Sourdough Bread Recipe

2024 Lancer Seasonal Report

Post author By Karen
Post date 24 June, 2025
No Comments on 2024 Lancer Seasonal Report

2024 Seasonal Report of our Lancer Wheat Crop for Provenance Lancer Flour 2025 by Simon and Sandy Doolin, Cleveland , North Star, NSW

For 2025 Provenance Doolin Lancer Flour is grown in the 2024 growing season. Leading up to the planting of the 2024 Lancer Wheat Crop we had been measuring the nutrient levels in the soil, and monitoring our soil carbon levels watching a steady increase through our farming practices. We are working closely with soil experts to make sure that we can maximise our stored carbon.

Throughout our farming system we are seeing worm numbers increasing, a true sign of healthy soil.

We received some lovely rain in the lead up to planting. Because our soils are free of compaction and we have maintained our straw stubble levels the soil was able to maximise its water holding ability. Once we started planting on the 28th of April the soil was soft and the seed was tucked into beautiful soil conditions. The germination was perfect, we can’t often use this word in farming!

The temperature remained mild throughout May 2024. We received our first frosts in late June 2024. The early morning frosts are great for the wheat as it toughens it up and makes the plant roots get fully established. We received some welcome rain in mid-June and this really kicked the crop growth and development along. Throughout July and August 2024 we continued to have some nice timely rain pushing the wheat through to into flowering. Flowering is when the wheat is at its peak nutrition demand. We observed the plant health was very healthy due to the years of care we have taken of our soils, the crop was feeling good and was a deep rich green colour.

Checking plant root development and health in July 2024.

September is when the Lancer Wheat crop is at its peak water demand. The rains didn’t come throughout September at all. As a result of our stored soil moisture, the crop was able to continue its natural development and fill the heads really well to produce some beautiful plump grain.

Provenance Doolin Lancer Wheat at the flowering stage in September 2024.

The forecast for rain was increasing as our Mid October harvest drew nearer. By this time the day time temperatures had risen to mid thirties bringing the wheat in evenly and putting a beautiful golden colour across our paddocks.

We had to patiently wait as we measured the grains to assess that they were all at the perfect hardness. This ensures the our Lancer Wheat achieves its best performance and consistency to be milled into the best flour possible for 2025. The harvest ran smoothly without any rain interruptions. The grains were a beautiful rich golden colour and the smell of the air over harvest was beautiful and earthy, almost like you could taste it! This is an amazing sensation.

At harvest all the grain was measured and tested through our receival laboratory and then segregated on protein levels and allocated into our silos. We use fans in our silos to blow cold air through the stored Lancer Wheat. This storage process is conducted for at least three months after harvest which optimises the storage conditions as it allows the Lancer Wheat to properly mature as it fully hardens the grains before sending it to be milled into Provenance Doolin Lancer Flour for 2025.

We hope you achieve the same level of satisfaction that we have from producing our Provenance Doolin Lancer Wheat for your 2025 baking.

Recipes

Osterbrot – German Easter Bread

Post author By Karen
Post date 3 April, 2023
No Comments on Osterbrot – German Easter Bread

This recipe is inspired by this post from ABC Food. It creates a delicious sweet braided bread traditionally baked at Easter in Germany.

Recipes

Potato Sourdough

This recipe creates a lovely moist and flavoursome sourdough bread made from potatoes.

Bread Education

Kneading Techniques

Kneading is all about modifying the flour protein to impart flexibility with enough strength to trap, yeast and bacteria generated, CO2 gas. It’s important that the protein network in the dough remain in tact so the gas doesn’t escape like a deflating balloon.

Recipes

Stoneground Sourdough

This recipe uses 60% stoneground flour and 40% bakers flour. Stoneground flour is created by grounding the whole wheat grain using a stone mill. The process is slower and prevents the grain from being exposed to high temperatures allowing more of the nutrients to be retained. The endosperm, bran and germ are in their natural, original proportions, allowing for higher and efficient nutrient absorption.

Tags stoneground sourdough

Recipes

Ciabatta for a Lovely Lunch Treat

Post author By Karen
Post date 16 February, 2020
7 Comments on Ciabatta for a Lovely Lunch Treat

We were inspired by this post from The Perfect Loaf to try making a sourdough ciabatta for some special friends, who used to own a cafe and are very particular about their food.

The first thing we realised about ciabatta is that it really should be eaten the same day that it is baked. Because of the high hydration it does become a bit “chewy” the next day. However having said that it is magnificent when eaten after it has cooled from coming out of the oven.

Tags sourdough ciabatta

Recipes

Fig Apricot Raisin and Walnut Sourdough

Post author By Karen
Post date 1 May, 2019
4 Comments on Fig Apricot Raisin and Walnut Sourdough

A lovely way to start your day with a sourdough packed to bursting with fruity flavour. The figs, apricots and raisins combine beautifully with the walnuts to create a delicious sourdough bread.

Tags Fig Apricot Raisin and Walnut Sourdough

Recipes

Gluten Free Bread by Robin Ellenberger

Post author By Karen
Post date 26 March, 2019
2 Comments on Gluten Free Bread by Robin Ellenberger

Learn the secret to making gluten free bread in your own home from our guest expert, Robin Ellenberger.

Tags Gluten free

Bread Boss Recipes

Panettone

If there’s one iconic festive sourdough product that has captured the imagination of bakers worldwide, its got to be panettone! A delight to eat for its flavour, aroma and its typically highly aerated texture. Coming up to Christmas its a fitting baking challenge that if done correctly is very rewarding.

The quest of making a really good panettone ‘artisan’ style – without the emulsifies, preservatives and bottled aroma concoctions – has been gaining ground in internet baking circles for good reason. It’s a challenge for bakers and chefs all over the world.

Tags Panettone

Bread Boss Bread Education Recipes

Sourdough Baking Lexicon Confused

Post author By Boris
Post date 29 June, 2018
4 Comments on Sourdough Baking Lexicon Confused

We recently received some feedback from a Bread Boss user who expressed dismay at the plethora of sourdough terms used all around the English speaking world. This included books, videos and websites. It’s all very confusing and makes it hard to understand. Bread Boss seemed like just another one to add to the pile of mishmash. It occurred to us this may be a timely post and others may also find this interesting and informative.

The author of the email kindly allowed me to reproduce the relevant part as the basis of this post. Here’s an excerpt from the email.

“In all the books and in all the serious online websites there is a complete range of names used for the various stages of bread baking. Some are reasonably consistent like ferment and proof but in sourdough there are a full range of names for the same thing. For instance Peter Rienhart calls his starter a mother and uses some of it to create a “stiff dough”. Dan Leader calls it a liquid Levain, to make a stiff dough. You guys call it a starter to make a “sourdough”. I know we can’t change the world but maybe recognising these wide variations of terminology in your app might help other beginning bakers. As for me the whole sourdough nomenclature was confusing.”

My reply isn’t meant to be an exhaustive recount but a brief outline of the history of the problem and why Bread Boss and this site uses the sourdough terms it does.

Tags baking lexicon, baking terminology

Recipes

Sourdough Pizza for Easter

This Easter happened to coincide with my birthday and Karen, Boris and I took our families to stay at a farm house for a little R&R. We stayed at the comfortable Billabong Cottage in Norway near Oberon on the western side of the Blue Mountains, about 3 hours from Sydney (Australia:). We decided to make the trip a bread holiday – not sure if that’s a thing, but it probably should be!

Karen was keen to perfect a fruit bread we have been working on. Boris wanted to perfect our freshly milled flour recipe and I … I just wanted sleep. As luck would have it I had to stay awake and work on the sourdough pizza. Oh, and we also decided to make a freshly milled sourdough rye – just to mix it up a bit.

Tags sourdough pizza

Bread Education

Baking Students Graduation At Ultimo Sydney

Post author By Boris
Post date 7 April, 2018
2 Comments on Baking Students Graduation At Ultimo Sydney

It was that time of year again when baking students at the Sydney TAFE Ultimo were recognised for their hard work and achievements on completion of the Retail Baking Bread, Retail Baking Combined and Patisserie Certificate III Courses.

Each year the graduation ceremony for baking students is held in the Apprentice Restaurant at the Ultimo campus on Harris Street. At the same ceremony, students with outstanding achievements are also recognised. There was an array of people present that night which included the students’ families, friends and employers. Industry representatives also graced the occasion marking the significance of the event.

Bread Education

Gluten or not? That is the question!

Post author By Boris
Post date 3 December, 2017
2 Comments on Gluten or not? That is the question!

It’s a good question that most people seem to have an opinion on. Opinions by trendy foodies, celebrities, as well as us mere mortals all over the world are mainly focusing on the ills of gluten. The gluten free market is now a huge market, so now there are vested interests involved, much the same as there were on the opposite side.

It seems that further investigation and blind testing has been finding that it’s more complicated than we thought. It seems there could be another culprit which has not been in the public consciousness.

Bread Boss

BreadBoss App as a Development Tool

Post author By Boris
Post date 7 November, 2017
No Comments on BreadBoss App as a Development Tool

Chef/bakers have found Bread Boss® a tool to manage, create and vary their formulas and recipes and also to manage the schedule alarm features.

What may not be immediately apparent to the new or prospective user is that Bread Boss® is an ideal tool for development of new products and refining existing formulas that are still a work in progress.

Tags Bread Boss

Great Bakeries

Tasmania Again..

It seems I can’t keep away from the “apple Isle” for too long. Trout, cane rods and baking beckon….

It was that time of year when some of us cane rod makers get together at Peter Hayes’ on Brumby’s Creek at Cressy for the Cane Rod Makers weekend. But I had decided to combine it with a research tour to see Gareth Shapiro of the “The Grain Family of Tasmania” fame in Moltema TAS.

But that wasn’t all… Having had the good fortune to have met not only Gareth among others at grAiNZ 2017, but also, Ian Lowe as well as Nick Boskell and Ian Pope of Apiece bakery in Launceston. In fact when I heard these blokes were not far from Cressy I rubbed my hands together and under my breath said to myself…. “you beauty!” I won’t be making bread at the Cane rod gathering this year. So I ordered baguettes and croissants from the clever bakers at Apiece.

Bread Education Great Bakeries

grAiNZ 2017 Bread Ed

Melbourne 2014 was the start of an event that has been an annual feature of a small group of craft bakers, millers and increasingly growers. It’s affectionately dubbed “grAiNZ”. This week “grAiNZ 2017” or “Bread Ed 2017” was hosted at Dust Bakery in Sydney.

Dust Bakery, Cesare was a great host and the venue was great.

The first time I visited Dust Cesare Salemi mentioned that a gathering of like minded bakers and millers will be getting together this year in Sydney. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as I’ve not been to this “Bread Ed” before, at least not a baking one of this ilk.

Bread Education

Every home has a proving cabinet

Post author By Kon
Post date 9 June, 2017
3 Comments on Every home has a proving cabinet

Where I’m living, winter is fast approaching and the annual problem of dough proving at home is rearing up again. It doesn’t get too cold in Sydney in winter (compared to Europe or North America), but because of that very fact most of us don’t have central heating. The house can easily get down to between 5 – 10°C (41 – 50°F) overnight and 12 – 16°C (54 – 61°F) through the day, which is a little cool for bulk fermentation unless I extended the times beyond my schedule. Most of my bread dough has a DTO (Dough To Oven time) of around 24 hours. So in these cool environments my timings are thrown out. Of course, I could reschedule to extend the time frames but I really want it to fit my current times.

Recently, it finally dawned on me: “why in gods name am I not using my kitchen oven!”

So, with the last couple of batches of bread, I used the oven for proving the sourdough overnight and for the final proof the next day. The results were fantastic and most importantly – predictable!

Bread Education Ingredients Recipes

Fresh Stoneground Milling at Home

Post author By Boris
Post date 31 May, 2017
8 Comments on Fresh Stoneground Milling at Home

A few weeks ago I was invited with a long time colleague, Laurie Donnelly, to coffee by a mutual colleague and friend, Jessica Pedemont the chocolatier, for a very interesting discussion with baker Cesare Salemi of “Dust” Café & Bakery at the Glebe Tramsheds. Cesare brought out some of his bread made from freshly milled stoneground. Cesare grinds his own flour through a stone mill in his bakery. We were duly impressed by the depth of flavour and aroma of his bread. Cesare calls it “living nutrition” and urged me to try it. I was keen to discover more.

So I contacted the company with an excellent reputation, Skippy Grain Mills. I wanted to try it for myself and show stone milling wheat at home. Home milling wheat with a stone mill then baking the bread using that fresh stoneground on the same day of milling is very doable at home. I wondered if I could significantly capture more of the flavour and aroma of the Lancer wheat variety in bread baked with freshly stone milled Lancer grain.

Tags Freshly milled stoneground

Bread Boss

Adding an Autolyse to Your Recipe in Bread Boss

Post author By Kon
Post date 22 May, 2017
No Comments on Adding an Autolyse to Your Recipe in Bread Boss

Sourdough and autolyse

I recently got some feedback from a Bread Boss user asking how to add an autolyse to their recipe. I thought this was a great opportunity to write a post on how to do that for all the Bread Boss users. I started writing up instructions with lots of screen shots, when it dawned on me: this would be much better as a video recording using the app. So that’s what I’ve done. Hopefully the quality is not too bad and you can get what you need from it (click the video to start playing):

Ingredients

Initial Bake Test Lancer and Spitfire Flour

Post author By Boris
Post date 13 April, 2017
2 Comments on Initial Bake Test Lancer and Spitfire Flour

Having different flour samples to test bake is always an interesting exercise. From season to season flour can be very different. Anyone who has baked for several seasons will know that from experience. Commercial bread flours have significant homogeneity as millers are usually blending grain grown in differing geographical areas of different varieties or from different seasons with different characteristics. The rationale is to remove the peaks and troughs in what is perceived as baking “quality”.

Ingredients

Australian Flour – from Commodity to Single Origin

Post author By Karen
Post date 10 April, 2017
6 Comments on Australian Flour – from Commodity to Single Origin

A quiet revolution is building as some consumers and bakers are beginning to appreciate bread as a food in its own right rather than a cheap “bulking” or “filling” food. Bread can have a variety of flavours and complexities not unlike other fermented foods such as cheese. A good analogy is the variety and complexity of wines and single malt whiskeys.

Bread Boss Bread Education

Bakers Percentages or Arbitrary Percentages

Post author By Boris
Post date 18 January, 2017
4 Comments on Bakers Percentages or Arbitrary Percentages

Recently a Bread Boss user contacted us with concern that they didn’t understand how their formula can be accommodated within Bread Boss. It seemed every time they tried to enter the formula, warnings were flagged in Bread Boss. Incidentally, warnings are built into the app as Bread Boss has a specific method of calculating ingredients using underlying principles. Of course these warnings can be ignored but it’s good to have the warning in case something is overlooked. More on that later.

It eventually came to light that although the user used percentages in his formula it was inconsistent with the “bakers percentage” method. This got me thinking about the most common methods used in baking to express formulas.

The Tale of Two Cities

As far as I can tell it appears there are two main methods, but not limited to these two, prevailing in the world of baking. For want of accurate designations I call them:

European method (although by no means all European bakers use it)
American method (again by no means all)

Recipes

Christmas Stollen

Learn how to make Stollen, a traditional German Christmas Bread. This is our first recipe that is not sourdough as it is a sweet bread and is normally made using yeast. This recipe makes 6 Stollen and they can be kept for a week or frozen and then brought out on Christmas Day.

Bread Boss Bread Education

What temperature should your water be?

Post author By Boris
Post date 1 December, 2016
2 Comments on What temperature should your water be?

Gluten structure showing in a mature sourdough

Good bread is born of controlling the key factors that influence bread quality. These are physical processes through micro-organism activity. After all, micro-organisms do all the work converting ‘grain into bread’!

Temperature is one of those key factors that bakers need to consider and use to influence the condition of their sourdoughs and bread doughs. As micro-organisms are highly dependent on their environment we want to get as close to giving them the best conditions as possible for them, our schedules and not least of all bread flavour and quality! The rate of bacterial and yeast multiplication, metabolic activity and enzyme activity is dramatically influenced by temperature. So we need to get it as close to optimum as we can.

Earlier I wrote up about the Major Factor (MF) method for calculating the water temperature for bread dough making. In this post I’d like to cover the “Base Temperature” (BT) method of calculating dough water temperature. So why another method? The reason is that the Base Temperature method has more accuracy when using pre-ferments, sourdoughs or quantities of other ingredients with varying temperatures, such as refrigerated ingredients.

Bread Education

Back to School

Last Saturday Karen, Tim and I went to the Sydney TAFE (Technical and Further Education) College to join the Artisan Bread Making course, with Boris as the Teacher. This was a simple one day course designed to introduce students to sourdough bread making. My main motivation for going was to see how Boris teaches in a formal setting and to see some larger scale machinery for bread making (I’ve always had a fantasy to own a serious dough mixer like a Hobart).

Being an IT professional, where most of your work is done sitting on your ass, it was quite an eye opener to see how hard it is working in a commercial bakery, much less teaching a herd of deer how to make sourdough bread.

Bread Education Recipes

Open Sesame!

Did a great variation on our classic mixed grain: inverted the bulk/retardation ferments and added a coating of sesame seeds.

Boris was over at my place a few weeks back and commented on my mixed grain bread just out of the oven. I was all pleased and proud to show off, but… “Looks good mate, but its a bit dense.” What I thought was a fine crumb turned out to be crummy. The good thing about Boris is that he’s not just an armchair critic: he’s an expert that offers solutions for every problem he diagnoses.

Recipes

Sourdough Pancakes

Cycling your starter during long breaks between bread baking can lead to excess starter if its not used in some way. Some people like to give some away to friends, but others like to put it to other good uses.

As one of our Bread Boss testers said he would rather make pancakes than discard a portion of his starter when not making bread. Great idea!!

Enjoy these delicious sourdough pancakes with fresh cream, blueberries, raspberries, bananas and maple syrup.

Recipes

Sourdough Baguettes

Learn how to make these crusty, mouth-watering sourdough baguettes.

Their complex flavour and beautiful taste come from the long fermentation and retardation time (time in the fridge), 100% hydration of the sourdough and a little bit of stoneground and fava bean flour.

These baguettes are quite small so that they fit into the domestic oven but they are delicious. Best eaten fresh from the oven. One of the flours in the recipe is fava bean flour but we ended up using fava and garbanzo flour as this was the only one available in our local health-food store.

Tags artisan recipe, baguette, crispy baguette, slashing baguette, sourdough

Bread Education

The Bakers Percentage

Making bread isn’t the same as cooking, bread making is a straight forward process but it involves a combination of biochemical and physical processes by living organisms. This means it’s important to have a balanced formula as microorganisms are very sensitive to changes to their environment – in this case – bread dough. It also means ingredients at the right weights. I use the word “formula” for good reason. Most uninitiated in bread baking believe that the word ‘formula’ and ‘recipe’ are really the same. This is not the case in bread baking. There’s a subtle but important difference.

Tags artisan recipe, bakers percentage, dough formula, sourdough

Bread Education

Storing bread – refrigerate or not?

Post author By Boris
Post date 1 June, 2016
4 Comments on Storing bread – refrigerate or not?

A question I get asked a lot by home Bakers and consumers is, what is the best way to store bread during the time it is to be eaten?

Many suggest the fridge but I tell people that the fridge is a bad choice. Some look at me like I’m from another planet. There’s a good reason for not using the fridge.

Tags baking, bread staling, freezing bread, sourdough, storing bread