Super Sourdough

The importance of shaping bread cannot be understated, and it is the most difficult and most technical aspect of bread making to learn. In short, it’s annoying.

By kneading or by stretching and folding, we develop the gluten. This involves repeatedly tearing apart these original clumps and stretching them over and over each other. This causes the formation of layer upon layer of thin films. As gas is produced from the dough, these films are pushed together, thus creating membranes.

It’s easy to tell whether the gluten within a dough has been developed in this way because it will appear smooth and shiny. If you stretch it thin, it will pass the ‘windowpane test’ – this is a test of your gluten’s ability to form thin films in order to create the membranes of your bubbles.

smell). Lactobacillus is a ubiquitous, mostly friendly bacteria found in the human gut in modest quantities and is used to make yoghurts.

An increase in size of roughly 50% is more than adequate for most loaves.

Gently does it. Feel what stretch you get and use all of it, but never so much that you feel it give or tear. As you fold and tighten, the dough will begin to support itself. As you gently roll it into its final shape, you can easily overstretch things, so take it very slowly and very gently. Keep all those delicate bubbles. The dough shouldn’t sti

In a sourdough starter, the first bug (chronologically) you might see signs of is of the Leuconostoc species. This is a family of bacteria that produces gas and causes the bubbles that you see in the first day or two of your sourdough starter’s growth. If you use fresh flour, or mill it yourself, this fermentation can be very vigorous indeed – doub

Alongside this, you will see the allure of retarding your dough in the fridge, overnight or longer. I often do this on the second prove, because this allows me to bake it whenever I feel like it. I’m in control. More importantly, retarding either prove helps develop a lot of flavour and leads to a softer, more irregular crumb.

Following all of this, we can still wreck things by allowing a dough to stagnate. Either overproving or leaving it in a retarded state without fermentation for too long will again break down your protein structure. The tense structure of the dough is destroyed, and your oven spring will be terrible.