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- If you think baking a loaf of sourdough bread sounds like a challenge, check out this episode of "Hungry For Science". I'll share some tips to help you increase your success with the help of science. Now, making bread is a great way to experiment with science at home, because you can do so many things with just a few simple ingredients. Bread is just water, flour, and something to help it rise, usually yeast. Now it's kinda hard to find yeast in the stores right now. You might be thinking to yourself, "What am I gonna do when I run out of yeast?" Here's the good news. You will never run out of yeast. Yeast is all around us. It's in the air, it's on our produce, it's even on us. All you have to do to cultivate the yeast is to provide it some food, and you can do that by just mixing some flour and water and inviting the yeast to come. Now, bread made from natural yeast like this is what defines sourdough, and I actually have some sourdough starter here, and in this mix, this starter, is just flour, water, and some yeast that was cultivated. If you want a recipe for how to make your own starter, check out the link in the description. We have one online for you. Now this starter is a living, breathing thing, and I usually feed mine with equal parts water, flour, and starter. I'm gonna give you some tips today to help you be successful in your sourdough and all of them actually have to do with that third ingredient, water. A lot of people pay attention to the flour and the starter, very important, but it turns out a little bit of thought to the water can also help you out. My first tip is to use a scale when you measure. That's because flour in the starter, for a given volume, there could be a different amount depending on how compacted the flour is or how active and bubbly the starter is. Your water's gonna be pretty much the same density throughout. Mass, however, is conserved, so if you're using a scale, it's a great way to ensure you're using the correct amounts of everything. Now, the amount of water that goes into your dough, which is how hydrated it is, turns out to have a great impact on how the final loaf turns out. Dryer doughs with less water are easy to manipulate. It might taste a little more sour, and they bake up a little denser, which is perfect for open-face sandwiches. More hydrated doughs, that is doughs that are a little wetter, might be harder to work with, but they bake up really nice and airy, which might be nice for just enjoying a piece of bread on its own. I have some dough that I mixed here. Mine is pretty well hydrated, because the other thing that extra water allows me to do is to be lazy. So my next tip is to not work harder than you need to. Bread-making can feel a little daunting, because it seems like there's all this kneading involved, which seems like a lotta work, and it turns out, you don't need to knead. All you need is time. So I've mixed up this dough, and you can see that it's a little sticky, but on a microscopic level, the yeast from my starter is chewing through the broken-down starches and the gluten that forms the protein network that gives the bread its chewiness, it's forming. All I have to do is wait, and the yeast will do the work for me. I have some dough here that has actually just been sitting overnight for over 12 hours, and you can see, I mean, this bowl is much bigger, but you can see that it's doubled in size. And the yeast has totally done its job and you can actually see the air bubbbles that have been trapped by the gluten formed with the flour. So this dough is actually ready to be shaped and proofed for a second time and baked in the oven. My last tip for you is to control the humidity in your oven. Now, professional bakers do this. They have different mechanisms to do this, but at home you can do this by just making a smaller oven. And what I mean by that is to create a miniature oven for yourself in some container. So I have two cast iron pans here. If you have a Dutch oven, that'll also work. Anything that can withstand high temperature in your oven. And basically, the cast iron provides even heating, and it's created a miniature space so that the moisture that comes out of the dough as it baked gets trapped, and it creates the humid environment that gives you a nice crust. So hiding in here, I actually have a loaf of bread that I made earlier, and you can see that this bread is a little bit smaller than the size of my miniature oven. It has baked up with this nice crispy crust. Let's see how it looks inside. So there we see some nice bubbles that are caused by the carbon dioxide that was a by-product of the fermentation. Smells really sour because of the lactic acid, and it's ready for my toaster. So you can see that it's not really hard to make some sourdough. All you need is some flour, water, a little curiosity, and time.