White sourdough Try 2

In White sourdough, I gave a recipe that sort-of worked for a white sourdough loaf. I’m going to try to improve that white sourdough recipe.

I took my sourdough starter out of the freezer earlier this week to thaw in the refrigerator, and I started early this morning, adding a cup of water and a cup of bread flour to the starter and leaving it out all day, covered with a damp kitchen towel.  The sponge did bubble, but it was rather slow—I suspect that a lot of the yeast did not survive freezing.  Maybe what I have now is more freeze-tolerant.  This evening I stirred the sponge and set aside a cup of it in the refrigerator for starter for next week.  That left me with 1½ cups of a rather wet starter to use.

As before, I’ll make a light dough to rise and sour overnight, then add more flour in the morning.

Mix

1½ cup sourdough starter
3½ cups bread flour (all I had!)
2 cups water

together using bread hook on the KitchenAid mixer.  Cover and let rise overnight.

In the morning, mix in

4 cups all-purpose flour
2 Tablespoons sugar
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoon salt

with bread hook, then knead in

½ cup all-purpose flour

by hand, to get a smooth, but somewhat slack, dough. Grease the mixing bowl with

 1 Tablespoon olive oil

Place in dough in greased bowl, cover, and let rise 2½ hours.

Punch down and divide into two parts. Knead each part lightly until smooth and surface is not greasy.  Roll into cylinders. Place on baking parchment for final rise (seam-side down), about 3½ hours. (I had to reshape about half an hour before baking, because the dough was too slack and had spread horizontally too much.)

Boil

½ cup water
½ teaspoon cornstarch

in microwave and cool to room temperature.

Preheat oven to 400°F with shallow pan of boiling water on bottom of oven (high humidity in oven makes for crisper crust).

Slash tops in long diagonals.  Brush loaves with corn-starch water and place in oven.

Bake 5 minutes, and brush again with corn-starch  water.

Bake 5 minutes, and brush again with corn-starch  water.

Remove pan of water from oven and bake another 20 minutes.

Remove baking parchment and bake another 15 minutes directly on baking tiles. The bottoms of the loaves should sound hollow when tapped.  (I again had problems with one of the loaves sticking to the baking tiles after removing the parchment, but the other one was fine.  It was probably a result of brushing on too much of the cornstarch water, and having some pool under one loaf, so the bottom of that one was too wet.)

Top view showing slight browning of crust.

Low-angle view to show the spreading, rather than rising of the bread.

Bottom view, showing damage from loaf sticking to tile.

Note: I did not do a bread-and-tea event featuring this loaf—it was much too hot today to sit at the computer for an hour or so.

The bread itself was a failure—the dough did not rise at all, and the insides were still a mass of unrisen, not quite baked dough. I think that the yeast in the sourdough starter did not really survive the freezing. Though the dough seemed ok after the first rising, it had only risen a little bit. I’ll probably have to add a little more yeast to the sourdough starter, if I want to do another sourdough loaf. And I won’t try freezing the starter again.