How I Make Baking Choices

Sometimes, it’s hard for us to decide what to bake. Maybe no one has asked for anything specific and we don’t have a craving, but we still want to bake. What do you do? For me, this is a multi-part process, and especially now that I work for Positively Probiotic. My job is pretty awesome, y’all, because it sits neatly at the intersection of a lot of my interests while affording me the opportunity to try out foods I might otherwise not have.

When there’s new stuff, though, and especially when we’re talking about sourdough starters (because let’s be frank here: that’s what we’re talking about), there’s always a learning curve. I started baking when I was a tot - somewhere between ages 2-3. My first independent bake (literally no adult involvement) happened when I was 6. I made molasses cookies. They were so terrible that I was put off of molasses cookies for the next 30 years, up until I ran into Martha Stewart’s recipe. Although my sister did like them, she was the only one in our family who did (including the dog!). We still joke about that on occasion. After somewhere around 40 years of baking, I generally have a good feel for what I should be doing when I get set to bake.

Even when you know what you’re doing, though, new ingredients can be game changers. If I don’t know the flour in question, I first do a lot of research. In addition to what I do here and my herbalism business, I’m also an academic. So I research like one - in depth, thorough, and usually including scientific studies. I’ll often spend a day or three just doing that before I even touch the given flour. New flours have to hang out in the freezer for 72 hours anyway to ensure they are and remain bug-free, so why not learn while I wait for them to be ready?

After that, I always default to a simple, 3-ingredient loaf for my first bake with a new flour. Those 3 ingredients are always flour, water, and salt. Sourdough starter counts for some of the flour and water, so we don’t list it as a 4th ingredient.

Why a simple loaf, you ask? Because it’s the easiest way for me to learn the personality of the given flour. They all have a personality, you know. They like things, they dislike things, different stuff gets them excited, and different stuff makes them sad. You should always know who you’re working with, and grains are really no different.

I am also a “by feel” baker. I really don’t use recipes for the most part, and at best generally will default to eye-balled ratios. So my goal is always to not be measuring while I’m baking and to get to know the new flour while I’m refusing to measure.

I obviously can’t bake without measuring for y’all, because you guys will think we’ve lost our minds entirely if I post things like:

“Do um… you know? I probably used about 3 cups, but I’m not sure. Somewhere around that should be fine. Then you just toss in some salt and starter, let it rest, and then add water until it’s how you want it.”

Sabrina would probably roll her eyes at me if I did that, too. And it wouldn’t be helpful to anyone.

This is what y’all and Sabrina would look like if I baked for y’all like I bake for not-y’all!

How I’ve worked around this “problem” is with the help of my handy dandy scale. I still totally bake by feel, but I dump stuff in the bowl while it sits on the scale so I can record what happened while I wasn’t actively measuring. This way, y’all can do these breads too! Doing the breads while making sure you’re really paying attention to what is happening in a tactile way will also help you learn to do “by feel” baking.

So far, no one has volunteered to just follow me around my kitchen to take detailed notes. Thus, I must do it myself!

Someone come do it for me!

This has been a really interesting process, because it turns out that I often decide how much of a given dough I’m making based solely on whether I want to use something up or not. Those Russian rye buns? I had some Polish rye I wanted to use up so I could check out a new rye. Other loaves? Not trying to use the flours up yet. Tea in the bread? Maybe I didn’t drink all mine and didn’t want to dump it… Yogurts happening? Probably more in the fridge than would get eaten in the normal fashion. And so on.

What I’ve learned from the scale is that when I am not trying to use up all of a given flour, is that I generally eyeball pretty close to the same amounts of flour and salt. The amount of starter I use is determined by how much is in the jar and how long I want to rise the dough. If I need a shorter rise, there will generally be more starter. If it’s not a well-rising flour (low, weak, or no gluten), then I will frequently use a bit more starter as well. Most of my loaves with new flours are starting at (or close enough that I end up bumping it up or down a few grams) around 450 grams of flour. That makes sense, since I generally am looking for a 1.5 pound loaf when I bake bread. Not always, but most of the time yes.

I had no idea I had the ability to accurately measure flours by feel! I feel like Justin Wilson now.

Childhood life goals realized!

It seems I’m mostly rambling at this point. I do that sometimes (most times). All of this rambling is really just leading up to a single point, which is that if the flour is new to me, I will always give you guys a simple loaf recipe first so we can both get to know it. Sometimes I might give you a simple loaf recipe just because I think you might like it, or because I think it’s the right way to address a given sourdough starter. For example, when I get to the Parisian starter, y’all should expect baguette from me before anything else happens. Because baguette. But also because it exemplifies what we think of when we think of Parisian bread. One of my favorite aspects of having so many sourdough starters is that I get to make substantially more indigenous breads than I otherwise might be able to. I’m literally just matching my starters to the cultures of the world I want to bake from.

Once I know a flour, I’ll make other things with it, too. Accordingly, if a flour I’ve written about it new to you, please make the simple loaf first. Getting your hands in there and feeling the weirdness of a flour that can absorb so much water (spelt, coconut, barley), or a flour that doesn’t understand why you’re adding so much (khorasan, einkorn) is the best way to learn your ingredients. When you know your ingredients, you can become a “by feel” baker as well, reserving recipes for the times when you really just want one. You’ll also know how to modify recipes that weren’t written for the flour you actually want to use, and it’ll be easier to see why the things I post that aren’t simple loaves come in the measurements they do. My goal is for us all to get our hands dirty and learn together, so let’s dew eet! As always, when y’all make something new, I want to know about it. Please tell me about your learning and baking experiences so we can all learn together!

Get your hands dirty. Also, read this article. It’s crazy interesting!