Sourdough bread on its own is already quite a special bread. It is leavened with natural yeast and is fermented for much longer than normal bread. If you are a sourdough baker, you probably know that making a good loaf of sourdough takes a lot of time and patience, but in the end, it’s all worth it.
Here are 5 ways to take your sourdough to the next level. I cover everything from preparation style, some special ingredients and some storage methods.
Using a Kitchen Scale
A kitchen scale is one of the most useful baking tools in the kitchen. It helps you measure flour more precisely, which gives more accurate bread hydration. Many sourdough recipes are given in grams, which is much accurate than using cup measures.
A kitchen scale also helps divide up your dough evenly in loaf pans. For example, in a milk bread or a brioche, you generally want to divide your dough into 6 or 8 balls. This helps the dough rise up nicely rather than randomly cracking or bursting in some spots.
A kitchen scale will help you divide your dough up into even sizes. Since the whole point of dividing the dough into ball is to help your final loaf rise evenly, you may as well start with even size dough balls so they will behave more similarly than differently sized ones.
Bread Four
Most of my sourdough bread recipes call for bread flour. Bread flour has a higher protein content (usually 11% or more) compared to all purpose flour. This means more gluten is developed during the kneading process, which gives all those gluten structure and a stronger dough.
A stronger dough is preferable for sourdough for a few reasons. One, the dough will hold its shape better through the shaping process, which gives up a nicely shaped, taller loaf, rather than a flat loaf. Second, stronger gluten structures trap the gases produced form the yeast in the starter, which gives the dough a better and more even rise. It will also help your dough with oven spring and give you a nice ear.
If you do not want to buy a separate flour for bread making, another option is adding vital wheat gluten to your AP flour to make bread flour. Vital wheat gluten is the protein in flour so adding more if it in will essentially give us bread flour. Doing this can take some trial and error (and math). If you want to get technical, you will need to find the protein content of your AP flour and calculate how much wheat gluten to put in to bring to the 11% protein range. I have been going off trial and error and found that adding 2% of vital wheat gluten of the total quantity of flour gives the best results.
Inclusions
Inclusions are any add-ins you want to put in your bread. Some common ones are nuts, sesame seeds, oats, or dried fruit. Inclusions can really change the flavour profile of your sourdough. Because a plain sourdough has a pretty mild flavour, adding some inclusions can really elevate your loaf both in terms of taste and looks.
Some of my favourite inclusions are dried cranberries, oats, and sesame seeds. I like to add inclusions during the stretch and fold stage or the shaping stage, depending on how dispersed I want my inclusions.
Milk powder
Powdered milk is a great way to add some rich, milky flavour to your bread. It is a great ingredient to have on hand because it a dry, shelf-stable product that can last a while. It adds concentrated flavour without adding more liquid into your dough and throwing off the saturation. It can be seamlessly added to most recipes without really altering any other part of the recipe.
You can experiment with adding milk powder in basically any sourdough recipe. I even add it to discard recipes and it works great. If you want try adding milk powder, start by adding about 8%-10% of the total mass of flour.
Some recipes that use powdered milk are my Tangzhong Sourdough Milk Bread and my New and Improved Sourdough Discard Chocolate Chip Cookies.
