Bread

Hi again, sorry for the delay!

For anyone who's been following me on Snapchat or my Lisa's Home Bakes page on Facebook you'll know I'm all about the sourdough bread at the moment! Once you get into it the process becomes really engrossing and it's not hard to see why people bake sourdough bread every day. It very easily becomes part of your everyday routine.

So today I wanted to go back and talk a bit about how I got into making bread and some of my more successful bakes.

I started making my own bread while I was at university in London, baking at the weekends in my spare time and soon came to love the process of kneading the dough... a great way to get out frustration from the week or just shut off my mind for a while when assessment stress got too much. Like with most things in my life, I'm not much of a planner - I tend to not think things through before hand and instead just launch myself into them. So with the bread I didn't really think much about techniques or anything like that, I just bought a packet of wholemeal flour and followed the instructions on the back.

Lucky for me the Greenwich market wasn't far from where I was living and my favourite stall sold the most delicious olives, sundried tomatoes and feta cheese. So I began buying a load of them at the weekends, scoffing the feta cheese and making olive and sundried tomato bread with the rest, again, just following the basic bread recipe on the packet of flour and figuring out as I went along if there was too much oil in it or too salty and adjusting next time. The bread became pretty popular in our little apartment and my roommate even brought me back figs from a trip home to Italy to make into bread. Yum!

It wasn't until I moved back home to Ireland that I actually started looking properly into bread recipes and trying out fresh yeast as well as dried yeast. And of course soda bread! I eventually found a really good bread book (after a lot of searching) - The Ballymaloe Bread Book by Tim Allen - and it is now my bible for bread making of all sorts, including sourdough!

My better Breads

'Stripy Cat' - Soda bread with chocolate chips

This was my first attempt and unfortunately (considering it was a valentines day brekkie surprise and I had been up since 5am baking) it was a bit of a disaster. I used dark chocolate chopped up and it came out far too bitter. I made it again the following week using milk chocolate and it was much nicer.

Olive and Sundried Tomato Soda Bread

White Yeast Bread

To get a lovely crunchy crust I put a bowl of water in the bottom of the oven while baking.

Brown Scones with Seeds

My first successful scones!! They were really tasty and I love how rustic they look.

Apple Oat Bread

One tub of natural yogurt and two tubs oats, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp bread soda and whatever filling you like. I used grated apple and cinnamon. You can also add sundried tomatoes, olives and fennel seeds or any other nice ingredients. Walnuts would be nice with the apple too.

Christmas Fig Bread

This has become a staple for our Christmas dinner table as an accompaniment with our starters. It combines plain, rye , wholemeal flour and bran. Brown Sugar, baking powder, bread soda, instant espresso powder, cocoa powder, salt, figs, currants, buttermilk, sour cream, butter, egg and treacle. All of this makes one loaf! Definitely not light...the main reason why we only have it at Christmas. It's really really tasty and is great for breakfast too!

My Sourdough Adventure

Always in search of the next big baking challenge, it was only a matter of time before I stumbled across sourdough bread. This may come as a shock but I had never actually tasted sourdough bread before I started baking it. I had heard the name but never actually came across it and had no idea what was involved in making it. My interest was sparked by those lovely Happy Pear twins and their snapchat sagas. Stephen Flynn is mad into his sourdough bread and they put together a youtube tutorial on how to get started.

For anyone who, like me, is a latecomer to the sourdough world, this bread is made completely from scratch. By this I mean that you start by making your own 'Mother' culture which acts as the rising agent for the bread, instead of using fresh or dried yeast. This way you know exactly what you are putting in your bread.

The 'Mother' culture consists of flour and water, thats it! You can choose whichever type of flour you want to make your culture but once you have, you need to stick with it. It is important to use good water, meaning not tap water. Either pre-boiled water or bottled water.

There seem to be three methods of creating your culture and I have tried two of the three. The first one I tried says to start by filling a jar about a 1/4 of the way with flour of your choice and then mixing in lukewarm water until you get the consistency of a pancake batter. Once you have the consistency, cover the jar with a cloth and leave to sit for about a week. After this you can start to feed the culture.

I tried this method first but after leaving it for the week I was a little worried it was going kind of mouldy and the first bread I tried with it was the most unsuccessful bake I have ever had! There was no rise at all - flat as a pancake!! - and after an hour and a half in the oven, the inside of the bread was completely raw, like sludge.

To be honest, if I had stuck with it and kept feeding the culture it probably would have come alive and started to work better but I just wasn't happy with it so I chucked it in the bin and started again.

The second method I used, which worked well for me, was to start by putting 100g flour in a jar and mixing it with the good water to get the pancake batter consistency. Cover with cling film and set aside. Every 12 hours give it a stir to encourage the air bubbles to form and cover again. Each day for 4 days feed with 100g flour and enough water to bring it back to the right consistency and cover again and set aside. On the 5th day my culture was super bubbly and I used it to make my first bread. This bread was definitely a big step up from my first attempt. It rose a bit, and there were some little air holes in the bread but it was quite dense and chewy.

The third method, which I didn't try, is basically the same as the first, except for the week that it is left sitting you need to come back to it every 12 hours and give it a stir.

My first really successful bread came after feeding the culture for a few more days. They do say the third time's the charm and it certainly was for me. This time I was loosely following a recipe from The Ballymaloe Bread Book, mainly for the quantity of flour and water needed. The recipe I was following was for a Rye bread but the majority of the flour included was strong white flour with only a small amount of Rye. I have no doubt this would have a much nicer consistency but I was keen to stick to one type of flour to start so I used all spelt flour.

The process of making a sourdough loaf starts by making a sponge. This is done by taking some of your sourdough culture (the amount differs depending on the recipe) and mixing it with more water. Then adding in flour and (in the Ballymaloe Bread Book) a teaspoon of sugar. I was using brown sugar to start and have been trying out using agave syrup. Then cover with clingfilm and leave to rise for 12-24 hours. When it's ready it should have risen a bit and be full of air bubbles.

When the sponge is ready it's time to make the bread dough. This is where I find sourdough really different to other types of bread. Basically you repeat the last step, but adding salt instead of sugar and whatever other filling ingredients you want (seeds, nuts, spices etc.). I used my big fancy stand mixer with the dough hook on as it was a very wet dough. You start by adding more water to the sponge - again the amount differs depending on the bread you're making but it's about 8-10 fluid ounces. Mix this up for a minute and then add more flour, salt and your chosen ingredients. Mix until it forms a very loose and pliable dough (so says the book), then transfer to a lightly floured surface and kneed for a minute or two..... This did not happen for me! After mixing in the stand mixer for a good while the dough began to form but was far too sticky to kneed. It all just stuck to my hands so I gave up. I put it back in the mixer with a bit more flour and then mixed it for another minute or two before dividing it into two oiled bread tins and leaving them to rise for 5-6 hours. These ones rose a bit more than the last batch and when they came out of the oven they looked like this!!

When I cut into it, as you can see, it was full of lovely air holes and tasted quite light with a faint tangy flavour. Toasted with butter it was the perfect brekkie.

I made two more plain spelt flour loaves which both rose even more than the last batch and two wholemeal flour ones. These I found a little more dense and tough and I'd say you would need to add some plain flour in with it to soften it up.

I also tried rye with caraway seeds using all rye flour and this evening I'm making rye again but following the Ballymaloe recipe to see how it differs combining the rye and plain flour.

I have to say I'm really enjoying this sourdough making lark. It's pretty addictive and I have already become far too attached to my 'Mother' culture! The only problem is, I have no idea where all this bread is going to go! Any takers??