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I recommend not getting into baking your own sourdough. I started during COVID because we couldn't get bread or even yeast at the store, just 50-pound bags of bread flour online. Now I'm stuck doing the whole process every fucking week because the bread is just so much better than anything you can get at the store.
I agree but my friends keep facilitating my addiction because I always give loaves away and now they've stopped buying bread too. Help 😭
You are like two steps away from turning into a bakery.
Time to open a bakery and start charging.
Once you get into a groove, it's easy to make you sourdough
No, it's not difficult or really time-consuming at all, but it does tie me to the house for a couple of nights in a row whenever I make it, and I have shit to do. I've also started sleeping through my alarms so I've developed a tendency to over-ferment a little bit.
Slow fermentation in the fridge is your friend. For me it's 4-6 hours of bulk ferment then overnight in the fridge.
My schedule is levain in the afternoon, stretch-and-fold after dinner, bulk ferment to around midnight, proofing in the banettons until around 4 AM, then into the fridge for most of the next day and I bake after dinner. It's that 4 AM alarm that I'm managing to completely ignore lately. An extra hour or two of fermenting isn't fatal, but it does reduce the height of the finished loaf a bit.
In Germany we get high quality Bread in local bakeries. The industrial bread isn't bad, but not comparable to the good ones from a bakery.
There also industrial bakery chains that just heat up frozen dough. Those ones are the worst.
We can get decent bread at bakeries in the US (sometimes), but it's not like having a process that is fine-tuned to your personal tastes, and even at these places what you buy can be a couple of days old. There's nothing like fresh bread that has just barely cooled off enough to eat.
We have LiDL here, too, and although their bread is just heated-up frozen dough it's still pretty good. Better than anything prepackaged, that's for sure.