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...