Rosemary-Garlic EXTRA SOUR sourdough experiment

Starter post peak activity and right before use. You can kind of see how it has settled a little bit rather than is bubbling up still.

I love a good rosemary garlic bread…I mean, who doesn’t? Ready made fresh garlic bread? Yes please! Recently, my friends and I were discussing how to make your sourdough more sour and I took to the internet. I found several suggestions, including leaving the hooch (brownish liquid that develops on top) in the starter before feeding, feeding it less water, and letting it settle a bit more after reaching peak activity before using it in bread. I am very curious about the hooch, but found I only develop hooch after leaving it in the fridge for a full week or two. Regardless, I fed my starter in the morning and then went about my day. I didn’t exactly plan on trying to make it extra sour, but didn’t end up getting around to mixing and kneading until a bit past peak activity, so here we go!

For some reason America seems to have realized how fulfilling (and perhaps conveniently time consuming?) baking bread is during this Covid19 pandemic. I CAN’T FIND BREAD FLOUR ANYWHERE! Alas, just an average all purpose flour was used for this one. I mixed 450g flour with 10g salt and 350g water before adding 150g starter. I decided to add a good amount of starter since it was a little bit past peak activity. I began with the typical slap and fold and progressed to a good, energized knead. I like to knead for at least 15 min before I even consider a window pane test. This time though, after about 7 minutes I began to panic by how watery the dough still was and added a couple hand-sprinkles of extra flour into the dough as I kneaded it. I’m not sure how necessary this was, but sometimes I just feel the dough asking for more. Halfway through I decided I reaaallllyyy wanted to put garlic in, but we were out of garlic!! I usually add any extra ingredients before kneading it too much, but this was a last minute decision. I also needed to run to the grocery store for other ingredients anyways, so I plopped my ball of dough in my bowl before it was fully finished and ran some errands. An hour later, I chopped some garlic and prepped some rosemary and worked them into the dough. Because it was already pretty formed together, I flattened the dough out a bit and spread the garlic and rosemary as much as I could throughout. I kneaded it until the garlic was spread throughout and the dough passed the window pane test.

Ready for the oven!

After its bulk fermentation for ~4.5 hours I shaped it into a nice round boule with a series of fold and tucks and gentle rolling before plopping it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, I took it out of the fridge to let it warm to room temperature before baking it. As I drank my coffee and rubbed sleep from my eyes, my roommate suddenly began whipping up brownies. With the aroma of chocolate and sugar intoxicating my brain, I somehow agreed to let him use bake his goodies before my bread. As a result, the bread was sitting on the counter for over an hour. As I scored it, it lost its shape and fell a little, so I got nervous that it had proofed for too long and wouldn’t rise properly. Alas, my worry was all for not. It rose nicely, browned properly, and came out with a gooooooddddd crunchy crust. It was a little more dense that I usually like, but the flavor was on point.

Breaking bread!

SO. In summary,

450g all purpose flour (plus maybe 15g as I kneaded?)

10g salt

350g water (making it about 75% hydration)

150g deflated starter

nearly a whole knob of garlic!

as much rosemary as you desire

bulk ferment for ~4.5 hours

second ferment overnight in the fridge

baked at 450 degrees F for 45 min until crust is golden and crunchy, with a pan of water in the oven and 2 sprays of water before going in the oven and halfway through the bake

The final bake!

It definitely didn’t get as airy and fluffy in the middle as I would have liked. I think maybe because I used entirely all purpose flour instead of bread flour? Perhaps I didn’t knead it enough? Although it felt like I gave it a good 25 minutes of kneading…