Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie...

Without a doubt, this bread is some of the best homemade bread I've ever had.

Sourdough bread takes a long time from start to finish and it is in part the slow rise that gives it some of the wonderful flavour. The amount of time required for actively messing about with the dough is very slow, though, since most of the time the bread is just getting on with it by itself. Don't forget to feed your starter, too, so that you have enough to make some the next time.

Basic sourdough bread

Step 1
½ cup starter
½ cup wholewheat flour
slightly less than ¼ cup water

Mix the starter with the flour and water until it turns into a sticky dough and all the flour is moistened. If you think you need more flour or water, add some (it's quite sticky but shouldn't be actually soggy...) Cover and leave to rise for about 6 hours.

Step 2
½ cup wholewheat flour
slightly less than ¼ cup water

Take your dough and again mix it with flour and water to produce a sticky dough, with all the flour mixed in and moistened, again, adding a little more flour or water if necessary. Cover and leave to rise again for another 6 hours.

Step 3
1 ¾ cups bread flour
½ cup water
1 tsp salt (or just under if you prefer)

Mix the sticky dough in with the flour, water and salt, and stir it quite vigorously with a wooden spoon. If the flour isn't all moistened and mixed in, add a little extra water, but don't add any extra flour if it's very sticky. Once it's been mixed up, leave it for 15-20 minutes, covered.
After sitting for this time, the dough should be easier to work with and slightly less sticky. Liberally cover the worksurface with flour and scrape the dough out of the bowl with a spatula. Then put some flour on top of the dough as well. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes, adding more flour if it needs it (quite likely) but ensuring that it remains reasonably soft and sticky enough to stick to the table occasionally (the dough doesn't want to be too dry).
Cover and leave for an hour, then tip the dough out (with a spatula if necessary) and squash down, folding over on itself a couple of times. Then leave it for about 6 hours again.

Step 4
Tip out the dough and shape it. I use a banneton, a basket lined with cloth that you rub flour into, but you can improvise with a tea-towel and some other container (a colander is good). The dough needs support while it rises since otherwise it would collapse, and the banneton provides this support. So shape the dough into the shape of your rising container, whatever that is, and put it in there. Remember to rub flour into the cloth or the dough will stick horribly. Then leave the shaped dough until it's ready - this will take somewhere between 4 and 5 hours usually. It's ready when you poke it gently with a finger and the impression fills in slowly (rather than quickly). It's not too picky if it's a bit over- or bit underrisen, but my experience is that underrisen is better than overrisen. (It will rise more in the oven and very quickly if it's underrisen, so will be slightly more dense, but if it overrises too much it will collapse and that's not great, although not terminal.)

Step 5
Preheat the oven to 220C.
Once the dough has risen, it needs to come out of the shaping container. Line a baking tray with baking parchment. If the top of the dough is somewhere less than an inch away from the top of the container, simply put the tray on the container and flip the whole lot upside down (carefully!). If the dough is further down in the container, take a piece of cardboard cut so that it will fit further into the container, cover that with parchment, and flip the dough on to the cardboard-parchment contraption. then place this on the baking tray and carefully slide the cardboard out from underneath.
Put the tray in the oven and if you wish, spray some water in to create steam (or put a tray of boiling water in the bottom of the oven). Bake the bread for about 15 minutes, then take it out, turn it round, and remove the baking parchment so that the bread sits directly on the hot tray. Turn the oven down to 200C and bake for another 10-15 minutes. The bread is ready when you knock on the bottom and it sounds hollow.
Leave it to cool for at least 45 minutes before cutting it.

I have discovered two good ways to incorporate this into real life (since if you're not a professional baker then the long rising times can be a little awkward), which result in the bread being ready either for lunch or for dinner. Either way, you need to start the dough the day before you want the bread.

Schedule 1: Start the dough first thing in the morning and do the first rising period until lunchtime ish. Second rising period from lunchtime until the evening. Final rise overnight (the dough isn't too picky about the time so if it goes a bit longer than its six hours, that will be fine). Shape the dough first thing the next morning, and you can bake it before lunch (although you'll have to get up early to do this).

Schedule 2: Start the dough at about lunchtime and the first rising period runs from lunchtime to evening. Second rising period overnight. Third rising period morning to lunchtime ish and the final rise and baking in the afternoon.

The alternative to these is that you can refrigerate the dough after it's risen at any stage, but it will need an hour or so to come back to room temperature before you do anything with it again.

The Stuff of Life

I don't remember when I learned to make bread, but I remember helping my mother to shape rolls when I was very young: she made nine loaves of bread each weekend, and they'd go in the freezer so that we had homemade bread all week. Aged around 9 or 10, I began to take on this task myself, although I had to stand on a chair to be tall enough to reach into the deep bowl that could take all the dough. Imagine my horror when I discovered for the first time what other people thought of as bread and ate every day, the horrible squodgy white stuff that comes pre-sliced in plastic bags and is designed to keep for as many days as possible.

Although I've made bread for years, I have only recently tried making proper sourdough bread, and it really is fabulous. I was worried that it would be difficult and time-consuming, but in fact, it is neither. The bread takes a long time to rise and so you have to plan a day or so in advance, but the amount of time required to mix it and shape it is very small. The starter culture takes about a week to prepare, but again requires only a little attention each day.

So here are my instructions for making a starter culture, adapted from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible.

Ingredients organic whole wheat flour bottled water bread flour (optional)

Equipment large glass jar, 1 litre capacity

In order to avoid contamining the starter, everything you use (spoon, bowl, etc) should really be extremely well cleaned. If at any point coloured streaks appear in the starter, throw it out and start again - it has been contaminated and will make you ill.

Day 1. Mix together 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup bottled water in a bowl to make a stiff dough, adding more water a little at a time if it is required. Transfer to glass jar. Cover with clingfilm and leave for 48 hours.
Day 3. The starter should look a little bubbly and a bit like batter. Remove about half of it (about half a cup) and add another 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup bottled water and mix well. Cover with clingfilm and leave for 24 hours.
Day 4. Again remove about half the starter and add about 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup bottled water and mix well. Cover with clingfilm and leave for 24 hours.
Day 5. The starter may be active by now: if it expanded to about double, and may have collapsed again afterwards, then it is. If it isn't yet active, repeat instructions for day 4 until it does this. I find the best way to check the expansion is to put an elastic band around the glass at the level of the starter once it's been fed, and then you can see how much it has risen by. Once the starter is active, remove half, and feed it 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup water, and leave it for a couple of hours. At this point it can be refrigerated.
Beyond Day 5. For the first two weeks it should be fed 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup water about three times a week (after removing half the existing starter each time) to build up the starter culture and mature it. After that it can be fed less often, whenever you make bread, or a minimum of once a week.

I gave up on bottled water after day 5 and I used fizzy water as my bottled water because that was all I had, but I don't think fizzy or still makes a huge amount of difference. I used wholewheat flour because I prefer it to rye flour, but in Germany rye flour is always used. Initially I fed the starter with bread flour (i.e. from Day 2-5) once I'd started it off with wholewheat flour, but now I'm making bread I'm using wholewheat flour again because I prefer the flavour that it gives. So now my starter is happily in the fridge, bubbling away to itself, and I can use it for making the most delicious bread I've ever had (recipes to follow in another post).

Oh, and my starter is called Honorius.

Neither doe they [sc. the Turks] eate much Milke, except it bee made sower, which they call Yoghurd. (Samual Puchas, 1601)

First on my list of projects was sourdough bread, although since it took a while to produce the sourdough culture what I made first was yoghurt...

Like the Turks, I don't really eat much milk, but I do really like yoghurt. Here in Germany it seems to be almost impossible to find Greek yoghurt, something I grew up with by spending too much time on archaeological digs, and which I really miss. Since most German yoghurt has thickeners in it, I couldn't just buy yoghurt and strain it. This led me to explore making my own, using a recipe that I found here.

Unfortunately, when I first tried it, I didn't realize how warm the milk has to stay (ok, so I wasn't really paying attention) and it didn't yogh. Undeterred, I reboiled the milk, added some more yoghurt, and tried to keep it warmer. After discovering that my plastic bowl really could go in the oven at a low temperature (thank you IKEA) I stuck it in the oven at 50C for a few hours, and then left it overnight with the heat turned off. Lo and behold, the next morning I had yoghurt! I strained it through a jelly bag and it was good, despite the monstrous effort required to produce it.

Excited by my (eventual) success, I made it a second time. Again, I used the trick with the oven, and hurrah, it worked! I strained this batch for a long time, until it was so thick that you could cut it in slices, the way proper yoghurt is supposed to be. I had created yoghurt, and it was good.

Dedicated to Petrus Comestor

Cooking is not just a nutritional necessity, something that has to be done in order to eat and so to survive; it is a large part of my life. I spend far too much time in the kitchen, time that would probably be better spent on the other part of my life, writing a Ph. D. thesis on medieval theology. This topic is perhaps less suited to general dissemination than food, not least because it's mostly a good cure for insomnia, but I hope that occasionally some of it will emerge on to this blog. But completing a chunk of work recently left me with a little more (!) time to spend on kitchen-related activities that I've been pondering for a while. The excitement at achieving some of these and the occasional weird result has resulted in me telling anyone who will listen about my latest success/disaster. The first purpose of this blog, therefore, is to save the poor people who would have to hear (probably several times) about what I've recently been up to in the kitchen. The second is so that I can record what worked and what did not, with the intention of producing slightly more successes and fewer disasters. Even if I remain a disastor, I may keep my friends this way...