I have been baking sourdough for 2+ years and I don't think people should take the timing too seriously. Yes it's good to loosely follow a schedule but if you don't the bread will still turn out fine. I don't think I've ever followed the exact same schedule twice. A few times I flat out forgot about the dough and shaped it hours after I was supposed to, and it still came out amazing. Sourdough is very forgiving. The most important thing in my opinion is mix it thoroughly in the beginning and to do the stretch and folds properly so the dough has strength and can hold it's shape for the later bulk rising.
As a beginner, I find a tool like this useful for understanding the general schedule and a visual depiction of the steps required, without taking the precise timing too seriously
Definitely as a beginner it helps to follow a schedule and start to notice some patterns. As you make bread more and more you start to rely on more visual and tactile signals. For instance, I know that the levain is ready when it appears 'bubbly' enough, and the stretching and folding is done when the dough is 'tough' enough, and that the bulk fermentation is complete when the dough has approximately doubled in size.
This is a great beginner's guide that I have shared with many folks:
https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/. After some time I have settled on theperfectloaf's 'best sourdough' recipe, which has a higher hydration.
Yes! I think it's also important to remember that you're cultivating a living organism. It's an art, and you should adjust your schedule based on what the dough is doing.
That's the most difficult part for me. We need more than a schedule - we need instructions how to modify the schedule and perhaps ingredients based on what we get.
The "Quarantine bread" receipt was wonderful last week. This week, for some reason it turns out terrible (dough very sticky, bread burnt on the outside, etc.) No idea what went wrong and what I should have done to fix this.
As someone who's been baking for a while (both sourdoughs and breads made with commercial yeast), there's a lot of learning to be done through trial and error, and it's difficult to communicate the nuances of how the dough feels or looks via instruction.
Temperature and humidity can change day-to-day (and certainly week-to-week) in a residence. Same with the temperature of "cold" water coming out of your tap. A thermometer and a kitchen scale go a long way towards consistently implementing recipes (and therefore getting consistent results).
Some general tips:
- If the dough is too sticky, add flour! Check the stickiness before bulk fermentation.
- Check the dough during the rise. If it has risen a lot and "domed" early, punch it down or give it a fold. If it's time for a fold but it hasn't risen much yet, let it rise longer!
- If you find your rise times are shorter than the recipe, use cooler water. If your rise times are too long, use warmer water.
- If you don't have a baking stone, baking steel, or dutch oven, you can use an inverted cast iron pan as a baking steel.
- Preheat your oven for an hour or more. Residential ovens often have substantial internal temperature variations. I use dutch ovens to bake bread, but also keep a baking stone on the lowest oven rack as a way to regulate the oven's temperature.
I am just trying to create my first loaf using sourdough so I have no experience on this (I will bake tomorrow) and I have read a book that says that the more you leave the dough the taster it becomes.
The normal recipe is to leave 24 hours the dough in fridge and it says that you can leave it for 48 or even 96 hours :)
Leaving dough out too long will overproof it. Leaving it out not long enough will not rise enough, or, in the case of sourdough, not develop that sour taste people are looking for.
Your first loaf is unlikely to come out great, if your starter is not matured yet - because the yeast/bacteria ratio in it is unlikely to be optimal.
It's very lively, when i feed it it rises and then it drop a bit but maintains it's bubbles. Hopefully it will be better that the breads with commercial yeast.
Or you could also learn how to make mixed 4/3 rye/wheat sourdough with a natural starter, which requires no scheduling at all. Just mix it in the morning and put it in the oven some time in the late afternoon/evening.
I've been doing it for years and it's the only kind of bread that I can make on a regular basis. It's something you can actually do daily, not an additional hobby.
Ingredients:
* 400g full-grain rye flour
* 300g wheat flour
* 10-15g salt
* 600ml water
* 50-80g levain starter (rye based)
mix, wait 6-8h, bake at 210C for 1h05.
This is a very popular kind of bread in Poland, while I found that in the US people don't really know what to do with full-grain rye flour. I've read books that said it can only be used to make dark pumpernickel breads, and I never found the recipe above (or similar) in any bread-baking books I've read.
Also, the rye starter is fairly stable, forgiving and easy to maintain in a fridge.
- to clarify, is the "wheat flour" whole wheat or white? If the latter, all-purpose or high protein "bread" flour?
- do you think it makes much of a difference if the levain is rye based? My understanding is that if the amount of levain is small relative to the overall amount of flour in a rye-based bread like this, it doesn't much matter fermentation-wise.
I've read that rye flour in North America isn't as good a quality as that in Europe. This makes me sad. I grind my own rye berries, but it would be nice if I had the opportunity some time to try your stuff.
And let me go out on a limb with one more question. Many years ago, our grocery store in a town with a heritage in eastern Europe sold a loaf of bread called "heavy rye bread". It was made of a fine flour, was quite dark, and was super tough to chew. I have never had a bread like it since and I have looked hard. It wasn't sourdough like a Borodinski bread, nor was it coarse like Scandanavian rye breads. Perhaps you might know of this bread?
The wheat flour is white wheat flour, the most common all-purpose kind. Don't worry too much about the protein, this bread will not develop lots of gluten strands anyway. You do want to mix it quite a bit, if possible, and you will get some gluten, but nothing like with white bread.
I think the levain should be rye-based, but I do not have data to back that up. Never tried anything different.
As to the quality of rye flour in America, the organic one from Hodgson Mill was good and very comparable to what I use in Poland. The non-organic one less so.
I think the dark bread you described resembles a pumpernickel, but I'm not sure. I never liked pumpernickel much.
Oh, I forgot one important thing in the US: the water in your tap! If it's chemical plant waste like in many places, it can't be used for bread baking. Specifically, if it's chlorinated, you might get away with keeping some in a jar waiting for the chlorine to evaporate. But if chloramines are used (like in San Diego, for example), you're screwed. I had to buy a good activated carbon water filter before I could bake bread in San Diego. I think it's a good idea anyway.
The theory goes that full-grain flours tend to inhbit gluten development, so the crumb ends up being finer-textured and the oven spring not that dramatic.
This is generally true, although I mix for a long time, to develop gluten strands. The dough grows by about 30%, and the oven spring is another 10-15% on top of that.
Rye flour is vastly under-appreciated in my opinion. Love that stuff.
For a lot of things you can't really get away with fully replacing wheat flour, but you can usually do half / half with good results.
I haven't made sourdough for a few years, but I think I was either doing 1 : 1 : 1 (white, wheat, rye) or 2 : 1 : 1.
Also, the easiest way to create a sourdough culture is literally just mix rye flour and water in roughly equal parts. Cover with a cloth to keep bugs out, and then dump out (our use) half each day and add in more flour and water to get back up to the original level.
It's basically the most idiot-proof process I can think of.
The main reason I keep getting out of the habit is that you need to monitor the thing basically daily. Otherwise you can put it in the fridge and take a bit less care of it, but then you need to build it back up for a few days before you can use it.
I've always wondered if I'm just being too cautious about the starter though. I know that people have said they thrive on neglect.
There is one trap when starting a culture: baking bread too early. The levain will start to rise madly after 2-5 days, but this does not mean it's ready! It needs much more time (two weeks?) to become more acidic and develop a good balance of yeast and bacteria.
Once you get a good one, maintaining it is rather easy, though. Feed it every day, and if you forget for a day or two, it doesn't matter that much. It's fairly abuse-proof: for years I even left a portion of dough as the levain for the next bread, which you should not do, because it contains salt (which slows the development of either yeast or bacteria, don't remember now). Everything was fine.
It's all pretty magical: the levain doesn't spoil, because of the low pH. The bread also keeps for a long time (a week, easily).
I use glass, and the dough sticks like crazy. What I do is press a sheet of baking paper into the container, then pour into that. Quick and practical.
Given the number of questions, I think I should write up a quick manual on practical bread baking, submit it to HN, and watch it get noticed by no one :-)
Cheers. I'm currently putting extra oil down the sides just before baking. This works pretty well but creates a loaf that's somewhat greasy to the touch. It tastes OK though.
Yes, when I was in the US I used to order "Hodgson Mill Organic Rye Flour, 30-Ounce (Pack of 6)" through Amazon sellers, and later had trouble getting the stuff. The organic version was better than non-organic.
It's difficult to get because nobody knows how to use it :-)
We do rye and wheat sourdough at home, as well. Prior to the lockdowns I had no problem finding 5 pound bags of wheat flour and 3 pound bags of rye flour. Now, though... Can't even find it online.
I honestly hadn't thought to look for it at any of our nearby Asian grocery stores. We used to frequent our local H Mart, Zion Market, and 99 Ranch, but have been sticking to our more immediate grocery store for the past 4 weeks, or so. I'm due to restock kimchi soon anyway, thanks for the suggestion.
Unlike the rest of the readers of HackerNews I'm not an expert on breadmaking. So, to me this looks like a very cool resource that could make me feel confident enough to try. It also looks real nice, and plays well on mobile! Nice work!
For those of us working in tech, it can be extremely satisfying to bake your own bread. I did that a few years ago, starting from scratch, making my own sourdough starter, and baking daily. It's rediscovering what a typical family did centuries ago. Your starter becomes a pet.
I had to stop it due to a lot of travel, but I still have a packet of my starter vacuum sealed and frozen.
Maybe I should try again. Travel certainly won't be an issue for a while.
I just like fresh bread without all the work ;). With a good bread machine, you only have to mix the ingredients (or purchase a nice mix) and the machine does the work for you. Ours never failed baking a good bread (except for the one time where I forgot to add yeast ;)).
I hope this works for somebody, but I'm going to have to critique the whole concept of "timing' when baking sourdough bread.
After years of baking sourdough I find that I cannot predict precisely the timing. I have to judge the dough at each step and not proceed until it is ready. This is especially true in that I like trying new things, making tweaks, fermenting at different temperatures, and this alters the timing. The timing depends highly on temperature, where in the refresh cycle the starter is at (still rising? fallen and foamy?), but also very much on your particular starter. Some starters run slow (especially newly created ones). Others are fast. Using someone else's timing just never seemed to work for me. Early on when I started baking sourdough I made some absolute bricks because I followed the timing that the recipe specified, even though their descriptions of the dough seemed very different to what I was seeing. And if they said two hours, then eight hours must certainly be enough... but it wasn't enough. Yes, it really can be off by that far (especially with a new weak sourdough starter that wasn't refreshed properly).
Nonetheless, you have to have some sort of plan. Turns out that I can always make it work within a certain set of bounds if I am home all day on some given day. And that has driven me into the following pattern:
1. Remove sourdough starter from refrigerator the night before, and refresh.
2. Build dough in the mid morning with active starter
3. Bulk ferment (with stretches and folds) in a proofer until it is ready
4. Pre shape. Then shape. Then refrigerate in bags.
5. Bake the loaves (I always do two boules) early the next morning.
This is by no means the only pattern that can be made to work, but it's robust and flexible enough for anything I've ever thrown at it.
One thing that really made a massive difference for me was making a proofing box. It's a large EPS container (similar to the ones that market sellers use) with a seedling heating mat inside. I control it with a cheap (like < $10) thermostat from Amazon. It maintains around 26C quite easily and is pretty efficient. I've never bothered to check the accuracy of the thermostat, but I imagine it's within a degree or two. You can also use it for fermentation, Noma have instructions on how to build one. My only suggestion is don't do what I did and go nuts on the size. You can get away with a much smaller box (e.g. I bake 500g loaves mostly, and I use a 4L graduated polycarbonate container - it's dwarfed by the size of the box).
Temperature control makes an enormous difference. I live in a cold house, hence why I built this. To make things worse, my kitchen has marble worktops. So if you use cold or tepid water and then knead, you end up cooling the dough even more on the counter. It's a bit different with Tartine because you don't really knead the dough, but still - yeast is optimally active around 25C or so and if you have to wait for the dough to come up to temperature, that can easily add an hour or two. So you can control this by measuring the temp of your water and using a climate controlled box (which costs about a tenth of one of those pop-up Broder ones).
I do agree about starter refresh cycles though, as well as what hydration you put in, how much you put in, what exactly the flour is. I don't climate control my starter except during the winter when it sits by the boiler.
Most of the time my routine is identical to yours. Feed the starter overnight Friday, make the dough Saturday morning and bulk it during the day. Refrigerate overnight and bake on Sunday.
I have a Sous Vide rig. I put my dough in a one gallon plastic bucket and that floats inside a small beer cooler with some water in it that the circulator keeps at whatever temperature I want. A dish towel over top ensures the temperature is basically constant top to bottom. Proofing dough to within 0.1C accuracy is ridiculously overkill, but that accuracy comes for free. Works amazingly amazing.
Grams have become kind of standard for baking, even in the US.
I think this is due to the use of "baker's percentages", which specify the weight (not volume) of all ingredients in terms of a percentage of the weight of flour used. So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor.
It's a lot easier to do this using grams uniformly, than some mix of lbs, oz, cups, tsp, etc. The system really takes advantage of the ease of conversion between units in the metric system.
But the oven temperate doesn't change even if you add more flour, so there's no need to do any scaling conversions for that. This let's people get away with using antiquated units for temperate.
> So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor.
I think maybe there's a typo here with "salt" vs "water"?
I've had a hard time with these percentages. 3% salt means 3 grams of salt for every 97 grams of flour, but that doesn't seem to be how it's used in baking. Same with water: 100% hydration is half water, half flour, because they're talking in ratios rather than actual percentages.
I guess the important part is that these are percentage ratios, so it's really 3%:1 salt and 100%:1 hydration.
Yes, you're right! It should say "water" instead of "salt"...and it's too late to edit now.
I too have a hard time with the percentages - it's a ratio against the weight of the flour, not a proportion of the entire dry mass. I guess that's why they call them "baker's percentages", as opposed to "the common understanding of percentages" :)
It makes it easier to adjust the ratios that way. Increasing the contribution of an ingredient only changes the percentage for that ingredient (other than the flour, obviously).
I feel like that website is slightly counter-productive, because it puts a very strong emphasis on timing, whereas for producing high-quality bread, things like dough handling techniques, dough and oven humidity, or baking temperature have a much stronger effect than timing.
You're right that it's important to observe the dough and modify timing as needed.
I think, however, that for many folks who are trying out baking sourdough for the first time, it helps them a lot to start with a fully detailed recipe that includes timing. The instructions on that bread scheduler will AT LEAST get you to the right ball park (assuming you use similar flour to the instructions).
For those starting this out, I would recommend following one of these detailed recipes, do it several times or more, and that way develop some sense of what factors to tweak.
Taking a closer look at the instructions, I see they're not emphasizing dough temperature during bulk ferment. Household kitchen temperatures can vary quite widely and this temperature is an important factor in how long the dough takes to ferment. That's why it's valuable to press the dough with your finger and gauge readiness prior to shaping steps.
I believe what most newcomers will want to bake is not a large bread - because then you're stuck with it if it turns out so-so - but rather smaller bread rolls. Those are based on instant yeast and prepared rather swiftly, so then the kitchen temperature becomes a major success/failure factor.
My dough was a full 10 degrees F warmer than normal after mixing recently, and it finished rising 1/6 faster (about 2 hours). Temperature strongly impacts the fermentation stage (warmer means the yeast works faster).
You are absolutely correct, I forgot to mention that. When it's cold outside, I actually have to keep the window closed and turn on the heating, or else my kitchen will be like 15 degrees celsius and the yeast won't rise quickly enough to counteract the wet dough slowly sliding flat.
I have found that a minimal version of no-knead bread is already good:
700ml flour, 350ml water, 1 to 1.5 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp instant yeast. Mix in bowl, cover, let stand for 12-16 hours. Put dutch oven in oven, heat to 250C. Take out the hot dutch oven, sprinkle some bran or flour or cornmeal on the bottom, scrape dough from the bowl into the dutch oven, sprinkle some bran on top. Bake 30min with lid, remove lid, bake 20min more.
I am sure extra steps (autolyse) and extra work (folding, shaping) would improve it, but even this minimal procedure makes tasty bread.
The dough bubbles and more than doubles in volume in the bowl when the yeast is slowly working. If you wait too little, it hasn't risen yet. If you wait too long, it will rise and then start to flatten back. You can see this from the sides of the bowl, that the dough has reached a higher level earlier, and started to contract, but left some marks up to the maximum where it was. I guess the timing depends on how much yeast you added exactly, and the temperature in your kitchen. You don't need to get it perfectly right, but it you wait way too little or way too long I guess the bread comes out dense.
You just scrape the risen dough from the bowl into the dutch oven with minimal disturbance, so you don't disturb the air bubbles too much. And your oven and the dutch oven need to be hot at this point, so the dough goes right into a hot oven, the heat expands the air bubbles and gives you some oven spring.
Other recipes make you sprinkle flour on a working surface, fold and shape the dough into a loaf, and then leave it, giving the shaped loaf a second rise.
What are people want to avoid kneading so much? Most of the recipes are for no-knead bread. I find this process very relaxing and prefer this over a session of meditation.
I love to knead, but in my tiny apartment I have a hard time finding a place to knead without making a mess. It would be nice to have a no knead option for some bakes.
This may be the first recipe list I’ve ever seen that doesn’t include a 20 page essay on family history followed by half a dozen ads. I like the design
I totally agree! Most recipe sites don't focus on what I want: recipes. I'm a pretty good home cook and I've been trying to get better at timing. Getting all elements of a big dinner party ready at the same time is tricky. This website is terrific. I wish this approach were applied to more complex multi-dish meals.
I've recently been making very low effort bread, which takes less then 10 minutes overall, and is (in my novice eyes) exactly the same as bread that has been kneaded with the "proper" schedule. Perhaps one of the experts here can shine a light on why something simple like below creates (almost) the same quality as a mixture that has been processed with much more effort?
- Put everything in a bowl, and mix it until it's consistent. Usually takes 2-ish minutes. I find a simple, non-sharp knife to work best.
- Cover it with cloth and let it sit for 12-20 hours depending on the mixture and temperature.
- Get the mixture out, en cover with flower on all sides. Don't knead or overly touch (it will lose volume).
- Preheat the oven with an iron cast over pot, once it's hot (250C), take out the pot, put in the mixture, and put on the lid. Halfway into the baking time, take off the lid.
This is exactly my recipe, which I have been using for 5 years now with great success. It's foolproof. The bread will usually look like shit after you dump it into the iron cast pot, but will have a nice and smooth and tight surface after the first baking round with the lid on.
Gluten development can happen through two mechanisms (usually both are in play), once water is added to flour: either physical stretching (kneading), or just time. The stretch-and-fold method balances these two. But if you're letting the dough sit for 12-20 hours, that's achieving the same effect.
Thanks for this. I'm extremely blessed to have a wife that enjoys making bread, and makes the best sourdough I've ever tasted. It's mostly in her head but from the notes I've pieced together it seems close to the weekday sourdough. Bread is so easy to make and so delicious if you have patience, I really hope this leads to more people making bread. Store bought tastes like paper in comparison.
Protip to any future breadmakers: buy a cast iron Dutch oven. It's the real game changer.
I've been wondering about that. The last time I baked bread was 10+ years ago. At the time, I got professional results with just a pizza stone and a spray bottle of water. The water replaced the steam oven and did a great job of gelatinizing the crust. Unfortunately I don't think I can get a dutch oven during the lockdown.
So, my wife has been making bread a while and it was always 'chewy'. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious, but there was no crust to the bread. After researching, the consensus was that the lid helped keep the steam in and brown the bread. You only leave it on for half the bake, typically. But the difference between bread on a stone and bread in a proper enclosure is truly night and day.
Thinking through not having access to a proper dutch oven, water would probably work but I'd think you'd still need a cover of sorts, even if makeshift foil.
> Unfortunately I don't think I can get a dutch oven during the lockdown.
ymmv and I don't know where you live, but I was able order one off Amazon and get it in about 4 days about a week ago. Just mixed up the dough for my first bread a few hours ago :)
This is really cool, but to complete these recipes successfully on schedule you'd have to account for the ambient temperature of your house and adjust accordingly. A rise overnight at 65 degrees is going to take ~twice as long as one during the day at 75.
I’m pretty new to bread making (like many I’m sure) but today realized I could use the oven to help rise, as our house is kept cool. Basically turn on the oven at its lowest setting for a few minutes and then turn it off, and let your dough rise in the warmer atmosphere of the oven.
If your oven has an incandescent light, often that's just warm enough. Just leave it on. Same with gas ovens with a lit pilot. I recently noticed mine has a "proof mode" I had been meaning to test out.
You can also fill water bottles with hot water (I usually use two) and put them next to the dough in the oven. My oven gets slightly too warm if I turn it on to the lowest setting / light only.
Are the amounts on the website broken or am I slightly dense?
The "Overnight Weekend Bread" recipe (http://www.breadscheduler.com/#/recipe/5bac85f720211052e0b70...) instructs you to create 500g-550g of levain (the amounts in the overview and the step-by-step instructions don't quite match for me). Then, in the "Mix Dough" step it tells you to use 108g of the levain. What happens to the rest? Are you supposed to throw it out or keep it as your sourdough starter?
Also, the "Autolyse" step tells you to use 402g of white flour while the overview specifies 804g. (Judging by the hydration they must certainly mean 402g).
At least personally, when my sourdough is ready (by appearance and feel) for the next step corresponds to the "time" from the "recipe" so infrequently that I'm shocked when it does
Following a schedule exactly is a great way to make Frisbees (short dense loaves)
This is cool. One minor thing, at least on Firefox it's not possible to open the links to different breads in a new tab. It'd be nice to have that, just so the user can open the breads that interest them in tabs and then sort through them.
So funny how tech people must have such a detailed recipe for baking with sourdough. It's the same with coffee.
Listen.
Dough is a living organism. You cannot set a timer to it. It must be nursed, especially based on what flour you use, freshness of the flour, the climate, the moisture etc.
If you want to be really good at baking, then bake at least 100 loafs and see what you learn.
Then try to change the flour brand and bake again. Then you will se a different result.
Yes, you're right. It really doesn't take a genius to make a sourdough. But you're misunderstanding the tech people. They will take tying shoelaces to the genius level. Same with baking bread. And it's a lot of fun for a lot of us.
Perhaps slightly off topic, but I have for years admired the cooking schematics on Cooking for Engineers. Here's the recipe for meat lasagne - scroll to the bottom and admire the schematic and the bonus layer diagram:
The internet psuhes this idea that you can quickly be an expert in anything, you just need to read a few websites or watch a few YouTube videos. It's nice to have those resources, but the advanced info is often useless without the context of experience. Doing things is often the only way to attain ability.
Anyone know a good recipe for a real French baguette? I haven’t yet been able to find a baguette in the Bay Area that tastes like they do in France (lived there for three years).
And honestly, good butter is hard to find too, although I did locate a little store in San Mateo that carries Echire.
Finding a flour that is close to French type 55 is going to be the biggest problem for getting a baguette that is close to authentic. Try King Arthur for some of the custom blends that are close to what you need; US “all purpose” flour has too much protein and the lower protein “cake flour” has a grind that is too fine.
The easiest way I've found to understand it is to think of 12 as being zero, so the times go 11am (11) -> 00pm (12) -> 1pm (13) -> 11pm (23) -> 00am (24) -> 1am (25).
Neat! I agree with the commenters above that we geeks try to take bread making (essentially, a free art form), and quantify it somehow and make it into and algorithm. And cheers to that!
Feature request: adjust timing automatically given a humidity + temperature measure.
Feature request 2: fetch ambient humidity and temperature automatically from users' GPS and time of day. ;-)
Great idea! Made my first sourdough bread yesterday after a couple of weeks of trying to get a starter going, the process is a fun and interesting project, especially while staying at home, and you don’t need much to get started (flour, water, ideally a cast iron pot, scales). Tastes amazing and reduces social contact of having to go to the shops/bakery too :)
This is nice! I have been baking my own bread for a while now in a large masonry oven, it takes a while to learn when the temperature in the oven is right and the dough is good. Baking bread is more an art than science IMO. You learn it by doing it, this is a nice starting point.
Next step is to better schedule yeast procuring in stores around the world, I have been looking for it at stores close to me for two weeks now with no success, I've read that the situation is similar in other European cities.
Yes, but while dried yeast is sold out completely here, locally produced fresh yeast is still available. There's also other forms (freeze-dried, liquid, etc) you can look for.
Not sure if intentional but I really loved seeing Recipe.vue open and with comments and logs...
I'm trying to learn how to generate charts with SVG and D3, this is helpful.
Few appreciate what has gone wrong with regular store bought bread. Regular store bought bread is created with the Chorleywood process, whereby substandard wheat and carbon dioxide can be mashed together to make some dough that can be baked into something that resembles bread.
These loaves of bread-style-wheat things are not made with just the basic ingredients needed for bread. There are the E numbers for preservatives and whatever else is 'needed'. Often the additives are added to the flour rather than the dough and therefore do not have to be listed. Stuff derived from human hair can get in there as an 'E number'. Often people self-diagnose themselves as having gluten or other allergies when there could be problems with the additives rather than the core product of what bread is supposed to be.
Chucking out store bought bread and joining the sourdough club is a popular reaction to the industrial nonsense that poses as 'bread'. However, there are economic factors at play here. Sourdough keeps and it can be sold at a premium.
Actual fresh bread made with yeast and zero additives does not keep and cannot be sold at a premium. It is also less trendy and not on the radar of the hipster crowd. However, if one is sorting out one's bread properly then a bread machine and the ingredients for bread making is a shrewd investment. It takes five minutes to load the machine with 500g of flour, 360 ml of water, 25g of some type of fat, a teaspoon of yeast, a teaspoon and a half of sugar (to make the yeast do its thing) and a teaspoon and a quarter of salt. You can then press the start button to have the freshest bread you could wish for in four hours. Or you can set the timer so it is ready in the morning or when you are back from work.
By taking this approach you have the benefits of pure, fresh bread with none of the downsides of lengthy preparation times. You don't need an app to manage your sourdough. It is also energy efficient as a bread machine is a small rather than large appliance. The Panasonic machines are best as you have recipes based on that machine plus you can get spare parts and the beginners manual uses metric rather than obscure 'cup sizes'.
With home-machine, properly bakes bread you don't need to be chewing on some sourdough rusk that is essentially stale, you can fire up the machine and keep the fresh loaves coming every 2-3 days. You can mix and match the flours to keep your bread varied. You can also focus on what you eat your bread with rather than try to forever by adding ingredients to the bread such as tomatoes, olives, nuts etc.
If you can maintain the routine then you never need join the sourdough club, you can cut your own way with the innovative 'yeast' ingredient used properly rather than thrown out.
Look, in my opinion the rejection of store bought bread made with the Chorleywood process to go for sourdough or anything else trendy is not entirely rational, there is much to recommend bread baked the conventional way with a machine. It means you ain't spending your time scheduling your life around some silly baking affectation but you get your bread.
That is a fair comment that needs a few words to understand. I appreciate that to those that can only write one liners this could appear as a 'rant'. But it is not.
However, I do now have a reason to rant, to rant about those that write things such as your comment without explaining in full why the need is there for sugar in bread.
You don't need sugar, You need carbohydrates, which are supplied in the flour. 4 ingredients are required, Flour, Water, Yeast and Salt. (though, in a pinch, you can do without salt, but it works as something of a regulator to the speed of the yeast and it affects the texture of the dough. (And you can do it without the yeast. but then it's sourdough. (Water and flour though, I'm pretty sure those are really required))) Fat isn't required either, but in some doughs, it can help with the workability or flavor.
Try this: Mix yeast and a batch sized quantity of water. Nothing really happens, but the yeast (depending on the type you've added) will dissolve or break apart. Add some flour, about what you'd add in sugar. Mix it so that the flour is not in clumps.
If the water temperature is reasonable, the yeast will start to break down the carbohydrate in the flour into sugar, consume it, and start bubbling. Then add it to bread, as the yeast has been proofed.
Some yeasts don't require the proofing step (SAF red for one). It's perfectly fine to add to the dry ingredients. I like that stuff, super reliable and easy to use but despite being french, I've never seen it outside the states. Some yeasts are better for sweet breads (like panettone, cinnamon rolls, or others). Some yeasts come in little sachets just suck and are hard to work with, like the stuff I had in the cupboard pre-pandemic.
