Fancy stuff, this is my recipe.... The starter is called 100% because it is equal parts water and flour, which if you measure it using measuring cups ends up right around 1/2 cup water to 1 cup flour. A scale helps a lot.
I use about 9 oz of active starter. An active starter is one that has been feed for at least a day or two and is at a risen state in the jar. If the starter has liquid on top or has deflated it would be better to feed it and then allow to rise till it is actively growing bubbles.
Put starter into your mixing bowl, I use a kitchenaid but you can easily knead this dough without one. It's pretty sticky, till the gluten is developed.
I start with approximately 150 grams of water. Weighing my ingredients gives me more consistent results, but for years I did this using measuring cups.
Add water to mixer bowl. I don't add yeast to my dough, but if you want to have bread in a couple hours rather than tomorrow this would be the time to add active dry yeast to the water or rapid rise yeast to the flour. I would use about a tsp.
I use 300 grams of bread flour for my dough.
I used 1 tsp kosher salt, simply because I had some on hand. I usually just use table salt.
Mix this together till the ingredients are sorta clumpy and sticky. With a mixer, this usually takes about 4 minutes.
This is what it will look like. Turn off the mixer, cover, and allow to sit for 20 to 30 minutes. This allows the flour to absorb the water.
After the rest (fancy people call it autolyse), turn mixer on with dough hook and knead for about 8 to 10 minutes. You want the dough to clear off the bowl, just like you would in regular bread recipes. Only difference how wet you want your dough. I like it when mine is wet enough to stick a little to the bottom of the bowl.
This picture shows the dough starting to clean the sides of the bowl.
I greased the bowl, then pulled the dough from the mixer, shaped it into a small ball. I tucked the outside edges into the center (bottom) sorta pulling the dough around to form a smooth ball on top. I sprayed oil on some plastic wrap and covered the bowl with it.
4 hours later, this has been sitting on the counter at room temp, kitchen is pretty cool today which is fine it will just make the bread taste better with the slow rise.
Nearly 2 hours later, starting to see small bubbles around edges and rounded appearance to dough.
About an hour later, definite bubbles around outer edge. Done for the night, I put this into the fridge overnight to develop more flavor.
I pulled this from the fridge and set it inside the electric oven with the light on. This provided a nice place for the initial warm up, although if you have all day you can simply leave it on the counter it will just take longer to warm up and rise.
I gave it a little longer on the counter, just cuz I was busy! I floured my new pastry mat lightly with bread flour. I then started a stretch and fold with the dough.
This is like folding a letter. It takes four folds, and I am actually handling the dough very gently. I don't want to fully degas like you would with sandwich bread.
Pull don't tear, or you bread the gluten.
You can see the bubbles in the dough at the bottom of the picture.
This is the fourth fold, I think I took a couple extra photos.
Invert bowl on work surface.
At this point I start to roll this dough inside itself.
First I start with a fold, similar to what I did in the bowl.
I simply turned the dough around on the board, with it pointing away from me I can roll it into a log form. Remember to do this gently, you want to keep most of the air bubbles.
This dough easily was shaped into a long baguette, but if it keeps springing back I allow it to rest for 10 minutes and try shaping it again.
Now I am ready to cut it into rolls, or let it rise to be a french loaf or baguette. There are different methods for baking with a pizza stone vs cookie sheet. I have a pan that is actually made to help hold the shape of a french bread or baguette, but for years I used a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
These are cut for rolls. I pinch the ends of these, to close them off.
Yesterday's I simply let rest and stretched them into the shape I wanted. Basically small mini baguette's. Today I divided the dough to make them smaller, 6 instead of 4. I then let these rest for ten minutes.
I put plastic wrap that I sprayed with oil on top of them, so they wouldn't form a skin. I should have simply moved these to the pan to rise, because I like nice big air holes in my finished rolls.
I then shaped them into torpedo rolls, as gently as I could. I should have just left them alone and put them onto the parchment paper to rise on the pan. I like the bigger holes in my sourdough rolls and by doing one more shaping it degassed them to much.
rising
I covered again with plastic wrap sprayed with oil.
Testing spring back.
I got a little bit impatient and decided they were ready, but I think they would have been better if I had waited another 1/2 hour to hour. My slits were not quite long enough, needed to wrap around the sides more. Overall they came out ok, just not as good as yesterdays.
This is the crumb from the day two batch of rolls.
Crumb from two different rolls from day two's batch of rolls. I call these mini baguettes because I slice them just like a baguette and use them for sandwich bread.
