I recommend not getting into baking your own sourdough. I started during COVID because we couldn’t get bread or even yeast at the store, just 50-pound bags of bread flour online. Now I’m stuck doing the whole process every fucking week because the bread is just so much better than anything you can get at the store.
No, it’s not difficult or really time-consuming at all, but it does tie me to the house for a couple of nights in a row whenever I make it, and I have shit to do. I’ve also started sleeping through my alarms so I’ve developed a tendency to over-ferment a little bit.
My schedule is levain in the afternoon, stretch-and-fold after dinner, bulk ferment to around midnight, proofing in the banettons until around 4 AM, then into the fridge for most of the next day and I bake after dinner. It’s that 4 AM alarm that I’m managing to completely ignore lately. An extra hour or two of fermenting isn’t fatal, but it does reduce the height of the finished loaf a bit.
I recommend not getting into baking your own sourdough. I started during COVID because we couldn’t get bread or even yeast at the store, just 50-pound bags of bread flour online. Now I’m stuck doing the whole process every fucking week because the bread is just so much better than anything you can get at the store.
Once you get into a groove, it’s easy to make you sourdough
No, it’s not difficult or really time-consuming at all, but it does tie me to the house for a couple of nights in a row whenever I make it, and I have shit to do. I’ve also started sleeping through my alarms so I’ve developed a tendency to over-ferment a little bit.
Slow fermentation in the fridge is your friend. For me it’s 4-6 hours of bulk ferment then overnight in the fridge.
My schedule is levain in the afternoon, stretch-and-fold after dinner, bulk ferment to around midnight, proofing in the banettons until around 4 AM, then into the fridge for most of the next day and I bake after dinner. It’s that 4 AM alarm that I’m managing to completely ignore lately. An extra hour or two of fermenting isn’t fatal, but it does reduce the height of the finished loaf a bit.