Hallo Stella,
Ja, dicht tegen de grens aan van de eindrijs om nog beter brood te krijgen is een mooi doel om na te streven. Het is prima mogelijk om ander meel, zoals spelt of rogge te combineren met de tarwebloem. Begin dan met een wat kleiner percentage 10 tot maximaal 20%, dan hoeft het recept in principe verder ook niet aangepast te worden.
En de speltbroodjes zijn ook heel leuk om te doen en bij elke recept proberen we ook een variatie aan te brengen in de methode om te laten zien dat er vele wegen naar goed en lekker brood leiden.

Heel veel succes en plezier met bakken, ook in het Nieuwe Jaar!

Hello Brenda,
For now you can print from your browser. You can find this option in the top right hand corner of your screen where you see three horizontal stripes. Click on this and then on print. You get the version of the recipe without pictures and other unnecessary items. It is not the most elegant, put it does the job. Unfortunately for now the program we use has some limitations, so we cannot incorporate a nice print option next to the recipe.
Hope it will work well and most of all that you will like the mini boules!

Happy Holidays and a very happy & healthy New Year,

Marieke & Ed

Hello Amber, thank you for sharing these tips from your own personal experience. We are sure it will be helpful to people having the same types of challenges. It is wonderful to stil be able to bake and eat good sourdough bread this way.

Wishing you all the best from Holland,

Ed & Marieke

Hello, I just want to jump on and add a quick note about the blood sugar. I’m definitely no expert on the matter but I do struggle with my sugars also (hypoglycemia, not diabetes) and for that reason I solely eat sourdough bread, if consuming breads. One key is longer fermentation. I like to let the dough rest in the fridge for around 2 days when possible. I just discovered this recipe so I can’t say I’ve done it with this one but I have with many others. Another key for the blood sugars is to make sure you consume good proteins prior to eating the bread. Even better if you can eat good veggies and good fats with the protein, then the bead gives me no trouble at all. Bread (any carb, really) on an empty stomach or on a stomach lacking quality foods will always cause sugar issues for me. I hope this helps.

Hello Rose,
First the shaping: Make sure to bring tension to the dough when shaping the dough into balls and bring the dough together at the bottom so it is ‘sealed’. Second: Make sure you score the boules well enough on the tops, so score a bit deeper and even more from side to side, so this part of the boule dough is the ‘weakest’ part and will tear open on the top and not the bottom. Because the bottoms of your boules probably formed the weakest part of the dough and that is the reason they bursted at the bottom when baking.

Do you also mean whole wheat flour that you mill yourself and want to use right away? This is no problem of course. You can expect the loaf to have less volume and less open crumb when using fresh flour. But on the other hand it can add extra flavor and texture that makes up for it.

Thank you !!

Thank you Jordana,
So happy to hear it turned out so well. As for the problem with blood sugar you are describing, we are no experts on the subject. Adding more whole wheat is of course possible, but will give a different result and you might need to add some extra liquid. Normally a good method to do this is to do this in small steps and see how you like the result, but this would mean you probably still would not be able to eat much of it. Maybe you can google for some more info on the subject, because we are sure there are more bakers out there with similar challenges.

Good luck with everything and happy baking!

Hi, I just wanted to come back on here and say that the loaves came out amazingly! It was my first time making sourdough and I was really happy with the results. My only problem is that I have a blood sugar issue and they spiked my blood sugar, unfortunately. Would you have any suggestions on replacing the bread flour with spelt or adding more whole wheat? Or would that be a completely different recipe? I really like your baking method and would love to incorporate it with other flours that would be easier on my blood sugar, if possible! Thank you very much for all of your help so far.

Hello Caliope,
That is not necessary, you can use your normal oven for these boules. The ones you see in the pictures are baked in our Rofco stone oven (so on stone) with added steam.
In your own (household)oven you can try and create conditions similar to such an oven with help of our oven tips:
www.weekendbakery.com/posts…your-oven/
Hope you can give it a try. Enjoy your baking 🙂

Thank you so much! I will!

Hello Jordana,
The amount of wholewheat in the recipe is relatively small. If you were to change anything it would be to use slightly less water in the final dough. It is hard for us to judge what the absorption level of your AP flour will be, but it will probably also be lower than that of the bread flour we use. So taking this into account we would suggest to add between 425 and 450 grams of water to the final dough, instead of the 470.

Enjoy your sourdough baking 🙂

Thank you for the information! Yes, what I love about this recipe is that it requires such a small amount of starter. I have more discard than starter at this point so from now on, I plan on maintaining a small amount after baking this batch. I just want to double check, if my 322 g of starter was made from 100% AP flour, that won’t impact the hydration of this recipe? Do I need to make any adjustments in how much flour and water I add? I’m very excited to try this recipe tomorrow!

Hello Tamara,
Being at (almost) below sea level ourselves, we can only image the challenges of baking at such an extreem altitude.
We can recommend taking a look at these tips about adjustments when baking in the mountains:
www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn…ude-baking
So, it could be that all kinds of things need adjustment, from baking time, to liquid and flour.
For your situation it would be ideal to have a proofing cabinet with added moisture. If you google a bit, you can also find people who have made their own proofing cabinets.
If you have a steam oven, you could use that to help with the proofing in a more moist environment.

Wishing you all the best and improvement of your results with some of the tips.

Greetings from the Low Countries,

Marieke

Yes, that is no problem, use your own active starter and take the amount of 322 grams as stated in the recipe. If your starter is active and you have the total amount of 322 grams ready to use, you can just start following the instructions at day 2.

FYI:
We work with a two step system. When using a preferment (like a poolish or a biga) we use about 15-20 grams of sourdough for a sourdough loaf. With this small amount of sourdough you create a fully active sourdough preferment overnight which you then use to build the final dough. This way you can keep a small starter and still have the full sourdough flavor. Big advantage for home and hobby bakers is you are wasting far less precious flour when refreshing your culture than you would maintaining a big one!

Example: You bake 2 loaves each week. With our method you only have to maintain about 50 grams of sourdough. If you decide to skip baking this week, using our method, refreshing means throwing away only about 30 grams of sourdough. With the other-big-starter-method refreshing means throwing away 200 to 400 grams of culture depending on the recipe! Plus with this method you always need to refresh your starter before baking because the gluten weaken and you would otherwise have all this flour in your dough. With our method, you add the small amount of culture to a fresh batch of flour and so you will not have this problem of weakened gluten in your culture.