French Country Loaf

This post assumes you have a viable starter. There are two steps to making this loaf. First you make your production leaven and once that has risen you make your final loaf.

Refreshing the leaven

Adapted from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters

• 160g wheat leaven starter
• 50g stoneground wholemeal wheat flour
• 150g strong white flour
• 120g water

• Mix all ingredients together and leave in your warm place for 4 hours. The production leaven is ready when it has risen appreciably and not collapsed.

Use as the production leaven for French Country Bread.

French Country Loaf

Adapted from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters

• 100g stoneground wholemeal wheat flour
• 300g strong white flour
• 7g sea salt
• 300g water
• 300g production leaven

• Mix all ingredients together except the production leaven. The dough formed will be quite soft. Turn dough out onto clean (not floured) work surface and knead for 10 minutes to develop the gluten. The dough is going to stick both to your hands and to the work surface. Resist the urge to add flour. After a few minutes your dough will firm up a bit. Add the production leaven and knead for a few more minutes, adjusting the softness by adding either water or flour. Your dough should become quite smooth, although it will stick a bit to your hands and the work top.
• Smear a clean area of work surface with water. Place your dough on the watered area and cover with a clean bowl whose rim as been moistened with water. Leave it to relax (both you and your dough) for one hour.
• Wet your hands and two plastic scrapers and stretch and fold your dough. Get ahold of the dough between your scrapers and pull it toward yourself, stretching it as far as you can without forcing it. Then fold it back on itself and pile it up on the main body of the dough. Repeat this from the back and left and right sides of the dough. You should be left with a tighter more vertical dough. Andrew says the point of this is "to thin the gluten membrane by stretching it, allowing a greater subsequent expansion of the dough, at the same time squeezing as little gas out of it as possible."
• Put some wholemeal flour in a bowl. Pick up your dough and dip it in the flour, making sure it gets completely covered. Place in a proving basket with what will become the bottom facing up. Cover basket with a plastic bag and put in a warm place to prove for 3-5 hours.
• Test the dough with your finger after it has expanded a fair amount. It is ready to be baked when an indentation made by your finger disappears slowly, "indicating that the pressure of gas in the dough may be passing its peak."
• Turn your dough out CAREFULLY onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. If you're too rough with it you may hear a puff and a sigh as gas escapes from your loaf. Make a few cuts in the top and put in a oven preheated to about 450°F. After 10 minutes reduce heat to 400°F and bake for another half hour or until done.

Feel free to experiment with wholemeal to white flour proportion and different proving techniques.

I am still learning and each week my bread turns out differently (though always edible). It is fascinating to watch the evolution. I limit myself to doing only one thing differently from week to week so I can track the changes and try to make sense of them.

Wheat Leaven

A wheat leaven, the levain part of a pain au levain, requires very little to get going: a warm place (about 28 degrees Celsius), flour (preferably wholemeal, stoneground, organic), water (preferably filtered or spring), and time. You will require patience and possibly a thermometer.

Wheat Leaven

Adapted from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters

• 120g stoneground wholemeal wheat flour
• 120g strong white flour
• 200g water, filtered or spring

• Day one: Mix 40g stoneground wholemeal wheat flour with 40g water. I use a quart canning jar covered with just the dome lid, but not the screw part. This way, if things really get going in there it will just pop off the top and not release the built up energy by breaking the glass. Put in a warm, draft-free place. Andrew says that for a wheat leaven 28°C is ideal. I ended up buying an indoor/outdoor thermometer for a couple bucks at the hardware store and have found it extremely helpful. Turns out I'm not very good at estimating what 28°C feels like. Although now that I do know what it feels like, I'm getting better.
• Day two: Take your nascent starter from its cozy home and add to it another 40g wholemeal flour and 40g water. You probably won't notice a significant change in it yet.
• Day three: Your starter might show signs of life--bubbling or frothing. Add to it another 40g wholemeal flour and 20g water. Andrew says, "The water proportion is slightly reduced to tighten the dough up a bit."
• Day four: Add 120g strong white flour (or wholemeal flour, if you prefer) and 100g water to your starter. Andrew suggests white flour to lighten up the leaven, but it's really up to you. "After fermenting the Day 4 leaven for another 24 hours, you should have a leaven that smells slightly acidic and has risen appreciably (and probably collapsed)."
• If nothing seems to have happened after day four: Mix 220g starter with 120g strong white or wholemeal flour and 100g water. Repeat another day if necessary.
• OR
• If it was showing signs of life and then seems to have died: Mix 130g starter with 60g wholemeal flour, 120g strong white flour and 30g water.
• If your starter still isn't starting, try again from the beginning.

Use as the starter for French Country Bread.

When I was starting my wheat leaven, it took repeating day four twice for it to really get going. I kept trying to convince myself that it had risen and fallen, when really nothing had happened yet. And then one morning I got up and checked it and my quart jar was completely full of leaven. It was gorgeous. It set the tone for the rest of the day--nothing could get me down; my leaven was alive! It's like the feeling you get when someone is trying to show you a constellation and you keep saying, "Yeah, I see it," and then you actually do see it and it's incredible.

Sourdough Pancakes

It was fat Tuesday yesterday and somehow I got it in my head that as such one should really eat pancakes. Maybe this is a tradition. I don't know. But it's a good excuse to make pancakes anyway.

These were unlike any pancakes I've had before. They were, well, very sourdoughy. They had the slightly sour taste and squeaky texture that I love so much in sourdough bread. At the same time they were distinctly pancake-y and a perfect vehicle for butter, apricot jam, maple syrup and two over-easy eggs.

This recipe requires that you have some sort of sourdough starter going. The pancake recipe I used is from Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz while my starters come from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters. This didn't seem to matter, sours being sours, but I have grown fond of Andrew's use of gram measurements and was thrown by Sandor's reliance on cups. Anyway, your sour should be a sloppy one about the consistency of porridge.

Sourdough Pancakes

Makes 15-20 pancakes

• 1 cup rye sourdough starter
• 2½ cups flour of your choice
• 2 cups water, luke warm
• 2 Tbs. sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 Tbs. melted butter
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda, dissolved in 1 Tbs. water

• The night before you're going to make the cakes, assuming you're having them for breakfast, disperse the starter in luke warm water and stir in flour and sugar. Cover and put in a warm place to ferment.
• About an hour (or a bit more) before you want to eat, finish the batter and start cooking. To finish the batter beat the egg and stir it in along with the salt and melted butter. Dissolve the soda in warm water and fold it into the batter. The soda is added to counter some of the sour flavor. Your batter will look very much alive. I guess that's because it is.
• Have a well-seasoned cast iron skillet already hot on a burner set to medium. Start cooking the cakes right away, placing them on cooling racks in a warm oven as they are finished. They take a little longer to cook than your average pancake, so be patient or they'll be undercooked in the middle.

Enjoy with lots of butter and maple syrup. Try putting an over-easy egg on top for a real treat.

Bread

Breadmaking is one of those perfectly simple, absolutely miraculous things that, if successful, deliver no end of satisfaction. How great is it to give life to a leaven? And then to see that leaven shape a loaf of bread? And, if that's not enough, to pull that loaf out of the oven and be able to eat it!?

It's hard to take credit for bread, though. You don't actually do very much. You stir flour and water together and just wait and hope that something is happening in the fort you've made out of your heater, drying rack, folding chair, and quilts. This in no way diminishes the elation you feel when you part the blankets to find a jar full to brimming with lovely leaven--leaven that just the day before was a seemingly lifeless lump of flour and water.

I owe my success first and foremost to all the little beasties who so graciously decided to populate my leaven, but also to Andrew Whitley whose wonderful book, Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own, made me believe that there is no reason why anybody should not have a viable starter waiting patiently in the fridge for baking day. It really is that simple.

So far I have only tried Whitely's wheat leaven. Its success has encouraged me to get a rye sourdough going and when I do you'll be sure to hear about it.

Recipe and instructions to follow