hi I'm Tom coming to you from Cleveland Ohio thank you for selecting this video today's video is the sourdough journey beginner mistakes and tips I made this video specifically for people who are beginners at making sourdough bread there are all kinds of videos on the internet and they're very good that described the making of the sourdough bread process but many of these videos are brought to you by experts who have done this for so many years that they've forgotten all the mistakes and all the questions that beginners have so the purpose of this video is to talk through the entire process end to end of baking sourdough bread and to really focus on what are the common mistakes that beginners make and what are many of the questions that beginners have I'm a relatively new sourdough bread baker myself so I wanted to make this video before I forget all the mistakes and questions that I had so the first step in our process is to select a recipe that you want to follow sourdough bread baking is different than other types of baking or cooking because the recipe is more than simply just putting the ingredients together each one of these sourdough recipes is a process where based on the specific types of ingredients and the specific quantities of the ingredients there's a specific process that goes with that combination of ingredients that you have to follow to make the recipe work and this is the first and most common mistake that beginner sourdough bakers make is what I call recipe improvisation recipe improvisation goes like this when I got interested in making bread sourdough bread I pulled out all of my cookbooks - hip bread recipes I found the all-time best bread recipes how can you go wrong with this I found the red revolution book buried in the back of my cabinet I read through that and then I found the Tartine bread book and this is the one that I selected that will be going through today but before I learned to use this recipe I did what I call recipe improvisation was that rich as I read all three of these I printed out a dozen recipes off of the internet and when I made my first loaf of bread I liked different parts of different recipes so I grabbed the first part of one recipe I grabbed the middle part of another one and I grabbed the last part of the third one and I kind of put them all together and I thought that would work and I made a brick it just didn't work and what I realized very quickly is that these recipes are not genetic interchangeable parts you can't take the first half of one recipe and add it to the second recipe because as I mentioned earlier the recipe and the process are inextricably linked so the idea of picking and choosing pieces of recipes just doesn't work so my first tip for beginning sourdough bread bakers is pick one recipe and stick to it exactly start to finish until you master it and you'll learn so much more than you will by changing all the variables and mixing and matching pieces together then you will if you just pick one recipe and stick to it so that's my first tip so the recipe that we'll be using through this process is from the Tartine bread book this is a fairly famous book by Chad Robertson from the Tartine bakery in San Francisco and there's a recipe in this book called the basic country loaf which is one that many people follow and we'll be following that recipe throughout this process the Tartine bread basic country loaf there are plenty of other recipes out there on the internet and and many of them are popular and proven if you choose to do it a different one just pick one of those and follow it top to bottom start without exception that's the best way to learn what I'd like to do each time I bake a loaf is I prepared a cheat sheet here that I use and this just is a boiled down version of the steps in the book and it has the key ingredients from the recipe and the quantities it has the key steps in the process and the times so this reminds me of the steps that I need to follow and I also leave space on the sheet here to keep notes because it's very important to write down and what time you're starting certain things what the temperature is and other things that may go right or wrong along the way and then you can go back and learn from your notes so I highly recommend creating some type of cheat sheet that you can follow as I mentioned we'll be following the Tartine bread method which includes the basic country loaf recipe that's the bread that we'll be making this is basically a three day process so let me give a quick overview of what we cover each day on the evening of day one we'll do some preparatory materials and then we'll build the leaven the leaven then builds overnight through roughly a 12 to 14 hour process on the morning of Dave's who will essentially mix the dough that starts with the auto lease or ferment Elise process which takes roughly 40 minutes to an hour we then add salt and begin the bulk fermentation which is a three to four hour process including the stretch and fold method which we will go through in detail after bulk fermentation is completed we will do a rough shaping of the loaves with a bench rest which is roughly a 30 to 40 minute process then we'll do final shaping of the loaves for 10 to 15 minutes and then the low-vis go in the refrigerator for what we call an overnight full or a cold proof which is roughly a 12 to 14 hour process on day three the morning of day 3 we preheat the oven for about an hour we score and bake the lows that takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour we let the lows cool for 90 minutes and then we eat them that's the step by step process that we'll be covering throughout this video you when you're baking sourdough bread the leaven is basically the vehicle that you're using to take the yeast and the electric acid bacteria from your starter and introduce that into your dough a lot of people ask the question what's the difference between eleven and a starter and there are really two things one is the the leaven is essentially a bulk top version of your starter so many people maintain a fairly small quantity of starter I maintain about one hundred two hundred and fifty grams of starter and for this 11 for this recipe we need 400 grams so we're basically going to take the starter a small amount of starter add more flour and water give it a long time to let that bulk up so it's basically increasing the quantity of your starter and it's also creating what Chad Robertson calls is a younger version of the starter where it's a little bit less acidic and a little bit less sour which is the type of flavor that he goes for in this recipe not the classic really tangy sour dough flavor but a little bit lighter flavor to his breath the second thing that the leaven does that's different than your starter is that some recipes call for different types of flour to be used in the leaven than what you might use in your starter so for example somebody might you might use the starter that's all purpose flour 100 percent all-purpose flour and the recipe might call for 11 which is half all-purpose and half wheat flour or you might have a starter that where you use rye flour in it and then you might be making a loaf that's not a riot loaf so even though your starter includes rye your leaven would not accurately include rye so that's the difference between the starter and 11 one is just the quantity bulking up the starter or the composition of the types of flour that are used in and so we get ready to build our leaven there are three ingredients to the leaven we have our starter we have our flour and we have water so let's talk about each one of those three ingredients separately and then we'll come back and start the leaven building process let's talk a little bit about the starter I keep my starter in top of the refrigerator where it's a few degrees warmer than room temperature so let me grab my starter I keep a thermometer up there with my starter it was 77 degrees Fahrenheit on top of my refrigerator that is 25 point one degrees Celsius I just fed this starter about three or four hours ago you can see the blue rubber band was where I started and it's more than doubled in size so this is the perfect time to be taking the starter to make the leaven you want your started really at its peak if I open up the starter I always smell it it smells yeasty bread II it does not smell vinegary does not smell acidic it does not smell like alcohol so this is really at its peak time where the the the starter was actually domed up a little bit in the jar and it does not smell as I said like alcohol yet it will over time so this is really the peak time you want your start in this video I'm not talking about how we build the starter I'll do a separate video on that topic but this starter is basically the recipe that's recommended in this art scene bread book it's 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water or attitude with the remaining starter everyday and the 50 grams of flour is a 50/50 mix of white bread flour and whole wheat flour which is the same ratio that's going into the leaven so our starter and our eleven in this case have the same ratio of flour in them so you can think of this leaven as essentially a bulk top version of the starter we have our flower we're using the king arthur unbleached organic bread flour and we have King Arthur whole-wheat organic flour those are the flowers that are two types of flowers that are recommended in the recipe when a recipe calls for white flour you have two options typically you can use all-purpose white flour or bread flour which is typically also known as white flour bread flour has a little bit higher protein content in it then all-purpose flour and you'll typically get a better gluten structure by using bread flour instead of all-purpose flour you don't want to substitute different flours than what's called for in the recipe because that's where you can really get into trouble let's talk about that in a little bit more detail the second most common mistake beginners make is flour substitution what do I mean by flour substitution so we get ready to bake a loaf we get a recipe this is what I did I want to make the terpene bread I read the recipe it calls for 900 grams of white flour and 100 grams of wheat flour so what do I do I go dig around my pantry and see what kind of flour I have and I have all this interesting flour so let's see what we have I have gluten-free flour maybe maybe that would work I have this giant bag of semolina flour we really need to use this up so I may be able to use that I have spelt flour or spelt flour is really good so that could be a great opportunity giant bag of rye flour or a look right rib maybe I could make a ride low I have rice flour I have tipo zero zero this makes fantastic Italian bread and pizza crust maybe I could make an Italian sourdough low I have pasta flour I'm not making pasta but if I get in a jam this would probably work I have white hard wheat flour this is expired and I have organic I mean corn all-purpose flour this is einkorn is this ancient wheat from Europe if you made bread in Europe in the Middle Ages you would use einkorn wheat so maybe if you're a middle aged bread maker you want to use the middle aged flour that could be good the bottom line is that none of these will work none of these flowers are a substitute for what's called foreign recipe all of these have different protein contents they have different nibs or water differently they have different leaving content so even though I have all this flour that I really want to use none of this is interchangeable with basic white bread flour or whole wheat flour so if I try to substitute any of these flowers they will more and you know if you're not used to baking bread you think flowers flower how different can it be these are all different and the recipes are very specifically designed for the types of flower that are called for in the recipe so what should you do you should go to the store and buy the flower that's recommended so and the recipe calls for white flour so we'll be using this King Arthur unglued red flower as our white flower and King Arthur a whole wheat flour for our 100 grams of whole wheat flour this is one of the biggest and easiest problems to solve for beginners has just used the flour that's called for in the recipe because the recipes just don't work these are not interchangeable once you become an expert bread maker you can figure out how do i substitute rye or wheat how do i substance you've spelt for white but but it's incredibly difficult for a beginner to figure out how to do that and it's one of the most common reasons that beginners recipes will fail is because they're trying to interchange and use different flours that don't they weren't called for in the recipe the second aspect of flour substitution is that you need to stick with the ratios that are called for in the recipe so this one calls for 900 grams of white flour 100 grams of wheat flour and again the beginners walk and say I really love wheat bread so maybe I'll just do 90 % wheat flour and 10% white flour I'll make a wheat loaf the recipe will fail the ratios of the flowers are just as important as the type of flowers so when you're deciding what flour to use follow exactly what is called fording the recipe some people ask what type of water you should use and people you'll get all kinds of answers when you ask people that questions some people say the use tap water they use filtered water they use well one or they use distilled water the the key thing that you need to know is that you don't want chlorine in your water if you're adding it to your starter or it's your dough so if you have a municipality that puts chlorine or chloramine which is different type of chlorine into your water you want to filter that out before you add that to your starter or your bread because for if there's chlorine in your water and you're adding that to your starter and your dough in your starter you're trying to grow a culture of bacteria and fungus basically and if you have chlorine in your water it's essentially like putting bleach in your starter in your dough which kills 99.9% of household bacterias so the main thing is whatever type of water you're using just make sure you get the chlorine out of it I have a filter on my refrigerator here so Ahriman Smith municipality puts chlorine into our water the filter takes the chlorine out so now I have one chlorinated water you can use bottled water which is generally uncoordinated different municipalities use two different types of chlorine which is important to know one is is chlorine which can be boiled off and the other is something called chloramine which is chlorine and ammonia which does not boil off some people think if you boil a municipal water out of the tap that you'll boil off the chlorine but it does not boil off chloramines so keep that in mind some people also Alaska if you should use distilled water distilled water is okay but generally speaking people don't recommend distilled water because it's also taken all the minerals and other good things out of the water if you're using distilled water so you want filtered tap water filtered well water bottled drinking water or something like that just make sure that you're not adding something to your dough or your starter that's going to kill the bacteria sofe of 11 we have three ingredients we have the flour the starter in the water and so let's mix up the leaven recipe so the ingredients for the leaven it calls for one tablespoon of starter and this is the only measurement in the recipe where we're not using the metric system or it's not measured in grams everything else from this point forward will be measured in grams but for some reason in the in the book it calls for a tablespoon I think because it's basically saying it Symphony precise measurement you can really all part how much of the starter you want to put into the leaven but let's pause for a moment and talk about why it's important to measure things in grams rather than using volume based metrics like cups and tablespoons and things of that nature the third most common mistake beginners make is inaccurate weights and measures when you're baking breath so you'll see in any of the recipes many of the recipes are listed in grams rather than cups and tablespoons and ounces so let's pause and take a quiz this is like jeopardy I'll tell you the answer and then you guess the question the answer is 197 the question is how many countries use the metric system another 97 the answer is 3 the question is how many countries do not use the metric system maíam are Liberia and the United States of America we don't want to be like the three countries that don't use the metric system when we're baking bread we're going to be like the 197 countries that do and we're going to weigh all of our ingredients in grams and then you might say but why do I have to weigh them in grams I have cups and I can convert cups to grams and that's you know that's that's easier when you measure things by cup a cup a cup or a tablespoon is a volume-based measure it's not a weight based measure and when you're baking bread what you'll find is that these recipes are incredibly precise in the ratio of flour to water at different flours to each other or the salt the starter etc are very precise measurements and they need to be measured by weight not by volume so when we're used to baking a cake or whatever and it calls for 4 cups of flour you're really approximating the weight of that flour when you're baking a cake when we're baking bread we really can't approximate because different flours have different weights and different salts have different weights so we need to measure everything by weight so let's do a quick example of why we need to weigh our ingredients in grams rather than measuring and cups or even trying to convert from cups to grams using something like the internet or a conversion table so I've measured out exactly cup of bread flour one cup of semolina flour and 1 cup of spelt flour and let's look at how much these weigh and how much the conversion table if we looked at converting these from grams to cups how close that would be to the actual weight Alexa how much does one cup of flour weigh in grams 1 cup of flour weighs about 120 grams 120 grams the actual weight is let's subtract out the weight of the cup 160 grams versus a conversion of 120 if you use the conversion of 120 for your recipe and you measured out this flour you would be over weighted with your flour by 34% that recipe would fail you would have a dense front break let's try semolina Alexa how much does one cup of semolina flour weigh in grams 1 cup of enriched semolina flour weighs about 170 grams 170 grams is the conversion this cup of semolina flour is 124 grams if you use that conversion factor the recipe would be underweighted and flour by 28% it would be a soupy mess and that recipe would fail let's try spelt flour Alexa how much does one cup of spelt flour weigh in grams 1 cup of spelt flour weighs about 150 grams 150 grams this cup of spelt flour is 95 grams that weight is off by 37 percent if you use that conversion ratio and put that amount of flour into your recipe it would fail this is the reason we need to weigh things the conversion is nothing wrong with Alexa she's really smart but those are average conversion factors an actual bag of flour that's in sitting on your counter has a different density different humidity different water content different grams of flour weight different things you have to weigh your ingredients because these are massive what these are off by massive amounts we ruin your recipe in three simple examples I have a dozen other types of flour here I could do this all day so we need the way our our ingredients in grams it's the evening of day 1 we're going to make the leaven at about 8 p.m. the recipe book the Tartine book calls for the leaven to sit overnight there's no specific timeline in there at room temperature about 65° so we'll make the Lebanon about 8:30 my room temperature right now is 74 degrees Fahrenheit twenty-three point five Celsius my thermostat will go down to 65 in about an hour it's winter here in Cleveland so our room temperature will get down to about 65 degrees and we'll let that leaven go until tomorrow morning sometime around probably 10 or 11 a.m. there's no specific time on the 11 building other than just saying overnight which I typically interpret it as about 12 hours but there's no specific items on that so the leaven recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of starter as I mentioned this is the last time we'll use a non metric measurement so I'm scooping out kind of one heaping tablespoon because this is really a Airy mixture in my starter here and I'm also weighing this so we can see how much 1 tablespoon actually weighs trying to get all of that out and that's about 12 grams that's pretty consistent with what I've seen in the past when I put 1 tablespoon of starter in is about 12 grams so let's call it 12 grams of starter and then before I put my starter away you can just look at what this starter looks like it's frothy it's stringy like I said it smells like yeast it has a tiny bit of alcohol smell to it but it's really a frothy mixture in here and if I turn my jar over it's very thick it is horrible it's thicker than a batter it's sticking to the sides here I can almost hold this upside down without the starter coming out so you get a sense of of the consistency of the starter you know we put our starter in a safe place so we have our starter 12 grams of starter roughly approximately 1 tablespoon the next ingredient in the starter is 78 degree water so in the Tartine recipe there are very specific measurements given for the water temperature and the dough temperature but let's start with the water temperature in this case 78 degrees so what I usually do is heat up about 500 grams of water to about 80 degrees this is right at about it said about 8 degrees right now and the recipe calls for 78 degrees so I'm gonna step over to my refrigerator and pour a little bit of cold filtered water in here until I get it down to 78 okay the water is exactly 78 degrees what's called is what's called for in the recipe so we're going to add 200 grams of water to the starter I always do this on the scale so we're always measuring even though this measuring cup has no leaders on it I'm still measuring as I'm pouring you don't want to overshoot and we're at exactly 200 grams of water that we added on top of the 12 grams of starter just going to mix this in a little bit resolve it up some people will ask what types of bowls should you use when you're making sourdough glass bowls metal bowls plastic bowls wooden bowls etc generally speaking you want to use glass or stainless steel some people say don't use metal bowls but stainless steel is a non reactive metal so it's okay to use stainless steel bowls for baking things like this if you use plastic bowls you want to use the food safe bpa-free plastic I generally use a combination of glass and stainless steel as you'll see here over the next few steps of the process so we've added two hundred grams of water now I'm going to zero that out and I add an equal amount of flour so 200 grams of water 200 grams of flour and it's going to be a 50/50 mix of the white flour and a weak Brown actually instead of adding this into the bowl what I like to do with the flour is pre combined it so that I mix the white and wheat and I don't get big clumps of white flour or wheat flour so let's do that first and zero out this bowl I need a hundred grams of my white flour before make me a knight hundred grams of the wheat flour this is whole wheat flour organic 600 grams wheat flour then I just like to combine these two together so you can see the white and the wheat was kind of separated it's just based on how I quartered and you don't want to pour it into your water that we're really big clumps of of white flour and big lumps of wheat flour I'm actually going to make the leaven in the glass whole now so I'm going to pour my star [Music] embodied and want to mix this up and this is the leaven so this is really the workhorse of your sourdough everything you really need to make the bread is in here it's the East and lactic acid bacteria the other flour and water that we add later is going to get eaten by the leaven we're going here so I'm just scraping down the sides of the bowl to make sure there's no dry flour and just just kind of lightly mix this together you can do with your hand you just want to combine the ingredients but essentially what we're doing here is like a super feeding of our starter so we took 12 grams of starter and we added 200 grams of flour to that so typically when you're feeding your starter you're doing a 1 to 1 to 1 ratio where you're adding the same amount of water and flour to your starter here we're doing 200 grams of flour to 12 grams of starter so that's something like I don't know 18 times feeding ratio so that's why this will sit then overnight because this has a little large food supply available and this is essentially what will go into our dough tomorrow morning this will bulk up our starter it gives the east and the lactic acid bacteria is something to eat overnight and they are going to be fully engorged on all this fresh water and flour in the so I'm going to cover this with a towel leave it on the countertop overnight room temperature will get down to 65 degrees which is what is called for and then we'll see this growing size a little bit tomorrow in the recipe in the book they suggest that you'll see this grow about 20 to 30 percent in size it will spread out a little bit you're not going to see a huge growth in this like you would in your starter doubling for example this has a little bit different pro 3 - and you're just sealed a little bit of a size pumping up okay 11 is good to go until tomorrow