Practically, we are using all-purpose flour for making noodle, however, there’s a little different for making noodles and pizza in Italy, they are using “00” type flour which is finer flour than all-purpose flour, it’s more smoothly, but they also mixed with semolina flour which is durum wheat powder, so after combine both, the pasta will becomes smoothly but chewy texture.
Firstly, combine sourdough starter with bread flour, water and little bit salt; actually I will use breadmaker for help to making the dough, but you can use your hand instead. After mixed well the dough, put it in a large bowl for the first raising for 30 minutes to 2 hours, depends on your dough size.
After first raised, put the dough on the table, make it a little bit longer, use your eyes to divide it into 3 equal pieces, then fold both left and right into center, then press the end that near you and the roll the other side towards yourself, make it like a roll, then put it into the bread mold, cover with plastic sheet/bag, put it aside and let it second raising for 12 hours. After the final raised, put the pizza stone into the oven and preheat your oven to 230 celius, then pull the dough out of the bread mold gentally into the pizza stone and brake it for 30 minutes or 1 hours, depends on your bread size.
Actually, I’m not really familiar about handmade bread since I and my beloved one not eat much, and we also made our own smoked meat (will share later on), so we prefer to make simple country bread most of the time, although we also tried to make other bread, i.e. red bean Chinese bun or Outback bread, etc, but we finished it for few days, really a bit too much for us.
Before we are making handmade bread, we need a sourdough starter, you can either buy natural leaven from supermarket, then put it into bread maker, let it do the fermentation for you, of course, it costed more, however, I will share you two types of method that more natural, but time consuming. One is using fruit as a base flavour, but another one just water and flour.
First of all, starting to talk about fruit dough starter, just select any type of fruit you like, cut it into chunk, then put it with water into a sealed jug, the scale is 1:2, then store the jug in room temperature without sunlight, shake it and open it for a while everyday, you can see bubbles increasing every day, if one day, you can hear sound when open, that’s mean your dough water is finished, the whole process around 7 days. After finished the fruit water, step into next step, prepare another jug, pull half of the water and add flour into the jug, the scale is 1:1, then add water and flour every day again until the dough starter raise up in double of it size, your dough starter is finished. You can see the below pics that I made before when the climate is quite good, I only took 6 days to finished it. If you wanna make another batch of fruit starter, just add half of the old starter with water, you will get better result.
You can use half of the sourdough starter to make your bread, the rest can be stored in the fridge for low temperature fermentation after add flour and water, you have to repeat the step every few days for further fermentation, after days and days, you will have a good sourdough starter.
On the other hand, you can make the most simple one, just add water and flour, scale is 1:1, you have to repeat this step every day, and maintain 4-5 days until your dough starter raise up for double of its size.
溫馨小廚 