Video Transcript: Tartine Bread Step-by-Step: Beginner Mistakes and Tips

Video Transcript: Tartine Bread Step-by-Step: Beginner Mistakes and Tips

This is a verbatim transcript of the video: “Tartine Bread Step-by-Step: Beginner Mistakes and Tips” from The Sourdough Journey.  Copyright 2020.  All Rights Reserved

The video can be found at https://youtu.be/_YBCogA32k0

hi I’m Tom coming to you from Cleveland Ohio thank you for selecting this video today’s video is the sourdough journey
beginner mistakes and tips I made this video specifically for people who are
beginners at making sourdough bread there are all kinds of videos on the internet and they’re very good that
described the making of the sourdough bread process but many of these videos are brought to you by experts who have
done this for so many years that they’ve forgotten all the mistakes and all the questions that beginners have so the
purpose of this video is to talk through the entire process end to end of baking
sourdough bread and to really focus on what are the common mistakes that beginners make and what are many of the
questions that beginners have I’m a relatively new sourdough bread baker myself so I wanted to make this video
before I forget all the mistakes and questions that I had
so the first step in our process is to select a recipe that you want to follow sourdough bread baking is different than
other types of baking or cooking because the recipe is more than simply just putting the ingredients together each
one of these sourdough recipes is a process where based on the specific types of ingredients and the specific
quantities of the ingredients there’s a specific process that goes with that combination of ingredients that you have
to follow to make the recipe work and this is the first and most common
mistake that beginner sourdough bakers make is what I call recipe improvisation
recipe improvisation goes like this when I got interested in making bread sourdough bread I pulled out all of my
cookbooks – hip bread recipes I found the all-time best bread recipes how can
you go wrong with this I found the red revolution book buried in the back of my cabinet I read through
that and then I found the Tartine bread book and this is the one that I selected that will be going through today but
before I learned to use this recipe I did what I call recipe improvisation was
that rich as I read all three of these I printed out a dozen recipes off of the internet and when I made my first loaf
of bread I liked different parts of different recipes so I grabbed the first part of one recipe I grabbed the middle part of
another one and I grabbed the last part of the third one and I kind of put them all together and I thought that would work and I made a brick it just didn’t
work and what I realized very quickly is that these recipes are not genetic interchangeable parts you can’t take the
first half of one recipe and add it to the second recipe because as I mentioned earlier the recipe and the process are
inextricably linked so the idea of picking and choosing pieces of recipes
just doesn’t work so my first tip for beginning sourdough bread bakers is pick one recipe and stick to it exactly start
to finish until you master it and you’ll learn so much more than you will by changing all the variables and mixing
and matching pieces together then you will if you just pick one recipe and stick to it so that’s my first tip so
the recipe that we’ll be using through this process is from the Tartine bread book this is a fairly famous book by
Chad Robertson from the Tartine bakery in San Francisco and there’s a recipe in
this book called the basic country loaf which is one that many people follow and we’ll be following that recipe
throughout this process the Tartine bread basic country loaf there are plenty of other recipes out there on the
internet and and many of them are popular and proven if you choose to do it a different one just pick one of
those and follow it top to bottom start without exception that’s the best way to
learn
what I’d like to do each time I bake a loaf is I prepared a cheat sheet here
that I use and this just is a boiled down version of the steps in the book
and it has the key ingredients from the recipe and the quantities it has the key steps in the process and the times so
this reminds me of the steps that I need to follow and I also leave space on the sheet here to keep notes because it’s
very important to write down and what time you’re starting certain things what the temperature is and other things that
may go right or wrong along the way and then you can go back and learn from your notes so I highly recommend creating
some type of cheat sheet that you can follow
as I mentioned we’ll be following the Tartine bread method which includes the
basic country loaf recipe that’s the bread that we’ll be making this is basically a three day process so let me
give a quick overview of what we cover each day on the evening of day one we’ll do some preparatory materials and then
we’ll build the leaven the leaven then builds overnight through roughly a 12 to 14 hour process on the morning of Dave’s
who will essentially mix the dough that starts with the auto lease or ferment Elise process which takes roughly 40
minutes to an hour we then add salt and begin the bulk fermentation which is a three to four hour process including the
stretch and fold method which we will go through in detail after bulk fermentation is completed we will do a
rough shaping of the loaves with a bench rest which is roughly a 30 to 40 minute process then we’ll do final shaping of
the loaves for 10 to 15 minutes and then the low-vis go in the refrigerator for what we call an overnight full or
a cold proof which is roughly a 12 to 14 hour process on day three the morning of
day 3 we preheat the oven for about an hour we score and bake the lows that
takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour we let the lows cool for 90 minutes and
then we eat them that’s the step by step process that we’ll be covering throughout this video
you when you’re baking sourdough bread the
leaven is basically the vehicle that you’re using to take the yeast and the electric acid bacteria from your starter
and introduce that into your dough a lot of people ask the question what’s the difference between eleven and a starter
and there are really two things one is the the leaven is essentially a bulk top
version of your starter so many people maintain a fairly small quantity of starter I maintain about one hundred two
hundred and fifty grams of starter and for this 11 for this recipe we need 400
grams so we’re basically going to take the starter a small amount of starter add more flour and water give it a long
time to let that bulk up so it’s basically increasing the quantity of your starter and it’s also creating what
Chad Robertson calls is a younger version of the starter where it’s a little bit less acidic and a little bit
less sour which is the type of flavor that he goes for in this recipe not the classic really tangy sour dough flavor
but a little bit lighter flavor to his breath the second thing that the leaven
does that’s different than your starter is that some recipes call for different types of flour to be used in the leaven
than what you might use in your starter so for example somebody might you might use the starter that’s all purpose flour
100 percent all-purpose flour and the recipe might call for 11 which is half
all-purpose and half wheat flour or you might have a starter that where you use rye flour in it and then you might be
making a loaf that’s not a riot loaf so even though your starter includes rye
your leaven would not accurately include rye so that’s the difference between the starter and 11 one is just the quantity
bulking up the starter or the composition of the types of flour that are used in
and so we get ready to build our leaven there are three ingredients to the leaven we have our starter we have our
flour and we have water so let’s talk about each one of those three ingredients separately and then we’ll
come back and start the leaven building process
let’s talk a little bit about the starter I keep my starter in top of the refrigerator where it’s a few degrees
warmer than room temperature so let me grab my starter I keep a thermometer up there with my starter it was 77 degrees
Fahrenheit on top of my refrigerator that is 25 point one degrees Celsius
I just fed this starter about three or
four hours ago you can see the blue rubber band was where I started and it’s more than doubled in size so this is the
perfect time to be taking the starter to make the leaven you want your started really at its peak if I open up the
starter I always smell it it smells yeasty bread II it does not smell
vinegary does not smell acidic it does not smell like alcohol so this is really at its peak time where the the the
starter was actually domed up a little bit in the jar and it does not smell as
I said like alcohol yet it will over time so this is really the peak time you
want your start in this video I’m not talking about how we build the starter I’ll do a separate video on that topic
but this starter is basically the recipe that’s recommended in this art scene bread book it’s 50 grams of flour and 50
grams of water or attitude with the remaining starter everyday and the 50
grams of flour is a 50/50 mix of white bread flour and whole wheat flour which
is the same ratio that’s going into the leaven so our starter and our eleven in
this case have the same ratio of flour in them so you can think of this leaven
as essentially a bulk top version of the starter
we have our flower we’re using the king arthur unbleached
organic bread flour and we have King Arthur whole-wheat organic flour those
are the flowers that are two types of flowers that are recommended in the recipe when a recipe calls for white
flour you have two options typically you can use all-purpose white flour or bread
flour which is typically also known as white flour bread flour has a little bit higher protein content in it then
all-purpose flour and you’ll typically get a better gluten structure by using bread flour instead of all-purpose flour
you don’t want to substitute different flours than what’s called for in the recipe because that’s where you can
really get into trouble let’s talk about that in a little bit more detail
the second most common mistake beginners make is flour substitution what do I
mean by flour substitution so we get ready to bake a loaf we get a recipe this is what I did I want to make the
terpene bread I read the recipe it calls for 900 grams of white flour and 100
grams of wheat flour so what do I do I go dig around my pantry and see what
kind of flour I have and I have all this interesting flour so let’s see what we
have I have gluten-free flour maybe maybe that would work I have this
giant bag of semolina flour we really need to use this up so I may be able to use that I have spelt flour or spelt
flour is really good so that could be a great opportunity giant bag of rye flour or a look right
rib maybe I could make a ride low I have rice flour I have tipo zero zero this makes
fantastic Italian bread and pizza crust maybe I could make an Italian sourdough
low I have pasta flour I’m not making pasta but if I get in a jam this would probably work I have white hard wheat
flour this is expired and I have organic
I mean corn all-purpose flour this is einkorn is this ancient wheat from Europe if you made bread in Europe in
the Middle Ages you would use einkorn wheat so maybe if you’re a middle aged
bread maker you want to use the middle aged flour that could be good the bottom
line is that none of these will work none of these flowers are a substitute
for what’s called foreign recipe all of these have different protein contents they have different nibs or water
differently they have different leaving content so even though I have all this flour that I really want to use none of
this is interchangeable with basic white bread flour or whole wheat flour so if I
try to substitute any of these flowers they will more and you know if you’re not used to
baking bread you think flowers flower how different can it be these are all different and the recipes are very
specifically designed for the types of flower that are called for in the recipe so what should you do you should go to
the store and buy the flower that’s recommended so and the recipe calls for
white flour so we’ll be using this King Arthur unglued red flower as our white
flower and King Arthur a whole wheat flour for our 100 grams of whole wheat
flour this is one of the biggest and easiest problems to solve for beginners
has just used the flour that’s called for in the recipe because the recipes just don’t work these are not
interchangeable once you become an expert bread maker you can figure out how do i substitute rye or wheat how do
i substance you’ve spelt for white but but it’s incredibly difficult for a beginner to figure out how to do that
and it’s one of the most common reasons that beginners recipes will fail is
because they’re trying to interchange and use different flours that don’t they weren’t called for in the recipe the
second aspect of flour substitution is that you need to stick with the ratios that are called for in the recipe so
this one calls for 900 grams of white flour 100 grams of wheat flour and again
the beginners walk and say I really love wheat bread so maybe I’ll just do 90 %
wheat flour and 10% white flour I’ll make a wheat loaf the recipe will fail the ratios of the flowers are just as
important as the type of flowers so when you’re deciding what flour to use follow
exactly what is called fording the recipe
some people ask what type of water you should use and people you’ll get all kinds of answers when you ask people
that questions some people say the use tap water they use filtered water they use well one or they use distilled water
the the key thing that you need to know is that you don’t want chlorine in your
water if you’re adding it to your starter or it’s your dough so if you have a municipality that puts chlorine
or chloramine which is different type of chlorine into your water you want to filter that out before you add that to
your starter or your bread because for if there’s chlorine in your water and
you’re adding that to your starter and your dough in your starter you’re trying to grow a culture of bacteria and fungus
basically and if you have chlorine in your water it’s essentially like putting
bleach in your starter in your dough which kills 99.9% of household bacterias
so the main thing is whatever type of water you’re using just make sure you
get the chlorine out of it I have a filter on my refrigerator here so Ahriman Smith municipality puts chlorine
into our water the filter takes the chlorine out so now I have one chlorinated water you can use bottled water which is generally uncoordinated
different municipalities use two different types of chlorine which is important to know one is is chlorine
which can be boiled off and the other is something called chloramine which is chlorine and ammonia which does not boil
off some people think if you boil a municipal water out of the tap that you’ll boil off the chlorine but it does
not boil off chloramines so keep that in mind some people also Alaska if you should use distilled water distilled
water is okay but generally speaking people don’t recommend distilled water
because it’s also taken all the minerals and other good things out of the water if you’re using distilled water so you
want filtered tap water filtered well water bottled drinking water or
something like that just make sure that you’re not adding something to your dough or your starter that’s going to
kill the bacteria
sofe of 11 we have three ingredients we have the flour the starter in the water
and so let’s mix up the leaven recipe so
the ingredients for the leaven it calls for one tablespoon of starter and this
is the only measurement in the recipe where we’re not using the metric system or it’s not measured in grams everything
else from this point forward will be measured in grams but for some reason in the in the book it calls for a
tablespoon I think because it’s basically saying it Symphony precise measurement you can really all part how
much of the starter you want to put into the leaven but let’s pause for a moment and talk about why it’s important to
measure things in grams rather than using volume based metrics like cups and
tablespoons and things of that nature
the third most common mistake beginners make is inaccurate weights and measures when you’re baking breath so you’ll see
in any of the recipes many of the recipes are listed in grams rather than
cups and tablespoons and ounces so let’s pause and take a quiz this is like
jeopardy I’ll tell you the answer and then you guess the question the answer is 197 the question is how many
countries use the metric system another 97 the answer is 3 the question is how
many countries do not use the metric system maíam are Liberia and the United States
of America we don’t want to be like the three countries that don’t use the metric system when we’re baking bread
we’re going to be like the 197 countries that do and we’re going to weigh all of
our ingredients in grams and then you might say but why do I have to weigh them in grams I have cups and I can
convert cups to grams and that’s you know that’s that’s easier when you measure things by cup a cup a cup or a
tablespoon is a volume-based measure it’s not a weight based measure and when
you’re baking bread what you’ll find is that these recipes are incredibly precise in the ratio of flour to water
at different flours to each other or the salt the starter etc are very precise
measurements and they need to be measured by weight not by volume so when we’re used to baking a cake or whatever
and it calls for 4 cups of flour you’re really approximating the weight of that flour when you’re baking a cake
when we’re baking bread we really can’t approximate because different flours have different weights and different
salts have different weights so we need to measure everything by weight so let’s do a quick example of why we need to
weigh our ingredients in grams rather than measuring and cups or even trying
to convert from cups to grams using something like the internet or a conversion table so I’ve measured out
exactly cup of bread flour one cup of semolina flour and 1 cup of spelt flour and let’s
look at how much these weigh and how much the conversion table if we looked at converting these from grams to cups how close that would be to the actual
weight Alexa how much does one cup of flour weigh in grams 1 cup of flour
weighs about 120 grams 120 grams the actual weight is let’s subtract out the
weight of the cup 160 grams versus a
conversion of 120 if you use the conversion of 120 for your recipe and
you measured out this flour you would be over weighted with your flour by 34% that recipe would fail you would have a
dense front break let’s try semolina Alexa how much does one cup of semolina
flour weigh in grams 1 cup of enriched semolina flour weighs about 170 grams
170 grams is the conversion this cup of semolina flour is 124 grams if you use
that conversion factor the recipe would be underweighted and flour by 28% it
would be a soupy mess and that recipe would fail let’s try spelt flour Alexa how much
does one cup of spelt flour weigh in grams 1 cup of spelt flour weighs about
150 grams 150 grams this cup of spelt flour is 95 grams that weight is off by
37 percent if you use that conversion ratio and put that amount of flour into
your recipe it would fail this is the reason we need to weigh things the conversion is nothing wrong with Alexa
she’s really smart but those are average conversion factors an actual bag of
flour that’s in sitting on your counter has a different density different humidity different water content
different grams of flour weight different things you have to weigh your ingredients because these are massive what these are off by massive amounts we
ruin your recipe in three simple examples I have a dozen other types of flour here I could do this all day so we
need the way our our ingredients in grams
it’s the evening of day 1 we’re going to make the leaven at about 8 p.m. the
recipe book the Tartine book calls for the leaven to sit overnight there’s no
specific timeline in there at room temperature about 65° so we’ll make the
Lebanon about 8:30 my room temperature right now is 74 degrees Fahrenheit
twenty-three point five Celsius my thermostat will go down to 65 in about
an hour it’s winter here in Cleveland so our room temperature will get down to about 65 degrees and we’ll let that
leaven go until tomorrow morning sometime around probably 10 or 11 a.m.
there’s no specific time on the 11 building other than just saying overnight which I typically interpret it
as about 12 hours but there’s no specific items on that so the leaven
recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of starter
as I mentioned this is the last time we’ll use a non metric measurement so
I’m scooping out kind of one heaping tablespoon because this is really a Airy mixture in my starter here and I’m also
weighing this so we can see how much 1 tablespoon actually weighs trying to get
all of that out and that’s about 12
grams that’s pretty consistent with what I’ve seen in the past when I put 1 tablespoon of starter in is about 12
grams so let’s call it 12 grams of
starter and then before I put my starter away you can just look at what this
starter looks like it’s frothy it’s stringy like I said it smells like yeast
it has a tiny bit of alcohol smell to it but it’s really a frothy mixture in here
and if I turn my jar over it’s very
thick it is horrible it’s thicker than a batter it’s sticking
to the sides here I can almost hold this upside down without the starter coming out so you get a sense of of the
consistency of the starter you know we put our starter in a safe place so we have our starter 12 grams of starter
roughly approximately 1 tablespoon the next ingredient in the starter is 78
degree water so in the Tartine recipe there are very specific measurements
given for the water temperature and the dough temperature but let’s start with the water temperature in this case 78
degrees so what I usually do is heat up about 500 grams of water to about 80
degrees this is right at about it said about 8 degrees right now and the recipe
calls for 78 degrees so I’m gonna step over to my refrigerator and pour a little bit of cold filtered water in
here until I get it down to 78 okay the water is exactly 78 degrees what’s called is what’s called for in the
recipe so we’re going to add 200 grams
of water to the starter I always do this
on the scale so we’re always measuring even though this measuring cup has no
leaders on it I’m still measuring as I’m pouring you don’t want to overshoot and
we’re at exactly 200 grams of water that we added on top of the 12 grams of
starter just going to mix this in a little bit resolve it up
some people will ask what types of bowls should you use when you’re making sourdough glass bowls metal bowls
plastic bowls wooden bowls etc generally speaking you want to use glass or
stainless steel some people say don’t use metal bowls but stainless steel is a non reactive metal so it’s okay to use
stainless steel bowls for baking things like this if you use plastic bowls you
want to use the food safe bpa-free plastic I generally use a combination of
glass and stainless steel as you’ll see here over the next few steps of the
process so we’ve added two hundred grams of water now I’m going to zero that out and I add an equal amount of flour so
200 grams of water 200 grams of flour and it’s going to be a 50/50 mix of the white flour and a weak Brown actually
instead of adding this into the bowl what I like to do with the flour is pre combined it so that I mix the white and
wheat and I don’t get big clumps of white flour or wheat flour so let’s do that first and zero out this bowl I need
a hundred grams of my white flour before make me a knight hundred grams of the
wheat flour this is whole wheat flour organic 600 grams wheat flour then I
just like to combine these two together so you can see the white and the wheat was kind of separated it’s just based on
how I quartered and you don’t want to pour it into your water that we’re really big clumps of of white flour and
big lumps of wheat flour I’m actually going to make the leaven in the glass
whole now so I’m going to pour my star
[Music] embodied and want to mix this up
and this is the leaven so this is really the workhorse of your sourdough
everything you really need to make the bread is in here it’s the East and
lactic acid bacteria the other flour and water that we add later is going to get
eaten by the leaven we’re going here so
I’m just scraping down the sides of the bowl to make sure there’s no dry flour and just just kind of lightly mix this
together you can do with your hand you
just want to combine the ingredients but essentially what we’re doing here is like a super feeding of our starter so
we took 12 grams of starter and we added 200 grams of flour to that so typically
when you’re feeding your starter you’re doing a 1 to 1 to 1 ratio where you’re adding the same amount of water and
flour to your starter here we’re doing 200 grams of flour to 12 grams of
starter so that’s something like I don’t know 18 times feeding ratio so that’s
why this will sit then overnight because this has a little large food supply available and this is essentially what
will go into our dough tomorrow morning this will bulk up our starter it gives
the east and the lactic acid bacteria is something to eat overnight and they are going to be fully engorged on all this
fresh water and flour in the so I’m
going to cover this with a towel leave it on the countertop overnight room temperature will get down to 65
degrees which is what is called for and then we’ll see this growing size a little bit tomorrow in the recipe in the
book they suggest that you’ll see this grow about 20 to 30 percent in size it will spread out a little bit you’re not
going to see a huge growth in this like you would in your starter doubling for example this has a little bit different
pro 3 – and you’re just sealed a little bit of a size pumping up okay 11 is good to go
until tomorrow
so it’s day two of our sourdough journey it’s exactly been 12 hours since we made
the leaven last night let’s check it out and see where we are okay so the room
temperature last night was exactly 65 degrees it’s winter here in Cleveland temperature
went down to 65 so I’m just gonna test the dough temperature it’s the first thing I do and the leaven temperature is about
sixty six point three degrees so I can assume that it was around 65 degrees
last night my thermostat just kicked down this morning and maybe brought it up from degree there’s a little bit of a
dark crust on the top of this which is not uncommon it just dried out a little bit on top because they just put this
towel over it I could have put a plastic wrap or something over it which would
have kept that browning from doing that so now we’re going to size up the leaven
and see where we are the first thing that we want to do is smell it it still
smells pretty young and refresh and that’s smelling much of the acidic smell and all I’m smelling a yeasty flowery
smell so I’m going to just stir this up a little bit and see what’s happening
here you can see it’s starting to get strain just stirring in that that murder
crust that forms on the top it’s a little bit stringy but this one has a
little ways to go now how do I know that because I compare this to my starter so
here’s my starter now this has been going almost 20 hours since I last fed this yesterday but you can see that the
starter is very liquid very slightly much more liquid froth to it and we
don’t want the welding to become like the starter and it’s not expected to do that it should be in what what Chad
Robertson calls a younger stage because this is this is more acidic and alcohol
smelling so we want the leaven to be you know essentially what he would call a young 11
most but it’s a little ways to go I’m going to give this another hour or two everybody temperature now it might he
does back on this will come up and speed up the process a little bit while check this another
it’s been one hour since we checked our 11:00 and I just wanted to pause here
and describe how did I know that that the lemon wasn’t ready because this is
what’s frustrating about a lot of these how-to videos as you say well how am I supposed to know this this person is an expert they could immediately tell it
wasn’t ready I’m not an expert how am I supposed to know I knew because of what
the book told me so I go back to the recipe and it says the in the morning when you check your 11:00 and I’ll just
remind you that the the book and the process the recipe does not tell you how
long to let the lemon go it just says overnight so I approximated 12 hours so I know that the time could be a variable that
could go either direction but but in the book Chad Robertson gives you basically three tests to determine if your leaven
is ready the first one which I did first was the smell he said your lemon should
smell sweet and an overripe fruit sort of way I smelled the leaven it didn’t
smell like overripe fruit at all smelled like flour so I could tell that it just wasn’t quite active yet from the smell
so that was test number one test number two was just looking at it the book says
that it should increase in volume by about 20% and I could see that it had developed that that heard crust over the
top because it had gotten a little bit dehydrated in the night and it hadn’t risen at all from from when I put it in
this bowl last night and I did transfer this from a large glass bowl into a smaller glass bowl which was not on the
video last night but I could tell where it started and actually put a piece of tape on on this side which you can’t see
to determine what my starting point was end 11:00 had not risen by 20% so those
were two two tests that failed the third test that we could do which will do here momentarily is a float test where you
take a small spoonful of the leaven through it in water and see if it floats and that will give you an idea of
whether or not there’s enough co2 to aerated the dough and that indicates how much how active the yeast has been so
based on the failure over those first two three tests and not conducting the third test I determined to let this go
another hour and this is a great example of how this process works the ingredients in the
process the the water the flour and the starter are only a piece of the equation
and you also really have to be able to manage the temperature and the time because those are the only two variables
that we have available now because they can’t change the ingredients we measured all the ingredients exactly but we’re
running a biological process here and it’s going to run on its own time occasionally so you have to use these
other indicators to determine when it’s done and then you use time and temperature to influence it
so the fourth common mistake beginners make when they’re baking sourdough bread is failure to monitor the time and
temperature of the process when you think about sourdough bread baking some
people ask the question you know how complicated can it be there are only three ingredients flour water and salt
there are actually more than three ingredients there’s flour water salt and your starter your starter has to
microscopic ingredients in a yeast and the lactic acid bacteria so that’s up to
five ingredients now flour water salt yeast and lactic acid bacteria some up
to five but there are actually two other ingredients in sourdough time and temperature when you’re making
sourdough the recipe is not just the ingredients that you’re putting into it the process also includes accurate
measurement of the time and the temperature because of the fermentation that you’re
doing with the starter ingredients these are the invisible ingredients that you can’t really measure what’s happening
with the yeast and the lactic acid bacteria well you can measure the time
and temperature of your dough and the process and that’s how we approximate
what’s happening with these so there are actually seven ingredients in sourdough bread and that’s the way you have to
think of it flour water salt yeast lactic acid bacteria temperature and
time now why is this important I’ll show you one example when I was reading this
chip Robertson’s book about the Tartine method and he talks about his recipe
he gives specific temperatures water temperature internal dough temperature
and he gives one example here in the book where he says when he was baking bread and his bakery that if he reduced
the water temperature that he was adding to his his dough by one to two degrees
Fahrenheit it would lengthen the fermentation process with all fermentation process by
one and a half to two hours so just think about that so you’re trying to follow a recipe it says you’re bought
fermentation should be three to four hours I made the same mistake myself I’m measuring the clock I’m I have my timer
going I measure it out to four hours but what I wasn’t measuring was the dough temperature and he specifically says
that the internal dough temperature should be between 78 and 82 degrees the room temperature of my house was 72
degrees maybe my dough is roughly 72 degrees so my dough was under fermented because I wasn’t measuring the
temperature I was only measuring the time and then there are other examples where if the temperature is higher or
lower than the target you can adjust the time to compensate for that we’ll go through this in much more detail as we
go through the baking process but remember that you need to accurately measure time and temperature you need a
probe thermometer one of these you can buy at a kitchen store I have use ambient room thermometers these are two
dollars and fifty cents apiece on the internet you can use I keep one of these
with my starter at all times so I know what my starter temperature is you can keep one on your countertop so you know
your countertop temperature is I keep one inside my refrigerator when I do my overnight proofing so I don’t my
refrigerator temperature is it’s very important to know the temperature will show examples throughout the process of how we do that so based on the
importance of measuring the time and temperature I knew that this needed a little bit more time so now when we look at this compared to before I can see so
I’ll do the first thing is the visual tests and say did this increase in size by 20% I have some tape on the side of
the bowl here where the lemon was last night and by looking at it it’s up about
10% and you can also see from the dough that it’s that it basically has
shoulders around the edges this is a good way to see if your dough is rising in the bowl or your eleven is rising in
the bowl is that if you look around the edge all you can see that it’s doming up in the middle and that means that there is
air building up their co2 building up inside and is pushing the dough up from when we looked at or an hour ago you can
also see there are bubbles on the top we didn’t see any bubbles before so this is definitely ferment fermenting it’s very
active because you’re seeing the bubbles here so that means that the yeast is generating carbon dioxide so that’s a
good sign that our starter is working that we didn’t have a bad start or an immature starter so we’re getting some
co2 activity in the dough and then the third test that we can do is the flow test so I’ll take a cup of water room
temperature you take a small amount of the leaven and we put this into water to
see if it floats
and it does so the lemon passed the float test so what that means is that
the lactic acid bacteria and the yeast has fermented enough to generate enough
co2 to basically carry the weight of the flower in a cup of water so I passed the
float test I’ve increased in size by about 10% even though the the book says
it should increase by about 20 percent and then I do the smell test this does
smell a little bit like ripe cantaloupe so I’m starting to get that right fruity
smell the flowery smell that I smelled that I smelled an hour ago I could smell
the raw wheat flour is gone now so I’m definitely moving in the right direction but I still think this needs a little
bit more time so it passed one of the three tests we passed the float test it’s starting to get that right fruity
smell I can definitely smell that those notes in here and it’s increasing in
size you can see the bubbles I’m going to give us a little bit more time we’ll check in 30 minutes
you
you
so we have to decide what to do here this is a challenge but this is the reality of sourdough bread baking is
that you never really know how it’s going to work out so we’ll assess our options and decide what to do there’s
always a temptation at this point just to press forward and say oh it’ll be fine let’s move on ignore the the facts
of what we’re seeing here before us so I’ll consult the recipe and decide
where we go from here
you
okay we’re moving on to the next step which is mixing the dough so I consulted my eighth recipe and we basically need
our leaven water and flour for this step in the process then we’ll add the salt a
little bit later so I like to pre measure the ingredients so I already measured have 900 grams of bread flour
and 100 grams of whole wheat flour and it mix those together in this bowl I
have 1 liter a thousand grams of water in this picture which I’ve heated up to
80 degrees which is what the recipe calls for put that in the microwave and
that is exactly 80 point 2 degrees that’s very close we’re gonna go with
that I’ve also measured out with 20 grams of salt it’s very important to measure out
your salt in advance because sometimes you get caught up in the process and forget to add the salt that just happens
all the time I don’t know why but many people make that mistake of just kind of
moving on and forgetting about the salt so let’s briefly talk about the eleven
as it goes into the recipe so this is one of the most confusing parts of the
recipe in the Tartine bread book because the the method the Chad Robertson uses
to create the leaven is that you basically create 400 grams of leaven but you’re only using 200 grams of it in the
recipe and then he assumes that you’re taking the other 200 grams and using
that for your starter so you’re basically pitching your old starter that you created this with and are using this
fresh starter half of what’s left here the 200 grams career start for the next
batch so it’s just the way that he does that in this bakery but it’s very confusing because I have all the ingredients laid out here and a mistake
that a lot of beginners make is they add all of 11 to this recipe when in fact it only calls for half so be very careful
about reading the recipe and only including 200 grams of the leaven once you get into the process and if you’re
not actually using this method of keeping the extras hundred grams as your starter you can
just make 200 grams of leaven to begin with because I mean I’m gonna be discarding 200 grams of this I just did
it so that we could follow the recipe so that I wouldn’t skip this step of telling you not to cut that in half because it’s very important a lot of
people make that mistake but I don’t have the need for another 200 grams because I already have my starter going
in advance what you can do is you can drive this out and save it for a backup
starter and here’s one that I did a couple of days ago I took some XF starter that I can you spread it on
parchment paper and let it dry out for a couple of days and then you can put this
in a sealed jar and keep this as your backup starter you can rehydrate this
you know in the future some people say oh how long hydrated starter elapsed the
answer is a very long time there is evidence that they found there’s an
example where they found some dehydrated starter in Egypt and they believe it was
4500 years old they reactivated that rehydrated it and basically baked bread
with 4,500 year-old dried out starter so I started my last 4,500 years I don’t
know make sure you put the data in case somebody’s in the distant future so let’s start to mix up the ingredients
here so we’ll start with 11 and the water so again my purpose is ricotta
might you one more time is you only use half of the leaven that you just made we
made 400 grams the recipe calls for 200 grams to be added to the dough very very
common mistake people make is dumping the whole thing in and that will really ruin your loaf as I’m looking at this
leaven right now it actually looks pretty good so that longer time I believe worked I guess we’ll see in the
end of a dip but it’s a great example of why you have to be patient you can’t
really push forward and and just try to move ahead with the
process we took an extra two hours to get this in shape 193 grams and we get a
little bit more in here 206 this is always a tough hit this
exactly at 200 201 I’m gonna go with that this is my leftover leaven which I
can use as a starter I could create another batch of starter I could dehydrate this this actually looks pretty good so I’m happy with okay my I
think that’s gonna work okay then to the 200 grams of leaven we’re going to add
700 grams of water at 80 degrees and so
it heated this up in the microwave is exactly 80 degrees I’m going to pour this into the leaven I reset my scale to
zero I don’t want to overshoot the target you can pre-measure this if you’re not used to using the scale
because once you go over the target you can’t go backwards so I’m just
monitoring this as I’m pouring I’m up to
500 grams 600 I get to about 670 and I
slow down so I’m actually at 690 I tried to stop at 676 94 700 exactly so we
added 700 grams of 80 degree water to the leaven and now we’re going to just
stir this up to dissolve 11 into the
water again this is where all the magic happens the leaven is yeast lactic acid
bacteria this is what’s going to do all the work over the next couple of hours we are just coaching this stuff along
there’s not a lot that we’re doing here once we have this sentence that’s why the leaven is so important and hopefully
this batch will be a bit batch one of
the other potential problems with with the leaven not working is if you have a weak starter that happens sometimes
with new sourdough bakers as you’ll create a starter and it’s been going for
about a week and you decide that you want to pick some bread you get impatient so you try to make bread with
a fairly weak starter and that will cause 11 not to to rise properly I don’t
believe that was the case here because my 11 – starter is a couple of months old it’s very consistent it doubles in
volume every four hours in fact I have a video showing the the starter doubling
over to a four hour period that’s the actual starter that we used in this batch
so I’ve sufficiently dissolved the leaven there’s still a couple clumps in
here I’m just gonna reach in and break these up by hand really you really want to make sure that that’s dispersed you
don’t have clothes in there because the East can’t swim so you really want the
yeast and lactic acid bacteria as dispersed as possible in the dough
because if you get a big clump of them together they’re just gonna eat all the food around them and you really want as
much dispersion as possible so that’s pretty broken up now that looks pretty
good now we combine the flour so we have
a thousand grams of flour for the recipe 900 grams of white 100 grams of wheat and this will make two loaves so we’re
making a double batch here this is what’s called for in the standard recipe what I like to do is put in about half
of this stir it up to try to absorb some of the water so you don’t get giant clumps of
flour but that dissolve seeing a lot of
bubbles in here which is a really good sign a lot of activity in the leaven I think we’re gonna be good at a little
bit more stir that and you don’t want to
just dump all the flour in at one time because you just get a big ball of flour in the middle of your water
that’s becoming pretty shaggy I still have quite a bit of flour left so now I’m going to go to change my tools here
scrape off the spatula this is a tool
called a bowl scraper these are handy to have you can pick up a pack of four or five of those for $10 on the internet
they come in different sizes and different shapes it’s now I’m folding the flour into the water
this is really dry so you have to really work this quite a bit but it will absorb
there’s always a temptation here to think that I need to add water to this but you do not just keep keep working
keep working it and eventually the flour
will all be absorbed into the water if you measure things properly then this is a really what this call – shaggy loaf
our shaggy ball is the tell-tale sign
that you got the ingredients right if this is really soupy it means that you
added so much water or you didn’t add the right amount of flour you had a too little flour or you added the double bag
full of leaven this would be very soupy
when you see this shaggy ball you just
want to get all the wrong flour off the sides you don’t want to work this too
much you’re really just trying to hydrate the flour you didn’t feel it with your hands do is starting to get
sticky so let’s see that the water so I’ve absorbed all of the flour into this
shaggy ball it looks pretty good
so we’re just trying to make contact between all the flour and the water you
don’t want any dry patches of flour in
the dough so there is your shaggy ball that’s really what that’s supposed to
look like doesn’t look very pretty but that is what it’s supposed to look like a lot of dough out for hands also just a
note be careful when you’re watching the hands in the sink you don’t want to wash a lot of dough down your drain because
it’s like cement so kind of wipe your hands off on a rag or towel or something before or just getting as much of this
into the bowl as you can before you wash your hands in the sink cuz you want to keep as much of that dough as possible
out of your sink okay so this is now called the auto lease process which is
which is essentially adding the flour and water and letting it sit so that the water can start to release the enzymes
in the flour technically Auto releasing or the auto releasing is when you lease a car
instead of buying a car but the auto lease process is usually just flour and
water in this recipe that’s our team recipe we’ve also added this 11 to this
mix so this is actually technically a ferment Elise which is oddities plus the
fermented leaven but it’s accomplishing the same thing it’s just starting the
activity of water absorbing into the flour and starting the bulk fermentation
process because we’ve added the lemon as well so we’re gonna let this sit according to the recipe for 25 to 40
minutes and it’s about 10 10 a.m. so I’m gonna make a note of that in my cheat
sheet here we’ll be back in let’s say let’s say 30 minutes we’ll check this so
before we cover this I like to take the temperature just to see where we are we again at 80 degree water to probably
room temperature flower and this is a great temperature right now it’s a 79 point
four degrees that’s right in the sweet spot we want to cover that and make sure that it’s not draught no drafts or cooling it down keep it at room
temperature or my room temperature here my countertop is seventy-three point four degrees Fahrenheit twenty two point
nine Celsius so this is eventually going to to equalize with the room temperature
which is lower than our desired temperature between 78 and 82 when we
come back in 30 minutes we’ll talk about how we keep this temperature up in that desired range above 78 degrees
Fahrenheit
it’s been 30 minutes since we mixed our auto lease actually ferment Elise so
this is our starter water and flour let’s take a look at what we have here the recipe calls for letting this sit
for 25 to 40 minutes we’ve let it sit for 30 minutes I really can’t tell much
by looking at this dough relaxed a little bit which it should do what I will do is test the temperature because
it’s incredibly important from this point forward that we monitor our dough temperature at every step of the process
for the the leaven to really do its thing the dough temperature needs to be
between 78 and 82 degrees right now we are at seventy seven point nine seventy
seven point nine so we’re just on the low end of their range so at this point
it’s incredibly important to think about how you can manage time and temperature because other than the salt which is
going in next all the ingredients are in here there’s not a lot we can do with this other than manage time and
temperature so because this recipe gave me a range of 25 to 40 minutes I want to
take advantage of that time I’m not in a hurry I’m gonna let this go another 10 minutes so I’m gonna push the outside of
the range because my temperature is on the low end of where it needs to be at
78 degrees so on my temperature is low I want to add time when my temperature is high I want to take time away but
because I’m it’s right at 78 degrees and my ambient temperature in the room is 74
degrees Fahrenheit which is 23.4 Celsius what’s going to happen if I let the bowl
sit here is it will continue to approach room temperature of 74 degrees and then it falls out of the range of all
fermentation which needs to be between 78 and 82 Fahrenheit which is twenty
five point five and twenty seven point eight Celsius so that presents another challenge for us which is I need to find
some way to bring up the temperature of the dough so the way that we do that is
by creating what’s called a proofing chamber so let’s talk about actions proofing boxes or proofing chambers so
what we need to get it within the target range of 78 to 82 degrees for the fermentation to happen properly we need
to bring up the temperature of the dough we do that by creating a proofing chamber proofing chamber is basically an
enclosed space in your kitchen where you can get the temperature slightly above the room temperature usually about 10
degrees above room temperature or the target temperature that you’re trying to get to so that when you put your your
dough into that enclosed space it helps bring the temperature up of the target
range it’s basically a heated box for me what we’re going to use is the oven with the light on the heat turned off but the
light turned on and just the light bulb inside the oven will heat the oven somewhere between 85 and 90 degrees so
that works well for all the different options that I’ve looked at here I looked at doing in my microwave
sometimes people can put the dough inside your microwave with the door ajar which will turn the light bulb on in the
microwave my microwave doesn’t throw off enough heat to bring the temperature up and I know that because thermometers you
have to if you’re building a proving chamber in your kitchen or a proofing box you absolutely have to have one of
these thermometers with it so you know exactly what your temperature is sitting at I have a warming drawer here below my
counter where I tried this for proofing it actually has a setting I called proof but this is more for doing commercial
yeast based breads I put my thermometer in here it was 105 degrees on the lowest
setting I can get it to so if you have an oven with a proof setting if you have a toaster oven with a proof setting or
warming drawer the proof setting be careful that you measure what that temperature actually is because those
previous settings are usually much much higher than we need for sourdough so there are other ways you can improvise
to create a proofing chamber you can create you could put a cup of boiling
water this cup of boiling water and I could
put this inside my microwave with my Jo and my thermometer and that would bring the temperature up inside that closed
space you know something like this which is roughly a half a liter of boiling
water can bring temperature up between five to ten degrees in a fairly small enclosed space I could also take up this
small cup of a pitcher of boiling water I have two sinks I can put it in my sink but I could cover my sink and I’ve just
created proofing box by using my sink and a cup of boiling water so you have all kinds of options and if you want to
spend the money you can actually buy a proofing box they they make these things for Baker’s and it’s full plastic box
that pops up it has a thermostat on it you say your desired temperature you can just buy a proofing box and then you
don’t have to worry about improvising something first option is always just see what your oven temperature is with
the light on put a thermometer inside listen for an hour or so and if that you
know gets you into that range of 85 to negative 5 degrees that would work but
with all this talking I’m running out of time so I’m going to put this bowl into my oven for a few more minutes with the
light in my temperature inside that’s a
little hot but with the door opening and closing now it’ll go back down to around 84 85
our auto lease / / mental lease process has gone 40 minutes that’s the maximum
recommended time so the next step in the process is to add assault
you always pre-measure the salt and leave it
here in a very visible place you might want to put a big sign next to it that says don’t forget to add the salt for
some reason if you don’t have your salt sitting out you know you don’t make a note people get to the step and they
automatically start the next step and they forget to put the salt in it’s just like I meant a lot people have it happens all the time so I always put my
salt right in front of me to make sure that I don’t forget it so let’s talk about what kind of salt should we use a lot of beginners have a question about
what type of salt should I use in my sourdough recipe so like everybody else
when I started baking I dug around my pantry and what do I have I have good old Morton table salt
I have superfine table salt known as popcorn salt
I have coarse sea salt I have fine sea
salt this is actually ancient fine sea salt I think all salt is pretty ancient
I don’t know where you’re really getting young salt nowadays I have Himalayan salt this is the expensive stuff pink
Himalayan salt because it’s pink and it’s from the Himalayas and they have
kosher salt which I used for a lot of other cooking all of these salts will
work in a recipe what you want to do is consult the recipe and see if there’s recommendation in the Tartine bread
recipe Chad Robertson actually recommends that you use fine sea salt so that would be this one so that’s what we
would use so all these would work there’s not that much difference in in flavor
the main difference in the salts is the weight so we’re back to the issue of weighing our dry ingredients which is
important even with salt which is a fairly small quantity in the recipe this
recipe calls for 20 grams of salt so if I said I don’t need to weigh this in
grams I can just estimate off the internet Alexa how many grams of salt
err in 1 tablespoon there are 18 grams in 1 tablespoon of salt 18 grams and 1
tables soon I’m going to use a conversion factor so I have one tablespoon and I slightly round it that should give me 20
grams according to that conversion when you just kosher salt I’m going to do a rounded tablespoon
should be about 20 grams right there you probably don’t how this is gonna end
let’s pick this on the scale 15 grams
same story is with the flour you have to weigh your dry ingredients doesn’t matter which salt you pick you
just have to weigh it if I used this approximation of 18 grams and a
tablespoon of salt but I happen to pick kosher salt that would be underweighted in my salt in the recipe by 25% I had 15
grams from the recipe calls for 20 if I’m not weighing it I wouldn’t know that I would only find out later because it
would impact my fermentation rate and it wouldn’t impact my flavor so always way you’re driving your dry ingredients
including salt
okay moving on now we’re going to add the salt to the auto leaf so I’m going
to take that out for my proofing change now my internal temperature in the oven
is 85 degrees Fahrenheit that went down one degree because I have open to close the door so now we’re going to add the salt the
way that we add the salt my 20 grams here find sea salt the way that we have
the salt some people dissolve the salt in water first I find that it actually
spreads out better if you had it dry and then add water we’re going to add 50 grams of water I preheated this water in
my microwave to exactly 80 degrees you just want to test that again because it’s been sitting here on the counter
for a couple minutes it’s very important that you get these water temperatures
correct because that’s that’s what you have to impact the temperature of the dough and this is light it’s down to
seventy seven point eight degrees so it’s a little bit low it’s the only way I can impact the temperature is through
water or heat so I’m going to keep this up back up to eight okay I’ve got my water to eighty point three degrees you
can be slightly over you don’t want to be under the target the recipe calls for eighty eight degree water I need 50
grams to mix in with my salt and remember that here in a cup first rather
than try to pour it into the mix because it’s easy to overshoot on these small
quantities that’s exactly fifty so the way that we add the salt is I usually
take the dry salt I don’t put it in the water and you want to spread it around as much as possible so you don’t get big
lumps of salt in any one place so I’m spreading spreading spreading my salt
truly evenly and then I add this water same thing kind of pour this over the
top it’s gonna help us dissolve the salt into the mix and done we mix this by
hand typically so I’m gonna grab the dough and kind of
fold the salt in turning the bowl so
it’s pretty stiff very wet you know I never had that water but this is exactly how it typically feels turning squeezing
so even though you can’t see the salt in here you have to do this quite a bit
imagine you know to get all the salt evenly distributed throughout the dough
squeezing and turning do this little trick squeeze the dough down like this
this looks pretty good it gets that nice and kind of glassy look to it it’s mixed
in well make sure you get all the bits off the edges here couple more turns
here you’re not really intending to walk the dough here you’re really just trying
to get the water and the salt distributed that looks pretty
you so now that I’ve mixed in the salt we
are officially starting to bulk fermentation phase this phase according to the Tartine recipe takes three to
four hours and as I mentioned the target temperature for this phase is incredibly important 78 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit
25.5 to 27 play on the Celsius scale so we’re going to continually measure the
dough temperature to ensure that we’re within that range otherwise we need to add time so let’s see where we are right
now that mixing by hand cools the dough down a little bit because it’s exposing
it to room temperature so I’m at seventy six point two degrees so I’m below my
target range I’ve got to get the temperature up the only way I can do that now I don’t have any more ingredients to add I can add any more
hot water so I’m going to use my proofing chamber which is my oven with the light on which is sitting at about
85 degrees that’ll start to pull the dough temperature up if you’re right do that I want to move this into a
different container so a lot of times you’ll see sourdough Baker’s we’ll put
these on a tall square container when you do bulk fermentation so it’s a little easier to see if the dough is rising then in a bowl where it’s
basically spreading out and you can’t really tell if it’s rising just because of the kind of geometry of the bowl so
I’m gonna put this power container I’m gonna try to flatten that down so we can
see where the starting point is because
we will get a little rise during this process and we want to know how much rise we’re getting so I’m gonna mark
this with a piece of tape on my side and this is going to go into our proofing
chamber also known as the oven with the light on I am going to cover this with
this plastic bonnet you can buy these these are called plastic food covers
they work really well the reason I use the plastic now instead of my favorite towel there is because I want to see
what’s going on so I can see both when it’s in the when I take it out I can get it a little better picture of what’s happening here
so I want to put this into the proofing chamber and I’m going to put some tape on it off-camera
sorry I’m back put the tape on this and realized this actually doesn’t go back
into the proofing chamber yet we need to start our stretch and fold process there’s no resting time between adding
the salt and starting the stretch and fold I thought there was that there is not so we’re going to start the stretch
and fold process this is really the next major phase of the the dough making and
this is the most hands-on work that we need to do so we’re going to turn stretch and fold the dough at least four
times maybe five times with 30-minute breaks in between each one this is what’s recommended in the recipe I’m
going to do the first one so we can get this in the oven and then I’ll talk about why we’re doing it and and how to
do it so so basically with the stretch and fold process you want to reach down
to the bottom of the dough pull it up and let the gravity of the dough kind of stretch it you don’t want to rip it and
then you fold it over on itself turn it 90 degrees reach down at the bottom let
the gravity stretch and fold turn 90 degrees reach down at the bottom let the
gravity stretch and fold and the fourth
time so I’m turning 90 degrees each time stretch and fold that was a pretty rough
process the dough really hasn’t taken shape yet it’ll start to firm up and take some shape over time but we’re
really starting to just create some elasticity in the dough by doing that so now I cover this with our combined it
and we put this in the oven for 30 minutes with the light on you go set my
timer for 30 minutes this is where you have 30 minutes to kill this process really takes a lot of time there’s a lot
of waiting time in between the next two and a half hours this when you think about your sourdough time timeline this
is the time where you have to be kind of hanging around in these you know you have these 30 minute brakes that you need to adhere to 30
minute time slots for struction fold so think about something you can do in 30 minutes and I’ll see you back here in 30
minutes
 
 
The Sourdough Journey Video Transcript: Tartine Bread Step-by-Step: Beginner Mistakes and Tips

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