These days I only bake sourdough bread every other week. We just don't eat that much bread, mostly on weekends for breakfast, maybe for a lunch sandwich. So baking one or two loafs every second weekend is enough for us.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to switch it up and make rolls instead of a bread. Rolls are always a bit tricky. I have tried them a few times but somehow most of them were a bit denser than I liked. This time though, they were perfect!!
Crusty on the outside, chewy/fluffy on the inside
Most of you probably know that if you work with sourdough you usually start the day before. My process goes something like this.
In the morning of day #1 I grab my sourdough starter and mix up a levain. Basically, I freshen up my starter to be able to use it later in the dough because I only feed my starter once a week. Then I let it sit (while I go work) and in the afternoon after maybe six to eight hours I start mixing the actual dough.
This here is a picture of the very nice and bubbly levain ready to be used.
Next up is the processing of the dough. Dissolve the levain in the water then add the flour and start mixing. That mixing tool I am using? Highly recommended! It is a Danish Whisk. I don't have a Kitchen Aid and am not using an electrical mixer just for this one dough but this whisk - whoa - what an improvement to using a spatula (or hands).
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After mixing water, levain and flour you have to let the mixture stand for 30 - 60 minutes so the gluten can develop. When you go back to the dough after this resting period you will see and feel the difference. It will be a lot more spongy. This is when you can work in the salt and mix it well. The last picture shows the dough before I put it into the fridge (after placing a plate as a lid on top) at about 8 pm after a series of stretch-and-fold rounds over the past two hours.
The first picture of the next batch shows the dough when I took it out of the fridge roughly twelve hours later on day #2. You will notice how it looks smoother and puffier - it grew during the night despite the cold treatment.
I plopped it out of the bowl onto a floured board. If you look closely at the second picture you'll see little bubbles in the dough. Then I first divided the dough length-wise in two before dividing it into the individual rolls. Twelve in total, some a little bigger, some smaller.
I lined my Dutch Oven with baking paper, put some corn meal on the paper before placing the rolls on it. Then it goes into the oven covered at first for ten minutes (475F) and then a further twenty minutes (425F) uncovered. The result is in the last picture.
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Then all I had to do is wait for them to cool down a little, kick the hubby out of bed and, finally, have breakfast with fresh sourdough bread rolls. Yummy!!
This is my recipe but I find this varies a lot between starter activity and flour used etc. etc. Yet, this one worked for me:
- 300 g levain (100g starter + 100g water + 100g flour)
- 300 g water
- 500 g All Purpose flour
- 12 g salt
I'm looking forward to the next weekend breakfast with these. They freeze really well.
I hope you enjoyed this post. And till next time!
Have a great rest of your day!
Cheers,
(Ocean)Bee
If you are on Nostr you may have seen some of my content over there as I have started posting a little on that protocol.
I strive to never copy/paste my text but my images will obviously be the same.
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I keep promising myself (for years) that I will one day make the starter and keep it alive. Until then I look for easiest and fastest bread recipes possible :D So far the fastest and easiest is Irish Soda bread. You mix and you bake. Done.
The rolls look so amazing though..I can imagine the smell...
Get you butt in gear, Ewkaw! 😁 😘 Seriously, sourdough is so easy to make, to start with, it only gets a bit more involved when you start thinking about tweaking e.g. more holes, less holes etc. Other than that it is totally worth it. And the starter maintenance, I have totally minimized it. I feed it once a week and that's it. If you don't want to bake weekly, put it in the fridge. I do that every time I go on vacation longer than a week. It's no problem at all. The starter has survived everything - thus far.
They smelled awesome! The whole house smelled of the fresh bread - hahaha - if you weren't so far away I'd send you a bit of my starter. Well, could do that anyhow because I dried some of it.
I've always wanted to make sourdough bread, gonna bookmark this for future reference
Oh nice! I'm far from being an expert but if you have any questions - ask away though I suspect you'll find better information all over the internet.
They not only look but TASTE yummy 😍