Last Words

How to avoid a bad bake

Neville Chun bakes thousands of loaves of organic sourdough each year. But he admits even he has a ‘bad bake' every so often. “Recently, I baked 32 loaves, and I chucked out 30 because they weren't right. Maybe to someone else they would be fine, but to me, I have this vision in my head, and that bake didn't meet my expectations. If you become complacent, sourdough will bite your bum!”

The reason for his bad bake was something every sourdough baker will struggle with at some point, no matter their level of experience. Neville bakes more than 70 loaves, two days a week in his certified kitchen, supplying a local organic food store. It requires careful timing at every stage, so each batch of 16 loaves is close to (but not quite) at peak ferment when it goes into the oven. But even after doing it tens of thousands of times, it can still go wrong.

“I might bake 4000 loaves a year, but I'm still learning. I realised (after that bad bake) I wasn't letting the pre-ferment ferment long enough before I mixed it into the dough. That created fermentation problems right through to baking. I needed to start a bit earlier to give myself more time.”

Neville says the time of year also affected it, with his bad bake coming just as autumn turned to winter.

“There's a seasonal change, and the sourdough seems to know that.”

Neville bakes two different types of sourdough each week. One is a ‘country' loaf made from a strong, organic, Australian white baker's flour. It's mixed with NZgrown organic rye and wheat, which Neville mills just before he makes it, and diastatic malt. The other is a pain au levain (pronounced ‘parn oh looh-varn', say it quickly), a classic creamy-white crumbed sourdough loaf enriched with freshly milled organic rye flour.

He experiments with other types of bread for his family – during lockdown, he spent hours perfecting a sourdough made using creamed corn – but prefers to stick with just the two for his commercial baking.

“The more you bake (a particular recipe), the more experience you get. Experience really means being able to spot problems, understand what the mistake was, and knowing how to remedy it for the next bake.

“It's all about the look, feel, exact measurements, and timing. It's about looking at the dough, feeling the dough with your hands, knowing where it's at whatever the stage, and if there's a problem, what to do.”

"There's a seasonal change and the sourdough seems to know that."