welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen welcome back to
stuff in our cupboard the pandemic pantry edition
a few days ago we made a no-knead bread recipe and
during that process i took off about a quarter sized or a walnut-sized piece of
bread dough put it into this bowl with a cup of water and a cup of flour i
then stuck it in the fridge and i left it in the fridge for
about a day took it out about 12 hours ago left it on the counter at room
temperature and you can see it started to bubble up the yeast has really
activated and i said in that video i'm going to
show you how to use it and i've struggled a little bit with how i'm
going to use it because initially i thought i would show you how to use it
as a sourdough starter
you could treat this exactly like a sourdough starter it is not a sourdough
starter so don't start on me about that at this
point it is just uh commercial yeast flour and water it
is a lavent or a bigger but over time if you treat it like a
sourdough starter it will start to sour and you could use it in any sourdough
recipe you cut off the amount that the sourdough recipe asks you to use and you
just use it and then you feed it and you maintain it
that way
there are a lot of people who will be watching this video
who perhaps don't make a lot of bread who
are maybe not as confident in the kitchen so i thought i would show you
how to use it all and then save a piece for your next
loaf so that you just continue on using the same thing for all of your
loaves so the best way to do that is to treat
this as a level or a bigger so you go back to our original no need
recipe from a couple of days ago and you essentially look at that
recipe and you take out one cup of flour one cup of water
and the yeast because that's already here so you've already started mixing
this loaf of bread so you just think of it that way you've
taken part of that original recipe you've already mixed it up you've left
it for a couple of days and now you're going to mix in the rest of the
ingredients so instead of the three and a half cups
of flour i think was in the original don't quote me on that please check out
the recipe in the description box i'm going to put that in because there's
already a cup of flour in here next i'm going to put the levant or the
bigger in you just put it all in there will be a
little bit of water on top it may have separated somewhat
that's okay it's fine um it's going to do that
so put that all in
and then i've got the rest of the water so i think the first one was a cup and
three quarters of water we've already got a cup of
water in so i've got three quarters of a cup of water
and i don't want to put all of that in at once i want to hold some back
and we're going to talk about that as i mix this so they're
going to hold that much back i've also got some salt i'm just going to put that
in as well and we're going to mix this with a
wooden spoon there were a lot of people in the comment section for that other
video giving me stick because i didn't give weighed measurements for the
ingredients to this loaf and there's a couple
reasons why i didn't do that first reason is i know that most of my
viewers are in the united states and scales in the kitchen in the united
states just not a thing just not a thing so i
wanted to use something that everybody has which is a
measuring cup
now i'm generally on board with weighing stuff when i develop recipes i
weigh everything and i make sure that it works by weight
and then i make sure it works by volume because volume
in the united states and canada where i live in canada volume
reigns supreme for all baking or cooking doesn't matter what the ingredient is
people just use cups just the way it is it's the way it's always been and it
probably won't change anytime soon
so that's why i used volume measurements just to make it simple to make it
approachable so that anybody can rock up in their kitchen and make this
the other reason that i sort of don't really care if i use
weights for this type of recipe is that i'm going to put in just a
little bit more water it's a little bit too dry
you don't want it to come together in an homogenous ball
like you would if you were kneading bread it still needs to be ragged i
think this is a little too ragged so i'm gonna add just a little bit more
be very careful when you add extra water that you don't add too much because then
you get into a see-saw back and forth a little bit more water a
little bit more flour and then you know it just goes downhill from there
so just add a little bit more which brings me to
flour um the reason that even a um a weighted recipe for bread
is just a guideline is that flour is different everywhere you go
even if you went into the same supermarket if i went to the supermarket
here and bought five different brands of the same type
of flour all purpose or bread doesn't matter which one
each one of those flowers would be different
each one of those flowers would have a different protein content each one of
those flowers would be a different mix of wheat it's all wheat but
there are different strains of wheat and those different strains of weed have
different protein content and they absorb water differently
so even though i would say x amount of flour
and x amount of water to make your dough by weight you would still need to play
with it a little bit because it would be different depending on where you are and
just a little bit more water i think we're there i think we're there
so there we go we have a really nice ragged ball of dough from here on in
it's exactly the same i'm going to cover it over leave it at
room temperature for 8 to 14 hours depending on when you make
this you could do this in the morning and have this
bread for dinner or you could make this after supper leave it out overnight and
bake it tomorrow morning and have it for breakfast or lunch
either way so i'm just going to leave this on the counter and we'll come back
for the next step here we go you're going to find that on this batch when
you use the bigger or the levant or the starter or whatever it is that you want
to call it you're going to find that you get a much
better rise on the dough and there's a whole bunch of reasons for
that but from now on the rest of the recipe is exactly the
same so you just grab it on the outside and you fold it over you bring it into
the center and you fold it over and you want to do this 6 to 12 times
6 or 12 6 to 12 folds not 6 or 12 turns of the bowl so you just pull it
over turn it pull it over and just keep doing
that and so that strengthens the dough this is also the
point where you want to take out a little piece same as you did last time
but the size of a walnut put it in another bowl feed it flour and
water and let it hang out for your next bread
baking so we're going to do this now the dough
can stick to your hand the dough will stick to your hand it is
okay when you're doing this folding a lot of people
left comments saying that they dip their hand in water and that prevents sticking
that's what you want to do that's fine i find that it just makes my hand too
slippery and then i can't kind of feel what the
dough is doing and i like that feeling of the dough so
i think i've got it folded enough next up is
same as last time a little bit of flour in the bottom of a bowl
and we take this mount and into the bowl with the flour grab up
what's ever left over i've got a joey hand and i've
got a clean hand so clean hand into the flour bag
dust a little bit of flour on top and just make sure that the dough ball
is covered and coated in the flour and you can use whatever flour you want
for this i often will put on a little bit of a of a cracked wheat
flour just to give some texture you don't have
to if you don't want to we're going to cover this over
and in the oven is our dutch oven preheating to 450 degrees in about half
an hour we move on to the next step okay everything is super hot i had a lot
of people ask me about the dutch oven they don't have a dutch oven you don't
have a dutch oven what the other alternatives are now part
of the problem with this is the dutch oven gets
super hot and stays super hot and when i put the lid on
it creates a steam chamber and that steam chamber
is what helps the bread rise and get a really nice crust on the
outside so you need something that is heavy with a good thermal mass with a
lid that seals reasonably well to keep the steam inside
and that could be as simple as a soup pot
that could be uh
i don't know a soup pot is the only other thing that i can really think of
you don't want to use anything that's glass
because you're going to dump the cool-ish
dough into a super hot glass dish and it could
shatter and you don't want that to happen so that's going to be in the oven
for half an hour with the lid on and then about 20 minutes with the lid
off and of course bread is cooked this type of bread is cooked
when an internal temperature is 190 degrees fahrenheit
so if you have an instant read thermometer use it
okay hey friends yet another loaf of bread
this one this one with the um with the saved yeast
now it's much larger than the other one you get a better rise
and i'm i'm gonna say that the interior oh this is the worst bret knife ever
isn't it yeah it really is i didn't tell you
i know i should have thought it was the cracker we should have brought the one
from inside um looks good yeah it looks really good
so it's it's going to have a little bit better flavor and texture
than the first one we made because that lavender which was a good bread
yeah yeah so imagine a good bread now a little bit better a little bit better
your family after having the first one is going to
be amazed at how quickly your bread skills have advanced
by the time you get to the second one
flavor and texture i gotta say the one piece
nice and crispy chewy mm-hmm okay so 190 degrees fahrenheit
is when this type of loaf bread is finished
i pulled this one out at 207 so there is a variation there's a wide
range there yeah so you've got a bit of space if it's
if it goes past 190 then you don't get it don't worry
it's fine you could probably take this all the way up to
225 and it would still be a good a good loaf of bread
so um keep playing with this give it a try and you can use that
levant that big for any loaf of bread just like
i said you just subtract the flour and water that you've
already gotten the bigger and everything's fine thanks for
stopping by stay safe stay healthy see you again soon
you