Tom, I think it helps any bread, sourdough or not. I started using it before I went to sourdough, and it really helped even the regular yeast breads.
Are you guys using AP flour and adding gluten or adding gluten on top of using bread flour?
Are you already using bread/high gluten flour and adding it to that? Is this something they should have at a regular grocery store or do I need to head to Whole Foods or PCC? It’s definitely time to make some bread 
MrNate posted first, but I have the same question about the flour.
I think my wife bought some gluten at the grocery store when she was on her bread machine kick, but I got a sack of bread flour from Costco that I’d been using… I was definitely under the impression that it was one or the other. Definitely curious to hear the answer.
If you choose the right flour to begin with you don’t need to add the extra gluten… King Arthur is a great place to start to find the right one. They also have alot of cool stuff that can be used in brewing…
I use King Arthur bread flour, which is a high protein flour. If I could find it easily, I’d use their bread machine flour, which is even higher in protein. It works really well, but I got even better results by adding the vital wheat gluten. BTW, I use Bob’s Red Mill for that. You can find both the KA bread flour and the Bob’s VWG at Fred Meyer.
Thanks Denny, I’ll give it a try.
I like the King Arthur too. Supposedly bread flour doesn’t need extra gluten but it doesn’t hurt to add some anyway IMO.
As Denny pointed out “crumb” is texture. I shoot for lots of big holes and firm cohesive texture. All purpose flour will result in a fragile crumb unless you really work it or add gluten. If you want more of a “wonder bread” type of crumb then don’t let it proof for as long and don’t make a poolish. You want a quick rise and a drier dough.
Oven spring… I want as much as I can get LOL. Gluten helps keep in the co2 which will expand in the oven blowing up the dough even more before it sets. This is where it can get tricky. Proof too long and it’ll collapse in the oven or when you handle it. If you don’t slash your dough deep enough it’ll retard the spring and maybe rip your loaf open since the outside cooks before the inside creating a type of shell that compresses the expanding dough inside.
Baguettes work well because they can expand more fully before the exterior crust becomes rigid. Conversely, a big loaf has a lot of mass so in cross section you’ll see fine bubbles in the center and outwardly they’ll get bigger. The loaf won’t spring effectively and maybe even rip.
I shoot for a dough that is very elastic and fairly sticky. If it can be handled easily without extra flour then it’s probably too dry and will result in a denser loaf.
It’s like brewing. One’s technique matters and I only covered part of it.
All I can say is that it made a BIG difference for me.
That’s exactly what I learned about dough texture through trial and error. For the first year or so I was baking bread, the dough was too dry and I couldn’t get the texture I was after. Then I accidentally got it wetter than normal one time and ended up with exactly what I was going for. And it is a lot like brewing…it takes some time and experience to really learn what techniques produce what results.
I’ll try wetter and gluten.
The King Arthur Bread Flour works great for pizza dough and with the addition of VWG , I think there’s a better rise to the dough.
Plus the texture of the crust is much better.
I want to try some sourdough using KA flour.
I grew up in VT and never knew there was any other kind of flour besides King Arthur (sort of) but it is great in everything. I have done sourdough with it and it was great. I just used the AP which is fortified with some malted barley etc.
I baked a loaf yesterday after picking up some gluten, but I ended up not using it. My standard recipe uses 50/50 bread/AP flour, so I upped it to 75/25 bread/AP to see what happened. It came out much chewier than usual, not to the point of being bad but not the way my family likes it, so I’ll probably go back to 50/50 and won’t use gluten.
That being said, I want to add some whole wheat flour to the recipe, maybe even a lot of whole wheat flour. I imagine swapping out some or all of the AP flour and adding some gluten will help. Someone around here must have experience with this . . .
Around here, chewy is the Holy Grail of bread! But it’s good to know what you like and how to achieve it.
That recipe is plenty chewy at 50/50 and with the method I use (food processor with a dough blade, kneaded, two rises). Although I make an English muffin bread too that is much more crumby/less chewy, and that is very popular. Damn, now I’m hungry for some bread.
I used a food processor for the first few years, but it’s all by hand now. I found that for me it works just as well and there’s less cleanup.
My mother used to make that crumbly bread. I don’t think she intended it to come out that way but it always did. Taste was great but made for terrible sandwiches. Fall apart in your hands. Toasted up fantastically and was hearty with breakfast- dunking in egg etc…
I use food processor too. My eye is on a stand mixer.
My wife gave me a KitchenAid mixer the first Christmas we were married. That dough hook is worth its weight in gold. 13 years and thousands of loaves (and tons of sausage) later that mixer is still running like new.
That was the Christmas I gave her a set of Wusthof knives. Man was that a good idea too. An artist needs good tools… but I think there’s another thread out there about that.
I have the kitchenaid, but the dough hook gets all bent up with bread dough. I’ve just been using the regular mixing blade to mix everything up and then kneading.
your dough hook actually bends? I have never had that happen. it’s quarter inch steel isn’t it? oh I guess there are those plastic ones. You can get just the dough hook in the white enamel finish or the plain steel finish I think. or maybe a set of the beater, whisk and dough hook. I start with the dough hook and finish by hand. makes me feel like I am working at it.