How To Make Your Own Sourdough Starter (and why you should)

Pictured:  Stockholm Sourdough 2.0

I think I will start today’s post with the why before the how.  Now that I think of it, it is how I usually structure my posts anyway, but in today’s case there are actually two ‘why’-s:  they why of why you should make your own sourdough starter, and the why I am writing this post at all.  After all, there are so many instructions on the internet about how to do this – right?

Right.  There are actually many instructions about how to make a sourdough starter.  In fact, I have read at least two good ones which have helped me immensely in creating my own starter… but!  But, in the year since I’ve made it (the starter has no name, in case you wondered – I don’t name what I eat), I’ve learned a whole lot about sourdough starters which I had not known back then, most of which has to do with making the whole business more foolproof and less problematic and labor-intensive.  And when you think about it, our foremothers and -fathers baked bread in their busy schedules for thousands of years without the use of sterilized this, special that, or having time to feed the starter every eight or however many hours, the way many internet ‘sourdough gurus’ would declaim you simply must!  The truth is, it’s far simpler than that, and a lot less messy, and this is why I decided to write my own guideline for making and caring for a sourdough starter.

And then, perhaps a few insights into microbiology offered in the previous post don’t hurt one’s understanding of how to take care of this, either.

The why of why should you make your own sourdough starter is far simpler.  Do you want to bake your own delicious and healthier-for-you sourdough bread?  Do you want to save money on it?  Do you want to have guests greedily reach for more bread at a table regardless of what else is on it?  Then you want to bake sourdough bread.  And for that you need a starter.  So, you should make it.

As an aside, if you have someone who can give you a starter culture, or can buy it in a shop to perpetuate for yourself, or would prefer to get a mail-order dehydrated culture, by all means, do so.  I did not opt for those (except for a piece of Polish starter which I managed to kill – Sylwia, if you are reading this, I will come to beg another bit from you at some point!), but decided to cultivate my own starter because I find microbiology fascinating, and I wanted something authentically mine.  And what can be more authentic than making your own local starter with locally sourced flour, local wild yeasts, and the resident population of microbes?  By now you probably suspect I don’t get out much (I do, actually), but if not, and you want the fun of your own starter, then read on!

The ‘how’ of making and perpetuating a starter is, like I’ve said, a lot easier than many people would have you believe.  Why they make it sound more difficult and complicated and labor-intensive than it has to be, I don’t know.  Perhaps it is to work on their own ‘blogger’ or ‘food writer’ cred.  Don’t get me wrong, some of their advice is very good, and the two places I’ve read for advice on sourdough baking (here and here) give no bad advice – if you follow their instructions to the letter, you will have a good sourdough starter.  It is just that I have found that a lot of the more labor-intensive bits which are ‘common knowledge’ about sourdough starter are either just not true (yes you can use stainless steel bowls and utensils!), or unnecessary.

So, let’s get to it!  What do you need to start and perpetuate a sourdough starter:

• Patience.  About two weeks’ worth (no, I don’t know where to buy any, either)
• Tap water (cold)  Addendum:  use tap water if it is drinkable.  If you filter your tap water to drink it yourself, filter it for the starter as well.
• Whole wheat flour (50g) – preferably local and reasonably fresh
• White wheat flour and rye flour (latter is optional)
• Bowl (glass, ceramic, plastic or steel – food-safe), spoon, glass jar with lid (washed out pickle or honey jar at least 1L in volume is good), volume measuring spoons or cup, kitchen scale or a measuring cup which approximates grams for flour, maybe a whisk if you want to be fancy

For cheating/troubleshooting/prevention of issues:

• 1 teaspoon of liquid accumulated in a bucket of live natural yogurt (ready source of food-grade lactobacillus)
• 100ml of supermarket-bought pineapple juice from a carton

What you need to do:

This section will be broken down into Day 1, Day 2, Days 3-? (usually 7-14), Troubleshooting (or in case you want to start things off with the cheats that aren’t for purists but work), and Maintaining Your Starter, for the obvious reasons.

Day 1:

• Mix 50g of whole wheat flour and 50ml cold tap water in a small bowl until fully combined.  Scrape mixture into the glass jar (it should fill your chosen jar no more than 1/4 of volume to allow for rise later on).
• Cover the jar with its lid, screwed on part-way (to allow a small amount of air flow but no direct contact with dust falling into the jar from above).  Leave until the next day.

Day 2:

• Remove about half of the mixture and throw it away.
  • Here is why:  until your starter is ready, you do not want to use the discarded portions of your starter for anything food-related – simple reason is that until you have an established symbiosis of acid-manufacturing microbes (a ready starter), which will make sure no spoilage organisms such as molds or pathogens can grow in it, spoilage organisms can be present in your starter.
• Add 25ml water and 25g of whole wheat flour to the remaining starter.  Add water first, mix the starter into it, then add flour.  Cover with the lid and leave be till next day.

Days 3-? (Usually 7-10 or so):

• Throw away half the mixture.  Transfer the remaining half to a small bowl.  Wash out the jar with dish soap and water, rinse well, and dry.
• Add 25ml of water and 25g of all-purpose or white bread flour to the bowl of starter.  I recommend mixing a teaspoon of rye flour as part of the flour as well (sourdough starters love rye.  I am not actually sure why, but they do).  Mix, return to clean jar, cover and leave be until next day.
• Repeat daily until starter is ready* or at least until Day 7.

At this point you will begin to notice bubbles which form overnight in the starter.  It might, in fact, even rise and fall in-between your visits, leaving some streaks on the glass of the jar (this is why you should clean it – so you can see what your starter has been doing while you aren’t looking!).  These are good signs.  Repeat the routine daily, stirring the starter so it collapses before throwing away half.

During this stage of development, the starter may well smell spoiled, and sometimes may have a film forming over the surface.  These are not a problem – they should go away by the time the starter is ready.

* Starter is ready to bake with (and to store for future use) when it is at least seven days old and it rises on a daily basis to at least twice its height (volume) in the jar, filling it with bubbles 6-12 hours after it’s been fed.  Please note the ‘and’ there – it should be at least a week old, and it should rise.  Not one or the other.

The third and very important thing is that any off-smells which may have been present during the initial week or two should be gone, replaced by a fresh and yeasty scent.  A small hint of acetone (nail polish) scent may also be present – it is not acetone but ethyl acetate, and it is an indication that acetobacteria are taking up residence in your starter, which is a good thing.  The starter at this point can be tasted cautiously – it should be quite sour to the taste.

Once the starter is at least a week old, rises regularly a few hours after feeding, and smells yeasty, you are ready for the next stage – keeping and storing the starter.

Maintenance:

A lot of sites tell you that you must keep your starter at room temperature and you must feed it every 8 or 12 hours.  I disagree.  This is unnecessarily labor-intensive, and would discourage even me from keeping this up and having sourdough starter around.

What I do instead, is keep my starter in the fridge.  The only thing you should know about this, is that it keeps better if you feed it and put it directly into the fridge (lid on but not very tightly to allow air flow), rather than stick it into the fridge after it rises and falls (is ‘ripe’).  So, after a feeding, you can put the starter into the fridge and forget about it for 2-4 weeks, no problem.

When you want to bake, get the jar out, and feed the starter.  If it has been less than 2 weeks, you can simply take a tablespoon of it and feed that and use it to bake, retaining the jar in the fridge – if it’s been longer, I figure the starter is getting hungry, and so I tend to take entire jar out, mix twice what I need, return half of it to a (cleaned) jar to the fridge, and use the other half for baking.  You can also freeze a ‘retaining’ sample in a small plastic tub in case you manage to kill the starter somehow – or bake up all of your starter.  I haven’t done that, but I’ve heard it’s traumatic if and when it happens, so you can have a bit of ‘insurance’ in the freezer.

If you want to keep more than just the 100g of starter around, feel free to feed it more for a larger total amount.  Once the starter is ready, I tend to keep approximately 150g of it in the refrigerator.  I prefer my starter to be 100% hydration – meaning that I advocate using equal amounts (by weight) of flour and water at every feeding, and all my sourdough recipes are geared and tested with this type of starter.  If you want yours thicker or thinner, feel free to experiment once you feel you have the hang of it – just keep in mind that the more water in starter, the faster it will both, rise and fall.

Troubleshooting and ‘Cheating’:

There are two additional pieces of advice I would like to offer here, one which I have used myself (not being a huge purist after all), and one that I have read about, but which appears to me to be both, microbiologically sound and easy to use (and won’t hurt anything in any case).

The first advice is using the teaspoon of yogurt water (the liquid that collects in a bucket of any good live natural yogurt) in your initial starter culture – mixing that into the water quantity on Day 1 of your starter.  This will ensure that you have lactobacilli present in the starter from the get-go.  I have done this and it has worked really well, so I do recommend it, although by all accounts it will work fine without introducing the lactobacilli there – theoretically there are enough present on our skin and in our kitchens to inoculate the culture.

The second piece of advice is for those whose starter ‘misbehaves’ and either rises well for a while and then stops, or smells off.  This advice is to use shop-bought pineapple juice instead of water on Day 1 and Day 2 of the cycle, and then swap to the water per routine instructions above.  What this is meant to accomplish (and does according to the source), is ensuring an acidic environment for the starter to begin with, which will stop development of the wrong (non-acid-tolerant) strains of yeast and pathogens, and allow only acid-loving organisms to survive (which is what you want).  I have not tested this yet, but I am curious and might do so just to see how well it works.  According to all I’ve heard of this method, it works, and does so really well.

I realize this got wordy, so this is all there is to it, folks – once the starter is ready, you can use it in any sourdough recipe.  If the recipe calls for more starter than you have, making more is very easy – just add equal amounts of water and flour (by weight) to some of what you have, mix and leave overnight.  Oh and obviously you can first impress all your foodie friends with home-baked sourdough bread, and then magnanimously bestow pieces of the mystical bread-making grey gloop on them if they want to experiment themselves.  So, have fun!

Sourdough Focaccia (and what ‘sourdough’ is and is not)

So, in the wake of my trip to Barcelona and some home improvement, I have cooked and eaten, but not photographed much in the recent weeks. This all changed yesterday when I was baking this and realized that it’s too gorgeous not to photograph and tell about.  And it tastes (I write this anticipating the very last piece of this for lunch!) amazing – the bottom crust is browned and lovely with olive oil, the top is golden, the crumb is chewy and moist and aromatic, with just a touch of the sourdough tang to it – which sets the herbiness of rosemary and oregano off really, really well.  In short, if you like baking, you need to bake this.  If you have only tried the common cafe ‘focaccia’ (which tends to resemble dry toast more than anything, at least hereabouts), you truly need to try this.  There is just no comparison – this wins on every count (unless you compete in ‘dry’, then maybe not – but then it’s not a cracker!).

There are no complicated techniques involved here (other than owning some sourdough starter – more on that shortly), and the entire process is very very easy – and really, so very much worth the fairly small effort!

The other thing which spurred this post is feeling that I really ought to get the rant about what sourdough is and is not off my chest. Because, really, people (whom I, per usual, will not name) who have food shows and are supposedly ‘bakers’ seriously ought to get their heads out of where the darkness reigns supreme, and maybe take a class in microbiology. Or, barring that, at least one in sourdough baking.  Or do something else to acquire a friggin’ clue.

What I refer to, is the rather common phenomenon I see permeating both, cookbooks and online recipes and cooking videos, whereby a celebrity (or a blog writer, or whoever) goes something like “this recipe calls for a sourdough starter… if you don’t have your own sourdough starter, you can easily make it overnight by mixing some water, flour and bakers’ yeast…”  and proceed with the recipe without batting an eye.  This, frankly, annoys me – not because the recipe in question is not good (it may well turn out fantastic!), but because it’s not sourdough.  It’s a simple recipe with a ‘sponge’ or ‘biga’.  Which could be a sourdough sponge, but unless it’s made with actual sourdough culture rather than baker’s yeast, is not a sourdough sponge.

Why does it annoy me?  Because it muddles terminology, and I have a science education.  Things have names for a reason.  When a doctor prescribes you some antibiotics, your pharmacist doesn’t just go “have some antihistamines, they’re also pills and sort of sound like that too”.  When a reader or listener wants to bake sourdough, they imagine the sourdough flavor, or perhaps they want it for the health benefits (lowered GI, easier to digest), and instead they are being handed a recipe based on baker’s yeast is simply false advertising.  Oh, and I guess it annoys me as a student of food law, too.

Why is this common?  My guess would be, because foodie culture is making sourdough bread more popular again, people want recipes for sourdough that’d taste like that fancy levain bread they had at a cafe, or that sour-tangy loaf they bought at a bakery.  But… giving ‘difficult’ recipes or advice regarding making starter (7-14 days) aren’t going to sell food shows, or cookbooks – because, sadly, people who grew up with the 70s, 80s and even 90s idea that a béarnaise sauce can come out of a dried packet, don’t take well to being told something takes time and you can’t get around it by using something you have on hand as a shortcut.  And so, the “sourdough-but-you-can-just-use-any-bought-yeast” recipes proliferate.  And people try them, and they never taste the way sourdough did and they give up on sourdough baking before they even actually tried it.  So, the practice annoys me as a food blogger, too.  Make it trifold annoyance, then.  Sigh.

The really silly thing is, these days you can get sourdough starter from a bakery, or you can mail-order it dried, or you can even buy it at some of the better gourmet shops – at which point you can simply perpetuate it forever without the effort of making your own.  Or you can make your own like I did over a year ago – and mine is going strong despite me frequently leaving it in the fridge for a month without any feeding (or even checking to see what it is doing).  In fact, I think I need to write a better summary of making and care of starter after a year of experience with mine – note for the near future.  Either way, sourdough starter is not hard to make (or get), and it’s not at all hard to keep alive if you have a refrigerator (and most of us reading this online do – or I hope so, anyway).

But, back to the title of the post – what sourdough starter is, is a culture of lactobacilli (bacteria which sour milk to create yogurt, for example), acetobacteria (bacteria which make vinegar), and an acid-tolerant species of yeast (one of a few, none of which are the species sold as baker’s yeast commercially) living symbiotically in a mix of water and flour, together comprising the greyish gloop that is referred to as “starter”.  Because it is a living culture, it needs to be fed occasionally – daily if it is kept at room temperature, monthly or so if it is kept in the fridge (which is what I do).  Why is it special and different from regular yeast?  Well, the thing is – the “sour” in sourdough – the part that makes it both, taste great and helps preserve it for days on end when regular bread would just go moldy – are organic acids (lactic and acetic) which are produced by the aforementioned bacteria.  And the yeast that is living in the starter must, in order to raise the bread, be able to happily live and reproduce in a very acidic environment that these bacteria create – which baker’s yeast generally can’t do.  Hence the symbiotic culture of the right yeast which can naturally coexist with the bacteria in question.

The above also answers the other implied question – by process of elimination, what sourdough starter isn’t, is anything which is made by mixing baker’s yeast with flour and water and whatever else.  Whew, good to get this bit off my chest.

And now that I’ve hopefully not confused you at all, I will proceed to the really lovely focaccia that I have baked yesterday that begged to be shared with other people (food is happiness, happiness is bigger when shared – platitude, but not a bad one).

This recipe, somewhat unusually for me, uses both, a sourdough starter (for its flavor and preservative qualities), and a tiny bit of dry yeast to help this bread rise faster and to make it practical – and no, I do not contradict myself here.  The sourdough overnight sponge does not involve any dry baker’s yeast – that is added in the final dough mix, where acidity is reduced by mixing in a lot of ingredients.  So in a way, this recipe is the best of both worlds, though not one for the snob bread-baking purists (maybe, who knows – I certainly don’t talk to those types!).

This recipe includes an overnight pre-ferment (sponge), and it obviously does require a sourdough starter.  If you don’t have one, don’t use regular yeast – it may turn out ok, but the flavor and the lovely texture won’t be the same at all.  Instead, consider making your own starter (link leads to first in a series of my posts about making my starter with some observations.  Like I said, I will write a better guide soon – and will update the post accordingly).  Or buying it, or asking a friend for a piece – anything goes.

So, what do you need?

• A couple of bowls, a kitchen scale (recommended for weighing flour), a hand or stand mixer (unless you have strong arms and are really good with that wooden spoon, then you’re fine with a spoon), a half-sized oven pan to bake this in or equivalent (two square or large round cake pans may do).

Day 1:

• 1 heaping tablespoon of sourdough starter (mine worked fine from a jar in the fridge last fed maybe 2 weeks ago)
• 110ml cold tap water
• 85g flour (white, I mixed in about a tablespoon of rye because my sourdough starter loves the rye and goes crazy-bubbly when it gets some)

• Whisk the tablespoon of sticky starter into the water in a large bowl.  Add flour, mix until thick batter-like consistency, scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula, cover with a plastic wrap (clingfilm), and leave overnight.

Day 2:

• All of the above sponge (in its bowl where it should be bubbly by now)
• 325ml cold tap water
• 1 tablespoon good extra-virgin olive oil + a lot more for pan and brushing
• 1.5 tsp dry yeast of any description
• 1-2 tbsp rye flour
• 450g white bread flour + a few tablespoons more if needed
• 1 tbsp dry oregano, crushed in a hand a little
• 1 tbsp coarse salt

For Topping:

• You can really use whatever you like here, but in the picture I used:
• 1 package of tiny baby plum tomatoes (I happily ate the last four or five that didn’t fit on the focaccia)
• 100g chopped feta-style fresh cheese (I buy a German cheese which is less salty and not technically ‘feta’ as it is not from Greece)
• Three sprigs of rosemary cut off my potted bush, leaves stripped.
• Olive oil, flaked sea salt

What to do:

• Combine all the dry ingredients in a clean bowl, mix a bit with a random kitchen implement (whisk or wooden spoon both work).
• Add water to the sponge and whisk to mix.  Add 1 tbsp olive oil.  Add the dry ingredients and mix with a mixer and dough hooks (I use a handheld mixer) until all flour is incorporated.  At this point the dough will be very wet and sticky.
• Continue mixing, turning the mixer up to medium speed, and adding white flour by tablespoonful at a time (I think I might have used 3-4 extra tablespoons) until the dough is still very wet (it won’t achieve the smooth elasticity normal bread dough gets when well-kneaded), but sort of pulls away from the sides of the bowl with the mixer hooks, though leaving sticky bits still, and sticking right back to the bowl.
• Clean and very generously oil the other bowl and your hands.  Transfer the sticky lump of dough into the oiled bowl, and turn it over so it’s all coated.  A tiny bit of oil in a ring around it is good.  Cover with cling film and leave for 2-4 hours (I went out for about 3 hours to shop and then fussed with the dough maybe 40 minutes after coming home).  It should have at least doubled in size during this time.
• Oil hands, lift the film, and stretch and fold the dough a few times right in the bowl, without taking it out on the counter (less mess!).  It’ll degas and be far more amenable for being made into a ball at this point.  Put the ball back into the bowl, cover and leave for another hour.
• Pour enough olive oil into your pan(s) to have a couple of mm of oil on the bottom, and use a pastry brush to brush the oil up on the sides, covering those thoroughly.  If using more than one pan, cut the dough lump in half.  I didn’t, so I just transferred it to the rectangular half-oven pan as it was.
• Use your hands to stretch and poke the dough into the shape of the pan.  If it resists too much, give it five minutes to relax and continue.  Be gentle and avoid deflating the dough – you want those air bubbles in there.
• Take your toppings and push them deep into the dough, as far down as they’ll go, making little wells.  I pushed the rosemary leaves in with bits of cheese and tomato to help them stay stuck in.
• Brush the top of the dough with more olive oil, and turn the oven to 225C to preheat.  Allow to rise for 30-40 minutes – the dough will become puffed up.  You may need to shove the toppings down again in places.
• Place in the middle of the oven and bake for 15 minutes, then move into lower part of the oven to avoid scorching the top and turn heat down to 210C.  Bake for another 10 minutes or so (for me it was total of 25 minutes) until the top is golden brown and internal temperature reads 93C (200F) on instant-read thermometer (fantastic way to tell when bread is done, by the way – get one, they are cheap as chips at IKEA!).
• Remove from oven, brush the top with more olive oil (I am not kidding!), and use a metal spatula to tease the bread out of the form and onto a rack to cool.  Wait as long as you can and then devour!

We had ours with roast pumpkin-and-garlic soup topped with fresh bacon bits and some chopped flat-leaf parsley.  You do as you will – you can just eat it as-is with a cup of tea or coffee.  Trust me, it won’t disappoint.

Submitted to Yeastspotting!

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.  :)

Of No-Knead Bread and Unmitigated Disaster

Edit:  If you don’t want the story or the moral and want to go directly to the successful no-knead bread recipe that I have tested since, go here.  Else, keep reading and enjoy!

Today I will tell you a story with a moral.

Or perhaps even a few of those (morals).  And no pictures.  And no recipe.  No, not today.  You’ll see (or not see, as it may be) in a minute.  But, you do get a moral, which is something I tend to like in my stories – hope you do too.

… Once upon a time, so it came to be that after being largely absent from the blog (and my kitchen) for a while, I figured that I would ease back into cooking after the essay-writing and being somewhat ill with something no more complicated than ordering a pizza or frying a few sausages to eat with a pile of arugula.  Something simple.  Easy.  Something everyone has been saying works, and is oh-so-easy to do – even a four-year-old can do it!

Yes, you’ve guessed it – I have decided to try that no-knead bread that virtually every food blogger wrote about in the past six years or so since it came out.  There are whole websites, with videos, dedicated to this and its apparently utter effortlessness.   So, I thought, this is the ticket – let me make this lazy bread and enjoy the fruit of my [not] labor tomorrow.

Now before I get into this… I have lived in USA.  I own a food scale which measures in metric and in pounds/ounces, and I own a measuring cup with American volume measures too.  Down to 1/4 cup.  And a calculator.  And a brain, too, though sometimes I do feel that might have misplaced it.

I faithfully wrote the recipe down – the version adapted for sourdough starter – and checked it against the original New York Times recipe.  Looked rather close, so I did not worry.  I did as the recipes suggested (and the video demonstrated) – mixed the dry ingredients, then whisked my sourdough starter into the water, and added that to the bowl.  Mixed further.  The dough became sticky and shaggy – and looked remarkably like what the video showed, to boot.  Ok, thought I, I’ve got it made.

But no.  None of the above has, apparently, helped.  Yesterday morning, I happily bounced into the kitchen anticipating carefree bread baking.  I floured my board and scraped the dough… I mean, poured the dough out on it.  It immediately stuck like glue despite my generous flouring (more so than the video demonstrated), and was nowhere near the consistency it would need to be to be stretched, and folded.  I tried to panickedly flour the board some more, scraping the dough off it, and add more flour to my hands, but to no avail.  While I was flailing about, the dough attempted to leak off the board and onto the counter.  That was the final drip (haha), and so after a few feeble attempts to get it to behave, I poured it off the board back into the bowl and contemplated it.  I really do not like throwing away food, and it did look fixable.  And not actually that far off from a really wet-but-possible-to-handle dough.

So I sighed, got out my handheld mixer and dough hooks, and more flour.  In all, I had to add 2.5 ounces (that’s about 90g) of flour before the dough could be handled.  With effort and a lot of flour on surface, hands, and virtually my entire kitchen, I heroically managed a stretch-and-fold, and allowed the dough to rest.  Then I said a quick prayer to the kitchen gods that it would not stick to my well-covered in wheat bran banetton, pre-shaped the dough gently and stuck it into the banetton.  The kitchen gods were, apparently, merciful, or else they were particularly well-disposed to my faithful banetton this day, for it was not ruined.  The dough did not stick.  So I proofed it, preheated my cast-iron pan, and baked it.

It was a total and unmitigated disaster.  The bread looked sort of ok, but once it has cooled and I cut into it, I found a combination of giant (not large, large is good – but giant!) holes and bricky, gluey crumb.  Which left me truly scratching my head and wondering what in the seven hells went wrong with it.  Other than my attempts to fix it by adding more flour later (likely at least a contributing factor), that is.

Having slept on it (well no, on my bed actually – I did end up tossing the bread out, as the results of this failure weren’t even fit to make croutons!), I have decided that I am going to do this again, until I have gotten it right.  Many photos of gorgeous no-knead bread beckon from the google image page, and besides, I am just too damned stubborn to let a recipe defy me in my own kitchen.  And gawdamnit, I am good at baking bread!  I should be able to deal with this touted-for-beginners recipe!  [insert foot stomp here]

So I did some more research, and I think I have pinpointed what went wrong – too little flour in the initial mix (I did follow the instructions, but I guess Swedish water is just a lot more wet *snicker snerk* – another site said that the consistensy should be adjusted if it looks too wet, thank you that first site for not telling me to begin with!), and possibly a too-long fermentation time as well (some authors suggest 12-14 hours, not 18-20, or else a refrigerator overnight – that makes sense to me, my levain usually does rise in about 8-10 hours and this is just a salted version of levain, essentially).  Some more photos of the mixed initial dough suggest it should be more solid.  In short, there will be a rematch, and this time, this time I will master and overcome!

And so the moral of today’s story is this:  Don’t believe all you hear.  This is really rather important, and I normally do follow my advice – shame on me for failing!  And, I really should know better, and remember that it applies to everything, including “trusted” cookbooks.  I’ve been there before.  Trust your gut feeling – if it [whatever it is you are making] looks like it’s too [something] for what it should be, it probably is.  It’s not true just becase you’ve seen it on tv/read it on the internet.

In the words of Arnold the Governator of the State of California, I’ll be Bach.  And next time, no-knead bread, I will return victorious!

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.

Scampi with Sherry and Lavender

Many people use lavender – as perfume, or bathing, or a variety of other things, but have you ever considered using it as a seasoning?

Lavender is part of the same family as rosemary, and as such, generally works fine in any dishes where rosemary can also be used.  It has a strong, sweet but a little harsh scent (familiar to most if not all).  A small caution for using lavender in food – it can turn slightly bitter if you go too generously with it.  Use the same guideline as you would with hot spices – try a little and gradually increase the amount if you feel it’s not enough.  On the other hand, because of how strong the fragrance is, a little really does go a long way.  There is no need to pour it on by the teaspoonful – a few dried flowers scattered over your meal do more than enough to impart the flavor.

This is a dish of giant prawns in which I incidentally decided to use up some slightly-softening tomatoes and a bit of sourdough bread from the day before which was going slightly stale.  The reference to “scampi” is not in terms of what species of crustacean I use, but the American prawn or shrimp dish, of which this is a more robust variation.

It takes nearly no time, tastes fantastic and uses up leftovers all at the same time.  It can go really well paired with a salad of some sort of bitter greens such as baby leaf salad or arugula, but it’s just fine as it is on its own as well.

What you need (feeds 2):

• 8-12 giant prawns or 300g tiger or whiteleg prawns (the commonly sold varieties), shell cut on top, and deveined.
• 2 tomatoes
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 3-4 cloves of garlic
• Pinch of red chili flakes
• Pinch of dried culinary lavender buds. Note: when buying lavender, please make sure it’s untreated and suitable for consumption.  Spice shops and gift shops in botanical gardens will frequently stock it, but I am sure it is possible to get culinary-grade lavender on the net as well.
• 75ml sherry (not sweet, I use Amontillado)
• Sea salt to taste
• 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• A few slices of sourdough or other crusty bread with strong crumb (somewhat stale ok).  Really, you can probably do this well with just about any decent bread, but for the love of little green apples, please, please don’t try this with the insipid white spongy bagged … stuff (I hesitate to call that bread), it will disintegrate on contact with liquids and you will get disgusting mush.
• Some chopped flat-leaf parsley to decorate (entirely optional).

What to do:

• Drain your defrosted and deveined prawns in a colander.
• Preheat broiler (top grill) of your oven to 220°C.
• Blitz garlic in a food processor to small shreds.  Add tomatoes and blitz to a coarse slurry.
• Add sea salt, chili, lavender buds, sherry, lemon juice and 3 tablespoons of olive oil, and blend to combine.
• Place your prawns in a bowl, pour over the sauce you’ve just mixed, and swish around to combine.  Ensure all prawns are at least moistened by the sauce.
• In the meantime, cut up the bread – reserve a few of the nicer slices for toasting and cut the rest up into 2-3 fingers lengthwise each.  Drizzle the slices reserved for toasting with the remaining olive oil on both sized (use more if needed) and allow to rest.
• Pour the prawns and sauce into a ceramic or glass baking dish and spread out into a single layer.  Add the cut-up fingers of bread at a tilt (close to horizonal) in a sort of a falling-domino pattern around the edges of the dish, submerging the edges of them in the sauce.
• Place a non-stick frying pan on medium-high heat to preheat.
• Place the prawn dish under broiler (about 2nd rack from the top of the oven) and cook until the prawns are red and curled up, with edges beginning to char lightly.  The time will depend on your oven, how far the rack is in it, and how large your prawns were, but at a guess, they can be ready in as little as 10 minutes or as much as 20 (my giant ones took a while).
• While the prawns cook, lightly toast the reserved drizzled-with-oil bread slices in the pan and arrange them on plates.  Sprinkly with flaked sea salt and some lavender buds if desired.
• When the prawns are ready, remove from oven and plate the prawns and the sauced bread quickly.  You can sprinkle them with a little chopped parsley if you like the look of greens among all of that gold and red, but I was happy with it as-is, with a few piercingly purple-blue lavender buds scattered on top.

Black tea with a touch of honey or coffee will work equally well with this.  Or, if doing this for dinner, a crisp white wine would work really well too.  The sauce, for the record, tastes utterly amazing and the toasted sourdough is great for sopping it up after the prawns are all gone.  Just thought you should know.  ;)

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!