I hope you all have had a wonderful Easter long weekend.

I have been making Bread fairly solidly for the past two years.  Bread making gives me an immense sense of satisfaction, because unlike most types of cooking where you are essentially making something already dead even more dead, bread making is a process of giving life to something.  That is, you turn a very basic mixture of flour, water, yeast, salt and sugar into a living, literally breathing, dough.  You mix it, knead it, prove it, shape it, prove it again (and sometimes a further time) and bake it. 

I find a lot of parallels in the series of transformations that is bread making to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly.  Bread is like the beautiful butterfly at the end of the series of transformations from the source ingredients.  Like the life cycle of a butterfly, each stage must run its own course and can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be rushed.  This is probably where the simile starts to get a bit stretched, but if you rush or otherwise compromise any step along the way, you could end up with a moth.

Anyhow, even though I feel I have gotten quite adept at making bread with wheat flour and yeast over the past couple of years, I had yet not ventured into Sourdough baking.  Aside from the fact that sourdough bread is delicious, there is something very traditional about taking some sourdough starter culture, feeding it and taking care of it before you even start the baking process. 

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine gave me a small quantity of sourdough starter (or “levain” in French).  A sourdough starter is effectively a fermented bacterial culture (in particular, lactobacillus) that you feed with flour and water to breed it.  It differs from yeast because the bacteria creates lactic acid, which is what gives the bread its sour taste.  Also, it works much more slowly and gently as a leavener, which makes it suitable for low gluten flours like rye. 

I understand that this starter originally came from an organic bakery in Paris.  It made its way over to Australia on a plane and it was given to a friend of mine, who took care of it for years in Melbourne’s southeast.  At one stage, it was combined with another sourdough culture made locally by my friend in Melbourne, although I am told that the features of the Parisian culture dominate the dough.  A few weeks ago, I acquired it from my friend and the current starter lives in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. 

Sourdoughs take on different features depending on the climate in which they are stored, as the bacteria in the atmosphere, altitude, climate, etc. will change the sourdough culture.  Therefore even though my starter has European origins, it is now a very distant relative, but no doubt with a lot of similarities to its ancestor.  The only way I will be able to know for sure is to go over to Paris one day and taste the sourdough at that organic bakery.  However, that is an idea for another time.

As I have not baked with rye flour before, I blended the rye starter with a mixture of strong white flour (wheat flour), water, sugar and salt.  The rough proportions were 200g starter, 400-500g strong white flour, 1 tablespoon of salt, three tablespoons of sugar and 250-300 mL water.  

1.      To start, I whisked the dry ingredients together (flour, salt and sugar) and then stirred in the starter with some lukewarm water.  The dough was very wet and sticky, but this is not a bad thing.  The dough will develop a better crumb (internal texture) if it is wet, as well has have potential to rise better than if the dough is dry.  The trade off is that it is difficult to knead and will stick everywhere – at least for those of us who do not use mixers or food processors.

All I can say is do not be tempted to add flour too early, because the dough will get dry and tough.  The following things help if you want to knead sticky dough:

·        Pastry scraper (like a paint scraper, but for pastry).

·        Wet hands.

With your hands, I recommend not pouring in the all of the measured quantity of water at the start, but keeping about 50 mL left in to dip your hands as you go.  By dipping your hands as you go, you will keep your hands wet as well as add water to the dough.  If you’ve already added all the water you needed, you will have to then add more flour at the end to compensate, which will effectively decrease the proportion of starter in your dough.

2.      After kneading for a good 20-30 minutes, the dough ended up coming together.  Towards the end, I started sprinkling a bit of extra flour on the dough just to help bring it together.  Once together, I placed it in an esky to prove (rise).  As the weather was cold, the dough only rose a little by the time I had to leave for work.  That was not a problem, as I just left the dough in the esky for the rest of the day.

3.      That night, I took the dough out of the esky and put it on a floured surface.  I punched it down (or rather I touched it a little and it collapsed – very different from my flour and yeast doughs I’ve made in the past).  I folded it over a couple of times and then put it back in the esky to prove again overnight.

4.      The next morning, I got up at around 4am and cranked the oven up to around 210°C.  I took the dough out of the esky again and shaped it like a baguette.  Unfortunately I don’t have a baguette pan, so the bread ends up with a flat bottom.  However, it is a relatively minor issue in the big scheme of things.

 5.     Just before putting into the oven, I brushed the dough with a beaten egg and sliced diagonally into the dough with a heated sharp knife.  Because the dough is quite wet, you need to create uniform vents for the steam to escape.  If you don’t do this, the dough will rupture randomly and you will end up with a pretty ugly loaf of bread.  I find that not only should your knife be very sharp to do this, but it helps if you heat up the blade first.  Otherwise when you cut into the dough, the dough will stick onto the blade.

 6.      Finally, I opened the now very hot oven, threw a handful of ice cubes onto the oven floor and placed the dough into the oven.  The purpose of these steps is to make sure that the dough rises as much as possible.  The ice cubes pretty much vaporise instantly, which creates steam.  The steam keeps the surface of the dough moist, which prevents it from setting.  At the same time, the moisture inside the dough heats up, causing the dough to expand and rise.  The combination of these two things helps create a light interior and crispy crust on the outside.

 7.      After around 15 minutes, I opened the oven door to release whatever steam was left and switched the temperature to 180°C.  The purpose of lowering the temperature is to allow the bread to cook through without burning the surface.  I baked this for about another 15 minutes and removed the bread from the oven.  I tapped it on the bottom to make sure it sounded hollow (this test works well on baguette shaped breads because they are not thick loaves) and placed on a wire rack to cool.

 Reflection

After testing a very small piece, I took the bread to work with some Philadelphia cream cheese.  After sending an All Staff email to let them know, the bread disappeared pretty quickly.  

This was my first sourdough experiment, and I hope to keep feeding my starter and experimenting with and refining different bread types.  For those of you interested in sourdough baking or keeping a sourdough starter, it isn’t as difficult as you might think, and if you keep your own starter, in time you’ll have a flavour that no one else can replicate and will be uniquely yours. 

You will also be able to pass it onto anyone else interested, just like my friend passed on his starter to me (and his friend to him).