Mastering the art of sourdough baking is incredibly rewarding. But oh, the cleanup! If you don’t have a strategy, you can be discouraged by the mess you make and the time it can to clean up after. So here are 10 tips for easy sourdough cleanup.
1. Put on apron
This sounds like a no-brainer, but I have forgotten to do this until midway through my bread making, and the horse is already out of the barn, so to speak! You’ll be able to take your apron off and be presentable if you need to go out somewhere in the middle of bread making.
2. Confine the mess
Take steps to confine the mess. Sourdough bread making takes awhile. Your kitchen will be needed for other things during the process of mixing, stretching and folding, rising etc. Try to keep the bread making in one place as much as possible.
This will look different depending upon how your kitchen is set up. If you have a 2 compartment sink, try to confine your bowls and utensils to one side. You can fill one side with cool water and use it like I use the dish pan, below. If you have one compartment or a large workstation sink, here is a basin that I find invaluable.
The basin, or dish pan, should be clean before you begin. Fill it about half way with cold tap water so it’s ready to receive used equipment. Do not add soap.
Remove sink racks if you have them. Bread dough likes to wrap itself around them! Just be careful not to dent your sink, since the racks are there for the sink’s protection.
3.Gather everything you need to make the bread and lay it out on counter
Keep scrapers, bread whisks, paper towels, spoons etc within reach.
Also useful is a bowl of cool water for wetting your hands when they get sticky. You can also dip them in the dish pan with the soaking utensils.
4. Start soaking or cleaning utensils as soon as you are through with them.
Raw sourdough bread dough is very sticky, and depending upon what it dries upon, it can be hard to remove! So put your utensils in the cold or cool water in your dishpan immediately after you use them. Since there is no soap in the water, you can easily take them out to use again without having to get them completely clean.
5. Use cold water for soaking bowls
For the longest time, I used hot water.I thought it would relax the dough sticking to the bowl. But this gelatinizes the gluten and makes it more difficult to remove the blobs of dough. So it’s cool or cold from now on!
I reuse the soaking water from the dishpan, pour it in the mixer bowl, and then put the mixer bowl into the dishpan. The mixer bowl is too big to move around much in the dishpan,. After it has soaked awhile, I rub the paper towel around and remove any major blobs of dough. Then I empty it into the dishpan.
6. Use paper towels for removing dough
This is a real time saver, since blobs of dough stick to sponges and cloth towels. I’ve had to throw sponges away because the dough just wouldn’t let go!
7. Don’t let big globs of dough go down the drain.
After soaking, scrape them out with paper towel and throw away–the whole thing, paper towel and dough blobs.
Make sure you wet all the places where dough sticks. I often forget the rim of the mixer bowl. Just rub the wet paper towel around on it so the dough doesn’t turn to cement.
Also, the cool water in the dishpan will need to be drained periodically. The water does a good job of dissolving the clumps of dough, but there will still be some left. The drain on the bottom will catch them. Once the cloudy water is drained out, you can gather the clumps on your paper towel and throw paper towel and clumps away.
Update…if you dip a rubber scraper in cool water before you try to scrape out the last bits of sticky dough, you will pretty much eliminate the blobs because the mixer bowl will be nearly clean!
Bonus tip: the knitted dishcloth!
Paper towels aren’t as good for scrubbing as the knitted dishcloth. If you know someone who can make you one of these, it is so good for this job! This is shown in the photo below. I have quite a few of these, made by Lynne, our pastor’s wife.
Fill with hot water and soap and wash what is left, rinse and dry. This is one of the biggest items to get clean, and once you’re through with it you can almost do a victory dance!
8. Once the mixer bowl is clean, set the bulk fermenting vessel in the dishpan in its place with fresh water.
All you have left is the bulk rising container, once you have shaped the dough. It has been oiled so there is very little dough.
9. Clean kitchen sink immediately
Don’t let blobs of dough, even little ones, dry on the sink. It does happen of course. So your plastic scraper (see above, #3) will come in handy and won’t scratch your sink getting them off.
10. Bonus hack: you can skip the cleanup of the mixer bowl by making a batch of sourdough bagels!
Once your dough is safely rising, don’t put the dirty mixer bowl in the sink! Put some plastic wrap over it so it doesn’t dry out while you gather your bagel ingredients. Sourdough bagels are a much stiffer dough, and that dough can scrape a lot of the sticky dough off the sides of the bowl.
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