Bread Matters (21 page)

Makes 1 large loaf

Preparing the grains

300g Boiling water

300g Coarse kibbled rye or wheat grain

600g Total

Pour the boiling water over the kibbled grain, stir, then cover and leave at warm room temperature for as long as possible so that the grain can absorb all the water. This procedure is best done at the same time as the sourdough is refreshed, i.e. at least 8 hours before assembling the bread.

Wholegrain dough

300g Rye Production Sourdough (page 165)

600g Soaked grains (above)

7g Sea salt

907g Total

Let the rye sourdough ferment for at least 8 hours, preferably 16-24 hours. Then mix it with the soaked grains and salt. The mixture will resemble wet concrete. Using wet hands, gather it into a lump, squish it roughly into a brick shape and drop it into a greased large loaf tin. Ideally, if smoothed out evenly, the mixture should come about two-thirds up the side of the tin. It will not rise very much, since there is not much flour to hold the gas generated by the fermentation.

Cover the top of the tin with a lid (e.g. an inverted baking tray, either greased or lined with baking parchment. Weight this lid down with a heavy, heatproof object such as an ovenproof dish. The idea is to get the bread to rise up to the top of the tin and press against the lid, forming a flat top. Baking under a lid also retains moisture, which would otherwise escape.

Rising time will depend on the vigour of your sourdough but is likely to take 2-3 hours. Take a quick look every hour or so to see how the dough is rising. It is ready to go in the oven when it is just about up to the top of the tin.

Slow baking is critical to this type of bread. The longer the bake and the lower the temperature, the darker the bread will be. In a range-type oven, bake overnight in the bottom oven. In conventional ovens, bake for at least 4 hours at 130°C or less. A dish of hot water in the oven will help maintain a slightly steamy atmosphere. It is possible to bake this bread without a lid and in a hotter oven but the kibbled grains on the surface of the bread tend to become as hard as flint and a danger to teeth – at least for a day or so until they soften up.

After baking, turn the loaf out of its tin and wrap it in a tea towel, which will recycle some of the escaping moisture into the loaf, ensuring that the outer crust is soft. The loaf will be grey rather than black and will look pretty much like what it is – a brick-shaped coagulation of coarse grains. But wait! After a day to stabilise the moisture and mature the flavour, slice the bread very thinly and serve with smoked fish, cream cheese or an olive tapenade – quite a different experience from the commercial alternatives.

Pumpernickel

Legend has it that this supposedly German word is a corruption of the French
pain pour Nicole,
the female in question being Napoleon’s dog, who was evidently partial to a bit of rough. Whether there is any connection between the imperial canine’s preference for wholegrain bread and French scientist Magendie’s experiment showing that dogs fed white bread did not survive beyond 50 days, history does not record. Despite such exalted associations, this bread is probably of humbler origin. It is easy to see how, using whole grains and very little flour, it might have been a do-it-yourself expedient for farmers who had no access to a proper mill.

Most sourdough baking systems involve an intermediate step between the original starter and the final dough. This is what I refer to as a ‘production’ sourdough or leaven. The purpose of this stage is to allow the yeast population to multiply so that there are enough active cells to aerate the final dough.

However, it is possible to cut out this intermediate stage and to put your sourdough starter straight into the final dough. This is probably the simplest way of making sourdough bread.

Really Simple Sourdough Bread

This recipe shows that you can use a rye sourdough to raise a predominantly wheat bread (which could be useful if you have only a rye sour on the go), although it will work perfectly well with a piece of wheat leaven instead of the rye sour. It really doesn’t get much simpler than this. Just take a bit of old rye sour, mix it with wholemeal flour, water and salt, put it in a tin and let it rise.

Compared to most of the breads in this chapter, this one uses a relatively small amount of initial sour or leaven, so the rise is slow because it takes some time for the yeast population to increase sufficiently to raise the dough.

Some experimentation will be required to establish the right combination of sourdough starter, temperature and time in your conditions. The process can be speeded up by using more starter, though this may result in a slightly stronger-flavoured (more acidic) bread. The quantity given in the recipe is designed to make it possible to start the dough in the evening and have it ready to bake first thing in the morning.

Makes 1 small loaf

40g Rye Sourdough Starter (page 160)

175g Water (at 35°C)

250g Stoneground wholemeal flour

4g Sea salt

469g Total

To be on the safe side, use a rye sourdough starter that has been refreshed within the last fortnight or so. It is quite possible to get good results with stuff that has been hanging around in the fridge for ages, but its acidity may have reduced the population of viable yeast cells and it could take quite a while to perk up. If you don’t have time to do a full refreshment, which really amounts to the same as making a ‘production’ sourdough (as described on page 165), do a mini-refreshment, by dispersing some of your very old sour in at least double its weight of wholemeal rye flour and water. It should be about 30°C and as sloppy as runny porridge. Give it 4 hours in a warm place if you can. If absolutely nothing has happened in that time, it will need longer, but you can expect to see some bubbling after a few hours as the yeasts start to ferment.

To make the bread, disperse your old (or refreshed) rye sourdough in the water and then mix in the flour and salt. Knead to develop the gluten and adjust the moisture so that the dough is very soft. Any structure that you create by tight moulding will largely subside during a long proof, so do not expect a fine-domed top to a loaf such as this. Place the dough in a greased small loaf tin, cover it and leave to rise. Do not put the tin in an especially warm place unless you want to hurry the process along. At an average kitchen temperature of about 20°C, this dough should rise in 10-12 hours.

Bake as for any normal tin bread, i.e. in a hot oven (about 230°C), reducing the temperature by about 30°C after 10 minutes or so. Since all the flour in this loaf has been fermented for a long period, the crumb will be markedly stickier immediately after baking than in a conventional leaven system such as French Country Bread (page 182), so it is better to leave it for a day before cutting it. Its keeping quality, however, is remarkable.

Even better, the science suggests that a long rise with lactic acid bacteria from the rye sour will neutralise almost all the phytic acid present in the wholemeal flour bran, making important minerals such as iron, magnesium, calcium and zinc more available to your body than they would be in an ordinary yeasted wholemeal bread.

Starting a wheat leaven

The procedure for starting a wheat leaven is almost exactly the same as for a rye sourdough. Again, all that is needed is flour and water.

I find that a firm leaven is easier to control than a wet one: it does not ferment quite so quickly, so there is less risk of it going too far too quickly, i.e. becoming too acidic and exhausting its yeast food, both of which conditions can affect the quality of the final dough. There is no compelling reason why you should not make a wheat leaven fairly sloppy like a rye sour. But if you do use more water in your leaven than suggested below, you may need to use slightly less water in the final doughs.

The procedures for handling a wheat leaven are much the same as for a rye sourdough (see page 160), so only the differences are described below:

Day 1

40g Stoneground wholemeal wheat flour

40g Water

80g Total

Keep this mixture as near to a constant 28°C as you can manage.

Day 2

40g Stoneground wholemeal wheat flour

40g Water

80g Starter from Day 1

160g Total

Day 3

40g Stoneground wholemeal wheat flour

20g Water

160g Starter from Day 2

220g Total

The water proportion is slightly reduced to tighten the dough up a bit.

Day 4

120g Strong white flour

100g Water

220g Starter from Day 3

440g Total

White flour is added on the fourth day to lighten the leaven a little. If you prefer to stick with wholemeal only, that is fine. After fermenting the Day 4 leaven for another 24 hours, you should have a leaven that smells slightly acidic and has risen appreciably (and probably collapsed).

What if nothing has happened?

If there are really no signs of life in your leaven, even after you have kept it in a warm place as suggested, it probably just needs more time to get going. Give it another refreshment by repeating Day 4 (discard 220g of your starter or put it in a separate tub and observe what happens to it). If it did show signs of life and then appears to have ‘died’, it may be that it has become too acidic at a stage when the number of yeast cells is still rather limited. In this case, it needs to be diluted with fresh flour, which will bring in some more yeast resources. So discard all but 130g of your starter and do a refreshment as follows:

60g Stoneground wholemeal flour

120g Strong white flour

130g Water

130g Old Starter

440g Total

If that doesn’t work, give it another go and if you still notice no life in the leaven at all, start again from the beginning with a fresh source of flour.

It is unusual for a starter to fail completely. One possible explanation, if low temperature can really be excluded, is over-cleanliness. From the chlorine in the water supply to the sanitisers and bacteriocides in household cleaning products, modern life is on a mission to exterminate all suspicious organisms. If you have been over-zealous in your domestic duties, traces of some fragrant biocide may have done for your leaven. Be sensibly clean, by all means, but lay off the chemicals. A doctor who came on one of my courses described how he routinely sterilised his utensils in a medical autoclave before making a leaven. I persuaded him to abandon this overkill and his leavens never looked back. In harnessing the power of wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria, we are only repeating what generations of our forebears practised long before sterile conditions were understood, let alone possible. We are lucky that in natural fermentations of flour and water, the bacteria that predominate are almost always those that do us good, not harm. Leave them to it, I say.

Assuming that you have got a viable leaven, it can now be put to work making bread. With a wheat leaven, the cycle of refreshment is different from a rye sour. The stages are the same – starter, production leaven, final dough – but the quantities and timing are different. A wheat starter seeds a production leaven only three times its size (not ten) and the production leaven is fermented for only four hours, even less in hot weather.

French Country Bread

This is a straightforward way of making the classic
pain de campagne,
or just a simple, naturally fermented wheat bread. It can be made with all white flour or combinations of white and wholemeal, according to taste. While the basic dough makes a terrific everyday bread in its own right, it can also form the basis of a host of interesting variations, some of which are suggested below.

Although this bread is usually baked as a flattish round loaf on the bottom of the oven, there is no reason why it should not be baked in a tin. If you make the dough as soft as the recipe suggests, you may find a tin loaf coming out fairly flat topped, but this can be corrected by tightening the dough up just a little with extra flour. Don’t expect the crumb to be close-textured and even, like a British sliced loaf. It will be more open and uneven – and infinitely more tasty.

The instructions here assume that you make this bread in one sequence with the doughs at ambient temperature, in which case the whole process, from beginning the leaven refreshment to taking the baked loaf out of the oven, will take 9-11 hours. However, it is possible to adjust the timing in various ways; see page 200 for some suggestions.

Makes 1 large loaf

Stage 1: Refreshing the leaven

160g
^*
Wheat Leaven Starter (from above)

50g Stoneground wholemeal flour

150g Strong white flour

120g Water

480g Total production leaven

Mix everything together into a fairly firm dough at about 27°C. If your starter was very wet, you may need to add a little more flour at this stage. Cover and leave in a warm place for 4 hours. In very warm weather, this period of refreshment may need to be reduced to 3 hours or even less. The production leaven is ready when it has expanded appreciably but not collapsed on itself.

Stage 2: Making the final dough

100g Stoneground wholemeal flour

300g Strong white flour

7g Sea salt

300g Water

300g
^*
Production Leaven (from above)

1007g Total

Mix a dough with all the ingredients except the refreshed production leaven. Make the dough pretty soft and aim for a temperature of about 28°C. Knead until the gluten is making itself felt and the dough is becoming smooth and elastic. About 8-10 minutes of vigorous action should see some changes. Then add the production leaven and work it into the dough until it is smooth. At this stage, the softness of the dough can be adjusted by additions of water or flour. If you are going to prove this dough in a basket, do try to keep it very soft. Even at the end of kneading (after another few minutes), the dough should not be so dry that it does not stick to your hands or the bench.