Heather's High Altitude Sourdough Bread Recipe - Food.com (2024)

FAQs

How do you make sourdough starter at high altitude? ›

Altitude does not have a profound affect on your sourdough starter. While there are many adjustments you'll need to make for a successful loaf of sourdough bread, your sourdough starter is more forgiving. If anything, you'll need to add slightly more water to compensate for the lower humidity levels and drier flour.

Real Quick: How to Adjust Bread Baking For High Altitude

Increase oven temperature by 25 degrees over what the recipe calls for. Generally, increase baking time unless oven temperature increases. Generally, increase hydration. Sometimes a decrease, but not always.

Adding whole grain flour: Whole grain flour, particularly whole rye flour (pumpernickel), tends to promote more sour flavor in bread for two reasons. First, the type of sugars available in whole rye (or whole wheat) flour encourage a shift toward acetic acid production.

Room temperature can mean a wide range and is different for each room, but as long as the temperature is around 68 to 76°F (20 to 24°C), you'll get rise in your sourdough bread dough. The cooler the temperature, the longer it will take for your dough to rise.

Honey: Honey adds a sweetness to this dough and helps balance any sour flavor that comes through from the fermentation process. If you are looking for whole wheat bread without the honey, try this recipe. Salt: Salt enhances the flavor and helps tempers the fermentation.

Proper fermentation of bread dough requires robust yeast activity, especially if you want good oven spring and an open crumb. Adding small amounts of instant yeast to a sourdough is an easy and effective way to get there, and a practice any baker might want to add to their bread baking toolkit.

Increase 15 to 25°F; use the lower increase when making chocolate or delicate cakes. Since leavening and evaporation proceed more quickly, the idea is to use a higher temperature to set the structure of baked goods before they overexpand and dry out. Decrease by 5-8 minutes per 30 minutes of baking time.

What temperature should you bake at high altitude? ›

In general, baking and cooking times at higher altitudes may need to be adjusted to account for these changes. Some common ways to do this include: Lowering the oven temperature by 25°F for every 5,000 feet above sea level. Increasing the cooking time by 10-15% for every 5,000 feet above sea level.

Baking at High Altitudes

Air pressure is lower, so foods take longer to bake. Temperatures and/or bake times may need to be increased. Liquids evaporate faster, so amounts of flour, sugar and liquids may need to be changed to prevent batter that is too moist, dry or gummy. Gases expand more, so doughs rise faster.

Any flour containing starch is suitable for a sourdough starter, since it is the sugar that the microbes feed on. Glutenous flours, such as spelt, einkorn, rye, and wheat, tend to work best.

Simple Sourdough Pizza Crust: The details

You absolutely can use bread flour or tipo 00 flour (read more about tipo 00 flour here) if you can get your hands on either. If you have been having a hard time finding flour, Baker's Authority is a great option — great prices, too, even with shipping tacked on.

One of the most common mistakes is having a dough temperature that's too low for the starter to feed on all the flour in the dough, resulting in a crumb that's dense, with fewer openings. "Starter is happiest and most active at around 75 degrees. If it's a lot colder, the process will be much slower.

Place your starter in a warm spot to rise and activate, ideally 75-80 F. Temperature is really important. The warmer it is, the faster it will rise. Your starter is active when it shows the following signs: doubles in size, small and large bubbles appear, has a spongey or fluffy texture and exhibits a pleasant aroma.

A 100% hydration sourdough starter is a culture which is kept and fed with water and flour at equal weights. Like for instance 5 oz water to 5 oz flour. A 166% hydration starter is fed with equal volume of flour and water, which most typically is one cup of water (8.3 oz) and one cup of flour (5 oz).

Since most recipes are designed for sea level, high-altitude success requires a few clever adjustments. Low air pressure has two main effects on baked goods: They will rise more easily, and lose moisture faster; liquids evaporate more quickly since water boils at lower temperatures at high altitude.

Put 10g of your starter into a clean jar (you can discard the rest). Feed this 10g of starter with 25g of flour and 25g of water and stir in really well, remembering you want as much oxygen in the mix as possible. Cover loosely and leave for around 6 hours. By this stage you should see some bubbling starting to happen.