Insomnia and sourdough
I couldn’t sleep. So I came downstairs to avoid disturbing my wife, and noticed that my tub of three-week old starter was looking lively.
A lively starter and insomnia. Maybe my kitchen was trying to tell me something.
What to bake? I’m currently experimenting with different formulae in order to have a product line of three or four core breads to sell once I’ve got a commercial bakehouse sorted out. I’ve got my ‘straight’ white, a miller’s loaf (whitish, but with barley and wholemeal in the mix too) and a wholemeal. All made with wild yeast and all delicious. Time to work on a multiseeded malty multigrain.
Working out a starting formula was easy enough. The process of making straight (no enrichment) breads doesn’t really change that much from bread to bread. There are details that can vary, mostly with hydration (ask any baker who’s had to deal with ciabatta ‘dough’, which is more like a batter and will stick to everything) but the the fundamental processes are the same and easy to remember.
The formula
Professional bakers don’t really talk about recipes, they talk about formulae. In a bakers’s formula, you start with percentages, then work out the weight of ingredients you’ll need based on the number and weight of loaves you want to make. So, taking the traditional formula for a baguette, (100% flour, 60% water, 2% yeast, 2% salt), if I want to make two 400g loaves, I would take 600g of flour, 360g (600 × 0.6) of water, 12g (600 × 0.02) of yeast and 12g of salt and scale at 480g to allow for water evaporation while it cooks.
The first question I ask myself when developing a formula is “what sort of crumb do I want?” The answer is almost always: not as holey as a ciabatta, but still with holes of varying sizes. The way to get that is by keeping the hydration up. I tend to aim for around 66% rather than the traditional 60% of French bread. I’m going to raise it with my starter rather than commercial yeast, which will help the flavour as well as being a less urgent affair. I’ve found that, with my current 80% hydration starter, using 30–40% starter works well. Shipton recommend adding their 5-seed blend at around 20% with white/light flour, but I’m planning on using a generous amount of seeds to coat the bread, so I end up reducing the amount of seeds that I add to the dough at the mixing stage.
So… taking all that into account, I end up with: 100% malthouse flour, 10% 5-seed blend, 40% starter, 60% cold water, 1.5% salt.
The mix
I pour the bulk of my starter into the mixing bowl, leaving enough to be worth refreshing. The scales tell me that that’s about 400g which makes the rest of the calculations easy. In goes 1kg flour, 100g seeds, a fistful of Maldon sea salt (my fist grabs about 15g of salt) and a generous 600g of cold water. I grab my trusty old tablespoon and mix everything together taking time to make sure it’s well mixed.
Once it’s mixed it doesn’t look inspiring. It’s a wet and sticky mess; not like dough at all. Which is what I’m aiming for — gluten development is all about hydration and time. This mix can only get better.
Kneading
After ten minutes I oil my work surface with some British cold pressed rapeseed oil and knead the dough for 10 seconds (about a dozen kneads). Once it’s kneaded I wash and dry the mixing bowl and place it upside-down over the dough to help stop a skin forming and prevent water loss.
After another ten minutes, I knead the dough for another ten seconds, oil the inside of the mixing bowl, and put the dough back into the bowl and place the whole thing in a large plasticbag. Ten minutes later, I oil the work surface again, knead the dough quickly, return it to the bowl and rebag it, where it will sit for half an hour.
Bulk fermentation
Now we’re into the bulk fermentation stage. I could just leave the dough alone for 3–6 hours, but I find that I get a more interesting crumb if I give the dough a few turns during fermentation. A ‘turn’ consists of dusting the board very lightly with flour, turning the dough out and gently pressing it out into rough square, then I fold it up in thirds vertically and horizontally and return it to the bowl, smooth side up. I do this three times in all. Once after half an hour then at hourly intervals before a final two hour ferment (during which I finally grab some sleep). You can use turning as a way of delaying things — just chuck in another turn and you’ve bought yourself another hour. This will stop working eventually as the starter culture runs out of damaged starch to turn to sugars and thence to alcohol and carbon dioxide, but you’re safe to do it a few times. Or just bung the bowl in the fridge — fermentation will continue, but much slower.
Dividing, shaping and proving
By the time I pull the dough out of the bowl for the last time, the difference between the way it feels now — bouncy, light, lively — and the way it felt after the initial mix — a sticky mass — is astonishing. Hard to believe that it’s the same stuff.
If I had the right size oven and people coming to sing around my dining room table the following day, then it would have been great to simply roll the 2.1kg of dough up into a tightly shaped ball, prove it in a large banneton and bake it for an hour or so in a blisteringly hot oven. Instead, I divide my dough into three pieces, each roughly 700g in weight and given them a pre-shape by rolling each one into a ball. These sit on the counter for ten minutes while I prepare a couche.
The couche is a length of heavy unbleached linen. To prepare it I dust it liberally with wholemeal rye flour. Linen is a brilliant fabric for proving bread. Its fibres are such that it doesn’t stick (much) to the dough but wicks away some moisture helping to form a good crust. The heaviness of the cloth means that it can be pulled up into ridges which support the sides of loaves as they expand rather than letting them flow where they will. It’s fantasticly versatile. You wouldn’t call it cheap to buy, but it’s a great deal cheaper than the quantity of bannetons you need to prove the same amount of dough.
With the couche prepped, I shape my balls of dough into batons (the original French word is bâtarde, which means ‘bastard’. This is because the shape is halfway between a boule, or ball and a baguette). The shaping is moderately complicated as the photos below show:
- Flip a ball of dough smooth side down, and flatten out into a circle an inch or so thick
- Fold the side of the circle furthest from you into a rough point. Push right into the dough to make sure that things stick
- Fold the point to the centre of the dough. Feel the tension developing in the skin of the baton
- Spin the dough 180 and repeat steps 2 and 3
- Working from right to left (assuming you’re right handed, swap directions if you’re not) fold the dough over your left thumb, using friction with the bench to help stretch the skin. Seal the fold by pressing down with the heal of your hand
- The bottom of the baton. I go along it and pinch closed any imperfectly joined edges
- The completed loaf, flipped over and tightened up
- A finished loaf after it’s been coated in the seed mix
- All the loaves
Coating and proving
As well as prepping the couche I took a couple of sheet pans and a teatowel. I wetted the towel and wrung it out and spread it out on the first sheet pan. I scattered 5-seed blend liberally on the other one.
As each loaf is shaped I place it smooth side down on the damp towel and roll it back and forth, making it nice and sticky, but not sopping wet. Then transfer it to the seedy pan, roll it around for a seedy coating and place it, seeds up on the couche (see picture 8). I pull up a fold in the cloth to support the loaf and divide it from the next one. As each loaf is shaped and coated with seeds, it’s placed in its own furrow of cloth. Picture 9 shows the couche holding all three loaves. Once they’re all done, they’re covered with a plastic sheet and left to stand for two and a half hours. After two hours, I put my — so thin it might as well be homeopathic — bread stone onto the middle shelf of the oven, and turn it on at 250°C.
Waiting to bake. The oven’s hot and ready, but the bread itself is still a bit lively. When I prod a loaf with my thumb, it springs back immediately, which means it’s liable to burst strangely in the oven or pop the top crust off the crumb of the loaf. After the time spent so far, I don’t want that to happen, so it’s best to wait for the loaves to prove in their own good time. My wife’s up by now, so I brew a pot of smokey Earl Grey to drink while the dough comes right.
The bake
Baking each loaf goes like this. I place a flipping board alongside the first loaf and roll it off the cloth and onto the board. Then I use the board to transfer it to my peel which I’ve dusted with semolina. Using a grignette (basically a razor blade on a stick), I slash the loaf along its length in order to control where the bread will expand and slide it onto the hot stone in the oven. Once the door is closed, I turn the heat down from 250 to 210°C (I want the high heat early in the bake to get good oven spring, but if I kept it that high for the full bake, I’d be in danger of scorching the bread) and bake for 40 minutes. At the end of which, I end up with this:
The second and third loaves aren’t quite so good — waiting for the oven to get back up to 250°C, and for the earlier loaves to bake mean that the third loaf is bordering on overproved by the time it goes in the oven. It still tastes great though.
End result
I couldn’t wait for the first loaf to cool fully. It was still warm when I cut into it to taste. Even unbuttered, it was good. Buttered, it was heaven. Here’s the ham sandwiches we had for lunch:
I have a few niggles with the end result; mostly down to the fact that I can’t bake more than one loaf at a time in my oven. The sooner I get my hands on a commercially sized oven, the better. This loaf is definitely going in my standard offering once I start selling though.
Storage
Loafery bread doesn’t keep — there’s only two of us in the house, and we’re down to a loaf and a half already. Because it’s a naturally leavened loaf, it seems to keep better than a straight yeasted version would. The sourdough flavours will continue to develop over time. There are even those who would warn you against eating a sourdough loaf on its first day out of the oven. If you do manage to let it go stale, it makes excellent toast.
