The Boomtown Rap

This post is a presentation of the essentials of sourdough bread baking, a collation of information I’ve acquired through months of inhabiting artisan bread baking forums, reading books by the bread gurus and – most important of all – trying many different sourdough bread recipes. Consider it a short-cut to your own wide wonderful world of artisan sourdough bread baking at home. Hopefully, I’ve included everything you need to know to get started.

If you haven’t been following this series of blogs on the sourdough bread movement, you might like to check out my previous post and have a listen to the ABC Regional Radio podcast embedded therein. Compelling stuff.

But why bother with home baked sourdough bread, you might ask, when there are now sourdough bakeries aplenty? That’s a question that could yield a book, but I’ll cut to the chase.

The Basics of Sourdough Bread Baking
OK, to business. How do you get started? With a starter!

The Starter
A starter is a wild yeast culture made from flour and water. Once it’s active, you can keep it in the fridge between bakes. Take it out and feed it up when you’re planning to make bread. Then put it back in the fridge. Or, if you’re baking very regularly, just keep it out and fed.

There are numerous ways to begin a starter. It took me some time and a few methods to get mine going. It was mid-winter, and I blamed my first failed attempts on the cold ambient temperatures (12-18C in kitchen). As it turned out, the temperature was not a factor – my refined fine-ground rye flour was. As soon as I switched to quality organic whole-grain rye flour in combination with plain white flour, voila!

Here’s the method that was successful for me: How To Make Your Own Starter
(by SourDom, one of the regular contributors on the excellent Sourdough Companion site)

Follow the directions, use 30% organic whole-grain rye + 70% plain flour, and you’ll have an active starter in 10–15 days, or less in warm weather (NB: you’ll need to increase the feeds to every 8 hours if your kitchen temperature is very warm – say, 28C+).

Don’t be impatient, as I was. I was so eager to get going, I convinced myself that a few bubbles and an acetone-like smell were signs that my starter was ready. It was not. Without enough healthy yeast to leaven the dough, it won’t rise and your bread will be compact and flat. Ah dammit, here’s a pic of my inglorious first bread attempt – known in baking circles as…

…a ‘brick’!



Here’s the starter that I mistakenly assessed as ready for duty:

Here’s the same starter a few days later, this time fluffed up with healthy yeasty activity and genuinely raring to go:

And the result? My first real bread:

If you’re not sure your starter is ready, it probably isn’t. The signs of an active starter are unmistakable and obvious: it will double in size, or more, within 8-12 hours (maybe up to 16 hours in very cold conditions), be light and mousse-like in texture, and aerated with bubbles.

Where does the yeast come from?
Debate rages endlessly. Some insist that yeast spores are floating around in the air, others that they are in the flour. The latter explanation has scientific backing. Me? I don’t care. It’s romantic to think that the yeast spores you invoke when you begin your starter are the same ones that the ancients used to make the very first breads, borne in the air down through the centuries, but my money’s on the scientists. Whatever, this really is a case of ‘build it and they will come.’ For me that’s magical, wherever the little beasties heil from.



Equipment
Some folk use expensive electric mixers, but I mix all my dough by hand (using a dinner knife to stir). And whatever recipes might specify, I’ve never encountered a dough that couldn’t be hand-mixed. So, up to you, but I wouldn’t be buying a Kitchen Aid or similar. All you need is:

That’s it! You can spend more if you like. Bannetons, brotforms, couche linen and other professional bakery equipment give panache to your breads, but you can get by perfectly well without them.



Ingredients
Flour
I prefer premium quality organic flours. You can afford the best as a home baker, but it’s not about bucks for me. I love quality flavoursome breads. Why would I compromise flavour, or my own baking, by using supermarket flour? You can if you choose, though. It will work fine, and you’ll still be turning out far better bread than you can buy from most commercial bakeries (or from many boutique sourdough bakeries!). It just won’t be as good as it could be…and that’s unbearable for people like me.

You’ll need a variety of flours. Start with a basic store of the following:

As you get more adventurous in your bread baking, you’ll probably want to seek out some spelt flour, durum semolina, barley flour, oat flour…the list goes on.

Water
Any potable tap water will suffice, but I prefer to use filtered water.

Salt
I use cheap sea salt (‘cooking salt’), without iodine or anything else added to it.



Some Bread Baking Terminology
Don’t get spooked by the jargon. You’ll pick it up bit by bit as you engage in the artisan bread baker forums, but here’s a short list that might help initially:

Shaping
When I began baking bread, I didn’t pay any attention to shaping. After the bulk proof, I would just dump the dough into a bread pan, pat it benevolently to even up the surface, and that was that. If I was making a boule (round loaf), I’d form the dough into a ball with cupped hands and transfer it to a plastic-bag-lined round casserole bowl. I soon learned that the result of not shaping your dough properly is often a very irregular crumb with wonky features you don’t want – such as tunnels and caves. Here’s a video demonstrating correct shaping techniques (there are lots more, covering any shape of loaf you might wish to make – do a search):

Once you’ve shaped your dough, you need some sort of mould to put it in that will retain the shape you’ve so lovingly given it while it proves. Pros and perfectionist home bakers use bannetons, brotforms, baskets and couche linen, which I see as a needless expense, since I’m happy with my breads having a rustic look. In the best tradition of the home baker, I improvise with teatowels, colanders, baking paper, bricks or blocks of wood – whatever works! If you are interested in my home-grown strategies to overcome a lack of pro equipment, let me know in the Comments (no private emails, please) and I’ll do a follow-up post on this.



Recipes
As mentioned, almost all the recipes I’ve tried have been courtesy of amateur artisan bread bakers posting on bread baking forums. There really is no need to buy books if all you’re after is recipes. There are some very well-resourced and skilful home bakers out there, who are ever-willing to share their knowledge. Peruse some of the many artisan bread blogs or forums and you’ll find any number of tantalising recipes, some based on classic breads made famous by acclaimed professional bakers, some developed by the posters themselves.

Here’s a good one to start with; it’s an easy dough to work with and the bread is one of my favourites:
Norwich Sourdough Bread

Every Friday, breadheads submit pics of their latest baking triumphs to YeastSpotting! – something of an institution among home bakers. Well worth checking, as the pics are usually linked to the posters’ recipes.

Below are links to my favourite artisan bread blogs and forums. Google and you’ll find many more. And although you don’t need to splash out on books, you’ll probably want to read the gurus once full-blown bread-baking addiction begins to take hold – see recommended texts below.



Recommended Resources

Websites/blogs:
Bread cetera
Farine
Sourdough Companion
The Fresh Loaf
Wild Yeast



Bread Baking Books:

Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes

This expansive work of Hamelman’s is widely acclaimed as the bread ‘bible’. Written for professional and amateur bakers, it is detailed and technical at times, and many of the recipes are not sourdough based. Nevertheless, Hamelman’s writing is a joy, and this hard-cover classic is highly recommended for anyone seriously into artisan bread baking.




The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread

Peter Reinhart is another of the American gurus whose name and recipes come up all the time on artisan bread forums. This is his seminal text, and is well worth having. As with Hamelman, extremely well written. Gorgeous photographs. Again, though, only a minority of the recipes are sourdough.




The Handmade Loaf

Lepard is English, and the breads he covers are all European in origin. Makes for interesting reading and the photography is choice. Some good sourdough recipes, although most call for commercial yeast. His ale barm bread is one of my favourites. This book is far simpler in its treatment than the others I’ve recommended here, and more directly geared to the home baker. A good one to start with.

Note: If you’re Australian-based, you’ll find that these books are available from Amazon at prices way lower than those local retailers are asking. As always, the more you order at one time, the cheaper the shipping works out. And yes, the above are affiliate links, which means I get a small commission if you click on them and then order. I refuse to monetise this blog with Google Adwords etc, but given the ridiculous amount of time I’ve put into this post I felt justified in embedding these Amazon affiliate links on this occasion. But go ahead and bypass them if you wish to order without dropping a few miserable shekels in my begging bowl. Your karma…

I have bought all my bread books through Amazon, with the exception of Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf, for which I got a better deal through the UK online seller, The Book Depository. It’s worth checking their prices against Amazon’s, as they have free shipping. Most of the time, their prices are much higher for US published books, though, even factoring in Amazon’s shipping charges.

There you go then. Everything you need to get started. What are you waiting for?

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