The Fugue

Over at r.f.s people have been experimenting with making bread with minimal kneading. This is right up my alley, I thought, so I gave it a few tries. It works astonishingly well.

The basic idea is that gluten development is a hydration process. When you knead a dough, you are working in the water and possibly creating little air bubbles. If you leave a ball of dough long enough, the water will work itself in. I know you don't believe me, but it's the truth. In my experience the loaves I make are plenty fluffy - more fluffy than when I knead - so I don't think the air bubbles part is an issue. You be the judge.

So the goal is to let water do the hard work over time. With normal bread, this poses a challenge in that you can't leave the yeasted dough a few more hours without ruining things. With normal bread, people do things with part of the flour and water beforehand and then mix in the rest and the yeast later, etc. etc. I'm no expert on what they do, and frankly it's too complicated. We don't have that problem because sourdough is naturally slower and gives us sufficient time.

Here's what I do. Let's say I want to bake on Saturday morning, and I plan on getting 6-8 hours of sleep. 6-8 hours is a nice rise time for chilled sourdough so I prep the starter so it's nice and active when I get home from work, then I mix up the dough and put it in the fridge. I take it out of the fridge after a few hours, just before bed, and form it into a loaf. I place it under a plastic container (I call it the greenhouse, because that's basically what it does: keep in moisture and heat) and go to bed. In the morning, unless something has gone drastically wrong, it's ready to pop in the oven and bake.

So let's review:

• mix
• rest
• bake

And now some more ramblings about the boring details. You do need to mix it to get the water distributed, and maybe there's some air bubble action going on there too. But you don't have to use your hard-to-clean mixer or get your hands dirty. Mix all the ingredients, including salt.

If you want to deflate or knead or stretch and fold during the rest phase, by all means have at it. Remember that even with sourdough you can only rest so long before the yeast eats all its food. Chilling retards this.

For those of you who like recipes:

No-knead Sourdough Bread (small loaf)

  - 200 g    active 100% hydration starter
  - 125 ml   water
  - 174 g    flour
  -   1 tsp  salt
  -   1 Tbsp oil
  -   1 Tbsp honey

Mix well. Let rest for 1.5 hours at room temperature, or up to 24 hours in
the fridge. Deflate/work it mildly and halfheartedly, then form into a loaf
and rise in a humid (and preferably warm) environment until ready to bake
(use the finger test). Bake in a cold-start oven at 400 degrees for 20
minutes, then at 350 degrees until internal temperature reaches the boiling
point. (You do have a probe thermometer, don't you?) Turn off the heat and
let it bake another 5 minutes and then take it out of the oven and let it
cool thoroughly for best flavor. If you can't hold off the ravening butter
slatherers, don't blame me.

Yesterday I felt like baking bread. Whenever I get this urge, my wife exhibits two simultaneous reactions. First, she starts salivating, then she remembers how the kitchen ended up last time and she rebels. I can't blame her, I don't like to clean up either, especially after slaving over the bread that we both enjoy.

As the cliché goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Yesterday all the neurons in my little brain lined up just right and invented the one-bowl bread solution. I made a fine loaf of bread and only got one bowl dirty. One bowl to clean, and it wasn't even hard to clean. I don't expect to win a Nobel prize here, it should be pretty easy for just about anybody to figure out once he has the idea in his head.

The first step in eliminating the mess is to figure out what the mess is. To do this, I used something called imagination, combined with memory. When I make bread, I make a mess of the mixer, a bowl, measuring stuff, the counter, and a bread pan. So I methodically started eliminating as many of those dishes as possible.

The mixer was easy: knead by hand.

The measuring stuff wasn't too hard to eliminate, since I have a scale. I put the bowl on the scale, dumped in 500g of flour, and poured in 350g of water (the cup used for this doesn't count as a dirty dish!). The yeast, oil, salt, and a bit of herbs thrown in just for kicks were estimated, not measured. If you aren't confident in your estimations, go ahead and use measuring spoons this time - measure it out into the spoon then pour it into your hand or something to give you an idea of how "big" the measure is without a container. For my part, I think I used too little yeast this time around, but next time I'll do better. If you don't have a scale, you could estimate the flour and add water until the dough is the desired consistency. But you really want a scale if you want to be a serious bread baker.

I skim the rec.food.sourdough newsgroup, and I had heard rumors there of a kneading technique called "stretch and fold." Whenever they bring it up they negligently leave out the details of just what this is, and so my first attempt at doing it was completely off. Still, my mistake remains to this day one of my favorite kneading techniques. I understand I'm not the first to think of it, so I guess I won't win any prizes for that either. Although it's not the same "stretch and fold" technique that is in vogue, it will serve our purposes. Here's what you do: dig into the flour/water mess and make it into a dough. No spoon allowed, remember. Once it's dough and can be lifted from the bowl, take it in your hands and stretch it. Now bring your hands together, thus folding it. Rotate 90° and repeat ad nauseum. This works as well or better than kneading on the counter, but it is a bit more of a workout on your hands. Don't worry, they could use a good workout. It will stick to your hands. Don't fret it. When it's kneaded, or you're pooped, throw it back in the bowl and wash your hands. Let it rise.

All we have left is the bread pan. You know, the non-stick one that sticks every time. The key here is to have parchment paper and a baking stone. If you don't have those, maybe you want to settle for two-dish bread instead. If you do, you probably know what to do.

When you use fewer dishes, you not only have less mess to clean up, but you have less things to fiddle with. You get closer to the bread, and the whole process goes faster (if not at first, in the end). Bread-making will seem less of a hassle and more fun. So go do it, and enjoy that bread!

So I wrote a little command-line sourdough calculator because I like the command line better than a web form or spreadsheet.

• sourdough calculator 0.1
• Samartha's web-based sourdough calculator
• What google has to say about "sourdough calculator"