Bread Matters (18 page)

Have a bowl of flour (wholemeal or white, as you prefer) ready to dip the rolls in.

Makes a dozen good-sized baps

10g Fresh yeast

390g Water

600g Stoneground strong wholemeal flour

5g Sea salt

30g Butter, lard or olive oil

1035g Total

Aim to finish the dough at about 27°C. Dissolve the yeast in the water and then combine all the ingredients and knead until the dough is pliable and the gluten properly developed. Cover and leave to rise for 1-2 hours, but in any case take the dough to the next stage before it collapses.

Without completely de-gassing the dough, divide it into 12 equal pieces, then mould each one tightly and evenly by rolling it on the work surface under cupped hands. As soon as each piece is moulded, dip it into a bowl of flour, making sure that the whole piece is covered. Place the floured rolls about 2cm apart on a baking tray lined with baking parchment. Line them up neatly so each has an equal space in which to rise. If you want to make a flatter sandwich roll or burger bun, let the freshly moulded and floured dough pieces stand for about 5 minutes to relax the gluten and then press or roll them out with a rolling pin until they are about 50 per cent wider than they were. Line them up on the tray, still 2cm apart.

Cover the whole tray with a loose polythene bag to create a warm, moist atmosphere in which the dough can rise easily. The baps are ready for the oven when they have risen appreciably and are just touching their neighbours.

Bake in a very hot oven (230°C), turning down the heat after 5 minutes or so to 210°C. They may take as little as 12-15 minutes, depending on your oven. Checking is not easy if the baps have batched together as they should. Gently tear one away from the rest and check its top and bottom crusts. If the torn side where it was attached to its neighbour still looks a bit raw, it probably needs a minute or two more in the oven, but the baps will firm up a little as they cool.

Scottish Morning Rolls

Although this recipe is for rolls, it can be applied to all kinds of breads. It uses the classic sponge-and-dough method – the way most bread was made until the second half of the last century. A very small amount of yeast is used in the sponge. This reproduces itself by feeding on the sugars available in the sponge flour, so that by the time the final dough is made there are enough active yeast cells to give a good rise to the rolls.

If, after fermenting your sponge for 18 hours, you discover that you haven’t time to make bread after all, don’t worry. Just leave the sponge in a coolish place or the fridge for another day. It will get a little more acid and the yeast will be rather more starved of food, but nothing drastic will happen to render it incapable of reviving when mixed with fresh flour.

For some thoughts on how a sponge can be turned into a ‘natural’ leaven, see pages 213-214.

Makes a dozen rolls

1. The overnight sponge

5g Fresh yeast

130g Water (at 20°C)

50g Stoneground strong wholemeal flour

100g Strong white flour

285g Total

The water for the sponge does not have to be particularly warm, since the yeast has a long time to get to work and the sponge will gradually reach room temperature.

Dissolve the yeast in some of the water and add it to the flours with the rest of the water. Mix until the dough has ‘cleared’, i.e. all the ingredients are thoroughly combined. There is no need to knead the sponge, since time will develop the gluten sufficiently. In fact, after 18 hours the gluten will be so softened that, if then kneaded hard, it would turn quite quickly into a sticky mess.

Put the sponge in a bowl large enough to allow it to expand to at least 3 times its original size. Cover with a lid or polythene bag and leave it at ambient temperature for 12-18 hours. If ambient happens to be more than 25°C, find somewhere a bit cooler, so that the yeast does not start fermenting too quickly.

2. The final dough

285g Overnight sponge (above)

350g Strong white flour

100g Stoneground strong wholemeal flour

5g Salt

270g Water

15g Butter, lard or olive oil

1025g Total

Before you do anything else, take the lid or cover off your sponge and enjoy a first whiff of the fruity, beery, slightly vinegary aroma. Notice how the mixture has obviously bubbled up and collapsed. The yeast is still working a bit, but it is running out of available food and the gluten structure has collapsed because enzymes have softened it and it has been stretched beyond endurance by vigorous pressure from the fermentation gases.

Aim to make the final dough at about 27°C for a reasonably quick rise. If you are calculating the water temperature accurately according to the formula given on page 68, measure the temperature of both the sponge and the flours, take an average and use that as the value for the ‘flour’ component.

Mix all the ingredients together into a soft dough. Knead until it is silky and slightly stretchy. Leave to rise for 1 hour, during which time the yeast will begin to use the fermentable sugars in the fresh source of flour. A long period of rising is not needed because both flavour and gluten-conditioning elements have already entered the dough with the overnight sponge.

Divide, mould, prove and bake as for Baps, above. Proof may take a little longer but, in my experience, a sponge-and-dough started with half as much yeast as a straight dough, if set to prove at the same time, will be ready for the oven only a few minutes later, if that.

No-time dough, straight yeasted dough, sponge and dough…each uses progressively less industrial yeast and time assumes ever greater significance. Not time for the sake of it, but time as the essential condition if the benign potential of grain is to be fulfilled in bread of incomparable flavour and nourishing ability.

The best way of harnessing time to make good bread is to dispense with industrial concentrated yeast altogether and to rely exclusively on natural fermentations.

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMPLE SOURDOUGH

‘…on establishing a well-grounded theory on this subject [fermentation] depends the whole art of baking bread.’
ABRAHAM EDLIN,
A Treatise on the Art of Bread-Making
(Vernor & Hood, 1805; reprinted by Prospect Books, 2004)

‘Sourdough’ means a dough fermented with naturally occurring yeasts and lactobacilli and without industrially manufactured yeast of the kind used by bakers and sold for home baking. Making sourdough bread is easy. People have made bread this way for thousands of years. This simple folk knowledge has been rediscovered by a new community of enthusiasts and some terrific naturally fermented breads can now be had from artisan bakers and even some supermarkets. But if you look for guidance on making this sort of bread at home, it seems strangely complicated.

Even if you are not flummoxed by words like
desem
and
levain
(both of which refer to types of natural fermentation), you may be expected to wade through pages of instructions, assemble a clutch of special ingredients and spend up to a fortnight fussing just to create a starter which, if it survives, becomes as demanding as a pet. Over the whole enterprise hangs an aura of mysticism, a sense that the processes involved may be accessible only to a chosen few. The sourdough grail is guarded by zealots, who expatiate interminably on the size of the holes in their
miches.

It doesn’t have to be like this. All that is needed is a clear understanding of what happens when flour and water are mixed and left in a warm place. The rest is detail. Forget the milk, the yoghurt, the orange peel, the grape skins, the apple juice, the raisins and all the other things that are suggested as aids to developing a starter. There is nothing wrong with them in themselves. They are just not necessary.

Naturally occurring (‘wild’) yeasts and lactic acid bacteria (lactobacilli) are present in any sample of wheat or rye flour (and many other flours). Water and warmth provide the conditions for their growth. They feed on sugars converted from flour carbohydrate by the action of enzymes (also naturally occurring). What’s more, sourdough is an object lesson in cooperation, with its various constituents depending on, and not competing with, each other. Yeasts do not compete for food directly with lactobacilli and lactobacilli actually generate antibiotic compounds that neutralise potentially harmful bacteria.

Flour contains everything necessary to sustain a sourdough, including its own yeasts, just as grape skins harbour the yeasts that help turn grape juice into wine. Some overlap is likely, given the enormous number of species of yeast. But grape yeasts work best with grapes, not bread. In the same way, using milk or yoghurt confuses the bacteria commonly found in dairy cultures
(acidophilus, bifidus
etc) with the lactobacilli
(brevis, plantarum, sanfranciscensis
and many more) that predominate in sourdoughs.

Of course, flour is not the only source of yeasts and lactobacilli. Moulds, bacteria and yeasts of innumerable species permeate our environment. So it is by no means impossible that some organisms can enter a sourdough from the air, or indeed (as some evidence suggests in the case of
Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis)
from the hands of bakers. But the shortest, simplest route to a sustainable sourdough is flour and water.

Instructions for starting and using a sourdough follow shortly, but a few definitions may be helpful first:

Sourdough

Sometimes called simply a ‘sour’. A self-sustaining fermentation of flour, water, lactobacilli and naturally occurring (or intentionally introduced) yeasts of acid-tolerant strains other than
Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
I usually confine the word sourdough to fermentations of rye and rice, and use leaven for wheat and other flours, but essentially the words are interchangeable.

‘Wild’ yeast

A genus, species or strain of yeast not normally used in the industrial production of baker’s yeast. In baking, wild yeast generally refers to naturally occurring species that ferment symbiotically with lactobacilli in a mixture that is more acidic than a normal bread dough.

Lactobacilli/lactic acid bacteria

Bacteria of several different species, strains and varieties naturally found in flour and the baking environment and capable of symbiotic fermentation with certain kinds of naturally occurring yeasts. Lactic acid bacteria multiply in any dough left to ferment for long enough. They produce mainly lactic and acetic acids, which give sourdoughs and leavens their characteristic aroma and flavour.

Liquid assets

In an age before industrial yeasts had been selected and purified to deliver very rapid fermentation, bakers were naturally on the look-out for anything that would make their barms, or leavens, more reliable and vigorous. Writing in 1805, Abraham Edlin reported that ‘most excellent bread is frequently baked on board of our ships of war that are on the West India station, with the water that has become sour in the casks and that the fermentation is as speedily excited as when made with yeast.’ In the East Indies, bread was ‘raised and baked by a liquor called toddy’, which was the sap of palm or wild date trees. Apparently within two hours of being tapped, the sap fermented spontaneously into an intoxicating liquor, which was ‘fit to bake with, in the same manner as yeast in this country’. And in the West Indies, there was another liquor ‘peculiarly serviceable in exciting a speedy fermentation’. It was the dregs left in the bottom of a rum still and it was known as ‘dunder’ (presumably only ‘dunderheads’ overindulged). The cask water, toddy and dunder may have contributed both actively fermenting yeasts (some of which would work in dough) and a source of yeast food in the form of partially fermentable sugars.

Leaven

The same as a sourdough, but usually used to refer to wheat-based naturally fermented doughs. The French for leaven is
levain.

Starter

Can refer to a bought-in preparation of selected yeasts and lactobacilli, as in ‘starter culture’. This usually needs to be activated by mixing with flour and water and being allowed to ferment for several hours or days. Bought-in starters can be a shortcut to a viable sourdough and they can, in theory, contain yeasts and bacteria specific to a particular country or baking tradition. However, they cost a lot more than simple flour, and some purveyors of these preparations imply, for understandable commercial reasons, that a fresh culture should be used for each batch of bread. That rather goes against the principle of a self-sustaining natural fermentation and is completely unnecessary.

I use the term starter in two ways: first, to denote the initial preparation stage of a leaven or sourdough; secondly, to describe a piece of fermented sourdough or leaven that is not baked into bread but is kept back to initiate a later cycle of dough development. In French/American artisan baking, this starter dough is sometimes called the chef, or mother.

Backferment

A German name for a proprietary sourdough culture based on honey, wheat and maize that is available in dried form. Honey, provided it has not been heated or pasteurised, is a good source of natural yeasts.
Backferment
has the ability to produce a vigorous natural yeast fermentation with less acidity than is usually associated with sourdoughs.

Refreshment

When you add fresh flour and water to a leaven or sourdough, the yeasts and lactobacilli can ‘feed’ on the new source of fermentable sugars. But the term ‘feeding’ is misleading because it suggests that a discrete body of organisms in the starter dough is being nourished with the new flour. In fact the new flour also brings into the dough fresh quantities of yeasts and bacteria; so the flora of the ‘refreshed’ sourdough comprise some of the original cells, some of their ‘offspring’ and some completely new ones that will bring their own fermentative power to the whole mixture.