Yeast Injection

After my first steps into the world of Sourdough, it was time to analyse the output. Although what I had baked was definitely bread, in the legal definition of the word, it was not exactly going to worry the bakers of Pier 39. Sourdough is serious business - not for the boulanger who is faint of heart. There is a lot of pride at stake, and your own sense of identity as a baker, instead of someone who once bought a bread machine.

Though edible, in the cold light of day, Sourdough Mk 1 was not a thing to be very proud of. Dense, crumbly and bitter, it was too much sour and not enough dough. Time to get back to basics, which in the case of Sourdough, means the yeast. Time to take a good long look at Eric.

The problem with relying on the caprice of airborne particles to grow your yeast is it is difficult to control what you get. As noted last time, the sourdough culture you can grow in flour and water is made up of two main ingredients: airborne yeasts and lactobacilli. The latter is the building block of lactic acid, which gives sourdough its characteristic, eponymous taste. The micro climate of San Francisco has created a unique strain of this bacteria that is sweeter than most other varieties, which gave its bakers a unique taste advantage, and created a geo-specific industry. For those of us unfortunate enough not to live in San Francisco, we have to resort to other methods.

Sir Alex - no hairdryer required.

My sourdough starter needed one fundamental change: more yeast as a proportion of the levain. This would, at a stroke, increase the potency of the rising agent, creating the classic springy texture and at the same time reduce the bitter aftertaste into a thing to savour, not to screw your eyes up at. But how do you stack the odds in your favour in what is supposedly a random process?

Naturally occurring yeasts such as Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, though found in small quantities in the atmosphere, are found in greater concentrations on things like fruit skins. So I started a new white levain in the usual way - flour, water - but on day two I added some raisins and a spoon of natural yoghurt to drive up the yeast content, then continued to feed flour and water for the rest of the week. After 7 days, I had a mix so powerful, it had already exploded across the counter twice, so in honour of my recently-established yeast naming convention, it has been christened Sir Alex.

Apart from his explosive temperament, another quality he shares with his more famous namesake is his ability to get results. By following the same method as last week - except baking using a casserole instead of flat on a tray, to give the loaf shape - the contrast in outcomes could not have been greater. Big, light, chewy, tasty, with a subtle sour note, instead of a bitter aftertaste. That elusive taste I had remembered from all those years ago, recreated in my kitchen. Memories of San Francisco, captured in a few slices.

Levain on a prayer

I first ate sourdough bread at Pier 39, San Francisco in 1992, used as an edible bowl for fresh clam chowder. The memory of this wonderful taste stayed with me for a long time: a shattering crust around a densely crumbed bread and the beautifully bitter aftertaste. Having spent the previous 6 months eating highly sugared American store-bought loaves, it was like tasting bread for the first time.

So when I started making bread, I naturally looked for a sourdough recipe to make my own. And then I realised the important point about sourdough: it's a baker's rites of passage. Sourdough is the difference between a home baker and someone who owns a bread machine. You can't just bash it out - it's a thing of time and passion. Especially time. A glance at the chat forums and websites of amateur bakers gives you an insight into the extraordinary, slightly scary lengths people go to in creating their own sourdough that, at times, seem to resemble a religious cult.

The secret (and, I suspect, part of the reason for its fetish status) is the unique creation of its yeast - a living culture you must nurture, to create a leavening agent, or Levain. By simply mixing water and flour, and leaving it in a sealed jar, you create yeast literally out of thin air: naturally occurring lactobacilli and yeasts in the air feed on the starches in your liquid, and create a living crucible for your loaf. It takes at least 5 days before a yeast 'takes' but longer before it is strong enough to use. If you keep it in the fridge, give it a feed (flour and water) and a stir at least once a month, it can keep for years.  It becomes another member of the family and will develop its own quirks and personality over time, so it's important to give it a name. So, meet Eric, the Hoffmans' sourdough.

The beauty of this method (apart from its simplicity) is its uniqueness. The yeasts and lactobacilli found in your kitchen are unique to you - and so the levain you create will be unique to your house, your kitchen, your street. Each sourdough bread create bears the unique stamp of its creator through its yeast - though I'm not sure there are yet bakers who can identify the terroir of a sourdough's provenance like a sommelier with claret. This is, of course, entirely logical, given that every beer's unique character is defined mostly by its yeast, as it's the only unique ingredient in a brewery's recipe.

So already you are looking at a few weeks before you can start. And once you have your levain residing in the fridge, you then need to take it our 24 hours before you bake for a feed to reawaken it. And when you come to actually use it to make bread you come up against the oldest problem - how do you make a 'natural' yeast rise as well as an industrially created yeast? The short answer is physical work and lots of time.

Second prove - still wibbly wobbly

To get a bit Zen about this for a minute, the first part of the physical work is to do nothing. Technically speaking, this is called the Autolyse - when you mix your flours, water and levain and just let it rest on the bench. This lets the newly combined flour and water start to form its gutenoids without the disruption of kneading. Purists would do this before even adding the levain - just flour and water - then add the yeast for further autolysing, and THEN the salt (very important, as salt slightly inhibits the growth of yeast).

After the doing nothing, the doing something is quite vigorous: at least 20-30 mins of kneading, about twice that for your average tin loaf, to maximise the starch breakdown and creation of sugars for Eric. But at first prove there's more than just letting it sit and relax; many people like to stretch it every 30 minutes for the first 3 hours of a prove, to ensure the gluten strings are forming and create surface tension for a stronger dough despite its wet core. The first three hours? Oh yes. This is going to take at least 6 hours first time round the track, preferably overnight.

For the second prove, you place your dough in the usual proving basket for another 12-hour spell, this time avoiding the stretching. This is just as well because it became clear how much the first prove had 'relaxed' my dough, turning a reasonably stiff ball into a soft, near-liquid state. With gravity operating at its normal way in my kitchen, this was going to make shaping a loaf difficult. And so, despite my best efforts, and nearly 24 hours of preparation, my first sourdough was a focaccia. Or, more accurately, a slightly bitter, edible paving slab. Back to the drawing board.

Flour and water. Plus, blood, sweat and tears

The reason sourdough recipes are so wet - most using a 1:1 flour:liquid ratio - is to create more gluten to maximise the lift. Whatever CO2 Eric is producing needs to be trapped. I've since learned people manage to create those beautiful football shaped sourdoughs that burst through their upper crusts in such stunning patterns through either another 12 hours in the fridge (to create the rigidity) or baking them in a casserole dish to prevent the liquid from finding its own level. Or else through such convoluted combinations of kneading, folding, autolysing and reproving that they start to resemble less a baking process and more a religious ritual. Like I say, the Cult of Sourdough does strange things to people.

But without resorting to such artifice, the obvious solution was to put less water in. Being an obvious person, this is what I tried, with reasonable success. At least it meant I could create a second loaf within 24 hours, but this time I could use a bread knife to slice it instead of a jackhammer. But I also realise that I am grubbing around in the foothills of Sourdoughs - there are dense crumbed crusty mountains to climb. And to get there, I will have to climb higher into the mysteries of these rituals. Along the well-trodden path to madness...

Impure thoughts

Just when I was worried that after last week's ciabatta success this would turn into a simple recipe blog, a baking disaster came along just to stop me getting carried away.

I was trying a new flour, called Khorasan. As well as being the name of a flour, it is also the name of a region of Iran and a Shi-ite Islamist group, so in Googling recipes, I've probably now gotten myself onto a security list at GCHQ,

Golden brown, texture like sun

I say new, but it is actually a very old tetraploid strain of wheat, originating in the cradle of civilization itself, and sometimes known as the Wheat of the Pharoahs, probably mostly by marketers, or less enigmatically as King Tut's Wheat. It gradually fell into disuse as hexaploid wheat variants superseded it, and had no commercial producers until the 1970s when a couple of Montana farmers cultivated a variety that they could trademark. Today all Khorasan wheat is produced under this trademark, Kamut (from the ancient Egyptian meaning wheaten bread), and through their breeding programme they have a monopoly on its use. And they control it strictly: no interbreeding, it must be certified organic, and when used in baking cannot be sold as Khorasan if it is less than 50% of the bread's contents.

8 hour prove - before baking

It's all the things hippy bakers love: low in gluten, higher in selenium, protein, antioxidants and vitamins than ordinary wheat. If you're familiar with other posts on my blog, by now you'll know this should be ringing alarm bells. An ancient in-bred wheat, low in gluten - always a handy thing for a knuckle-powered baker. It has the colour and consistency of fine sand, and in many ways was rather like baking with it too. Sticky, hygroscopic and as flexible as Netanyahu at the negotiating table. About the only thing left in my armoury is time, so I left it on an overnight prove and went for a safe tinned loaf option.

 And the result? Despite generous oiling, a stuck loaf. And the bread I was able to evict had the nutty, golden taste of...sand. As a wise sage once said: "the stone age didn't end because they ran out of stone." And so with wheat: there was a reason we started to cultivate modern wheat varieties.

After baking - surgery required

So what did we learn today? As with the partial success of the rye loaf, the total lack of success here was baking using the pure, specialised, idiosyncratic flours to strive for a unique taste based upon a misplace sense of 'purity'. Purity as a general concept is something I instinctively avoid - purity is barren, narrow, limited. Purity is a dead end - in art, in genetics, in life in general. I should follow my instincts and not follow the cul-de-sac of purity, but look to blend and mix combinations of the fussy Ryes and Khorasans with the reliable bedrock of modern wheat varieties to achieve new tastes, unique and interesting breads. It's the grit that forms the pearl.