Sourdough Experiment #2

Well, apparently it's been over a year since my last major sourdough experiment! It does NOT feel like it's been that long at all! Still, I've been wanting to find a good sandwich bread recipe, so of course it had to turn up through some spontaneous experimentation this weekend.

Here's the Recipe {and THEN you can read about how I got there if you're interested}.

600g starter (~2.5 cups)
25g water (25ml)
30g olive oil (30ml or ~2 Tbsp)
50g honey (50 ml or ~3 1/2 Tbsp)
1 egg
10 g salt (~2 tsp)
340g all purpose flour or bread flour (~2.5 cups)

• Mix all ingredients together till it just comes together. 
• Let it sit 30 minutes.
• Knead on medium with dough hook for 10 minutes. (It's a sticky dough but it should pull away from the bowl.) Or mix by hand with a
• Cover with a tea towel and let rise till doubled (time will depend on temperature of your kitchen, I'm in east Texas and mine takes about 2 to 2.5 hours right now)
• Punch dough, and pull out onto lightly floured counter.
• Split into two pieces and lightly sprinkle tops with flour.
• Pat gently into a rectangle.
• Fold sides in thirds, then shape into loaf using a gently stretching-roll motion from the top working your way down.
• Place in a loaf pan greased with ~1 tsp coconut oil, seam side down.
• Repeat with second half of dough.
• Let rise till doubled in size (mine takes 3-4 hours). Check dough with finger poke test.
• Bake at 375 for 30 minutes.
• Immediately turn loaf over onto a cooling rack and cover with a tea towel until cool. 

So earlier this week I had started a loaf of traditional bread when I saw that Amber's Kitchen on Instagram had posted her new sourdough sandwich bread recipe. I took a quick look at the added ingredients which were some oil, some honey and an egg and thought to myself, "ok, so its basically an enriched dough. Oh, what the heck"... so even though her flour and water and starter measurements weren't anywhere near mine (she was making 3 loaves and well, I was only going to make one big loaf), I just decided to trust my gut on the amounts and just go for it (even though my dough had already been rising for about 30 minutes.) So I squeezed in some honey, glugged in some olive oil and threw in an egg. Crazy, I know, but a few hours and a couple of loaves later, it was a success!


Of course the problem was I hadn't measured anything, but at least I had jotted down some quick notes. So this weekend I decided to try and replicate what I had done and made sure to measure along the way, and BINGO! I hit the jackpot!

Now... I'm a little bit of an outlier when it comes to sourdough, it just doesn't make sense to wait for MORE flour and water to ferment after I've already waited for the starter to do the exact same thing. So for my traditional loaf I use a higher ratio of starter than most. My "perfect" loaf size is 400g starter, 320g flour, 120g water, 8 grams salt. BUT on the day I threw in the extra ingredients I had REALLY gone crazy and upped it to 600g of starter!! Again with the crazy!! All that to say, this sandwich recipe is based off of that double crazy experiment and when I replicated it today, well... let's just say it was worthy of a blog post.




Now it's totally ok if my recipe is not your cup of tea, just like other recipes I've tried aren't mine. I'm mostly just here to tell you that you should definitely experiment and make tweaks along the way until you find what you like!!! And when we cut into the loaf on the right tomorrow morning (a quick stab at a cinnamon raisin version) I'll let you know how that one turned out too!

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For those really interested and still learning how to navigate starter feeding and baking times, this was my time table...

9:30pm Fed starter

9:00 am Started dough.
9:30 am First rise begins.
11:45 am First Rise complete. Shaped dough.
3:30 pm Preheat Oven.
4 pm Second rise complete. Baked dough.
5:45 pm ATE IT WITH DINNER! ;)