wait until my day off to bake. I ended up letting it sit in the fridge for about 36 hours.
On a well floured counter, I poured out the dough, formed a rough ball and let it sit for 15-20 minutes.
I then shaped it into a boule and with seam side up put it in a well greased bowl. The dough ball didn’t really rise much (which is what it said from the original recipe) but did spread out and relax. I let it come up to temperature for about 3 hours (again it depends on warmth of your house…2.5 to 3 hours)
About 1 hour before baking I preheated the oven to 500 F. I put in my dutch over with the lid partially ajar to preheat as well (as this is my baking container).
After 3 hours, I dumped the dough into the dutch oven, floured the top and made 4 cuts on top with a sharp knife.
I replaced the dutch oven cover, put it in the oven and reduced the temperature to 450 F. I baked it for 45 minutes covered.
After 45 minutes, I removed the cover and allowed it to bake another 10 min (~10-15 min until internal temp is at least 205 F).

Continue reading “Sourdough bread (fresh starter!)” →

I picked up some semolina durum wheat flour at the local specialty grocery store (Corti Bros.). I had been making some egg noodles for pasta the last few months with AP flour. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make a dough entirely out of just semolina so looked up some recipes. I found that you can do a 50:50 semolina:AP flour mix.

100g – Semolina durum wheat flour
100g – AP flour
2 eggs
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp Avocado oil (we don’t have any olive oil in the house currently)

I started by weighing out the flour and adding the salt.

I mixed it together with my fingers because I don’t have a sifter.

Then I created a well to place the eggs and oil. I used a fork to scramble the eggs.

I slowly mixed in the flour with the egg mixture and continued to mix and then knead for about 5 minutes, creating a cohesive dough ball.

I let the dough sit at room temperature for about 1.5 hours (I read you should let it sit for at least an hour but can let it sit for multiple hours if needed). In the meantime, I started work on the sauce. I already had some plain San Marzano tomato sauce that I had made previously for pizza. Now I just needed to make the other ingredients added to the pasta and the sauce.

I sautéed some chicken sausage, then vegetables and finally added in the pre-made tomato sauce.

Then I went back to work on the pasta dough. I broke off between a golf ball and tennis ball sized piece, flattened it into a disc and floured it. I have a small hand crank pasta machine. One half of it has rollers of adjustable thickness to gradually thin out the pasta dough. On the thickest setting I ran the disc of dough through once. Then I folded this in half, re-dusted with flour, and put it through again. I did this 4-5 times before then gradually decreasing the thickness (from 7 to 3).

The other half of the pasta machine has 2 different rollers of various widths for pasta. This cuts the thin length of dough into actual strands of pasta.

What I’ve learned is that after you create the strands of pasta, you need to liberally dust/cover the pasta strands to prevent them from sticking together. The great thing about freshly made pasta is that it cooks super quick. I boiled up some water and salted it and then added the pasta. I cooked the pasta for about 3 minutes and then drained out the water and added some oil to the pasta.