Down to the crumb

For some reason, being busy and stressed always makes me want to make things. I guess the feeling of productivity eases the panic of having-still-so-much-to-do-and-not-knowing-whether-it-is-even-possible-much-less-when-the-next-opportunity-for-sleep-might-come, even if the thing produced in no way advances the goal that gave rise to the stress in the first place. In that frame of mind I have in the past few weeks made chocolate granola, cinnamon muesli and yoghurt, started up a sourdough culture and baked a few gigantic loaves of bread.

I was pleasantly surprised, actually, by the yoghurt making, which turned out to be dead easy and super satisfying. But the real revelation was the bread.

Let me back up here. I live in England. The English are obsessed. with. soft. bread. Sticky, flavourless bread. Palate-suffocating bread. Bread that can only be tolerated after toasting – and even then, barely. Bread that is mouldy before it even begins to go stale. Aisles upon aisles of extra soft white bread. But no decent loaf in sight. Ironically, what triggered my attempts to bake bread was finally finding a loaf that I did love: a sourdough rye bread from my veg box suppliers Abel & Cole. It wasn’t even that switching to it would have been unaffordable, but somehow this bread got me thinking. Perhaps I was just curious how sourdough gets made, and what the difference with a regular bread is, and then found out from the internets that starting a culture without all kinds of fancy measuring devices isn’t actually that impossible. Perhaps it came up in one of those BBC cookery programmes that are so nice to watch during dinner. I honestly don’t remember. But somehow I decided I wanted to give it a go.

Now there are really two elements to baking sourdough bread. Raising the culture, and baking the bread. Fun fact: you’ll have a new family member to take care of for several weeks before you even get to the latter stage at all. Yup, that’s a warning: raising a sourdough starter requires some serious patience and commitment. You will also have to get over the pain of throwing away substantial quantities of flour in the first month, unless you want to commit to feeding your household / office / workplace pancakes for breakfast every day for three weeks.

It’s all worth it.

There are a few different ways to start a sourdough starter, and if you’re interested in some live-action controversy you only have to google “wild yeast starter” and indulge in the results. Basically, a starter is just flour plus water plus lots of time, but depending on whom you speak to the best results are clearly obtained by kick-starting the culture by adding grapes or cabbage, or by substituting the water with boiled pineapple juice. The world of sourdough bakers is also divided into feeders and fridgers and freezers and many more exciting categories. Becoming a bread nerd is easy. Anyway, despite the oceans of information, so is establishing a culture. Just pick somewhere to start and commit to looking up any problems you encounter or questions you have.

So without further ado… here’s Naomi’s Rules for Starting a Sourdough Starter:

1. First, go look at these pictures here and here. That’s the goal. Four weeks. Drooling yet?
2. You need kitchen scales. Even if they’re just the £4 ones from Tesco. You’ll thank yourself. And this is coming from someone who has been baking cakes and pies for years and years without any measuring device beyond a warped plastic jug. Honestly, just do it.
3. Buy a large bag of wholegrain rye flour and a large bag of unbleached white flour (must be organic). Try to get fresh batches. (While you’re at it, get some wholemeal flour too – you’ll need it once you are ready to actually bake a bread.) Keep your flour in the fridge in a plastic bag (at room temp the oils will go rancid pretty quickly, gross).
4. Find a container that has transparent and more-or-less straight sides and a lid (an empty yoghurt cup works well). It needs to have space for the starter to triple.
5. Now for the action. The basic drill is this: every 12 hours, discard two-thirds of the culture, then “feed” 1 part culture with 1 part flour and 1 part water. Easy, huh? Ok, you need to have culture first before you can discard any. So the first day: mix 100g lukewarm water + 50g white flour + 50g rye flour, put in container, mark top of mixture with some tape (yes on the outside of the box) so progression can be checked. (I pretty much follow the instructions given here; they’re along the lines of how I ended up raising my starter, plus it’s the place where I got the recipe for the first bread that blew my socks off. The instructions are probably clearer there anyway. Fewer tangents, too.) It’s important that the flour is organic, because you want it to have yeasts on it that will mature and multiply and eventually raise your bread. (I always thought sourdough bread did not have any yeast, but it turns out I was WRONG!) Leave the mixture in a warm place (boiler cupboard) for 24 hours. After 24 hours…
6. …measure out 50g or 75g of culture and discard the rest (don’t be tempted to use it in the first few days – bacteria etc.). “Feed” the culture with equal amounts of water and flour. So take 50g starter, mix with 50g water, then mix in 50g flour (25g rye and 25g white). (Or 75g + 75g + 75g… you get the point.) Put back in its warm place.
7. You will now need to repeat step 6 twice a day for a month. That’s right. Four weeks of feedings, every twelve hours. Time carefully. (The good news is, you can start baking a lot sooner than that. Ten days or so and you should be ready to go. The other twenty days are just to get the starter stronger, but they do make a difference!)
8. Resist the temptation to judge your culture too soon. In the first few days, it might first rise a lot and then very little, or it may not smell very great. Just keep up with it for a few feedings and see where things land. If the mixture separates, develops a layer of liquid on top and smells of alcohol, it probably means you forgot to feed it. Just feed normally as soon as you can and don’t neglect it again.
9. After a few days, the culture should gradually start rising a bit more in between feedings. In a panic? See point 14.
10. Starter bubbly? Smells nice? Rises significantly between feedings, close to doubling in 12 hours? This should happen after five days or so. When it does, you’re ready to make some pancakes! Down to the recipe, go go go! (From this point onwards you can also switch to feeding with water and white flour only, though I still always use half rye.)
11. After 7–10 days of twice-daily feedings, the starter should be doubling (or almost doubling) in 8 hours. Congratulations! At this point, you can start baking bread with it. Make very sure, though, that you don’t accidentally use the entire starter for a bread!
12. After a month, the starter should be strong. If you wish, you can now put it in the fridge, taking it out to bake with and to feed every week or two weeks. Refrigerated starter may need one extra discard–feed–discard-cycle and some time in the warmth before it’s ready to be used for a bread. The starter will still rise and produce gas, so don’t put in too small a container, and put on any screw-top lids loosely.
13. I’d also put a back-up in the fridge: instead of discarding two-thirds of the starter when feeding, keep an extra 50g, feed normally, put in the fridge, and feed or replace every one or two months. (I usually just replace it every time I feed the main starter.)
14. If something goes wrong or doesn’t look quite right, just ask that pesky land shark (or Mr. Google).

Next week: the art of baking bread (Amateur Rundown).

Sourdough pancakes

The perfect way to make good use of starter that needs to be “discarded”. I always just eyeball the ingredients for these pancakes based on the consistency of the starter – so treat the recipe accordingly! Particularly, the amount of starter here is based on my 75g-routine and the leftover starter it produces – it could be any quantity. These pancakes can be made as soon as the sourdough starter is quite active, probably after five or six days. Until the starter is mature and very bubbly, the pancakes do need some extra help from another raising agent. Makes about five to seven American-style pancakes.

150g sourdough starter

1 large egg

about a tablespoon of sugar, maple syrup or honey

¼ teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (or baking powder)

some milk, if the mixture is very thick

cinnamon and/or ground ginger

Mix the starter with the sugar, maple syrup or honey, then beat in the egg. If the mixture is very thick, add a little bit of milk – keep in mind the mix will end up a lot lighter after the raising agent has done its work. The mixture should be easy to beat with a fork, but not very runny. Add the sodium bicarbonate / baking powder and leave for a few minutes. The mixture should rise, show a lot of bubbles, be very light and run off a ladle slowly. If it seems too dense still, add some more raising agent. Too runny, add some flour.

Pour about two-thirds of a large ladle of mixture into a well-seasoned or non-stick frying pan (I never use any extra oil or fat). The mix should spread out slowly into a circle (about 10-12cm / 4-5 inches in diameter) without losing all its height. Don’t mess with the cakes until the top is full of holes and almost dry. Then flip and cook till browned on both sides.

Some blueberries, ricotta and/or vanilla through the mixture are delicious too.

- Naomi