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May. 19th, 2020 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msconductI've realised I went through an entire lockdown without once bragging about my sourdough. We can't have that.
I must admit I cheated, as I'm not actually one of those people forced to try and grapple with sourdough because they couldn't find any yeast in The Great Shopping Panic of 2020. I've been sourdoughing now for several years. I do admire those people for stepping up so fast, however, as once I'd decided to give sourdough a try it took me a couple of years before I actually got started.
Part of that was because sourdough seemed so intimidating. First of all there was a mass of advice, all contradicting itself, on how to master it. Even more confusingly, the advice was either terrifyingly precise (percent hydration levels???) or maddeningly vague (add a bit and see). Also, just so much information. In the end, I decided to pick one source and stick with it. I found a guy in the US, Ed Wood, who with his late wife had spent his life collecting sourdough cultures from all around the world. He sold the cultures dehydrated, and the thought of that was a lot more appealing than attempting to start my own. I bought one of his from Bahrain that was the sourest he had and was a good riser, and one that was particularly good at raising wholemeal. It's a pain keeping two cultures going, but it's worth it. I also bought his cookbook and followed his instructions, and as a result cut out a lot of the trial and error part.
And the other reason I was so slow to start was that I was slowly collecting the stuff needed to produce it. New Zealand might be a lovely country to live in in many ways, but a shopper's paradise it is not. Not for us Amazon next-day delivery - the next six weeks is more like it. And some things you can't get delivered at all. I ended up buying an extra-thick baking stone on a trip to Los Angeles and lugging it home with me together with a peel. And because my hot water cylinder is in the roof and I therefore don't have a warm cupboard, I had to source and have delivered a proofer so I could raise the dough at the right temperature. (Ironically, I've now abandoned my painfully-sourced baking stone as my Breville Smart Oven, presumably because it's small and the elements are close to the bread, makes better loaves than the stone did. I still use the stone for pizza, though, and I feel very fancy swooping on the pizza and shovelling it up with my baking peel.)
I had been making commercial yeast-raised bread before, and OMG, sourdough is so much better. My previous 100% wholemeal loaves were tasty, but you could have used them to build a garden wall. Using my special wholemeal-loving sourdough culture, I get 100% wholemeal loaves that are actually feathery. It's a bready miracle. That's our daily bread, and it doesn't look all that exciting as I bake it in a loaf tin. At the weekend, though, I do the artisan thing, which looks much nicer in photos. Most often I make a mix of white, wholemeal and rye (that's one of those in the photo), and it is absolutely delicious. I don't take any of the credit for this: it's Ed Wood's culture and Ed Wood's recipe. I'm really glad I found him, as his bread makes us happy every day.
I must admit I cheated, as I'm not actually one of those people forced to try and grapple with sourdough because they couldn't find any yeast in The Great Shopping Panic of 2020. I've been sourdoughing now for several years. I do admire those people for stepping up so fast, however, as once I'd decided to give sourdough a try it took me a couple of years before I actually got started.
Part of that was because sourdough seemed so intimidating. First of all there was a mass of advice, all contradicting itself, on how to master it. Even more confusingly, the advice was either terrifyingly precise (percent hydration levels???) or maddeningly vague (add a bit and see). Also, just so much information. In the end, I decided to pick one source and stick with it. I found a guy in the US, Ed Wood, who with his late wife had spent his life collecting sourdough cultures from all around the world. He sold the cultures dehydrated, and the thought of that was a lot more appealing than attempting to start my own. I bought one of his from Bahrain that was the sourest he had and was a good riser, and one that was particularly good at raising wholemeal. It's a pain keeping two cultures going, but it's worth it. I also bought his cookbook and followed his instructions, and as a result cut out a lot of the trial and error part.
And the other reason I was so slow to start was that I was slowly collecting the stuff needed to produce it. New Zealand might be a lovely country to live in in many ways, but a shopper's paradise it is not. Not for us Amazon next-day delivery - the next six weeks is more like it. And some things you can't get delivered at all. I ended up buying an extra-thick baking stone on a trip to Los Angeles and lugging it home with me together with a peel. And because my hot water cylinder is in the roof and I therefore don't have a warm cupboard, I had to source and have delivered a proofer so I could raise the dough at the right temperature. (Ironically, I've now abandoned my painfully-sourced baking stone as my Breville Smart Oven, presumably because it's small and the elements are close to the bread, makes better loaves than the stone did. I still use the stone for pizza, though, and I feel very fancy swooping on the pizza and shovelling it up with my baking peel.)
I had been making commercial yeast-raised bread before, and OMG, sourdough is so much better. My previous 100% wholemeal loaves were tasty, but you could have used them to build a garden wall. Using my special wholemeal-loving sourdough culture, I get 100% wholemeal loaves that are actually feathery. It's a bready miracle. That's our daily bread, and it doesn't look all that exciting as I bake it in a loaf tin. At the weekend, though, I do the artisan thing, which looks much nicer in photos. Most often I make a mix of white, wholemeal and rye (that's one of those in the photo), and it is absolutely delicious. I don't take any of the credit for this: it's Ed Wood's culture and Ed Wood's recipe. I'm really glad I found him, as his bread makes us happy every day.
