Rye Sourdough English Muffins

Another recipe to make use of the "discarded" sourdough starter.

Ingredients
120g starter that has been stored in the fridge (mine is a 100% hydration rye starter)
200ml milk
344g all purpose/plain flour
1 TBSP sugar
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
Semolina or cornmeal, for dusting

Method
Mix starter, flour and milk in a large container. Mix to combine, cover with plastic wrap, and leave out for 8 hours or overnight.

Starter, flour and milk mixed and left overnight in room temperature

Result overnight. Bubbles are obvious and doubled in height

After the overnight rest, add sugar, salt and baking soda and mix well. Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 4-5 minutes.

Roll out to 2 cm height and cut with a biscuit cutter into rounds. You can re-roll the scraps, but you may need to let the dough rest before cutting more muffins from them. Place muffins on a piece of parchment dusted with semolina and let rest for 45 minutes.

Cut into rounds and resting on semolina

Spray frying pan lightly with spray oil. Cook muffins for about 6-8 minutes on each side using low to medium heat, or until browned on the top and bottom and cooked through. Don't use too high heat or the top and bottom will be too brown and the middle remains uncooked.

In a frying pain, lightly coated with oil

Waiting to be eaten

Sourdough Walnut Bread

Esther has been buying walnut bread for the past few weeks. And I have been trying to perfect a loaf of sourdough bread. So, instead of just baking a simple sourdough bread, I added walnuts to my loaf. The good thing about bread making is that the end product is edible even if the baking fails. :p

As usual, for the sourdough bread, we need to create a levain first which will be used to "lift" the final bread dough.

Levain
52g bread flour
20.5g water
22g active sourdough starter (100% hydration)

Active starter means after feeding, the starter will double or triple its size within 12 hours. It depends on the temperature you are keeping the starter in.

Start by dissolving the starter in water. Then add in the bread flour and mix until the flour is fully incorporated. I flattened it in a glass jar to monitor how much it rises overnight. Cover the opening of the jar with cling film.

Levain created

Notice the bubbles in the levain left overnight in room temperature

Final Dough
208g flour
23g whole wheat flour
165g water
5.5 salt
94.5g of levain created above
46g toasted walnut


Method
In a stand mixer, mix the flour and water at low speed until it forms a shaggy mass. Cover and autolyse for 60 minutes. During the wait, you can toast the walnut.

Shaggy mass of flour and water

Toast the walnut at 200C in a toaster for 10 minutes, stirring them regularly. Let them cool down before using.

Toasted walnuts, broken into smaller pieces

Add the salt and levain and mix at low speed for 2 minutes, then increase the speed to medium (Speed 2 in a KitchenAid) and mix for 10 minutes. Add flour and water as needed to adjust the hydration.

Add in the walnut and mix by hand. I tried using the stand mixer but it doesn't seem to be doing a good job at mixing the walnuts into the dough.

Transfer the dough into a oiled bowl and do a stretch and fold, then shaped into a ball to bulk ferment.

After the first stretch and fold

Do a stretch and fold every half hourly for 2 hours to develop the gluten during the bulk fermentation.

After the 2nd stretch and fold

Notice the dough getting tighter and less "relaxed". Compare the photo above and below.

After the 3rd stretch and fold

After the final stretch and fold, pre-shape the dough into a ball and rest for 15 minutes while you prepare the banneton. I floured the banneton with rice flour to prevent the dough from sticking during the proofing stage.

Dough resting

Shape the dough tighter into a boule and put it in a floured banneton. Let it proof. It is difficult to say how long you should proof for because it depends on the activity of your levain and also the surrounding temperature.

You can try using the "finger poke" test to see if the dough has proofed sufficiently. By poking at various places on the dough with your floured index finger to a depth of 1 cm, see how the dough behaves when you remove your finger. If the indentation disappears immediately, it is not proofed. If the indentation stays the same, it is over-proofed. What you are looking for is for the indentation to pop back half-way. This is the point where you can bake the bread. Don't worry about leaving dents on the dough. Once it is in the oven and expanding, the dents will disappear.

Dough proofing in a green plastic banneton

Bake the dough in a preheated oven at 240C for 30 to 40 mins. Use a thermometer to check the internal temperature. You are aiming for around 96C in the middle of the bread.

The final product

Crumb shot

Still trying to master my sourdough starter. Baking bread using sourdough is different from using commercial yeast. How fast the dough rises depends on the "mood" of the sourdough and nature of things.

Next bread might be baked using a kombucha starter instead of a rye sourdough. We shall see...

Sourdough rye and whole wheat crackers

When you are growing your sourdough starter, you need to discard half of it and feed the leftover with more flour and water. So what to do with all the discarded sourdough starter when you are growing your sourdough? Do you throw it away? It's perfectly edible flour that has been fermented. I keep a big bottle of it in the fridge to stop it from fermenting further.


Found this recipe at The Fresh Loaf.

50g whole wheat flour
20ml coconut oil
0.9g salt
100g discarded sourdough starter at 100% hydration (50g flour/50g water)


Mix the whole wheat flour with salt, then mix in the coconut oil. Add in the sourdough starter and mix well. Leave it overnight until risen in a warm place. My house is around 30C all year round.

All ingredients mixed

Fermented overnight and risen. See the bubbles.

The next day, take out the dough and roll it out as thin as possible and evenly with a rolling pin. Then cut up the thin dough into squares using a pizza cutter. I use a "special" rolling pin to control the thickness I want. :)

Rolled as thinly and evenly as possible and cut.

Special rolling pin that can control the thickness of the dough

Bake it in the oven at temperature of 175C convection mode. Rotate your tray at around 7 to 8 minutes if your oven heat is not even. As mine is very thin, it is done in 14 minutes. So, monitor it closely to prevent the crackers from being burnt. Noticed the edges are darker than the middle.

The crackers will shrink once they are done

Keep in airtight container to maintain the freshness and crisp.