Seeing bread:
ROLY ALLEN SHARES A CHOCOLATE-FILLED TAKE ON THE CLASSIC SOURDOUGH LOAF.
A chocolate-filled take on the classic sourdough loaf
MAKING A BASIC STARTER
You can’t make sourdough bread without a starter, and starters inevitably take a few days to come to life. This delay seems to deter many aspiring first-time bakers, but it shouldn’t. Once you’ve got a starter up and running, you can keep it in hibernation in the fridge, then bake at your own convenience. So, let’s get started!
What is a starter?
A starter is a living thing – or more precisely, a collection of several billion living things, swimming in a mixture of their food and their by-products. Yeast is the star of the show: a single-celled fungus that eats carbohydrates (sugars and starches) and turns them into carbon dioxide gas and alcohol. (Unbaked dough is slightly alcoholic, but bread isn’t, as the alcohol is driven out of the loaf by the high temperature of the oven.) Cohabiting with these busily eating (and farting) yeast cells is a rich mixture of bacteria, mostly lactobacteria. This family has hundreds of members that share a very useful property: when they eat carbs, they produce lactic acid. This quickly makes their home too acidic for other bacteria to live in, and as most lactobacteria are either harmless to humans or actively beneficial, they offer an excellent way to preserve food. If you’ve ever enjoyed yoghurt, kefir, cheese, kimchi, soy sauce or pickles, you’ve enjoyed the benefits of lactobacteria. They, even more than the wild yeasts, are the crucial difference between sourdough bread and the factory-baked loaf you’ll find in the supermarket.
Where do starters come from?
So, how do you throw this amazing microbial party? There are almost as many methods as there are sourdough bakers, but they all work by introducing wild yeasts and lactobacteria to a nutritious mixture of flour and water. As both yeasts and lactobacteria are present in the air we breathe (and in flour, too), it’s possible to make this introduction just by leaving a mixture of flour and water out in your home, keeping it warm, and waiting for nature to take its course. This is unpredictable, and you run the risk of other bacteria stealing in and spoiling the show, so the method we will follow uses raisins, an excellent natural source of wild yeasts, and live yoghurt, an excellent natural source of lactobacteria, to get your starter going.
Note that timing, with yeast and bacteria alike, depends on temperature: if you have a warm kitchen, or an airing cupboard, everything will happen much more quickly than if the ambient temperature is on the cool side. If you’re making this starter in a heatwave, you may run a day ahead of schedule; if it’s cold, you may have to wait a day or so longer.
YOU WILL NEED
a jam jar or preserving jar (for your starter to live in)
10 raisins (to introduce natural wild yeasts)
1 tbsp organic natural yoghurt (to introduce natural lactobacteria) strong white bread flour – preferably organic (for your yeast and bacteria to eat)
water (to introduce all these parts to each other) a sieve or strainer (to remove the raisins after they’ve done their bit)
HOW TO Day one
Take a clean jam jar or preserving jar, at least 500ml in capacity. Mix the yoghurt and 50ml of water in the jar, then add 25g of the flour and mix that in. Finally, add the raisins. Put the lid loosely on top of the jar (not sealing it) and leave it in a warm place. Tip: Set a daily alarm on your phone so you remember to check in with the starter at about the same time each day.
Day two
Open the jar and give it a good sniff to see if you can detect any scent of alcohol vapour being given off by the yeast. No worries if not, but if you do have these smells, you’re already on your way. Whether or not you can smell anything, add 50ml of water and another 25g of flour, stir, cover loosely, and put the jar back.
Day three
All going well, today you’ll see tiny, pinhole-sized bubbles on the surface of the mixture and smell something – sour, sweet, volatile – that will confirm your starter is springing into life. Don’t worry if you don’t, though, especially if the room is on the cool side. Add 100ml of water and 50g of flour and stir well. Cover loosely and return the jar to its warm place.
Day four
By now, you should see and smell clear evidence of fermentation in the mix. It may be full of bubbles – a good sign – and you may get a sour odour (not unpleasant – similar to the smell of natural yoghurt) when you sniff. You may even get a slight whiff of alcohol. In any case, the raisins will have done their job of introducing the wild yeasts to the mixture, so it’s time to get them out. Add 100ml of water, stir, and strain the runny mixture through a sieve. Tip the mix back into its jar, add 100g of flour, stir, cover loosely and return to the warm place.
Day five
By this point, it should be clear that your mixture is completely alive, with plenty of foamy bubbles. It’s full of healthy, active yeasts and a rich mix of lactobacteria, but it needs thickening up in order to become manageable. If you want to use it today, add about 50g of flour, mix thoroughly and leave it for a couple of hours before you bake. Otherwise, discard about three-quarters of the mixture, add 100ml of water and 100g of flour to what’s left, and stir well to make a thick paste. About eight hours later, you should have about 300g of vigorous starter – more than enough for your first loaf. If you don’t want to bake today, just park the starter in your fridge until you do.
MAKING A CHOCOLATE SWEET AND SOURDOUGH
INGREDIENTS
150g starter 200ml warm water 350g strong white bread flour 7.5g (1 1/2 tsp) fine salt 2 tbsp cocoa powder 100g raisins 50g milk or plain chocolate, grated or finely chopped rice flour or semolina, for dusting
HOW TO
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the starter and warm water.
In another large bowl, mix the flour with the salt, cocoa powder, raisins and chocolate. Add this to the wet mixture and mix well with your hand until the ingredients are evenly distributed. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and leave to rest for 30 minutes.
Wet your hands, then pull, fold and rotate the dough 8 to 10 times, so it forms a ball. (Pull a corner of the dough from the bottom of the ball and stretch it up; fold it down into the centre of the ball, aiming to trap some air bubbles; then rotate the bowl clockwise about 45 degrees and stretch up another corner, starting the process again. You should feel the texture of the dough change as you go: it will become smoother, less sticky and more elastic.) Next, cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave it to rest for 10 minutes. Repeat this step two more times so that you’ve worked the dough three times and it has rested for an hour in total.
Dust a proving basket with rice flour. (Also known as a ‘banneton’, this is a special basket that allows a loaf to rise while keeping its shape – but a regular non-stick loaf tin will also work.) Wet your fingers, work them around the bottom of the ball of dough and gently transfer it to the proving basket, keeping the seam upwards.
Cover with a tea towel and leave in a warm place to prove. (This is when the yeast does its thing, pumping out carbon dioxide that forms millions of tiny bubbles and helps the dough to rise.) Depending on the temperature, it may take around three hours to gain about 50 per cent in size.
Preheat the oven to 230°C (210°C fan) or gas mark 8 and cut a piece of baking parchment about 35-40cm square. When the oven is ready, tip the loaf gently out of the proving basket and onto the centre of the baking parchment. Place the parchment and dough into a 1.8L casserole dish, then use scissors to make a couple of cuts 1 to 2cm deep into the top of the dough. Put the lid on the casserole dish.
Place the casserole dish on the middle shelf of the oven. There’s no need to add a source of steam.
After 25 minutes, remove the lid of the casserole dish so the crust can brown. After another 20 minutes, remove the casserole dish from the oven, remove the loaf, and tap its base: if it sounds hollow, the loaf is done. If not, place it back in the casserole dish and back in the oven for another 5 to 10 minutes, then test again. Leave to cool on a wire rack before eating.