Flour Salt Water – Sourdough Loaf

Just three ingredients – if you count different flours as one.

A long recipe for my first blog post, but not as complicated as it looks. You’ll end up with a tasty, chewy loaf, with a burnished crust; almost unrelated to supermarket-sliced, with a fraction of the ingredients and none of the dodgy ones!

I’ve split this into five steps, each taking 10-15 minutes, with additional inactive time (for you, not the dough). In total, the five steps take six days. If you already have a sourdough starter on the go (step one), you can bake a loaf in a day. At any stage before baking, you can pause the process by putting dough in the fridge (say overnight), which also improves the final flavour. Makes a 1kg loaf.

Ingredients

• 300g Stoneground dark whole grain rye flour
• 50g Stoneground wholemeal malted flour
• 490g Strong white flour
• 10g Salt
• Tap water

Utensils

• Digital scales – it’s easier to weigh ingredients, rather than measure by volume
• 500ml to 1 litre container with lid
• Food mixer and dough hook – or knead by hand
• Dough scraper
• Small bowl
• Shower cap – I nab them from hotel bathrooms
• Large glass bowl
• Banneton proving basket
• Round cast-iron casserole with lid
• Sharp knife or razor blade
• Cooling rack

Step One

Rye Sourdough Starter

• 250g stoneground dark whole grain rye flour
• 250g tap water

Day One

Mix 50g flour with 50g water. Cover and leave at room temperature for 24 hours. There’s natural yeast in the air, on your hands, on the flour – so no need to add any fresh or dried yeast.

Days 2, 3, 4 and 5

Each day mix in an additional 50g of flour and 50g water. You should end up with a bubbly mixture which smells a little boozy. Store in the fridge in the container with lid.

The starter will keep for around two weeks without adding anything and should still contain some active yeast. If you’re going to leave it longer before making bread, freeze the starter and it should work fine when you defrost it, if you ‘feed’ the starter with a little more flour and water for a day. Rye isn’t as vigorous as wheat flour, so you don’t have the palaver of remembering a daily feed, plus if you leave the starter alone, it won’t end up smelling like the floor after a student party . The rye starter also helps the finished loaf stay moist and fresh longer, but doesn’t make it taste of German rye bread, as the rye flour is only a small proportion of the final loaf. You do need to do the next step though, to boost the yeast action.

Step Two

Production Levain

• 100g of the rye starter from Step 1 – not all 500g
• 50g stoneground wholemeal malted flour
• 75g strong white flour
• 75g warm tap water

300g total

Mix ingredients together in a small bowl and cover with the shower cap. Leave in a warm place to start to reactivate the starter and let rise for 3-4 hours.

• 50g stoneground dark whole grain rye flour
• 50g warm tap water

Feed the rye starter in the container with the additional flour and water and put back in the fridge for the next time.

Step Three

Dough

• 415g strong white flour
• 275g warm tap water
• 10g salt
• 300g production levain (all of it from Step 2)

1000g total

Knead the flour and water together for 5 minutes in a food mixer with a dough hook, or 8 minutes by hand. The dough should feel sticky to start with, but gets less sticky and more elastic as you go on.

Next, add the salt and production levain and knead for another 2-3 minutes. You should end up with a dough that stretches rather than immediately tears when you pull on it. It should still be fairly sticky, probably adhering a little to your hands, or the mixer bowl. This makes for a better crust when you bake the loaf.

Wipe a countertop with a moist flannel and run a wet finger round the inside rim of the glass bowl. Tip the dough onto the counter and cover with the inverted bowl. After about an hour, the dough should start to spread out and flatten as the glutens relax.

Uncover and use a dough scraper to lift the dough – pulling away from the centre in 4 directions (e.g. East, South, West, North) – then folding back over itself, to make a higher heap again. The stretching helps develop the gluten slowly, making for a tastier loaf. Cover with the inverted bowl again and repeat this folding process after another hour or so.

Step Four

Prove

Put a spoon or two of flour into the banneton and rotate and tip it to coat the inside; to help stop the dough sticking. I found the banneton develops a non-stick coat over time, so you’ll be able to use less flour over time. Now use your cupped hand and the dough scraper to make the dough into a tighter shape, pulling it underneath as you rotate the dough between hand and scraper. You’ll need enough flour to stop your hand sticking, but try not to use any more than that. Once you have a more compact, tighter ball of dough, invert it into the floured banneton and cover with a shower cap, to give it room to rise and keep the dough moist.

Either prove at room temperature for a few hours; or even better, in the fridge over night, which will let the flavours develop more. It should have roughly doubled in size and bounce back a little when you prod it: too much and it will bake flat; too little and it will bake with big holes in the loaf.

Step Five

Bake

Preheat your oven to the max (mine’s about 250 degrees C) and put the cast-iron casserole and lid in until they are super-hot. Working quickly to preserve heat, sprinkle a tablespoonful of semolina into the casserole, which should start to smoke as it hits the heat. Invert the banneton, tipping the dough in. To get the dough centred, you may have to give it a little shake – gently, with oven gloves . Then slash the top of the dough with a sharp knife/razor. A ‘#’ sign is attractive and allows the dough to rise evenly, rather than tearing. Put the hot lid back on and bake in the oven for 35 minutes.

After this time, you can take the lid off, admiring the risen, but still pale loaf. Return to the oven and reduce the heat a little to 220C to finish cooking for another 25 minutes, until you have a very dark loaf. Leave to cool on a rack, resisting the temptation to cut until cooled, as it will still be finishing cooking and is often too moist otherwise.

You’ll have created a crusty loaf that should last up to a week in a bread bin (please not in a fridge, which dehydrates). I prefer it toasted and tend to cut in half so I have a flat surface to put on a board for slicing, as the crust can be hard to cut through versus supermarket pap.

For readers of a nerdier disposition, this loaf is 60% hydrated. This is a measure of the proportion of water to flour; the higher water content, the crustier the final loaf. The downside is that a soft dough is harder to handle and may be too sticky to knead, rather than just fold, as in the final part of Step three.

The proportions of flour in the finished loaf are 10% Rye, 10% Wholemeal and 80% White. I’ve found that any less than 80% white and the loaf has a different texture, more solid and worthy, but still tasty and probably even better. I’m told that the sourdough process means this bread is palatable even to people with gluten intolerances, but please don’t rely on my word!

If you want to read more, I stole shamelessly from several books for this recipe. The closest to being plagiarised were these three, currently being put to work as a laptop stand:

• Baking School, The Bread Ahead Cookbook – MATTHEW JONES, JUSTIN GELLATLY & LOUISE GELLATLY
• Bread Ahead – ANDREW WHITLEY
• Tartine Bread – CHAD ROBERTSON