The Great Sourdough Bread Experiment

And that's how easy it is!

Not

First create your sourdough starter, what you do is, one day at work you decide that you want to bake sourdough bread so you look it up on the interweb and ring your daughter up and ask her to put 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of warm water in a loose lidded container. This takes roughly half an hour to get across to said daughter!

You then forget about it for a day, and notice something odd in a airtight tupperware container. Doh.

Move the resulting mess into a kilner jar without a seal. Add another 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water. Add the same the next day, and the next. Get bored and use some of it to make bread,  very flat bread.

Search around on the web and decide to buy some organic rye flour and add that. Come down the next morning to a sourdough explosion in the kitchen, The starter had gone mad and climbed out of the kilner jar and tried to get into the fridge, no literally, it had made it through the door seal and into the fridge. Grin manically and clean it all up and divide the starter into two jars, add 50 grams of rye flour and water to each jar.

Make bread, very nice bread, but sort of flattish and not looking much like one of those nice artisan sourdough loaves that Richard Bertinet sells for a small mortgage.

Buy a 25kg sack of organic wholemeal flour from Shipton Mill. Make bread every arsing day for a week. Change the dough formula to a higher hydration, oh yeah use normal english, make wetter dough.

Wetter dough == bigger holes. Apparently. (Note: I am a geek for those who noticed :-) )

Bigger holes duly appear in extremely flat bread, incredibly nice bread, bread that makes the worlds best, very flat, toast. Damn, blast and buggery.

Try white flour, buy a 25kg bag of organic white flour, try using the bread maker and add some yeast, nice bread, very flat. Oh for God's sake

Do this for approximately a month. Do much more research on the web and finally find this post. 

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/5818/sourdough-bread-will-not-rise

Produce the loaf at the top. As I said easy.

Starter:

100 grams of organic bread flour I use wholemeal- honestly it works much better than standard supermarket

100 grams of warm water. 

You need to feed this every day, discard half and replace,  do this for about a week until it is doubling in size after you have fed it. 

Loaf:

200 grams of  your starter

400 grams of white organic flour

200 ml warm water (give or take)

1 teaspoon salt

Mix the starter, flour, salt and about half the water. You are looking for a fairly wet dough but not too wet to work. Knead the dough until its really silky. You will probably need to use the stretch and fold method if the dough is fairly wet

Put in a well oiled bowl and let it rise for 5 - 6 hours. 

Stretch and fold, then shape to get a good surface tension, yeah I know, you'll just have to read the post above or http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/video-shaping-a-boule/ . I use a bowl with a floured clean tea towel for the last prove, I use a floured banneton with a linen liner, (Get one from eBay, its more than worth it) it needs to roughly double in size about 45 minutes - 2 or even 3 hours.

Now what made this work for me is heating the oven up to 250c and cooking in one of these, enamelled cast iron casserole. After looking at a La Cloche baking dome, fast intake of breath at price.

I put the pot itself in the oven and kept the lid out. Basically to avoid burning myself not for any technical reason.

Very carefully tip the dough into the pot (Doh! stupid idea, tip the dough onto the lid and put the bowl on top) , slash the top. Cook at 250c for 15  20 minutes and 35 minutes at 200c.

As I said easy....