Spring, Moss, and Half-Rye Sourdough Bread

Considering my recent silence, you have undoubtedly wondered if I have been eaten by crocodiles by now.  Or maybe polar bears.  It’s Sweden, and the polar bears must be hungry.  Or some other grisly fate.  The truth is, however, very prosaic – I have simply been busy.

It happens to all of us, and I am entirely unapologetic for having a life outside the blog, much as I love it.

And besides, to quote a recently-seen on the internet and absolutely brilliant photo:

“IT’S SPRING.  WE ARE SO EXCITED, WE WET OUR PLANTS!”

As you can see, the plants are happily blooming – at least some of them, and others look like they are preparing to, and if you are like me and like houseplants, then it’s exciting.  What can I say, I am easily excited.  I think that’s a good thing.  Surely beats sitting there looking bored and feeling blasé about the world.

So um, yes.  I have been busy, it’s spring, which means my plants needed more attention, my studies are kicking back in, and I have not had so much time to cook anything impressive, nor, mostly, to photograph it.

I did bake a half-rye bread on the basis of my two-fifths rye no-knead recipe, and it turned out gorgeous.  I have, again, let it proof entirely too long due to the same reason (I went for a walk and returned later than planned), but it was delicious and lovely nonetheless.  One of those days I will actually bake it in time and see if it can be made taller, but between the high rye content and the high hydration of no-knead method, I am not sure.  On the up side, the narrow slices make fantastically elegant open-faced sandwiches with slices of cheese, salami, dried ham or cured fish.  Anyway, no recipe here – merely a note that the two-fifths rye recipe works exceptionally well with a half and half split between the types of flour.  And, I will try a closer to 65 or 70% split in favor of rye next.

And then there is my newly-found fascination with moss.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of conflicting and downright bad information about how to grow it on the internet.  And doubly unfortunately, I managed to spray the two original moss-homes I made with the wrong water spray bottle.  What’s so wrong about the wrong spray bottle?  Well, it used to contain agricultural soap-and-oil mix for treating bugs on one of my orchids last summer.  As a result, I think one or two applications of that instead of water are killing the moss slowly, which made me very sad.  It is still alive and struggling to stay so (and I am helping), but I am not sure it will win the battle, and it is entirely my fault.

So, I did a lot more reading, and gathered more moss.

And then I followed several other new instructions which changed or negated the things I originally found.  For example, I did not use any potting soil on this round.  Instead, I made a base out of aquarium-filter activated carbon, and piled sterilized gravel bits, re-sterilized bark chips (from my orchid potting bark bag), and pieces of terracotta (broken flowerpot that did not survive the winter freeze) on top of that.  Added aged tap water with some activated carbon swirled in it via my new, clean spray bottle, and arranged the moss on top, above the water level.

Note: to sterilize rocks and bark chips, soak in boiling water, let stand, pour water off and repeat.  This won’t sterilize them for purposes of neural surgery, but it should kill most mold spores and random microfauna present on and in them.  If you want to be more sure about it, boil a pot of water and toss them in there for a while.  Do not salt.  ;)

The second thing I found important is having a lid for your moss-growing dish.  A more reputable moss-growing website owner mentioned in his blog that he covers his moss dishes overnight and leaves them to air out during the day – so, upside-down flat candle plates were found to cover the little terraria, to maintain good humidity with periods of drying-out and fresh air.  Since, unless your moss is swamp moss (mine isn’t, it came off rocks and tree stumps), it doesn’t want to sit in a swamp.  (Deep wisdom right there, for various houseplants other than moss as well!)

And a third thing was washing the moss when I had initially brought it home, removing all debris and clinging dirt under running water, and then quarantining it in sandwich boxes with partially-shut lids for several days before using it in the arrangement – to make sure no pests or molds surface in the meantime.

The new terraria are now a few days old, and are so far doing well.  I’ll just avoid spraying them with insecticidal solution by accident and see what happens.

So, there it is.  Coming soon(tm) – posts about vanilla, and about the two entirely new to me white whole wheat flours (That is not a typo – they are whole wheat flours made from white, not red wheat!) that I have just received in the mail and all excited about – but obviously, first I need to bake something from them and see how that works out!

Folded Cheese Sourdough Bread (with just a touch of garlic)

First of all, let me tell you, fellow cheese freaks – you need to make this bread.

You need to make it because it turns out gorgeous, because it takes so very little effort, and because it tastes so incredibly cheesy, it borders on being hard to describe.  I’ll try though!  Have you ever bought that pretty loaf of “cheese bread” in the bakery, and then were disappointed when only the cheese-sprinkled crust tasted of cheese at all?  I know I have.  And this, in all its oozy cheesiness, this tastes like – and thus is! – the remedy for all your cheese bread disappointments.  This bread is moist, and has a beautifully open crumb with some shiny set-melted-cheese slicks in it, and is smells rich and wonderful and tastes as cheesy as I could have wished it to.

The sourdough base with a bit of wholemeal rye mixed in adds both a good sour edge and a wholesome earthiness to the flavor, and the chewy, glossy-pored texture is satisfying in the sense of you not actually needing to eat half the loaf to sate the cheese craving (hey, that’s a great way to deal with desire to snack on cheesy snacks otherwise!).  And to make it more of all the good things I love, I tossed in just a touch of garlic, too!  Now, do you feel the need to make it?  I sincerely do hope so!

The making, and specifically the putting-together method of this bread was inspired by something I had seen on the net somewhere, and, to my utter dismay and frustration, have failed to bookmark – which subsequently ended up with me being unable to find where I had seen the recipe and photos that prompted the making of this.  I looked and looked and found tons of different cheese bread recipes, but not the one I had wanted.  So, the credit for the idea goes to you, unknown blogger – and if someone recognizes the idea from someplace else, please do let me know so that I can credit the blogger for his or her idea.

The dough for this bread is a sourdough with about 1/4 wholemeal rye to 3/4 white bread (high-protein) flour, prepared by the no-knead method (see detailed instructions here).  Which is, in short – I mix the ingredients, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, leave overnight at room temperature (fairly warm, Swedish room temperature – I suspect it is 19-22C in my kitchen at night), then shred my cheese and proceed to the very easy prep and proof.  And then I transfer the whole thing on a piece of baking parchment into a preheated Dutch Oven and bake it.  But, first things first!

Ingredients:  (makes one loaf)

• ~50g live sourdough starter (I use 100% hydration) fed with some rye and some wheat flour in the past 48 hours.
• 120g wholemeal rye flour
• 360g white bread flour
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons garlic granules or powder (this is entirely optional but I recommend it.  If you like garlic, I heartily recommend it.  If you worry about it, no it does not give it a heavy garlic scent at all – more like a gentle hint of it in the finished product.  If you still worry, replace this with a favorite seasoning of your choice.)
• 350ml cold tap water

• ~2.5dl (1 cup) coarsely shredded cheese of your choice (I used a mix of aged cheeses but this is really up to what floats your cheese boat).

Method:

• Mix all dry ingredients other than cheese and whisk to combine.  Mix water and sourdough starter in another bowl and whisk to combine.
• Mix the liquid into the flour mixture with a wooden spoon until all flour is more or less incorporated – the dough will be shaggy and somewhat sticky, and grey in color (rye flour tends to do that, don’t worry, it’ll bake up beautiful!).
• Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (clingfilm) and leave overnight in your kitchen.

• The next day, flour a board thoroughly and scrape the soft dough out on it.  Flour your hands as well and gently stretch it out using your hands into a rough rectangle.  The dough should be very relaxed and not resist at this point, so it should be fairly easy.

• Take your shredded cheese and sprinkle it all over the rectangle, as evenly as you want to bother with.  Just, you know, avoid dumping it all in a sticky clump onto the middle of the dough, and it’ll be fine.

• Roll the rectangle along the short edge to make a short stubby roll.  (Yes, I’ve rotated it in this photo after rolling!)  Cut the roll into three pieces and place them on a piece of baking parchment cut sides down to make a lumpy loaf.

• Flour a piece of cling film and cover the loaf with it (floured-side down) and then with a kitchen towel, and leave to proof for 1-1.5 hours (this may take longer if your kitchen is not very warm and depending on how lively your starter is), until it is somewhat puffed up.  Because of its shape, the loaf won’t quite double in volume, but the rise will be visible.
• While the bread is proofing, preheat your oven to 220C with the Dutch oven inside.
• Once bread is ready to bake, remove Dutch oven from the oven, open lid, (be careful, it will be bloody searing hot!), and carefully place the bread into the Dutch oven holding it by the baking parchment edges.  If you drop it a few centimeters, it will do it no harm.
• Cover Dutch oven, and bake for 20 min at 220C covered.  After the 20 minutes, remove lid and lower temperature to 190C and bake uncovered for another 20-25 minutes until the top is properly browned.
• Remove (carefully!) from Dutch oven – I usually stand it on a sturdy foot stool covered with a terry towel I do not mind singing for this – and cool on the rack for 2 hours or until cooled completely before cutting.
• Once cooled and cut, wrap the cut end in aluminium foil.  The bread will keep for a few days without drying out – if it lasts long enough to be around.  I cannot say with any certainty that it would last for longer than 3 days because after that it was just gone.

Rejoyce in your cheese satisfaction!  This is one of the best ever breads to have to vegetable soup in my opinion – the earthy flavor, the substantial texture and the glorious flavor of cheese works great without any need to butter the slices – but you do as you wish, for that is between you and your cheese addiction.  Because *cough* it’s not like I have sliced thick slices of it just to have alongside a cup of tea or anything…

In hindsight, I may try to make an even fatter roll and only slice it in half to see how that works to make a shorter and thicker loaf, but that is more a matter of curiosity than a necessary instruction, and it may well not turn out any better than this in the end.  And the slices were still a good size, especially if slicing slightly on the diagonal as I did.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.

Two-Fifths Sourdough Rye, and Some Baking Myths

This week, winter has finally and properly come to Stockholm.

We have -15C in daytime, sparkling white snow everywhere – it only really sparkles when the temperature outside is way below 0C – and the city is bright and beautiful and inviting to wander out and around in, now that there is no more horrible wet and dark November muck that lasted entirely too long this year – about two months too long if you ask me.

This sort of weather calls for comfort food, but not the heavy rainy-day fare, no – this calls for satisfying textures and earthy flavors; and the fact that there is NO way to overheat the apartment (all it takes is opening the kitchen vent and the problem is solved!), it is also a fantastic excuse to indulge in baking.

Rye bread is both, healthful and enormously satisfying to eat, and I happen to adore the flavor of it – nothing, nothing beats real and heavily buttered rye bread for things like pickled herring, Skagen seafood salad, charcuterie or smoked salmon.  Unfortunately, good sourdough rye is not that easy to find in even an average Swedish supermarket (it’s easy to find average quality there, heh!), and I can imagine that in most English-speaking countries it is a specialty item, and many people consider wholemeal rye flour difficult to bake with.

I know, I have been there myself when I tried to make the 100% wholemeal Finnish rye.  It turns out great, but it is a pain in the head dough to work with, really.  Now, that one is a traditional recipe so not up to me to change (I may well come up with a better way to make a high-percentage rye bread later), but this specific recipe I came up with on my own the other day.  And, guess what?  It is easy to make.  Really really easy.

Two things which gave rise to this recipe are my incessant reading on the subject of food, and my recent experiments (the failed and the successful) with no-knead bread.  I wanted rye bread.  I have read that rye flour works far better after a long sourdough fermentation, and I have seen how well and easily gluten develops in long, sourdough no-knead method fermentation.  The difficulties with bread that has a large part of rye are normally:  1. that it does not rise very well because rye gets in the way of gluten development, so you get a brick or a doorstop; and 2. that the dough is awful to work with and even look at – it is unattractively grey, gloopy and it is sticky above and beyond all reason, to the point of resembling actual carpenter glue.  So the problem is that you really don’t want to knead rye bread – and you have to knead to get the gluten to develop… oh wait – the no-knead method… Eureka!  And so this recipe came to be.

As the name suggests, the recipe is two-fifths rye and three-fifths wheat, although that is approximate.  I will test a half-and-half one at some point later and let you know whether that works as well, which I think it will.

The method used for this bread is simple, and is described in detail in the (successful) no-knead post.  I suggest you read that once as then you will not have to ever read it again (it makes sense).  The only things I can add that are specific to the rye bread are that:

• I was really really generous at covering the banetton with wheat bran (fearful of the stickiness).
• The first rise for this much rye is longer than I suggest for wheat – this bread was left for approximately 18 hours (from late afternoon and overnight till next morning).
• The 2nd rise (in banetton after folding) can also take longer than the 1.5 hours for wheat – I left mine for 5 or so hours in a cool kitchen and then baked it.
• The baking time after the 30-minute mark removal of lid or bowl (whatever you are using), is minimum another 20 minutes, but I watched the bread for about 10 minutes after those 20, and simply took it out when it reached the right color for my liking.  Since the ovens and baking dishes vary, so may your mileage.  My advice is that if this is your first rye bread, watch it.  It should get beautifully deep chestnut-golden brown (rye bread color), and if it is too light it is underbaked.

The recipe is even simpler – and here is where I would like to kick a few of the things you commonly read on the internet, and even in reputable baking books about baking bread, where it hurts.  Why?  Because among a lot of good and useful advice, there are also sites and books (no names or links as usual, you will know them when you see them), that tell you that unless you do X in exactly Y way, your bread will not work and it’s your own fault for being a bread sinner not doing it as the holy internet church of bread bakers preaches.

In my opinion, all four myths mentioned below (I think I will probably point things like this out as I go along, but only four of them make an appearance in this recipe) are so much of what comes out the back end of a cow.  If you do one of those and your bread does not work, something else is wrong (weak starter, wrong flour, etc.).  It is not because you have sinned against the holier-than-thou principles which are nothing but so much hot air being blown where the sun don’t shine.

So, recipe!

• 100-150g sourdough starter, (I feed mine with mix of about 2/3 rye and 1/3 wheat flour before baking rye, half-and-half for wheat breads).  100% hydration (1:1 ratio of flours to water).  It should have been taken out of the fridge and fed at some point within the past 48 hours.  Myth: a lot of baking purists say you should feed your starter every 8 or 12 hours or oh god oh god it will die and nothing will work… that’s a load of [unmentionable substance].  If you have a strong and healthy starter (one that wakes up and rises within 12-24 hours of being taken out of the fridge and fed), then it is more than fine to do like I do:  I keep my starter in the fridge, and a day or two before I want to bake, I take some and mix it up and let it rise.  It is then fine to bake with the next day or two.  No, I am not hallucinating all those well-risen breads on this blog.
• 350ml cold tap water.  Myth:  you must gather the first morning dew from the petals of lilies, or get the purest mountain spring water you can find, because the chlorine in tap water kills your yeast!  No, it doesn’t.  Your water does not need to be bottled, brought in a wooden pail from a mountain spring, or filtered unless you live in an area where it is otherwise not safe to drink (like London).  But if you can enjoy drinking your tap water, so can your starter.  People who go on about how you should use bottled water for baking bread are… let’s not go there.
• 500g flour (200g wholemeal finely ground rye and 300g bread-quality high-protein wheat flour).  Myth:  you must always sift your flour.  No you don’t need to sift any of it for bread-baking – weighing it and dumping it into a bowl, adding salt and spices, and swirling around a bit with a dry whisk or a spoon before adding liquids is also just fine.
• 2 teaspoons salt.  Use a measuring spoon.  Myth:  you should use un-iodized salt of one fancy and expensive variety or another or it kills your yeast!  Truth – no; regular iodized table salt is fine.  The trace amount of iodine in it is not enough to kill the microorganisms in the starter.
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds.  If you don’t love caraway as much as I do, use 2 teaspoons.  Or none, if you don’t want any.  (No, I do not feel the need to toast mine before adding it, but you can if you like.)

Method (the post linked above details it better, but here is the summary):

• Mix starter and water.  Mix all the rest in a bigger bowl.  Mix liquid into flour mix.  Cover with clingfilm and let stand for 18-20 hours.  Dump out onto a VERY well floured board.  Fold, rest 15 min, stick into banetton to rise.  I left mine to rise for nearly 5 hours but it may have been ready before I came home from my walk, so when it is puffed up, it is ready.  May be as little as 1.5-3 hours for the rye.  Bake, cool on rack, do not cut until completely cooled (more important for rye than wheat breads for flavor development).

Enjoy.  And don’t take [manure] from those who tell you baking bread must be difficult.  It really, really does not have to be.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.  :)

No-Knead Sourdough Bread: The Glorious(ly easy) Rematch

It would come as no news at all to those who know me that I am a stubborn, stubborn sort.

If something defies me, I will hammer at it until I have gotten it.  That goes for most things I have encountered so far, with the notable exception of tennis.  Notable because after having had friends and an ex-boyfriend try to teach me, owning decent rackets, and having taken a course in it, I frankly, suck at tennis still, for all I would love to play it.  But exceptions only prove the rule, and so it was that the no-knead bread that ought to be easy enough for kiddies to make, had dared to defy me.

Once.

Which, of course, resulted in frantic reading of everything I could find and alternative recipes on the internet, and interrogating bread-baking friends regarding their experiences.  And adjusting the flour/water balance some, and calculating a hydration percentage to check against something a friend had read in this very good book (Swedish, sadly no translation available – but I plan to both, get it and post recipes, so rejoyce!).  And, obviously, more baking.

And boy, did that make a difference!

The bread rose, and it puffed up further in the oven, and the crust crackled gratuitously as it cooled on the rack when it came out – and the crumb… it was truly impressive, just the right amount of moist chewiness and large and well-spaced holes.  This, this is what I had been going after in that previous attempt!  Moreover, I had used 2 teaspoons of dried (and pretty well pounded in a mortar) culinary lavender in the dough, so the aroma was utterly amazing.

If you haven’t ever used lavender in baking, I would really urge you to try – just please, for the love of little green apples, get the culinary-grade one.  You don’t want a mouthful of soap with your bread, and that is what you would be getting if you tried using something out of a potpourri sachet or something intended for a bath preparation!  But, I digress.

Now, after having made all the adjustments, it is a truly lazy-sofa-dweller-easy recipe for gorgeous bread, and the best part is that if you have a sourdough starter, it is also a completely painless, really novice-proof method for sourdough breadmaking.  One that is, arguably, easier than making bread with regular yeast and other methods.  Now, do I have your attention?

If you make it with sourdough starter, it will also keep like a sourdough.  Which is to say it neither molds, nor goes tough outrageously for several days when kept unwrapped, with just the cut side covered in foil, or in one of those neat bread bags that I do not have.  So not only is this easy, it is a good way to make bread that is not in a hurry to go off, making it a good option when you count pennies and do not want to waste what you have bought.  In this case, that is just flour and salt and the optional lavender – sourdough starter, while not free, only needs feeding about once a month if kept in the fridge, so it is virtually free as well.

Behold, the glorious remains of the no-knead bread!

Since my camera was not at home when the bread was cut open originally, and there was daylight around, it was photographed two or three days later, which has done it really no harm!

So, to the recipe (minimal as it is), which is this time NOT adapted from any website, nor do I agree with the original New York Times no-knead bread article – neither about proportions, the time to raise it, nor about the whole proofing-in-towel idea, which is frankly asking for a stuck-dough disaster.

The idea, however, is downright brilliant!

You will need:

• A bowl, a dough spatula, a dutch oven or clay baker or a bottom of a cast-iron casserole and a large steel bowl to cover it (for baking – do NOT preheat the bowl if using).
• To get the pretty stripes and domed shape, a banetton is really helpful.  I imagine you could also raise this bread on a sheet of floured baking parchment or a silpat (non-stick baking mat), and it would turn out fairly decent too.
• If using a banetton, you will need a bit of wheat bran or rye flour or whatever it is you use to powder it before using it for bread to avoid sticking.  I used wheat bran this time.

• Sourdough starter (about 50g, bubbling and awake).  I feed mine with some rye and some wheat flour, it appears to like the combo best, but a pure wheat one will be juuuuust fine!
• 475g bread flour.  I will experiment more with various flours, but pure white bread flour (about 11-12% protein) works fine.
• 1.5-1.75 teaspoon salt.  Iodized table salt works fine, though you can go fancier.  I couldn’t be bothered to grind my sea salt so that is what I used.
• 3.5dl (350ml or 0.35L) cold water.
• 2 teaspoons dried herb of your choice (lavender, oh yes, make it lavender if you have some!), pounded to soft shreds in a mortar.  Bashing is therapeutic you know!  I would say fresh would work too, just make it an even tablespoon then and chop finely instead of pounding.

• Note:  I use a 100% hydration starter so it can be counted as 25g flour and 25g water.  This brings us to 375ml water and 500g flour.  375/500*100=75% hydration.  If you want to adjust the size of the dough, keep the math in mind.  If you just want to use the recipe, it’s a useful thing to remember but not necessary as the quantities are already written above.

What you do:

• Put flour, salt, and any seasoning if using (lavender in my case) into a bowl.  Swirl with a dry whisk to mix.
• Whisk your sourdough starter into your cold water in another bowl.  Trust me you want to do this and not skip this step – since there is barely any mixing, left alone kneading in this method, you want to distribute the starter well into the dry ingredients from the start.  So whisk whisk till it’s all murky water and no large starter blobs clinging to bottom of bowl.
• Pour the water+starter mix into the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon, silicone spatula or whatever.  It will be shaggy and not appear too wet.  Keep stirring and poking it till most of the flour is incorporated.  Or you can cover it and let it sit 10 min to soak through and then stir a bit, pushing bits of dough down the sides of the bowl if any get stuck there.
• Cover with plastic wrap (clingfilm), or put the entire bowl into a plastic bag and seal with a clip.  Put in non-too-cold place in your kitchen.  Doesn’t have to be very warm (don’t stick it on the radiator, but say half a meter from it is good, or on a counter).  Don’t get hung up on temperature as long as your kitchen isn’t freezing cold.
• Leave for about 8-12 hours.  If you do not intend to bake it the same day, leave out for 6-8 hours and then stick the bowl in the refrigerator till the next day.  If your dough was refrigerated, give it about an hour to come to room temperature the day after and then go to next step.
• Flour a board or surface generously and poke the dough out of the bowl onto it.  It will be somewhat sticky but it will not be liquid and it will not actually get stuck to anything.  Or shouldn’t.  It will flatten out some under its own weight.  Flour your hands and sprinkle the top of the dough with a bit of flour too, and do a single stretch-and-fold.
• Powder the top of the folded dough with a bit more flour, cover it with the plastic wrap you used on the bowl (unless it is wet then get a new piece), and leave it be for 30 minutes or so.
• Sprinkle the banetton with wheat bran, or flour a baking parchment/mat.  Pick up your dough, lightly shape it into a ball with your hands, and rest it seam-side down if using banetton, but seam side up if you are using baking parchment or a mat.
• Cover with a towel and allow to rise for 1.5 hours or until approximately 1.5-2 times the size.  About an hour into the rise, pop your dutch oven, pan or clay baker into the oven and begin preheating it to 250C  (yes, that high).
• When the dough is ready and oven is preheated (read this post about safety and handling of really hot cookware for baking!), invert the banetton onto a piece of baking parchment or gently slide the dough off the mat onto baking parchment right-side up (silicone mats are not rated for the sort of temperature we are talking here).
• Take the hot dish out of the oven USING THICK MITTS! and place the baking parchment with dough on it inside.  Edges sticking out are not a problem.  Cover with preheated lid, or the upside-down bowl if using.  Stick back into the oven.
• Bake for 30 minutes covered, then remove the lid or bowl (latter may need a bit of help with a spatula stuck under an edge to lift), reduce heat to 190-200C and bake for a further 15-20 minutes uncovered until the bread is no longer pale.
• Remove from oven and out of the baking dish and cool on rack for 2 hours minimum before cutting.

Trust me, the wait (and lack of effort) is worth it.

Pan Marino – Beautiful Bread for The Holidays

Look, it comes pre-decorated with a crown and all!

You may have noticed that all my recent photos are taken in what appears to be a dark room with a flash.  Worry not, I have not become a vampire – but the Swedish winter is here, and it’s dark most of the so-called “day” as well.  The sun is up around 9-10am and down by 3pm, so yes, by dinnertime it’s pitch dark.  I love it, as it’s an excuse to have candlelight every day, but the camera goes “what the heck, where’d the sun go?”.

Speaking of winter – and December specifically! – as the end of the week looms closer (yes, it’s already Tuesday for gossake, I have a party in only three days!!!), I have decided to post about this before I get half-mad with running around, making tiny canapes to be consumed by (hopefully appreciative) crowd, and tidying the place.

I made this yesterday, taking advantage of a reasonably slow Monday, and in anticipation of aforementioned rat race towards the end of the week.  So before the party prep hit, I wanted to do a bit of comfort cooking, the decidedly unfiddly variety – and so I made this bread, which is anti-stress therapy itself to bake, and a pot of beef marrow bone soup, which is another thing that takes the time it takes (many hours), and that you really can’t hurry – but also doesn’t require much attention at all after the initial 15 minutes.  I’ll write about it soon, too – I promise – I took photos this time!

But, back to Pan Marino – I have seen only a few mentions of this historical Italian bread online, but the best recipes all agree on it having to be fully sourdough, include copious amounts of fresh rosemary, be cut in a crown or star shape on top, and sprinkled with sea salt.  Ever since I’d heard about it, I wanted to make it, and I happened to have an unused pot of rosemary on my window from the week before, which was convenient.

And boy, was it worth it!  This bread is what supermarket herb bread wants to be when it dies and goes to heaven.  Or maybe not even then.  It has a beautiful crust which audibly crackles as it cools, a chewy and filling crumb that just begs to be dipped into soup or olive oil, or spread with a thick slab of butter (or go one step further and slap some honey on that butter – rosemary goes amazingly well with that!), and the rosemary scent permeates the entire place as you bake it.  After you’ve had this, I promise you (like me) will never buy supermarket “herb” breads again, for they will not qualify even as a pale imitation of the glory that is this bread.  Seriously.

And think of the bragging rights – a friend came by last night after I’d baked it, and saw it (precipitating the too-early cutting of the loaf), squeaking a delighted “oh did you buy this at a local bakery?!“, to which I puffed up gleefully and said “no, I made it myself!“  Major ego-boost points.  Without any further decorations, I think this is beautiful enough to be served as a centerpiece of a holiday dinner, with the meat (and this is carnivorous me talking!) on the side, as a dressing to be placed upon its majesty.

Furthermore, making this is really uncomplicated, even for a sourdough beginner.  You do need a ready living sourdough starter for this, but if it’s been in the fridge for a few weeks, that works just fine.  For starting your own starter, there’s a really helpful page here.  Note:  While the author is very right about having to feed your starter often the first week or two of its life, I find that once a starter is working, storing it in the fridge for a month at a time between feedings does it no harm whatsoever.

However, this is a 3-stage bread, which means that while it is very, very forgiving of timing (half an hour or an hour this way or that – or up to an extra 12 hours in Stage 1 or up to extra 4 hours in Stage 2 will do it no harm at all in my experience!), you do need to start it at least the morning of the day before the day on the evening of which you want the bread.  So, start Sunday morning to achieve bread by Monday night, if that makes sense.  On the other hand, the time-critical stages of baking this aren’t all that critical, and therefore not stressful – I’ve had situations when I planned to make the bread on a Saturday, forgot about it at one of the stages, and ended up baking it Monday and it turns out just fine (remember, Stage 2 can be refrigerated up to a week after its initial 8-12 hours fermentation).  As I have mentioned, sourdough made in 3-stage process is very forgiving.

I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that giving bakers’ percentages or gram measurements in 1-g increments is going to help anyone.  Heck, my kitchen scale only does 25-g increments, and I don’t own a chemist’s graduated cylinder to measure water to the single ml.  Nor do I think it is sane or needed, as bakers have made bread for thousands of years without using those.  Approximate measurements are useful, however, for those of us who haven’t.

What do you need:  Makes 2 loaves of bread – either both on Day 2, or one then, and one can be deterred up to a week (see Levain stage instructions).  If you want to make 1 loaf only, halve quantities for Stages 1 and 2.  If baking on same day, it can be done either at the same time if you have a large oven and a baking stone, or sequentially, if you are like me and bake it in a cast-iron dish with a bowl cover.

• Olive oil, to oil bowls throughout the process.
• 1.5kg banetton, recommended.  Can theoretically be replaced by a colander lined with a very well-floured baking towel.  I use a banetton, it avoids the bread-stuck-to-towel-anyway situation.  (I speak from experience, though a lot of people do swear by the well-floured towel method).  If you have no banetton, and fear the stuck towel (rightly so!), you can raise the bread upright on a sheet of baking parchment, then slash and bake it without the inversion.  It’s what I’d do – but it may result in a slightly flatter loaf.

Stage 1: Reactivating Starter

• A tablespoon or two of sourdough starter (refrigerated is just fine)
• ~50ml water
• ~50g white flour

Stage 2: Levain

• All of Stage 1 starter, bubbling
• 500g white bread flour (I use high gluten content flour)
• 300ml water (I use cold from the tap)

Stage 3: Final Dough – given quantities for 1 or (2) 1.2-1.3kg loaves of bread

• 1/2 (all) of the above levain
• 3 (6) teaspoons (not heaping) sea salt, finely pounded or milled
• 500g (1kg) white flour (high protein content)
• 315 (630)ml water (cold from the tap)
• 3 (6) generous tablespoons fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped
  • Flaked sea salt for decoration

What to do:

Day 1:  Morning

• Mix all Stage 1 ingredients, cover with clingfilm, and let stand in a warm place till late evening.

Day 1: Evening

• The mixture should now be bubbly.  Add Stage 2 water, whisk to liquefy, and then add Stage 2 flour.  Knead (I use a handheld mixer with dough hooks) for a few minutes till a shaggy dough forms.  We aren’t going for any sort of great gluten development here, just till it holds together.
• Take dough out of bowl, wash bowl, dry it and oil it.  Put dough back in, cover with cling film and leave in a warm place overnight.

Day 2:  Start in the morning – process takes 3.5+1+1=5 to 6 hours at the very least, but worry not – you will not have to do much during most of that time.

• The dough should be pillowy and puffed up, or possibly even collapsed.  This is fine.  If baking two breads, proceed to next step.  If making one bread on this day and one sometime over the next week, cut the levain in half, and put half of it into a plastic box oiled on the inside and stick it into the fridge.  It can be taken out and used as of next step at any point in the next week.  (Don’t forget to oil the inside of the lid… just saying, not that I’d ever forget something like that, nooo!)
• Add all Stage 3 ingredients except flaked sea salt to the bowl.  Use your mixer or arm power and a wooden spoon, and mix to combine.  Cover with cling film and let stand for 20-30 minutes for the flour to absorb water.
• The dough will be noticeably more developed after resting.  Knead with mixer (or without) again until the dough is more elastic.  Do a single stretch-and-fold, cover and rest for 1 hour.
• Do another stretch-and-fold, let rest for another hour, and then another stretch-and-fold, and another hour of rest.  This brings up to ~3.5 hours from mixing.  The dough should be slightly risen – to 1.5 of its previous bulk or so.
• Dust your banetton or toweled colander or wooden board with a baking parchment on it with flour.  Shape the dough into a boule (ball), tucking the edges and pinching them neatly.  If using banetton or colander, place dough seam side up, if using a board/baking parchment, place dough seam side down (since you won’t be inverting it).  Cover with a slightly damp kitchen towel, and allow to rise for 1 – 1.5 hours in a warm place.
• In meantime, preheat your oven to 250 or 260°C with baking stone or cast-iron pan in it (this depends on how you prefer to bake, but for baking bread in cast-iron casseroles, please read this).  Preheating the oven properly may take most of the hour.

About halfway through the final proofing process

• When the bread is risen and passes the poke test (poked dough should spring back but slowly – I don’t believe in proofing till it doesn’t spring back at atll), invert your banetton or colander onto a sheet of baking parchment.  Or else you already have your bread on it.
• Slash the bread, or scizzor it in a star shape, and sprinkle flaked sea salt into the cuts.
• Place the bread into the oven.  I use a cast-iron pan bottom and cover it with a stainless steel bowl for steaming.  A bread this size is then baked covered with a bowl for 25 minutes at 250°C, and then uncovered at 190-200°C for another 30-35 minutes until golden brown.
• Remove to a cutting board, and let cool for at least an hour, but I’d recommend two (if you can wait that long bathed in the aroma of fresh bread and rosemary) before cutting.
• Eat.  I don’t need to give you instructions for this, do I?

I didn't wait long enough to cut in. As usual. It'll slice even prettier if you do, I promise!

This bread is wonderful with any sort of Italian food, or just with a thick consomme or bone bullion based soup – we had ours with a bowl of beef marrow bone soup with chanterelles, fishing the marrow out of the soup to spread on thick slices of it and eat, sprinkled with salt.  Bliss.

Yeast, Flour, Water, Salt – Bread. You should bake it.

Today I will be teaching a friend how to bake bread.

Incidentally, I am also back on the LCHF diet as of yesterday to reconcile myself and the mirror, but there’s no reason for that to deter me – I have one of those Scandinavian-model effortlessly-slim boyfriends, and he can eat all the bread I’ll end up baking.  I’d hate him for having such a figure while eating whatever he likes – and chocolate! – if I didn’t love him so much!  But, I digress.

The friend in question is a single young man, university student, and loves to cook.  And bake.  Or try to – as in his case, and in his own words, his attempts at yeasted bread simply won’t rise and result in a brick.  And we aren’t talking about sourdough-starter bread here, which ok, I admit, can be a temperamental piece of… dough.  So, what could be possibly going wrong – is it the yeast?  No, baking with yeast in Sweden is popular and so the regular supermarket-available fresh yeast it, it works like clockwork.  Is it the other ingredients?  Flour?  No, can’t be – flour here is locally produced and is very, very good, even the plain kind.  Is it something else?  What? – I just told him to come on over with a sack of flour and we’ll bake bread together and see what gives.  You’ll see what gives later or tomorrow is my guess, after we solve the mystery.

So, what’s the deal with baking your own bread at home?  Supermarkets are full of bread, and it – at least superficially – is a fairly cheap grocery item.  Or is it?

Turns out, not really.  Pick up a bag of bread and check the back of it – see how much it weighs and what goes into it.  Then check the price for a bag of flour and some yeast (water and salt aren’t really high-ticket items), and suddenly you realise – it does cost one heck of a lot more than flour.  Even counting yeast.  Even if you buy the higher-priced bread flour with higher protein content.  Store-bought bread tends to be expensive even for the price of the raw materials, and as to the quality you are getting – eh.  In Sweden, the situation is better than in a lot of other countries I’ve lived in, but even here the bread is still… eh.  Some of it is healthy and wholegrain, but then it is either expensive, tastes eh, or both.

And besides, the stuff you get from the shop just doesn’t have that freshly-baked smell as the bakery loaves.  And those are expensive.  We are talking about a small (half-kilo) loaf going for 50 sek (about €5) for the artisan-style stuff.  And, is it better than the things I can make at home after a few months’ practice?  Let’s not pretend here that I am some sort of master baker – I so am not, never taken a baking class in my life, in fact.  Microbiology – yes.  Baking – no.  Though the skills do overlap.

Initial attempts - Stockholm Sourdough 1.1. I dropped the dough because it stuck to the floured towel, and then baked it anyway. Behold, its resulting "rustc" looks!

And the answer is – well, no, it’s not.  It’s about at the level of my initial attempts at baking, and the sourdough bread I’ve produced recently knocks the socks off most things I’ve seen in bakeries.  And if someone as lax at the whole instruction-following as me can manage it, so can you.  Going back to the price question – a 2kg bag of flour makes several loaves – and for the good stuff, it costs about 20 sek (€2).  And even if you count the energy in (some 1-2 sek per loaf in a home oven if I remember correctly), it’s still worth it in price.  Oh, and you can put anything you like in it.  And salt and season it as much as you prefer.  And the effort, especially with minimal modern machinery (we are talking a handheld mixer – I don’t even own a bowl mixer!) – is very, very small.

Not to mention, most bread you’ll bake at home (unless it’s dessert!) will be healthier as it’ll contain better ingredients, less random additives, and almost certainly less sugar.

So, now that we’ve established it’s worthwhile, what stops people from baking?

One of a few things, apparently.  What kept me from baking bread for a long time was that it’s harped about as being difficult.  The kneading is labor-intensive, supposedly, and it can fail to rise, or it can collapse in the oven.  And don’t even think of trying sourdough – that, supposedly, will stink up your endire kitchen, if not the entire house!  The horror!  And all of those rumors conspire to tell you that you shouldn’t bother.  There’s perfectly good bread in the supermarket, after all… Well, that’s a load of what comes out of a cow’s back end, frankly.

Focaccia with Young Garlic, Olives and Sea Salt

Baking bread is easy.  (The more mysterious and fascinating is the case of my friend who’s coming in two hours!)  Before you decide to learn about sourdough like I did a few months ago, you should try commercial yeast – simply because it’s easier.  It’s like a well-trained dog:  you tell it to sit and it does.  You tell it to run, and it does.  You learn and you gain confidence and experience.  Sourdough bread is utterly gorgeous – far superior to the regular commercial-yeast bread in many cases, but well, that’s like taming a wild animal for a pet:  very doable, but takes some understanding of the beast.  Hence, get a dog (commercial yeast), and practice first.

Learning to bake with regular yeast, aside from providing you with lovely fresh bread on reasonably short schedule – accomplishes this – it teaches you to handle living yeast (how to not kill it and make it thrive and rise your bread), and it teaches you to develop gluten.  There are as many methods here as there are bakers – some knead the heck out of it, some use and swear by a bowl mixer, some mix it and then do stretch-and-folds*** and avoid kneading altogether, and I use a handheld mixer with a couple of dough hooks until the dough comes together, and then use stretch-and-folds myself.  Once you have learned these two basics – keeping yeast alive and developing gluten, it’s a short step in patience to proofing your bread (allowing it to rise properly), and a hot oven – and if yours is difficult, you can always ‘cheat’ a better oven with a pizza stone or a cast-iron dutch oven (casserole) if you really want to make it easy.

There are gazillions of yeasted bread recipes around, but if you want mine, there are a couple of really easy ones I’ve posted here, here, and also here.  And by easy, I really mean easy.  And there are, obviously, pictures!

So yes.  Bread.  It’s inexpensive, it’s easy, it’s delicious and you should absolutely make it at home – for your own eating pleasure, the sense of accomplishment, for proving the myths wrong, for the sake of your wallet, and for various friends who’ll love eating it, and if you give them a loaf, will totally adore you for it.  I promise.

*** The link is to a website made by a guy named Mike – a baker in USA – which I found amazingly helpful in learning about baking with sourdough bread from point zero.  It also has a lot of good tips and techniques, and even videos which are wonderful at explaining and troubleshooting your baking process.  It may look like a lot of text, but it’s very worthwhile to those wanting to learn to bake.  Sure, you can get a baking book later, but when starting out – free – and good! – advice, what’s not to like?

Recipe Test, Success, Sourdough!

Earlier today I’ve posted my current recipe (with some rather lengthy and detailed instructions) for Stockholm Sourdough bread, along with a promise to test it again later – so, the result of said test just came out of the oven.

Stockholm Sourdough

I’d say this is proof positive that the recipe does, indeed, work!  Currently it’s scenting the entire apartment to the point where though I am not too hungry, I want to go and tear a piece off… but, banish the thought!  This one is going to cool well, get wrapped up really pretty and come with us tonight to be given away as a present.

Stockholm Sourdough 2.0

As those who have been reading this with any sort of regularity will know, I’ve been happily cultivating a sourdough starter and trying to learn how to bake real artisan-style naturally leavened (sourdough) bakery bread for several months.

Moreover, I’ve been trying to perfect my sourdough recipe for everyday, standby bread that would go with most things and that T would absolutely love (it’s an important criterion!).  My first decently successful attempt was eaten happily some weeks ago, however as I’ve mentioned back then, it wasn’t really a recipe, but rather a work in progress – progress which continued through the purchase of a banetton, a trip to the Stockholm Essencefabriken to buy some traditional Swedish bread spices, and a rummage through my dishware for the appropriate cast-iron dutch oven to bake it all in.  Then there was the frantic posting back and forth on sourdough forums with questions regarding proofing, and then there was another attempt…

Without further ado, I proudly present to you – Stockholm Sourdough 2.0:

Stockholm Sourdough 2.0 in all of its 1.3kg-loaf glory

First of all, yes – it is large.  And yes, the crust is crunchy but not too thick, and the crumb was lovely and open and fluffy and fantastically aromatic.  I’d not used bread spices before, and I have to say that I now know why they are so popular in Sweden – the bitter orange peel gave the bread a gorgeous golden tinge, and the smell is simply amazing!  I have to pronounce this one a success, and since this time around I’ve documented the recipe as I went along (and I am retesting it today, and again later this week), I am happy to share it.

This bread uses a three-stage sourdough process, which is a lot less work than it sounds, but it does mean you have to start it a couple of days in advance.  On the up side, stage 2 (levain) can be refrigerated up to a week after initial fermentation, and the final stage can be performed on the same day you pull it out of the fridge.  Timing of first two stages is none too strict, and can certainly be worked around a study or work schedule.

What you need:  (Makes 2 large loaves over a couple of days – or on the same day if you insist)

• A living sourdough starter (if yours is frozen or dried, you will have to reactivate it first – if it is refrigerated, it’s absolutely fine as it is).
• A 2kg bag of high-protein content flour (I use 12% protein)
• 4 (2×2) teaspoons of sea salt (I use good coarse sea salt that I pound fine in a mortar and then measure it out)
• Water – cold or finger-warm.  (I use cold water if I am not in a hurry, or finger-warm if I want the bread to stick to schedule.)
• Refined rapeseed or light olive oil – to oil bowls, etc.
• 6 (2×3) teaspoons of Swedish bread spices.  (This is entirely optional and the bread will rise perfectly fine without these so if you dislike the idea, you can skip them, use your own mix, or another spice mix if you prefer).  Swedish bread spices are a finely ground mix of:

1. ground dried bitter orange peel
2. star anice
3. coriander seed
4. fennel seed
5. caraway seed.

Stage 1:  Starter

If begun in the morning, it’ll be ready to start stage 2 in evening.

• Take your sourdough starter (this can be cold from the fridge), and mix 2 heaping tablespoons of it with about 1dl of water and 1.5 dl of flour to fairly thick consistency.
• Scrape it into a glass jar or measuring cup, cover (I use a washed-out jam jar with a screw lid which I don’t screw all the way on to allow gas exchange), and leave at room temperature for 6-18 hours (this will depend on your room temperature, how fast your starter is, etc. – but don’t worry, it’s not very time-critical!) until the starter has at least doubled in volume (if I do this in the morning, mine tends to be close to triple by the end of the day), and is full of bubbles.
• When it is, you can proceed to stage 2, OR you can stick it in the fridge and wait with stage 2 until it’s convenient (1-3 days).

Stage 2:  Levain

This takes about 5 minutes of work + 6-8 hours at room temperature – perfect to start in evening of day of stage 1, and leave overnight.  Quantities given make enough levain for 2 large loaves to be baked the same day or over the next week.  If you want less levain, halve the quantities, but I prefer to make a larger batch of this so that I can repeat stage 3 (final dough and baking) twice without having to go through stages 1-2 again.

• Take all of starter from stage 1 (or you can take all except 2 tablespoons which you can save if you want to keep a sample of your starter), and place in a large mixing bowl.
• Add approximately 3dl of water to the starter bit by bit, breaking the starter down as you add.  If you add too much water too fast, it’ll be harder to mix it.  a balloon whisk helps here, but a wooden spoon will do just fine too.  Continue mixing the slurry until all the water is added.
• Add 500g (that’d be 4.2 cups or 9dl) of flour, and mix until combined into a somewhat sloppy dough.  You can do this with a wooden spoon, but I am lazy and use a handheld mixer with dough hooks on low speed for a few minutes.
• Oil a 2L plastic box all over the inside (including inside the lid), or a bowl, and plonk the levain into it.  Cover (with said lid or some plastic wrap aka clingfilm), and leave at room temperature for 6-8 hours.  Overnight works fine.
• When the levain is puffed up, you can use it right away or you can put the bowl or box in the fridge and use it at any point over the next week.

Stage 3:  Final Dough and Baking – for 1 large loaf.

If you want to bake all the levain you’ve prepared into 2 loaves on same day, simply double the quantities of everything and divide the dough in two before final pre-shaping, shaping and proofing.  Note that if you are proofing in banettons, you will need 2 banettons large enough to hold ~1.3kg of dough each.  I would recommend baking the breads sequentially, as most house ovens won’t fit two of those at one time, and placing one of them into a refrigerator to finish proofing about 2.5 hours into final proof to avoid over-proofing it while the first loaf bakes.  I normally bake one loaf immediately and the other one the day after or a few days after.

• Measure out 500g flour and the 3 teaspoons of spices (if using) into a mixing bowl and mix with a dry whisk to combine.
• Slowly add approximately 3.5 dl of water while mixing with a wooden spoon or a mixer with dough hooks until the dough comes together (it will be fairly stiff and you may need to use your hands towards the end if you have started with a spoon).  Cover with plastic wrap (clingfilm) and leave for at least 15 minutes (30 min won’t hurt it either) to autolyze (let the flour absorb water).
• Sprinkle 2 teaspoons of salt over the dough.
• Take ~400g (about half of Stage 2 recipe) levain and add it to the same bowl (or all the levain if doubling quantities for 2 loaves together).
• Mix together to incorporate levain and salt into the dough.  This really is easier with a mixer, otherwise you will need to knead it together, but only enough to mix – kneading is not used in this recipe for gluten development.  Shape the dough into a rough ball.
• Place the dough into a cleaned and oiled bowl and turn to coat in oil.  Cover with plastic wrap.
• Bulk fermentation of the dough at this point is about 3-4 hours.  I do a stretch-and-fold every 1 hour starting at 30 minutes after mixing, and stop when the dough is pillowy and doubled in bulk.  Some people do this on an oiled surface, but I find i can just lift the dough out of the bowl with lightly oiled hands, let it stretch as it hangs, and fold it in my hands, then place it back into the bowl – easy!
• After 3-4 hours, the dough will be soft and fluffy and will have doubled in bulk.  If using 2x quantities for 2 loaves, here is where you cut it in half and proceed as follows.  If you are using half the levain for 1 loaf, no need to cut the dough.
• Take your dough and place it on a lightly floured surface.  It should be soft and very elastic and not really very sticky at this point.
• Gently fold and preshape it into a boule, place on a well-floured spot on the surface and cover.  Allow to rest for 10-15 minutes.
• In the meantime, dust your banetton with flour.  I use a little bit of regular wheat flour and then some wholemeal coarsely ground flour on it.  Or you can flour a kitchen towel and line a large bowl with it instead.  Note:  more flour is better than less – you really don’t want this sucker to stick.  Dough stuck in banetton or towel = utter misery.  I speak from experience.
• Finish shaping your dough into a ball by stretching the surface and gently tucking the ends underneat it, then pinch the bottom seam shut and place the dough ball into the floured banetton OR the floured-towel lined bowl seam side down.
• Preheat your oven with the cast-iron casserole dish inside to 250°C.  If your dish is deep enough for the bread, preheat the lid too (make sure your knob is heatproof to the required temperature!).  Note, the cast iron will be very hot – please read tips and cautions about baking in a cast-iron dutch oven/casserole dish here.  For this loaf, I used a shallow round casserole bottom and a stainless-steel bowl for top since the lid was too flat to contain the bread in the shallow dish.  Do not preheat the stainless-steel bowl if you will use that.
• Cover and allow to proof for 1-1.5 hours until the dough has close to doubled or doubled in bulk and passes the poke test.  (Poke test – poke dough with a finger, the surface should not bounce back immediately, but should rise up again very slowly.)
• When the time has elapsed, oven is preheated, and the dough passes the poke test, uncover the banetton or bowl, place a piece of baking parchment over the opening and hold it tightly – then quickly invert the banetton/bowl onto a counter or table so that the bread ends up on your baking parchment.  Lift the banetton or bowl+towel off.
• Since you proofed seam-side down, it’s now up so there is no need to slash the bread – it will open up in a natural pattern.
• Using thick oven mitts, take the very hot dutch oven or casserole bottom out of the oven and put it on a surface covered with a wooden cutting board or something else large and heatproof and non-slippery.  Pick up the baking parchment with your dough and gently place it into the very hot cast-iron dish.  Cover with a stainless steel bowl, or if the dish is deep enough, its own lid also works fine (in which case I recommend preheating the lid too).
• Place the covered dish back in the 250°C oven, and bake for 25 minutes covered.  Then remove the cover (whether it’s lid or bowl – if it is a bowl, you may need to use a butter knife or such to pull it up before you can grab it with an oven-mitted hand), reduce heat to 210 or 220°C and bake for further 25-35 minutes until the crust is deep golden-brown.  This is a large loaf so 50-60 minute baking time is not unusual, and you don’t want it to end up underbaked.
• Cool on a rack for at least 1 hour or until entirely cool to touch before cutting.  I failed at this last one and cut it while still warm because it was dinnertime and we were hungry – but the crumb will be even prettier if you wait.  Trust me.

Crumb very slightly squished due to cutting while still warm

Bake, eat, enjoy!

Stockholm Sourdough: a work in progress

The following post, unlike usually, is not precisely a recipe.

Instead, it is a chance to show off this gorgeous sourdough bread I’ve baked a couple of days a go, and brag.  Well, that and a rough sketch of the process which led to it, which is precisely what it is – a rough draft for a process that will, in the near future, become a recipe I could share with more confidence.  In meantime, all this is, is a successful first try at creating my own sourdough bread recipe by eye and feel, rather than by following any precise measures or instructions from the many good sources I tend to use and like.

Stockholm Sourdough: Take 1

Since I’ve started playing around with wild yeast two months ago, I believe my sourdough-baking ability has improved sufficiently for me to want to experiment and find “the bread” recipe that would work for me and taste really, really good as everyday eating bread – and with the added benefit of the fact that long-fermented sourdough bread is scientifically shown to be lower-GI than regular yeasted bread made with the same-quality flour, and as such, of much interest to my sugar-sensitive self (and to anyone predisposed to type II diabetes).

Now, in general, I prefer strong flavors and I love cheese, herb, nut and meat breads, but for an all-round bread, those aren’t what is needed – rather, I want to develop a bread that I could happily replicate a couple of times a month and not get tired of.

With that in mind, I decided to experiment some.  The starter I’ve used is my own 100% hydration Swedish-flour-grown wild yeast sourdough, which I keep in the refrigerator and feed any time I bake (which is a couple of times a month to once a week).

I refreshed the starter twice, to a total of about 300ml over a period of 24 hours (2x feedings), then added ~4 cups of high-protein wheat flour (12% protein ICA Vetemjöl special), 2 teaspoons fine sea salt, and approximately 2 cups of finger-warm water.  All of the above was mixed and allowed to rest for about 10 minutes, then mixed again with dough-hook equipped hand mixer until gluten development.  The result was a fairly soft dough, which I scraped onto a floured surface and kneaded a little by hand until it was silky and elastic.  The dough was placed in an oiled bowl to bulk-ferment, and was taken out 3 times at 10-15 minute intervals to stretch-and-fold on an oiled surface (same countertop I’d used for kneading, but with flour cleaned off and surface washed, dried and oiled).

After this, I left the dough to ferment for approximately 3 hours until it doubled in bulk, then took it out again, cut it in half, gave it a little light kneading and shaped the two pieces into round boules, and placed them seam-side up into floured-towel lined colander and bowl (as I don’t own any banettons yet), and allowed this one to proof for 3 hours until doubled in size again (the other one got fridge-retarded overnight).  (Note for the future – perhaps 1-2 hour longer bulk fermentation would benefit this.  Alternatively, a longer final proof might not go amiss.)

For the baking, I preheated my oven to 250°C with my large enameled cast-iron dutch oven and its lid inside.  My dutch oven has an enameled metal lid knob, but it was made by a company called Olive&Thyme, which is sadly no longer in business.  However, I believe LeCreuset also offers metal knobs for their dutch ovens, and I think Chasseur do as well.  Once the oven was up to the requisite temperature, I took the bloody hot dutch oven out of it (a pair of large oven mitts is a great help in manipulating the hot and heavy piece of cookware!), and placed it on a terry-towel covered sturdy step stool – 1: it’s sturdy and thus unlikely to tip the bloody hot dutch oven onto my foot, and 2: it placed said bloody hot dutch oven at a comfortably low height to carefully place the bread in it.  I then inverted the bowl in which I was proofing my bread onto a piece of baking parchment, quickly slashed the top of it with a sharp knife, and gently lowered the baking parchment (held by its sides) into the dutch oven.  I then covered it with its bloody hot lid, and popped it back into the oven.

Note:  all the references to bloody hot in the above paragraph are to draw your attention to the fact that, having been preheated in a 250°C oven till shut-off, and considering the heat capacity properties of cast iron, it is something which will stay hot enough to sizzle your skin off if you touch it carelessly.  So please, treat it as a caution – beware of the hot surfaces of the dutch oven and its lid, and I really, really don’t recommend doing this when small children are in the vicinity.

As per instructions from my crafty little brother, I baked it with the lid shut for 20 minutes, and then with the lid open for another 15 (though I think 10 would have sufficed as well), and cooled it on the rack.  Resulting in the beautifully puffy and browned bread pictured above.  The crumb was airy and light, and the crust crackled wonderfully as it cooled, resulting in what I will now strive to replicate under more controlled and measured conditions – my newly-named Stockholm Sourdough™ (recipe to follow in a week or two).

How (not) To Glue Yourself To Kitchen Counter (adventures with rye bread)

This post is dedicated to all those well-meaning bread-baking books and blogs which I have consulted regarding baking rye bread.  They have all been full of good and helpful (no sarcasm) tips and explanations, and the result of my efforts has been lovely and very, very worthwhile.

Finnish 100% Rye Sourdough Bread

In fact, these worthy sources have even mentioned, offhandedly, that rye dough tends to be sticky but that I should not add more flour because it will not become any less sticky from it.  That’s fair enough.  There is just one thing none of them thought important enough to mention – and that is, that by “sticky”, what they actually meant is – it’s a bloody glue!

No, I am not exaggerating.  If you’ve made wheat bread, or even part-rye bread, you have no idea what this means.  Allow me to elaborate:  the dough will be sticky and it will remain sticky.  And it will stick to your bowl, utensil, stainless steel mixer dough hooks, your (floured) kitchen counter, and yes, your hands.  And gods forbid you let it set on your hands for a few minutes while kneading it, because – get this! – it will then be difficult to scrub off even with liberal use of dish soap and a nail brush under running (cold) water.  I’ve never encountered anything like this short of superglue – paint and regular wood glues are normally easier to get off hands than rye dough!  In the end, I had de-ryed my hands with just that bit of extra effort and scrubbing, however.  So, here’s your warning – by floured surface and hands, all those helpful sources mean: cover that counter with a thick layer of flour when you do the final forming of the dough, and drown that sucker in flour, else you will never be apart from your kitchen counter, bowl or utensil you happened to grab again!

Now, if this has not made you run away screaming discouraged you, I will, by all means, share my other insights (other than the “don’t try this at home unless you do own a nail brush”) into making a 100% rye bread.  All in all, glueing self to items aside, it is both, doable and rather worth the while.

The bread is absolutely fantastic – it fills the entire apartment with a wonderful fresh rye bread scent while it bakes.  It is aromatically sour (both from the sourdough which I fermented for approximately 20 hours, and from the rye and caraway), dense and, to abuse a buzz phrase, literally packed full of flavor.  A friend of mine, after having tasted it, said that most of all it reminded him of Finn Crisp, only in softer bread form (they actually have a caraway version which really does taste similar!).  The texture and density allows it to be sliced into very thin slices with a sharp serrated bread knife without breaking.  We’ve eaten it lightly buttered with Serrano ham, heavily buttered on both sides and toasted for breakfast, and simply sliced with dinner.  If you like sour rye and strong flavors, this is the bread for you, and I can’t recommend it enough!

... goes amazingly with thinly sliced salami, garlic, dill and robust-flavored chanterelle mushrooms, too!

This recipe for Finnish Sourdough Rye is adapted from Jan Hedh’s “Bröd” (“Bread”) book, which I can happily suggest to anyone who wants to bake bread and can read Swedish, or, failing that, Danish or Norwegian.  Sadly, the book is not translated into English (that I know of), but this is what I am here for (tonight, anyway)!

Before I list the recipe, a few notes regarding 100% rye bread in order not to confuse expectations:

1. Rye has a low gluten content, and therefore cannot develop the typical elastic dough texture the way wheat flour does.  The dough will remain dense and somewhat chunky, with a slight wet-sand texture even when it has risen.
2. Pure rye will never rise as high as wheat or wheat-blend dough does.  The loaf will not be a “brick”, but it will be fairly dense, with close crumb and small pores.  It will be heavy for its size compared to wheat bread.  This is a recipe of Finnish origin – those of you who know what traditional Russian breads are like, this will be similar to those.
3. This recipe requires a 12+ hour fermentation period, so it is best to prepare it over the course of two days, unless you want to be baking in the middle of the night at the end of day 1.

Yield:  2 breads

Ingredients:  Day 1

• 250ml water, finger-warm
• 125g active rye-fed sourdough starter (wheat starter will do if it rises properly after a feeding of rye flour)
• 400g fine wholemeal rye flour

Ingredients: Day 2

• All the dough made on day 1
• 30g fresh yeast
• 180ml water, finger-warm
• 500ml sourmilk or buttermilk
• 675g fine wholemeal rye flour
• 30g sea salt
• 1 heaping tablespoon caraway seeds (entirely optional but I like)

Instructions: Day 1

• Place flour into a large mixing bowl and mix in starter and water.  I use a handheld mixer with dough hooks on low speed, but I am sure a larger mixer or a spoon and putting one’s back into it will work.
• The dough will be pretty thick – add more water by a spoonful if the mixture is too obviously dry.
• Cover with cling film and allow to ferment for 12+ hours (from midday to morning the next day in my case) in a warm non-drafty place.

Instructions: Day 2

• Mix cake yeast into water and allow to stand 10 minutes.
• Add all other ingredients except salt to dough from Day 1, and mix on low speed for 10 minutes.  (You can mix with a spoon or knead with a hand in bowl, but in case of wholemeal rye, a mixer really does wonders.)
• Add salt and mix another 5 minutes.
• Place in a slightly oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and allow to rise for an hour in a warm place.
• Prepare 2 baking sheets lined with parchment.  I use aluminium mesh sheets so that they can be placed directly in a hot oven, but you can preheat your pizza stone if you have one and place breads onto that when done proofing instead.
• Take dough out onto well-floured surface and cut in half.  Form two round breads and place on baking parchment.
• Allow to rise at room temperature for 60-90 minutes until roughly doubled in bulk and the dough surface has begun to visibly crack.
• Preheat oven to 250°C.
• Place your bread sheet (I did this one after another, not two together in the oven) inside, or use a board or peel to transfer your bread onto your pizza stone if using, and toss a few ice cubes into the bottom of oven.
• Shut the door quickly and watch the oven for the first 10 minutes, adding ice cubes as each previous batch evaporates in order to maintain steam pressure.  Make sure to keep face out of the way when opening oven with steam – this will be very hot!
• Reduce temperature to 190°C and bake another 50-55 minutes until bread is dark brown and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
• Cool on a rack for at least an hour before eating.

Note: After removing the first loaf, I reheated the oven back to 250°C and repeated the process with the second loaf – an extra hour of proofing harmed it not at all.  Also, your bread should come out even more floured than mine in the picture if you want it not to glue you to the aforementioned counter.  Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way!

The bread keeps for up to a week without any sign of mold wrapped in a plastic bag at room temperature.  I’ve frozen one half of one loaf, as the book suggests it will freeze well, but have not defrosted it yet, so the judgement on that is still out.  However, considering how well it kept without it and how fast we ate it, I am not sure I needed to freeze it at all.