Bad Romance (And Amazing Pizza Crust)

No no, I have not suddenly decided to leave T!  This is so not what this is all about!

Allow me, for just a moment, to wax all Lady-Gagaesque.  Oh all right, maybe I would cook and eat the steak instead of making a dress, but still – over the past year, I have been having what I can only call a love affair with bread.

Which is for someone who really ought to stay away from too many carbs, is notably a case of bad romance.  But rather than set the bed on fire torch the bread, I have dealt with it by feeding most of the bread to T and assorted friends, and only having a little.  Because, really, what sort of life is it if you don’t even try what you bake?  (And what sort of life is it if you don’t bake at all?!)  So in the end, I live within the best of both worlds – I can bake, he can eat, and I don’t overdo bread-eating.  Usually.

In the case of this pizza however, T had to share equally.  Because, you know, some things are just entirely too good not to have – and had I made two, I imagine we would have both finished one each easily.  I need not sing hallelujah for the pear and blue cheese pairing, nor for the addition of red onion and olive oil-and-balsamic-herb wash for this, for they need it not.  These are all classics, and as such, worthy of many repetitions because they never fail.  No, what made this special is the crust – thin, crunchy, light-as-air and crispy on the outside: the very epitome of what I have always loved about good pizza.  Just when I had thought homemade pizza-making could not be improved, there is was, yet another revelation, bringing me into higher reaches of pizza heaven.

It all began with being lazy.  Because I am, you know, and make no secret of it.  So while I wanted to learn to bake real breads, and was willing to put in the effort for the learning curve, if there are better and easier way to make something, I am always very interested in trying them.  Like the adventures with no-knead bread (including the original spectacular failure!).  And, this – this being the other recently popular method for artisan-style bread for home bakers, the so-called bread-in-five (minutes a day), which is another variation of the no-knead method (allowing time and moisture to develop the gluten instead of pounding the dough like a sumo wrestler), but with the added caveat of it being very wet dough, and stored in the refrigerator to make it less sticky and more manageable.

I would not say that five-minutes-a-day is an absolute claim, because really, that excludes the resting of the bread, preheating of oven, and other such things (as many critics have claimed), but it is true that it is five minutes of actual effort a day if all you are making is a loaf of bread from pre-prepared dough.  And well, as such the claim is true enough – after the initial mixing and such, of course – but that is hardly laborous either.

The method for dough handling outlined on their site (I will go over it in short in a bit) works brilliantly well.  As you can see from the neat and smooth ball of dough on the next photo, the gluten is well-developed and the dough is both, elastic and very relaxed – both very desirable attributes more or less regardless of what you are baking.

Before we go any further, I cannot make any claims as to what quality of loaf the method produces, because I have not tried to make a loaf using this dough yet.  All I have made so far has been a small focaccia on the same day I mixed the dough (post-mandatory-refrigeration), and a pizza this morning for lunch.  Although I can attest that it does hold its shape once shaped into a ball despite very high hydration % (very wet dough), probably due to well-developed gluten after the refrigerated maturing of dough.

Bread experimentation forthcoming, I have to give this method (at its very basic master recipe adjusted to bread flour) two thumbs up for making flatbread that is incredibly crispy and light, with a moist and airy interior.  And the dough is a joy to work with, for someone as clumsy with dough-stretching as me (I make zero claims on my pizza-tossing ability as I imagine it’d end up draped on the overhead lights if I tried – that, or stuck in my hair) – the dough stretches easily, does not resist much, and does not stick nearly as much as you’d think when you initially mix it.  Well… you do need to flour your hands, but that’s it really.

So what does the method for dough-making entail?

The principle is very simple.  You mix a high-hydration dough, you allow it to rise to maximum rise (about 2 hours with regular yeast), and then you place it in the refrigerator and cut off and use as much as you want over the next fourteen days (2 weeks).  All the dough requires before baking is a minimal shaping with floured hands and 30-40 minute rest before going in a hot oven onto a pizza stone or into a cast-iron pan or pot.

The master recipe is listed here, but it is in American measures.  I have converted the recipe to metric and then used bread flour, of which I used proportionally less to same volume of water as advised on the site:

• 3 cups (710ml) barely-warm water
• 1.5 tablespoons dry yeast (this came to just under 1 packet (50g) of Swedish yeast)
• 1.5 tablespoons coarse salt (I used coarse sea salt)
• 6.5 cups (2lb) = 910g all-purpose flour.  I had adjusted this to ~850g bread flour (which absorbs slightly more water)

Mix, cover, allow to rise for 2 hours, and place in refrigerator covered (but allowing a bit of air to escape so don’t screw a lid on tight) for 3 hours to 14 days.  The site recommends using a plastic bucket with a snap lid and a tiny hole in the top to vent the air.  I used a large stainless-steel bowl and covered it with plastic wrap which gets around the danger of blowing-up from gas pressure very well.

To use, sprinkle the top of the dough with a bit of flour, stretch up the amount of dough you want to use grabbing it by that floured bit, and scizzor it off.  Drop dough onto a floured board, and pre-shape into a boule in the classical manner of tucking ends under.

To make the pizza or focaccia base, in my experience the use of rolling pin only makes the dough too tough.  So, I had allowed the dough ball to rest for about 15-20 minutes, then I placed a piece of baking parchment onto a board, preheated my oven with my trusty huge cast-iron shallow casserole bottom in it to 225C, and stretched the dough gently with well-floured hands.  Then dropped it onto the baking parchment without any flouring.  Why?  Because a tiny bit of sticking to the parchment helps prevent it shrinking (See that stuck bit on the right?  Like that.), and because it comes right unstuck during baking – and keeps your cast iron pan clean as a bonus!

The rest, so to speak, is history.  While the crust is resting a few more minutes, cut up your favorite toppings – or whatever happened to be in the fridge (in my case, a bag of pears, a leftover quarter of a red onion, and a small chunk of blue cheese), brush the pizza crust with a bit of olive oil (or leftover dipping oil mixed with balsamic vinegar and herbs in my case), and top it.

Slide onto a pizza stone, or if you are like me, pull out the hot cast iron casserole, and slide the baking parchment with the pizza into it.  Turn oven to 250C and broiler (top grill) on, and bake for a few minutes until done.  Ovens and distance from the broiler will vary, so watch your pizza – half a minute and it may char beyond what you want it to be!

Take it out and cool on the rack for a few minutes (few = not many here!), before cutting it apart and serving, and regretting that you did not make two or three.

And if you are like me and live with sugar sensitivity – eat, but enjoy in moderation.  Complete deprivation never did anyone any good.

Submitted to the lovely baked-goods showcase at Yeastspotting.

Mini-Pizzas – Canapes For The Hungry Guests (And Hosts)

Many holiday parties aren’t actually dinner parties – they are an invitation for drinks (of whatever description), and canapes (snacks, hors d’oeuvres, whatever you want to call them).

Tiny canapes are well and good, and I actually love eating them, and even making them (though perhaps not for a very large number of people at a time!), but for me, it goes against the grain to not give my guests (and myself!) something substantial to munch on, however, and these, found and adapted from my now-much-used holiday edition of a Swedish baking magazine, are one of the better solutions.  First, who doesn’t love pizza?  Ok, I’ve met one person who doesn’t, but she’s an exception – most people love pizza.  Second, they aren’t difficult (or expensive) to make, and third, they are delicious, with just the right combo of crunch and chewiness to the crust, and a savory bite of the toppings.

The dough is yeasted, but it only (really!) does take about an hour to rise, and it’s made with plain (non-high-protein) flour, which makes it very easy to work with.  And think of it this way – even if the dough rounds look a bit clumsy before raising and baking, they all puff up deliciously and look great afterwards!

What you need (makes ~20 palm-sized pizzas):

• Dough:
• 1/4 packet dry yeast (about 1 heaping teaspoon)
• 2.5 dl (1 cup+ 2 teaspoons) finger-warm water
• A pinch of sea salt
• 1-2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 7dl (3 cups) plain flour
• Toppings (what I’ve used):
• Extra-virgin olive oil and a pastry brush to brush it on
• A handful of oil-packed sundried tomatoes, cut into thin strips crosswise
• ~10 slices of spicy cured chorizo sausage (the large-cross-section salami sort – if you have a thinner cured one, slice it thinly and use as much as you need)
• A couple of handfuls of shredded hard cheese (parmesan, romano, asiago, gran moravia or grana padano or whatever you like)
• Dried oregano to sprinkle
• Black pepper or chili flakes to taste
• Other suggestions include:
• Some pitted and halved olives of your favorite sort
• Pine nuts
• Chopped parsley leaves

What you do:

• Mix all dry ingredients of dough together (including dry yeast) in a bowl.
• Add the water and then the oil, and mix together.
• Allow to stand 10 minutes, then knead (I use a handheld mixer with dough hooks but a stand mixer or your own hands would do) until smooth and elastic.  The dough will become “friendly” (stick to itself more than everything else) but will be quite soft.  If you must add flour, do so sparingly, you do not want to make the dough hard.
• Place in an oiled bowl, turn, cover with cling film (plastic wrap), and a towel and place in a warm place to rise for 30 min to an hour or until doubled in size.
• Preheat oven to 200°C  (Ovens vary.  Mine has the no-fan option which is what I use).  Cover two baking sheets with baking parchment.
• Prepare your toppings – shred cheese, cut tomatoes, scizzor slices of chorizo or salami into 1cm square-ish bits.  Put in the fridge (mostly for sake of cheese here, so that it doesn’t get warm and soggy).
• Punch down the dough, knead it lightly, and roll into a sausage.  Cut into halves, then again and then into ~5 pieces each to make 20.
• Roll the bits into balls and allow to sit under a slightly-damp kitchen towel while you work (to prevent drying).
• Take balls of dough one by one, and gently flatten them with your hands, then pull the edges gently to enlarge the circle until they are about 10cm on a side.  Place them on the baking sheets a few cm apart.
• (This step is entirely optional – but helped me.) After you have finished all the rounds, it helps to start with the ones you did first as they had some resting time, and pick them up and stretch them a bit more if it looks they could use it.  The dough will be easier to handle at this point – do not tear.
• Place the re-stretched pizza bases on the sheets (still spacing them out to allow for expansion), cover with cloth kitchen towels, and allow to rise for about 20 minutes.  They will puff up visibly.
• Brush each round with a little bit of olive oil, leaving approximately 1-cm margin (this is roughly, if you splat oil around it’s not a problem of any sort), and then top with a few squares of salami or chorizo, and a couple of strips of sundried tomato.  Or whatever else you like.
• Sprinkle with dried oregano and grind a little bit of black pepper on top.  Add a small heap of shredded hard cheese onto the middle of each pizza.
• Place sheets in the oven.  I did this sequentially, but you could also up the temperature to 210°C and put both sheets in, and swap them top to bottom halfway through baking.  Bake for about 10 minutes, but watch the pizzas the entire time – as I’ve mentioned many times, ovens vary and I do not know yours!  The cheese can burn really quickly if you leave them in.
• When pizzas are puffed up more, crust is golden and the cheese is melted and golden as well, take out and cool on a rack.  These are fine to serve warm or at room temperature – they get a wonderfully crunchy crust when they cool down just a little.

Enjoy!  And if a stray guest wanders in having not had dinner, then just hand him or her a few of these, and problem solved!

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?

Sourdough Experiment – Day 7 : Update

It also appears that I have been a little too timid in slashing the top, but the bread did not tear too much, and next time I'll know to cut deeper.

Picture, thousand words, yadda yadda!

This morning I started the first bake run of my sourdough experiment with wild yeast.  I fed the starter, gave it a couple of hours to rise, then took a portion, made and kneaded the dough.  I then allowed it to rise for 6 hours before baking it in an oven with a water reservoir in the bottom (for steam).

The colour  of the bread turned out gorgeous, the rise was decent for such a short time, and the flavour is wonderful!  Because of a single rise and the short (for sourdough) rise time, the crumb turned out pretty dense, though in a good way (not stodgy or wet) and while I normally like fluffier (bigger-holed) bread, this is lovely all the same – we ate it a little warm, but I imagine it will make fantastic sandwich or toast bread once it is cooled.

Again, because of the short rise, the flavor was not very sour, but there was a distinct sour note, and a lot of flavor in general -  and it was the right kind of flavor, without a slightest hint of off-taste.  In short, this tastes like bread, the way bread should taste, (and not like a wad of Kleenex the way commercially-made stuff tastes more often than not).

So, overall I pronounce this a success.  T ate his test piece with happy gusto despite having just finished a substantial dinner, and said that the flavour was great and that it was good bread.  The crust is crunchy and cracks in places, and I am definitely making another run this weekend – this time with a full rise time and punch-down for fuller flavor and more sourness, so will start it Friday night for overnight rise #1 and Saturday morning rise #2 to be baked for lunch or thereabouts.

The experiment continues!

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 7

Fast-forward another day, and we are now on Day 7 of the wild yeast sourdough experiment I began last week.

The premise:  there is wild yeast on wheat flour you buy, especially wholegrain.  I have wanted to culture a sourdough starter with local Swedish bacteria and yeast (wheat is Swedish too) the original way – i.e. without adding bakers’ yeast or fruit (yeast growing on fruit surface is, generally speaking, the wrong species of yeast anyway).

The past few days, I’ve been feeding the starter culture white wheat flour rather than wholegrain, as per idea idea that wholegrain has more microbes on it, and once the culture is started, it is better to let it multiply in a cleaner medium than keep introducing new organisms into the mix.  So, to summarize, I started the culture with whole wheat flour, tap water and a few drops of liquid from natural yogurt bucket, and then continuously fed the starter white flour and tap water at 2:1 volume proportion (roughly equivalent to 1:1 weight proportion) twice per day (morning and evening) after discarding half of the starter each time to avoid waste.

I have not sterilized anything after the initial washing-out of jar with boiling water before adding tap water and flour to start.  Again, the theory here is that a healthy growing culture should be able to keep pathogens out on its own – which it appears to be doing fine.  I have heard that some people have mold growing on the sides of the jar of culture, but mine hasn’t as much as shown a spot.  On morning of day 2 of culture, the top layer of the starter looked slightly darker than the rest of it and there was a slight sweet off-smell, but the colour disappeared after the first feeding of day 2, and the scent was gone a day or two after and had not come back, which indicates that the culture is both, healthy and is fighting the competing (pathogenic and otherwise) organisms on its own.  So far so good!

Now, at the end of first week, the starter is doing great.  Both yesterday and today it has risen to about-or-over twice its volume between feedings (check), and the smell is now clean and fresh fermenting sourdough smell, with no off scents (check): it passes the two culture quality tests, and today it is a week old so it also passes the “don’t use starter before it is a week old” instruction.  I have discarded half of it and fed it last night, but this morning I doubled it (instead of discarding half) as I would like to try baking with it once it has risen to twice its volume again (hopefully in a few hours).  The raising and bake-off of bread are obviously the ultimate test – and objective.  Wish me luck!

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 5

… what happened to day four, you ask?

A summer party happened!  It was a sunny and hot-hot-hot Saturday (those happen in  Sweden in the summer!), and we had guests over for an evening of fresh strawberry daiquiries, margaritas, food and fun.  No, I did not take any photos of any of it, I was too busy slurping daiquiries and trying to keep my cooking straight while intoxicated.

In any case, it is not as if a yeast and bacillus culture does that much exciting stuff every day, so I did not feel the need to elaborate on how it was doing.  It was, in fact, doing fine yesterday and the same today, only more so.  I had remembered to feed it twice yesterday as I’d planned, for which I am still congratulating myself, as I believe I was both, tired and not too sober before bed last night.

But, less about drunkenness and more about yeast!  As I mentioned, it was doing fine yesterday and more so today – but what is “fine” for yeast?  Well, the sweet off-smell I’ve mentioned in “Day 3” has disappeared by yesterday (Day 4) morning, and was replaced by a lovely well-remembered from the visits to my favourite bakeries American-style sourdough bread scent.  I’d fed the starter twice yesterday, and this morning awakened to see it had risen well, though not yet quite to twice its volume I am looking for.  The sourdough scent has further deepened and intensified.  So far, so good.

I am not sure I have mentioned this before, but I keep the starter in the not very hot corner of my kitchen, under a vent.  The vent does not provide a draft in the summer, but it does freshen the air a little, and the starter is kept out of direct light of the window, but not very much so (it’s just to the side of it against a well).  The temperature in the kitchen (unless I am cooking) is a comfortable +20°C +/- 3 degrees between day and night, and the starter appears to like it.

Five days done, minimum of two days to go before baking according to starter-maturing instructions, though as mentioned before, the plan is to give it until next Friday to mature and grow.  I have been discarding half of the starter per feeding the past few days, but I will start building up its volume starting Thursday, so that by Friday morning I will have enough to scoop it out and raise bread with it.

Now that it began to both, rise properly between feedings and smell oh-so-yummily like a bakery, I am getting really impatient.  But then, patience is a virtue that I never had in good supply.

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 3

Day three.

After waking up properly (that’s at least 2 mugs of coffee!), I looked in on the starter to see much more activity than yesterday.

Look at all the bubbles!

It has apparently risen and fallen overnight, just as it is supposed to, by about 1/3 again of its volume.  According to all my sources, this is a good sign, though what I am shooting for is at least doubling in size after feeding before I can attempt to leaven bread with it.

The smell was also far stronger today, both sour and with a pungently sweet edge that I am not entirely sure I like.  Based on my reading, it may well go away, as apparently starter tends to smell in a variety of weird ways (depending on what grows in it initially) in the first days of its life.  Interestingly, it smelled better after being stirred (more like sourdough bread and less sweet), which makes me wonder if there was some surface activity by another microorganism (other than the desired yeast and lactobacilli) which is causing it, but I do not have a full lab at home to take samples for identification (although I do have my microbiology book in storage around here somewhere).  In any case, ideally the yeast-and-lactobacilli symbiosis will have killed off any other critters in the starter by the end of the week.

It should be noted that my fears of the starter smelling up the kitchen like spoiled milk or other food-gone-off have not come to pass.  It smells if I stick nose in it, but not of something outright gone-off in a bad way, and it certainly does not smell enough to notice much around the kitchen.  I can live with the faint scent for a few days, and the fact that it can be then frozen or refrigerated in a closed container alleviates my worries about the impracticality of keeping a live starter in a modern kitchen.

In other word, so far so good.  Three days down, and I am getting positively impatient.  I think it’s been many years since I have had properly-raised sourdough bread.  In fact, I think it must have been back in the USA, either at one of those natural-food supermarket’s bakery, or possibly at Saint Louis Bread Company (apparently now it’s called Panera Bread).  It’s not that there isn’t good properly-raised sourdough bread in Stockholm (though if there is any in the UK, it’s hiding rather well!), but that I haven’t gone to look for it in Sweden yet.  I may, yet – if not for the bread, should this experiment succeed, then at the very least for recipe ideas.

The Wild Yeast Sourdough Experiment – Day 2

Yesterday I decided to try to develop my own sourdough starter.  I’ve gone and asked my sourdough-baking friends questions, read around on the internet (none of my cookbooks gave any advice, but then I’d not bought them for bread-baking at all), and gave it some thought.  Then I got a clean jar, mixed up roughly 2 parts wheat flour to 1 part tap water, covered it lightly and left it on my kitchen counter.

Oh right, forgot to mention this before – I have also added a drop of the liquid collected on top of my natural yogurt in its bucket, to provide a good proven strain of lactobacillus, in case there weren’t any desirable ones around in the flour, water or on my utensils used to mix the starter.

This morning the starter did not appear to do much of anything, but I dutifully mixed and fed it and left it alone all day again.  And lo and behold, by the end of 24 hours since the start of the experiment I have bubbling throughout the starter and a minimal rise.  It is also beginning to smell less like wet flour and more sweet and yeasty, a slightly pungent and generally pleasant sort of smell.  Apparently there is some sort (hopefully right sort!) of fermentation taking place, so I will feed it again in a little while to keep it happy overnight.

In the process of reading about how to make real sourdough, I have learned several things, the most notable one being that, apparently, most “sourdough” cookbook writers can’t tell find their behind with two hands and a flashlight.  Not naming any names here (that’d be just uncivilized, not to mention unnecessary), but if your cookbook suggests using commercial bakers’ yeast for starting your sourdough starter, it’s one of the aforementioned cases.  And here’s why:

Sourdough starter aka natural leaven is an interesting exercise in home microbiology.  Of course, so is every fermentation process.  Wait, what?  Yes, indeed – all alcoholic beverages, all yeasted breads and all fermented dairy foods such as some cheeses, yogurts and the like all make use of microorganisms, be it lactobacillus in dairy cultures or yeast, or the combination of the two which is the alchemist’s stone of sourdough baking.  In the case of sourdough starter, it is apparently a combination of acid-resistant yeast strain such as Saccharomyces exiguus (most of yeasts are not such, notably including bakers’ yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and a lactobacillus of some sort, which coexist in the acid environment maintained by the lactobacillus, and kill off any other microorganisms in the medium (competitive critters that the single-celled organisms are!), thus making it not “spoil” in uncontrolled fashion (i.e. not grow random mold or the wrong – and likely unhealthy – bacteria).

So bottom line there is that you want to let whatever yeast is on the flour to begin with fight it out with whatever other yeasts are there, and let the one most adapted to the acidic environment win eventually.  Dumping a clump of bakers’ yeast in the starter to begin the process only muddles up the situation, as it may grow well for one or two days, and then die off because of lactobacillus proliferation.  And in the meantime thanks to its quantity and the resulting head start it got, it’d outcompeted all those other yeasts that we want to be in the running.  Not a smart idea in my view.

Anyhow, the point of the above is that one should not start a sourdough starter with the yeast sold for quick-fermenting breads, and also explains why it is not a good idea to use a starter that has not yet stabilized (read: in which the desired organisms have not yet had time to bloodily murder all competitors whom we don’t want there anyway).

One day down, nine to go till the first test baking.  The excitement of kitchen-sink (literally!) biology never ends!

Olive And Red Onion Bread

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have decided to go after the elusive wild Swedish yeast and began my own sourdough starter.

However, the first few days of the sourdough starter development are incredibly boring.  I’ve checked the jar with starter in the morning, and is it doing anything?  Nah.  Well, maybe a few bubbles.  So I fed it and left it be.  In the meantime, and in preparation for the (hopefully!) upcoming sourdough experience, I decided to give myself a crash reminder course in yeast bread baking – and to use up the remainder of the yeast block I had bought for the Herb and Lemon Peel Bread.

Kalamata Olive and Sundried Tomato Bread

(Note: THE RECIPE FOR THE BREAD IN THIS POST IS NOT SOURDOUGH.  IT IS LEAVENED BY FRESH COMMERCIAL CAKE YEAST.)

Since it seemed a bit boring to just make white bread (yes, I am spoiled), and we needed to go buy milk anyway, I picked up a can of good Kalamata olives (I usually keep those and sundried tomatoes around, but I’d run out), and a few red onions in order to make a Greek variation of an olive bread.  What makes it Greek? – Other than the fact it stated so in the introduction to the recipe in one of my favourite cookbooks (“Mediterranean: A Taste of the Sun” by Jacqueline Clark and Joanna Farrow), it is also a known fact™ (to me, anyway) that Greeks think red onions go into just about anything but dessert.  Not that there is anything wrong with red onions – nor do I disagree with the fact that they are, in fact, very good in many dishes.  But then, I love Greek food, and I am biased in favor of flavor.  (And also, I make bad rhymes.)

The basic recipe (modified by me as I tend to tinker with just about any recipe which crosses my greedy paws) is surprisingly simple in preparation, and the result is aromatic, moist and good enough to pick the crumbs up off the board after cutting it.  Oh, and even without steam, in a simple (non-fan) household oven, this gets a lovely crumbly crust, perfect for messily ripping pieces off, dipping into some olive oil and balsamic vinegar, or just eating as they are all on their own.

Which is what we did.

For the dipping oil, I simply poured 1 tablespoon of good-quality balsamic vinegar and 2 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil into a bowl, added a pinch of sea salt flakes and a few dried chili flakes, and swished it around a little with a fork.  It needs nothing more than that, and you can easily skip the chili flakes if you aren’t a fan of capsaicin (I am but I won’t tell anyone else how to not abuse their chili!).

As to the bread itself – as I have mentioned, I have modified the original recipe a little.  The first change was to convert it from using dry yeast to fresh cake yeast (I like the latter better, and it’s what I had), and a few seasoning/flavoring ingredient changes.  The basic idea, however, remains the same.  I have also halved the quantity, because frankly speaking, at the rate we eat bread – even very good bread! – one of those loaves is more than enough for two hungry people for a couple of days.

The total preparation time (including 2 rises) of this dough is approximately 3 hours including baking.  The rising time will vary based on your yeast and room temperature, among other things.

Here is what you are going to need:

• A large mixing bowl
• Baking parchment
• Cling film
• 1 red onion, thinly sliced and sauteed in 1 tablespoon olive oil until soft
• 1 tablespoon olive oil (to saute said onions) + 1 tablespoon olive oil for oiling the bowl and cling film later on
• 1/2 cup pitted and chopped Kalamata olives.  You can use regular black olives, but the taste won’t be nearly as good.
• 3.5 cups good white flour.  I used simple white Swedish flour with declared protein content of 10% (10g/100g of flour).
• 1 teaspoon salt.  Use a measuring spoon for this, as most teaspoons are actually smaller than 5ml.
• 20g (a bit less than 1/2 of a block) fresh yeast
• 2 tablespoons finely snipped fresh thyme, lemon thyme, or oregany.  1 tablespoon if using rosemary.
• 1-2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 3-4 oil-packed sundried tomatoes, snipped into bits
• 1 teaspoon dried chili flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon caster sugar (white or golden)
• 1 cup (approx. 250ml) finger-warm water

How-to:

• Measure out the water and add the sugar, then crumble the yeast cake in, swirl a little and leave to stand on the counter for 5-15 minutes.
• Place lightly-sauteed onions, chopped olives, snipped sundried tomatoes, salt, spices and flour into a large mixing bowl.  Mix with a wooden spoon to combine.
• Once yeast is slightly (or more than slightly) frothy, swirl it around again.  Make a depression in the flour mix and slowly pour it in, mixing the liquid in as you go with a wooden spoon until all water is absorbed, then continue mixing by hand.  Add water a tablespoon at a time if the mix feels too dry.
• Turn the dough out on a well-floured surface and knead for ~10 minutes or more, adding flour if necessary, until the dough is smooth and elastic.  It’ll also show less desire to stick to your hands or the table surface at this point.
• Wash and dry the bowl.  (If you fill it with cold water immediately after turning dough out to knead, it makes said washing far, far easier.)  Oil the bowl with about 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil.
• Form the dough into a ball and place it in the bowl neat side down.  Turn it to coat and leave it neat side up.  Cover bowl with cling film and then a clean kitchen towel and leave in a non-drafty place at room temperature until doubled in bulk (took me 1 – 1.5 hours, but I did not watch it too closely – was busy eating lunch).
• Prepare a baking sheet with a layer of baking parchment on it.  Lightly oil a sheet of cling film with remaining 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil.
• Once the dough is risen, punch it down and turn back out on floured surface to knead.  Knead lightly until the dough is elastic again and form into a round loaf.
• Place the loaf onto the baking parchment and cover with the oiled film, oiled side down.  Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise until doubled in bulk (for another 40 min to an hour).

Oiling the film before covering the dough - very important! - prevents it sticking.

• While the bread is rising, preheat oven to 210-220°C on top+bottom heat (no fan or forced air).
• Remove cling film and slash the loaf several times with a serrated (bread) knife to avoid in-oven tearing.
• Bake in preheated oven for approximately 40 minutes or until loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base.  Cool on a wire rack for 20-30 minutes until eating to avoid burning mouth.  (Also, the bread will slice much easier after it has cooled a little – warm bread tends to be fragile and tears up inside if you try to slice it too soon.)

Eat as you like – with or without dipping oil or salt flakes, toasted, or as a sandwich.  Baking may be a science, but the taste of this is pure joy!