Tag Archives: sourdough

Share the sourdough love

olive oil bread Dan Lepard foccacio sunshine

Lets hear it one more time for this Dan Lepard recipe!

We had fun today. It’s so good to bake with a friend! And as an added bonus the sun came out this afternoon, look how it transforms the bread!

First time sourdough!

We made Jeffrey Hamelman’s sourdough; the Vermont with the increased grain and we made Dan Lepard’s olive oil bread (a version of this here) only this time we followed the recipe from the Handmade Loaf exactly down to the last gram of malt and it was perfect. Maybe the best I’ve ever tasted, which I put down to my friend’s elegant stretch and fold technique and her gentle final dimpling. We chopped up some garden rosemary and threw that on the top together with some Cornish sea salt.

Light as air and fragrant with olive oil and rosemary

As none of it was ready by midday we had to defrost a loaf of bread for lunch and hunt out some soup too: but as this was a loaf of Cheese Bread made with fine Glastonbury Cheddar from Gloucester’s farmers’ market and the soup was our take on this great Christmas Lima bean and celery recipe we didn’t suffer too much.

Showing someone what you do in the privacy of your own kitchen there’s always that moment of self-doubt, well several quite often….Will the starter work, will it do what it should do, will the dough stick coming out of the banneton, will it rise, will the slashes open? And all the time, you’re answering questions, I’ve never known an activity for generating so many questions. It’s amazing that the bread gets made at all.

Boules of sourdough springing in the oven

But this time it worked fine. Happiness all round. I don’t know any other cooking activity that makes me feel this good. I love the quirky lively Chi-full shapes of the bread. I would recommend bread baking to anyone for sheer happiness. Find a friend, insist on baking with them, share the bread love.

Who says you can’t make fab sourdough first time?

On The Table

For Celia – whose delightful In My Kitchen posts inspire many a blogger.

A basket of sourdough made with French flours, a gift from my sister, a plate of salad, some champagne pink yorkshire rhubarb with home made yoghurt. Two new and exciting bags of German rye flour and a box of Mozart Kugel from lovely Mandy who eats my bread with great enthusiasm and replenishes the store cupboard when she goes back to Germany from time to time.

Grapplestein Son of Oregon

Grapplestein arrived by post all the way from The Lost World in Oregon in mid November. He arrived in his own special non machinable envelope together with a travelling companion who I haven’t got to know as yet. GS has been acclimatizing to the food and the weather and has had a little difficulty with jet lag too.

: Here he is on Day 3…

However this weekend (26/27th Nov) he announced he was ready for action and as there was no football to watch he thought he might as well have a crack at baking some sourdough.

GS has a lovely wheaty/fruity aroma while he is fermenting, and did an excellent job with this sourdough bread.

I also finally had a go at baking in a pot, Dutch Oven style. The good Doctor Fugawe and Gill the Painter are two people who I know both use this method with great success. My first attempt was not entirely successful as the parchment sort of got inside the dough a bit, but the crust was thin and fine and the ovenspring, particularly with this teetering-on-the-edge-of-being-overproved loaf, was more than satisfactory. In fact the crumb was beautiful!

As you can see in this last pic, there is no stopping him now, so I’m having another go with the bake in a pot method tomorrow with a larger ball of slightly lower hydration dough this time! Edit: You can see the resulting pic in one of the comments below…

: Go Grapplestein, go !

This dough was made from :-

200 g of revived and cosseted Oregon starter (1:1 water to wheat flour)
325 g water at 20 C
500 g of flour: a mixture of 350 g of strong bread flour, and 50 g each of wholemeal spelt, dark rye and swiss dark
12 g fine seasalt
4 dessert spoons of runny yoghurt
1 tablespoon of barley malt

Made a soft loose dough.

First prove took about 3 hours, then shaped and into bannetons, and a second prove of about 4 hours. I find breads with spelt tend to prove quicker and the dough slackens more quickly towards the end of the second prove, so it is easy to go over with them. I think I just caught this one in time, though it is a bit mishapen. Tasted as good as it looked! Thanks Doc for sending him so far. At the moment he is definitely different from my own starter, whether time and the English diet will change him, we’ll have to wait and see…