Sourdough Bread Recipe
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.
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.
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.
Learn the secret to making gluten free bread in your own home from our guest expert, Robin Ellenberger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Learn how to make this gorgeous rye sourdough bread with a complex flavour, aroma and moist crumb. Very popular as the grain flavours are very apparent in this bread.
This recipe uses 25% rye flour (only the endosperm of the rye berry) and 20% rye meal (the entire rye berry) and only 20% bakers flour. The soaker includes kibbled or cracked wheat, kibbled rye, sunflower kernels and linseeds.
Rye flour is a good one to try if you have issues with bloating as it includes only small amounts of gluten.
This is a beautiful sourdough with a grain mix added for more health and flavour. The variety of grains that can be added are unlimited. The only thing to be aware of is that most grains will need to be soaked beforehand.
Grains that will need to be soaked include:
Kibble wheat (kibble means that the wheat has been cracked)
Kibble Rye
Kibble Soya
Rolled Oats
Polenta
This recipe uses 100% rye flour, it tastes beautiful and is often tolerated by people sensitive to gluten. It will make two loaves of rye sourdough with no kneading required. The bread is baked in a tin or silicon bread loaf container.
One of the first questions posted on our site was asking for a way to keep the good properties of naturally leavened sourdough while minimizing the actual sour taste. I have to admit that I’ve often come across people new to the sourdough experience complaining that the bread is too sour. I suspect that the white poison (sugar) permeated throughout our food industry has altered peoples sense of taste, creating a baseline far from that of our not too distant past, when all bread was ‘sourdough’. I decided that this would be a perfect home baking experiment: Project Semolina.
Last week someone asked me how to convert yeasted bread or other formulas so the leavening is done by sourdough rather than bakers yeast.
Good question, but I realised I couldn’t explain it in 5 minutes. It takes a bit of background knowledge first to make sense of it.
To create this rustic sourdough using only bakers flour you must first create a sourdough and then the bread dough. Essentially the sourdough stage is a method to increase your starter from its original amount to the amount needed to successfully leaven your bread dough. Additionally there needs to be enough sourdough created to allow you to remove the amount added as starter – effectively cycling your starter as well as making bread.