Sourdough? Or just long and slow?

Sourdough September seems like a long time ago already! It was a lot of hard work, setting up two long Sourdough Saturdays at the Heron Corn Mill, but it was definitely worth it. For most of the ten bakers who came along to bake at the mill, this was their first time doing sourdough. So it was quite a responsibility for me to make sure it was a positive experience. And you really never quite know, with sourdough, what is going to go wrong next.

In the end, to judge by the feedback, everybody had a good time. And I was really quite proud of the loaves that went home with the bakers. I should think there were some surprised people back home when mum or dad came back with really quite spectacular looking sourdough loaves.

There will be more sourdough in March, but for now I am happy to be doing something a bit less challenging in the bread line.

Real Bread Campaign gets arty

Is it just me, or is this wonderful cover picture on the front of the latest True Loaf magazine a little bit familiar?

I want to be taught bread making by her! (The one on the left!) She clearly takes the wood fired oven for granted - how else would you make bread? - and is very much at home with that dough. Shaping bread in mid air in front of the fire, while having your photo taken: she's definitely comfortable with what she's doing.

Wetter is better

One of my bread group asked if the dough was a bit too wet, and was surprised when I said no, it was too dry and sloshed a load more water on from the jug. But that was last term, and this term, the same baker retold this story to a new starter, and added "I'm much happier about soft dough now". That's the way!

Slow but quite a lot drier

I spent yesterday afternoon fussing over a pre-ferment for today's baking day at the mill. I wanted us to do something out of the Real Bread Campaign's bread book "Slow Dough", but it's not really practical in a morning to do a long slow rise. Doing the real thing properly means leaving it overnight at least. So I've had to improvise a little. I made up half the dough for the entire group as a pre-ferment chez moi starting at 3 p.m. I didn't put any salt in, and only a tiny amount of yeast. By 5 p.m. it looked like this -

I knocked it back and by 9 p.m. it had grown back again and looked like this -

I knocked it back again, and by 11 p.m. it had grown back again and looked like this -

I knocked it back one last time and left it to rise overnight. By 6:30 a.m. it had grown back yet again and looked like this -

And this is with just 2 g of yeast in each bowl!

I took the pre-fermented sponge with me to the Heron Corn Mill, and the Bread of Heron bakers and I incorporated it into our bread along with more flour, water, salt and yeast. And cheese and onion.

This is an unusual bread for me as it uses the baker's standard percentage - 60% hydration. That is, 600 g of water per 1000 g of flour.

Using the overnight pre-ferment means we were able to get much the same effect as if the whole dough had a longer rise than we actually had time for. It turned out pretty well, anyway!

Long and slow is a recurring theme

This idea of making some dough up in the day before is a bit like the Sourdough Saturday approach. When I was preparing for Sourdough Saturday, I made the sourdough sponge for everyone the day before we baked. Now you could say that's cheating because I was the only person who did the most important bit - making the sponge. But my thinking was that it's important to get that bit right, and it's terribly easy to get it wrong. So I felt it was reasonable to show the group how I'd done it, and to show them what it had to look like if it was going to work properly. It's no good trying to make sourdough with a half-hearted sponge. It has to be really violently  bubbly and so active that you risk losing a finger if you get too close to it. With a really vigorous sponge, all the bakers were at least half-guaranteed success. I wanted to inspire this year's bakers to have a go at home, knowing the difficulties, but having some idea how to approach it, and how to deal with the problems that inevitably arise.

Must it be sourdough?

Good as sourdough is, it isn't the be all and end all of bread making. It's a bit of a specialist interest. It's hard work. And it's unpredictable. When it's going well it is beyond compare, but getting it right and keeping it working can be a bit of a nightmare.

What is it with yeast?

All commercial yeast is basically the same strain of yeast - Saccharomyces cerevisiae apparently. And all sourdoughs are different. Lovely diversity!

Whichever strain of yeast we happen to be using, the starch in flour is broken down by water into various sugars.  The gas which makes the dough rise is a by-product of the process of yeast feeding on these sugars and breaking them down further.

The OED defines a by-product as - 

 a. A secondary product; a substance of more or less value obtained in the course of a specific process, though not its primary object.

So the production of gas is not the primary object of the process of making dough. Try telling that to a factory bakery where speed is everything! If the yeast can produce the required amount of gas in 10 minutes, what do we care about the primary object of the process?

Slower is a goer

We really should care about what it is that yeast is doing which, as a by-product, produces the gas that makes the dough rise. It's great that the dough rises. But it's really much more important that the yeast breaks down the sugars from the flour. This is where the flavour comes from, and all the good stuff that makes for a healthy gut. That is the primary object of the process: not gas, or speed, but flavour and healthy guttiness. We should be glad to give our dough - sour or not - as long as it wants to work on the flour. The longer the better.

Strangulation by triangulation

In computer projects at work, I was often puzzled by the idea of triangulation. A piece of work would require a certain amount of time to complete, and a certain amount of resources. If the customer wanted you to complete it quicker, you either needed to throw more resources at it, or cut back the amount of work that would be completed.

Modern factory bread seems to have taken the same approach. To get the bread out quicker, throw more yeast at it and cut down on the amount of work the yeast has time to do. Oh, and find the most gaseous strain of yeast known to man.

It does seem to me that along the way we have lost track of which part of the process is the primary object, and which is the by-product.

Supersize me

For a long time now I have wanted to try making a much larger loaf than I usually make. All the old household recipes assume that you will be making loaves with something over a kilo of flour (although they are more likely to talk about a 4 lb or quartern loaf).

The thing is, how do you go about doing it? Bread tins come in 1 lb and 2 lb sizes, and bannetons are generally made to hold either 500 g or 1 kg of dough. My dream loaf has 1 kg of wholemeal flour and 750 g of water. There's no way that would fit into a normal sized banneton.

However, there are bannetons and there are bread baskets. I have often used small woven bread baskets - the kind you put on the table - to raise small loaves in. So why not use a bigger bread basket to raise a bigger loaf? I found this one at the Salvation Army charity shop in Kendal for 79p -

It was just the job. The bread rose nicely in it, and the weave gave it a nice pattern on top -

This again was a low-yeast bake. I used 2 g of yeast for 1000 g of flour. It took 24 hours to be ready to go in the oven, but it really did taste good. And, as predicted by Elizabeth David (p 221), "the larger the loaf the longer it stays fresh". Although it is quite a dense texture, it is not at all heavy, and the mixture of 25% Heron Corn Mill stoneground wholemeal wheat with 75% roller milled wholemeal wheat, and about 5% more texture items - rye flakes, cracked wheat and linseeds - gives it a real rustic feel.

We did the same recipe, but without the long rise, at the mill today, and it worked pretty well there too.

What the experts say

Elizabeth David often quotes Eliza Acton's book -

It's a ripping good read, and you can find it online. This is Elizabeth David agreeing with Eliza Acton about long slow fermentation -

So with authority like that, you know it must be a good idea. Starting your bread making the day before baking is only a problem if you are focused on getting it done as quickly as possible. Once you get your 24 hour loaf hat on (as Jamie would say) it all starts to make better sense - and better bread.

Long live the long slow rise!