My World of Travel and Food: Sourdough

Tuesday 3 September 2013

Sourdough

I have had a tummy interest in sourdough from the first time I tried it many years ago. I've been meaning over the decades to try recreating this sublime bread and have never gone further than occasionally thinking about it.....

However this is summer in Dubai. I'm recovering from a running injury so exercise is not part of my routine for a few weeks and the heat keeps me inside.

I have been slobbing around watching back episodes of "The Great British Bakeoff" and suddenly the yearning to create sourdough came upon me with earnest.

The starter....I am pretty sure few people had as many problems with their first starter as I did. I tried and failed 8 times using Paul Hollywood's green grape starter recipe. OK so I finally thought it wasn't the starter for the environment right now and I found a sourdough starter by Patrick Ryan. This one used yoghurt instead of grape and smelt nicer from the outset.

It looked great, did what it should have for the first few days and then on the final day when it was supposed to be ready to bake with it just looked out of steam and not the bubbling full jar of sour yumminess it should have been. Oh the disappointment. I was about to give up on sourdough altogether then hit the internet and decided to try feeding it every 4 hours for a day to see if I could resurrect it. The result....a lively sourdough starter than is so perfect I feel like it's my baby!

I think my problems with the starter was simply that our room temperature here is set at about 24 degrees and I think the Paul Hollywood version was for a cooler room temperture. Actually it would be helpful with these recipes by professionals if they gave a guideline of what "room temp" is ideal just so that it's clear. Ryan's recipe called for a warmer room temp of around 20.

It's fun having a starter ready to go anytime. I keep it in the fridge, and feed it every 3 days or so therefore bake every 3 days. Feeding simply means taking some out (about 200gms) and topping up with equal parts flour and water (ie 100gms flour and 100gms water) so you can use your 200gms in baking and keep your starter happily fed. Meaning ultimately the whole house is happily fed!

I'm still in the honeymoon phase of this .... I've done some beautiful crusty breads and am currenly trying to perfect the ciabatta. I made cinnamon buns using only the starter as the raising agent and they were superb even though the recipe I used required a little yeast. I'm going to do brioche, crossants and panetone. The smell in the house these days is quite frankly heaven.

A bubbling alive starter

Starter.

I've learnt that the best results with sourdough breads are from kneeding until very very stretchy. You should be able to stretch the dough until you can see through it.

Viola!

This bread, toasted with my 95 year old Poppa's home made marmalade and of which I hope to snaffle another jar of when I'm next in NZ is breakfast perfection.