SOURDOUGH
Looking for a great sourdough? You are spoilt for choice in Tasmania. We spoke to some of our best bakers to find out their secrets
Tasmanian bakers are at the forefront of a movement winning supporters throughout the world to restore the ancient art of making bread
It’s just flour, water and salt. That’s it. No yeast. No preservatives. No other raising agents. True sourdough — not the bread labelled as such in the big supermarkets — is made from a natural leavening, a fermented form of flour and water. It’s the way bread used to be made before the massproduced, yeast-heavy loaves on supermarket shelves. Naturally leavened bread expands in the resting period and creates a moist, fine-grain texture. Sourdough has an extended shelf-life, better nutritional profile, and nicer flavour.
According to Tasmania’s growing band of sourdough fans, once you taste it, you can’t go back to heavily processed breads.
“Sourdough that is handmade and naturally leavened is a kind of magical food,” explains Cam McKenzie, who runs the Cygnet Woodfired Bakehouse. He’s had elderly customers break down in tears after tasting his sourdough because it’s transported them back to their childhood. McKenzie says when people try real bread for the first time they are gobsmacked by the taste and the energy it gives them.
“There has been a whole generation of bakers who have missed out on what real bread is,” he says.
Alistair Wise, from Sweet Envy in North Hobart, says the best thing about sourdough is that every baker’s bread tastes different because the water, the flour, the technique — even the temperature — is unique to them. “Sourdough tastes like where you are at that moment,” Wise says. “You end up with all these little sourdough niches, and Tasmania has some fabulous little ones.”
McKenzie says the taste of sourdough is different even if it’s made in the same bakery with the same recipe. “Even if my baker is following my recipe in my kitchen, his sourdough will be different to my sourdough,” he says. “Sourdough baking has an artisan quality like spoon carving. It’s the little nuances and character each person puts in, that makes their sourdough different. Bread tastes the way it’s been manipulated, the way it is stretched and how much it is stretched changes its character.”
McKenzie’s method of making sourdough is unusual. He does not use electronic mixers because he prefers to mix by hand. He built a wood-fired masonry bakers’ oven that requires burning a fire inside the baking chamber to heat it to replicate the wood-fired cooking technique used by bakers during the Renaissance. “I went back 500 years because it’s the best way to cook it,” McKenzie says. “It’s bat s**t mental to even think about doing this commercially, so it wasn’t an easy choice. But it makes for a better product,” he says.
Scoring a unique pattern into every single sourdough loaf he creates, also makes for a better product according to Corey Newton from Taroona’s Philadelphia Bakers. “I’ve always had a passion for making things beautiful,” Newton says. He says his bread is the best dressed in the state because he makes a big effort to ensure his loaves are really visually appealing. “Scoring those lovely patterns into the dough before it hits the oven is giving it that final respect, that last bit of love,” Newton says. “If it’s not visually appealing, there is something missing from it so for me the full package needs to be beautiful on the eye as well as beautiful on the palette.” Newton’s bakery is completely yeast free: all 40 of his products are true sourdough.
It’s the same yeast-free set up in Launceston, for sourdough guru Ian Lowe from Apiece. He’s a yeast-free bread junkie. He loves bread so much that he loses sleep over it. “Baking is my obsession,” Lowe says. “I can’t turn off.” Lowe is inspired by the European bakers who still use natural leavening. In his 20 years
of baking bread Lowe has developed a global reputation as a sourdough master. He regularly welcomes bakers from around the world who stay for month-long, sometimes longer, stints at Apiece to observe and learn the art.
There were two bakers at Apiece when TasWeekend talked to Lowe, including one from Phoenix, Arizona and a pastry chef, formerly of Vue de monde in Melbourne, and two were on their way one from the US and another from Brazil.
Annalisa Macaluso, of Arizona, says her two months at Apiece were invaluable. “The emphasis is on simple, old world techniques with a focus on flavour,” Annalisa says. “This becomes immediately obvious after one meeting with the incredibly talented people on the team. The owner, Ian, is a wealth of knowledge. He is extremely passionate about contributing to the betterment of the culinary world, [and] adding to the collective ethos of ‘keeping that which is simple abundant’. If you walk through the doors with a thirst for knowledge and a desire to work hard, he would pour out every drop of knowledge from his mind in the hopes that a baker from the other side of the world would take back a passion and respect for a craft that is fading.”
Despite the praise from visiting bakers, Lowe says he sees himself as a student. “I’m mostly self-taught but any time I travel it’s for learning,” he says. “I recently came back from several months in Germany and France where I got to spend a lot of time in and around many of the best bakeries there. Experience is the best teacher. I freely share everything I know because a lot of the information I put out there is original to me as a result of my own research.”
Lowe reads everything he can get his hands on about sourdough fermentation. “I obsessively read about as many bakers and chefs as possible,” he says. “I’m a junkie and a formula whore.” When a new scientific article is published he applies its findings in his kitchen laboratory. Lowe taught himself basic chemistry, biochemistry and microbiology so that he better understands the microbiome of his favourite food. “There are only 20 researchers in the world who study this and I am in contact with them all,” he says. “It is the microbiology of fermentation and specifically the fermentation as a baker that I am obsessed with. I’m trying to bridge the gap between science and artisan baking.”
Lowe’s Instagram feed is one of the most popular among sourdough baking enthusiasts, with close to 32,000 followers. Lowe says Instagram acts as a “non-systematic conduit” for his always-on-the-go mind. It is where he shares the fruits of his research. “[The Instagram page] @apieceofbread is more about bread education with walls of texts I’m surprised anybody wants to read,” he says. “I want to free the professional and amateur baker from a particular recipe, so she can create her own formula, and make any product from any type of flour and using any method of fermentation of her choosing.”
Lowe says that even as a kid he adored handmade, imperfect, old-world breads and pastries because of their contrast to the industrial and pre-packaged baked goods he was used to. In the 1980s he tried a sourdough roll for the first time at a Steakhouse in Texas.“They were small, tidy-white and with mouthpuckering sourness,” Lowe says. “Looking back on it, they were probably yeasted, retarded and artificially sourced with acetic or lactic acids from a packet mix. No matter. I was hooked.”
Lowe says no technique or ingredient is off limits at Apiece. Everything he makes is hand-cut, hand-shaped and made the old way. He uses a bacteria and yeast-rich starter, a small amount of dough that is regularly fed by adding flour and water to breed the living organisms that make the yeast rise and give sourdough its tang.
“We do not use any commercial yeast,” Lowe says. “All our stoneground flours come from Wholegrain Milling in Gunnedah in New South Wales and all our roller-milled flours from Laucke in South Australia. Our pastry takes 48 hours to ferment at room temperature and our breads take 36 hours.”
Pigeon Whole Bakers invest the same time into their sourdough. “Bread is more digestible once it’s had a proper fermentation,” explains Pigeon Whole Bakers owner Jay Patey, in a phone interview done while he was in Italy on a European bakery tour. “People are becoming more and more in tune with where their food is coming from and what they are putting into their body.” Pigeon Whole Baker’s whole grains are sustainably farmed and milled in NSW, with no chemicals, sprays or pesticides. Patey says he also uses flour sourced from Oatlands: “Tasmanian farmers are growing more experimental crops in heritage-type grains which is exciting for bakers.” Pigeon Whole is Tasmania’s biggest sourdough producer, making between 800 and 2000 sourdough loaves a day in eight different varieties. They use an electronic mixer, but every other process is done by hand. Customers can watch the bakers at work.
Patey says often his customers will return not long after buying a loaf of his sourdough because they’ve already eaten half before arriving home. “That happens quite a bit,” he says. “Sourdough is huge in Tasmania. We really love real bread here. We have loyal customers who excitedly come into the bakery after European holidays because they haven’t been able to find bread as good away as they can buy at home from us. They say: ‘thank God – we haven’t had anything this good since we’ve been travelling’.” Recently a Danish captain ordered 40 loaves of Philadelphia Baker’s traditional Danish rye just before he took off from Tasmanian waters to head home.
For those keen to make their own, Patey runs three sourdough making classes at the Agrarian Kitchen each year. They always sell out. His tip: “Practise, practise, practise and make sure you start out with a really quality flour.”
Patey says he believes Tasmanians’ love of sourdough will never stop. One sourdough devotee is Phoebe Nimanis, who is one of those many Hobartians who line up for their sourdough fix at Hobart’s weekly Farm Gate Market. “Tasting the Apiece table loaf was a bit of a revelation for me,” she tells TasWeekend on a recent Sunday. “I’ve decided if I ever had to choose a meal for my last supper it would be their table loaf with some good quality olive oil.”