In Connecticut, where I was born and raised, we call the long sandwiches you might get from a deli or Italian takeout place grinders. My wife tells me that in upstate New York, they call them wedges. I believe that in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, they call them hoagies. Just about everywhere else, they call them subs, thanks in part probably to Subway, which started in, of all places, Bridgeport, CT, just like me. My uncle worked at the first one, and supposedly routinely stole lunch meat to help feed his mom and brothers. This is the type of legacy I come from.
Nom nom nom
I. Love. Grinders. What would a cheesesteak be, if it was served on a Kaiser roll? Who would want an Italian combo on a couple of slices of rye? The grinder roll is the perfect container for everything from the hot-and-gooey meatball parm, to the cool-and-tangy Italian. What’s better than grinder roll? A homemade sourdough grinder roll!
I started my homemade sourdough grinder rolls dough the way I always start my sourdough: 300g of sourdough starter, 600g of water, and 900g of flour. I brought this together in my KitchenAid with the paddle attachment and then let the flour hydrate for about an hour, covered. I then added a table spoon of oil and switched to my dough hook, and kneaded for five minutes on medium. This probably would have been a good time to add a tablespoon of salt as well, but I totally forgot it this time around!
After kneading, I let my dough rise on the counter, covered, overnight. In the morning it was at least doubled in size and ready to go! I scraped the dough out into my floured bread board, and divided it into eight, roughly equal hunks. I preshaped each hunk into an oblong, similar to a baguette or batard (technique coming soon).
Check out these bad boys
I have this cool nonstick baguette pan that I use to hold the shape of my rolls. It is also common to use a kitchen towel with a pleat pulled up between each loaf. I’m sorry to say that if you plop a bunch of loaves down on a flat pan on a warm day, you will come back to a flat mess of wasted time.
I let my rolls rest for an hour while I preheat my oven to 500F. I place a sheet pan on the bottom rack, ready for the hot water I will add to crest a steamy, moist baking environment for my bread.
When my grinder rolls are rested and my oven hot, I rub some more light olive oil on the tops of my rolls and quickly snip each one a couple of times. I pop them into the oven and pour about a cup of hot water from my kettle into that sheet pan I mentioned. Fifteen minutes later and it’s party time!
Grindr
This was my first mobile blog post so I hope it came out okay. Do you notice I’m not selling anything? Peculiar. If you liked my post why don’t you smash me a like and drop me a comment? Or leave me a suggestion of a topic you’d like to see me cover? Or tell me about how you first learned about grief and loss? Love ya. Peace!
WHEW. SO my first ever blog post of my life I decided to take on the universe of sourdough bread baking. Mmmmkay.
I covered A LOT of ground and I want to take a step back and examine some of the aspects a little closer. Case in point: Sourdough Starter.
I have kept a sourdough starter around on and off for the last five years or so. I’ve made some mistakes along the way, learned a lot, and want to give y’all a cheat sheet.
A sourdough starter has three components: flour, water, and wild yeast. You can actually make your own by mixing some flour and water together, setting it out, and letting it collect its own yeast! This is hit or miss, because you may have less-desirable yeasts and other nogoodniks floating around. The addition of raisins or apple skins may help, as they re a great source of natural, wild yeast.
That’s a lot of work for something that is available at every decent market, especially those that specialize in whole foods. A quick search online will provide you with a hundred options. My personal preference is actually a free source, because, hey, it’s free, and it has a really awesome backstory. Read about it here: http://carlsfriends.net/
In case you didn’t know, I’m not into selling stuff. I started this blog to share my journey, not to make a living. I am a self-employed accountant and I don’t need Amazon telling what I like and dislike, although I do buy a bunch of stuff from them, since the nearest Trader Joe and Aldi are two hours away. Rant over.
Anywho, once you procure your sourdough starter, which will come in a dehydrated form, you have to rehydrate it and activate it. There will be instructions with the starter, but you basically soak it in some lukewarm water for an hour or so, and then begin your feeding schedule. Initially, you want to feed your baby starter a small amount, more frequently. You do this by adding equal parts flour and water, by weight. Lets say the first feedings are 28g of flour and 28g of water, every 12 hours, for the first 48 hours.
A note on weight and the metric system: many bread recipes use the metric system to measure ingredients by weight. I like it, because it makes me feel like a mad scientist. Weight is a more accurate way to measure ingredients, as opposed to volume, because so many factors can affect volume. The way that your flour is ground, the humidity, and how you scoop can all affect volume. Not so with weight, and grams allow a certain precision I really like. Not familiar with grams? You never sold drugs as a kid and it shows.
You can store your new baby sourdough starter in a special crock, or just any old mason jar. I recommend a quart size, but I have a big family. You could probably make a smaller one in a pint jar, but I wouldn’t know. You need to allow room for your starter to expand and contract: When you feed it, you can expect it to double in size, with carbon dioxide bubbles , so keep that in mind. Oh, very important, you should give your new starter a really punny name, like Doughsephine, or Bread Skelton.
Peter Parker House
Now that you have a rehydrated, activated, fed starter, you are ready to start baking sandwich bread, dinner rolls, pancakes, baguettes, waffles, English muffins, grinder rolls, batards, cinnamon rolls, rye bread, pretzels, whole wheat bread, boules, naan, and Portuguese rolls.
My typical bread recipe is 300g or starter, 600g of water, and 900g of flour(s). After taking my 300g of starter from my jar, I replace it with 150g of water and 150g of flour. Then, I stash it in the fridge, which slows down the starter’s metabolism, allowing me some flexibility in my feeding schedule. This is a welcome reprieve, as I am already a slave to my work schedule, my wife’s schedule, and my kids schedule, not to mention mother nature’s schedule for planting and harvesting.
I usually bake about once per week, and my starter is plenty happy in the fridge for that time. If I need to bake more often, I will take Peter Parker House out of the fridge for a half day or so, and watch for him to make sure he is active, bubbly, and expanded. If I cant bake for a couple of weeks, I will still remove half of the starter, discard it, and feed as normal.
If you forget to feed your starter for a while, a grey layer of liquid will form on top, which is a byproduct of fermentation called hooch, which is likely ethanol alcohol. This can be stirred back in or poured off, depending on how much we’re talking about. Too much hooch will create a harsh environment for your yeast, and eventually kill them off. A little here and there will contribute to that sourdough flavor.
Tune in next week for our another installment of our series on combating existential dread. Make sure to leave a comment informing me of all of my spelling and grammar errors. Tell your friends too! Peace.
Nothing says “I love you” like fresh-baked bread. Nothing says “I love you so much that I am willing to risk a lifetime of failure” like fresh-baked sourdough bread. Lucky for you, I have already experienced a lifetime of failure and I have a few tips to help you along your way.
Baking sourdough bread can be tricky. I am a firm believer, however, that anybody can do it, with some determination and a little practice. I have read countless blogs, watched countless videos, and baked countless loaves, and by far, the later was the most educational.
That being said, if I can provide you with some entry-level guidance and help you avoid some common mistakes long enough to see some success, I believe you will be more likely to stick with it! Breadmaking is a labor of love and I hope it brings you as much joy as it does me. These steps are about maximizing your CHANCE of getting a perfect loaf, but in bread, as in life, there are no guarantees.
If you want to skip ahead to the recipe, by all means, be my guest. I am often frustrated when I am looking for a quick recipe for dinner, kids yelling throughout the house, only to have to scroll, or worse yet, read, through pages of someone’s opinions and descriptions of their recipe. (tl;dr) No judgement here.
Basic Sourdough Ingredients
Sourdough breads are made from a few basic ingredients:
Sourdough Starter – A mixture of flour, water, and naturally-occurring yeast. There are several mail-order places you can buy one, or I’m sure that they are available in all of the fancy organic yuppie hipster supermarkets. If you want the best sourdough starter money can buy, from 1847 on the Oregon Trail, it’ll cost you a forever stamp: carlsfriends.net Expect a whole lot more on this topic in future posts.
Flour – Any old all purpose flour will do for now, but if you plan on opening a bakery, you may want to explore some different brands King Arthur is a good one) and types, including bread flour, which has a little more protein, and thus produces more gluten, which is totally unnecessary for the home baker.
Water – You’d think that this one would be self-explanatory, but not quite. If you have “city water” which is treated with chemicals, this could hinder the growth of, or even kill, your yeast. You can remove chlorine from your tap water by filling up a big pot and letting it sit for 24 hours. If you still have problems with chemicals after that or just don’t want to wait, store-bought filtered water works great!
Salt – Bread without salt is like life without love…
Basic Sourdough Technique
In this method, sourdough starter is combined with water and flour (by weight) and allowed to “colonize” for an hour or so to get established, before the salt is added. Salt draws water out of substances, so if you skip this step you will still get bread, but your yeast may be less active which may give you an inferior rise.
If you really want to be a nerd, you can just combine the flour and water for an hour or two before adding the starter. This is called Autolyse and allows the flour to fully hydrate and to begin developing gluten, before the yeast gets to work. It is not necessary for your first loaf but may be something you want to explore in the future. Remember, these steps are about maximizing your CHANCE of getting a perfect loaf!
Next, we add in our salt and give the dough a good kneading. This can be accomplished a few different ways. For the purpuse of this simple post, I’m going to say eight minutes in your KitchenAid mixer with a dough hook on medium speed.
Our dough is then covered and allowed to rise until it is doubled in volume, which will probably take at least four hours at room temperature. This is called bulk fermentation. A cool way to watch this happen is to use a clear cylindrical crock we use in foodservice. You can mark the cylinder and wait for the dough to double in height. Usually, I just leave it covered in the bowl of my KitchenAid on the counter.
Preheat your oven to like a thousand or as high as it goes. We want our bread to explode upwards as soon as we pop it in the oven, and we do this with the highest temperature we can get. 450-500 would be great.
For our simple loaf, we will now dump our dough out on to our lightly-floured counter (or fancy bread board if your brother-in-law happens to be a master carpenter).
Courtesy of Sanders Architectural Woodworking
To shape our basic sandwich loaf, we will basically “punch” the dough down flat, and then roll it towards ourselves, into an oblong shape. Drop it, seam-side-down, into a loaf pan and set it on the counter to do it’s final rise while the oven is preheating.
Final Rise
When the loaf has risen up above the loaf pan, and the oven is good and preheated, we want to slash our loaf so that we can control how it rises. If we don’t do this, it will erupt (called an “ear”) unpredictably and not be as pretty. A clean razor blade works well. A serrated kitchen knife should work in a pinch as well. We want to cut the dough without disturbing it or dragging it too much. you can absolutely go over your cuts more than once to get them deeper. Notice how I didn’t slice these guys and how they split?
Random “Ears”
Bake for 15 minutes before checking on it. If it is nicely risen and developing some color at this point, you can turn off your oven and let it continue to cook for another fifteen minutes. Remove the loaf pan from the oven and then remove the loaf of bread from the loaf pan and let cool completely before cutting into it (yeah, right).
Basic Sourdough Recipe
Sourdough Parker House Rolls
Here is the basic dough recipe I use to keep it simple. I use this for sandwich loaves, baguettes, boules, batards, rolls, pretzels, pizza dough, etc:
