Category: Baking

Until the 1940s, home cooks used either fresh “bakers” yeast or home-made “sourdough” starters to make their bread rise. Then some genius discovered how to produce bakers yeast on an industrial scale, and packaged it in such a way that it could be stored in the kitchen for months on end.

After the Second World War, improved manufacturing, packaging and transport systems made it easy to buy fresh bread of a standardised quality from shops. The only people left baking bread at home were those worried by what additives this Chorleywood Process of bread-making might do to their health.

I bought my first bread-making machine as a treat for myself when our last baby was born. It got me really interested in all types of bread-making. Since then, bread, rolls, buns, naans, pizza bases —you name it, I make it. The only bread we buy now is for the family’s weekly Friday night treat of bacon-and-egg sandwiches. To get the full, wicked experience, those have to be made with ready-made white sliced bread. Healthy eating takes a back seat at the end of a busy week!

Then came the Coronavirus lockdown. Within a week or two, I couldn’t buy yeast locally. That didn’t mean it had disappeared entirely. I saw some offered online at a cost of £15 for a packet that, pre-virus, would have cost only about a pound! There was no way I was going to support a profiteer. Instead, I made my own raising agent.

You can read about how I did that here. I had to start the process before I ran out of packet yeast, as it takes a few days to build up enough for baking. Five days after making a simple paste with nothing but flour and water, the resulting yeast culture had expanded enough for me to make my first loaf of bread.

In the same way making your own starter takes time, baking with it needs patience. That’s why sourdough loaves and other artisan breads are so expensive! Andrew Whitley’s book Bread Matters is a fascinating read, and it sparked my interest in speciality bread-making. Over the years I’ve adapted his recipes and timings until I settled on the following method. It turns out a good, light loaf every time.

A few hours before you start, fill a jug with half a litre of cold water and put it aside, covered. Letting the water stand allows the chlorine within it to dissipate. If you forget to do this ahead of time—as I sometimes do!—use cool, boiled water from the kettle.

Last thing at night, measure out a big ladleful of bread-making starter (see here for details) into a large mixing bowl with 50g of wholemeal bread-making flour and 150g of strong white bread-making flour. Add enough aired water from the jug to make a stiffish dough. Cover the bowl and put it in the fridge overnight.

Next morning, mix together in a separate bowl 100g wholemeal flour, 300g strong white bread flour, a heaped teaspoon of salt, and 300ml water. Andrew Whitley says knead this mixture vigorously for between eight to ten minutes, but I cheat by measuring everything into my food mixer and leaving it to run at a medium speed until the dough is stretchy (about five minutes).

I’ve found I get better results when bread-making if I go by the feel and stretchiness of the dough rather than by strict measurements and timings. Different flours absorb different amounts of water. Once you’ve followed a recipe a couple of times, you get a feel for what works well.

Add a couple of big ladles of your sourdough starter, and knead (or mix by machine) for a few more minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. At this point it should be quite sticky, but be careful not to make it too wet or it won’t rise well.

Moisten a clean kitchen work-surface with a little water, put the dough on it and invert a clean bowl over the top (I wash out the mixer bowl, and use that). Leave for about an hour, during which time the natural yeasts work their magic and the dough will rise. At this point Andrew Whitley holds a plastic dough scraper in each hand and gently stretches the mixture first one way, then the other, folding the dough in on itself to retain the air while exploiting its elastic properties to gently trap as much air as possible. If you don’t have a pair of dough-scrapers, you can use a plastic spatula or the tips of your fingers. That’s how I started. The thing is to be gentle rather than forceful—you want to stretch, not squash.

I rise my dough in linen-lined baskets, until the mark made by my finger in the surface takes only a few seconds to disappear, then turn the risen loaves out onto a flat tray for baking. The dough can just as easily be put into a greased baking tin, left to rise and then put straight into the oven to be baked. Either way, I give the lined basket or tin a really thick coating of flour to stop the dough drying out while rising, or sticking to the tin when cooked.

Rising takes between 3-5 hours. The dough is ready to cook when it takes a second or so to spring back after you poke it with a floury finger. If the dough has been put to rise in a basket, it will need to be tipped out onto a baking tray for cooking. This has to be done very carefully, or the air you’ve worked so hard to incorporate will escape and the dough will deflate like a Christmas balloon on January 6th.

The oven needs to be really hot to begin with— 220 degrees C or equivalent— to make the dough expand vigorously before the yeast is killed by the heat. After ten minutes at that temperature reduce the heat to around 200 degrees C, and bake for about another 30 minutes until the loaf is firm and golden.

How are you managing for bread and other staples at this time?

How are you weathering this awful crisis? I’m a loner by nature and thought I’d be able to cope well with being in isolation. After all, I’ve worked from home with no near neighbours for years, but it isn’t quite working out as I’d hoped.

There’s a big difference between not needing to leave the house, and not being allowed to leave it. Even if we weren’t restricted to one walk for necessary exercise each day, there’s nowhere to go.

Comfort eating is my big problem. I’ve wrenched my knee so running on my treadmill is off my agenda for a while. Instead of doing between 12-15k steps per day I’m down to about 7k. That means I dare not make any cake, so it’s healthy food only!

I love cooking, but while we’re in lock-down and with no more supermarket deliveries, I’ve got to make the best of what we’ve got in the house. Apparently Jamie Oliver was on TV telling people they didn’t need to panic about not being able to buy bread. He supplied a recipe which needed only three ingredient: yeast, flour and water.

That’s fine in theory, but most people are finding that two of his three ingredients are impossible to get. The supermarkets around here haven’t been able to supply either yeast or bread-making flour for weeks.

I’ve made bread for years, both by hand and machine, so I always have a good supply of ingredients. Unfortunately, as I refused to panic-buy at the start of this crisis, my stocks are getting low. At a pinch, ordinary flour can be used to make bread but you’ll still need yeast. That’s why I’m creating a new batch of sourdough starter today, so that when I’ve used the last of our dried yeast I can still make bread.

Sourdough starter begins as a mixture of flour and water. Wild yeasts naturally present in the atmosphere colonise this, and turn it into a culture. Once this mixture has been fed and nurtured for a few days, a ladleful of it can be used in place of commercial dried yeast.

Loaves made using sourdough starter have the distinctive appearance and tangy taste of those expensive artisan breads on sale in bakeries, but they are really easy to make. All you need is patience, as it takes a few days for the wild yeasts to multiply enough to provide sufficient raising agent. You can buy sachets of sourdough starter, but to be honest what starts off as “San Francisco’s Finest” (or whatever) is soon colonised by your own local yeasts and becomes unique to your kitchen.

Here’s my recipe for a sourdough starter. You’ll need:

• A jug of boiled water, left to stand (covered) overnight at room temperature in order to get rid of the chlorine.
• Strong (breadmaking) wholemeal flour, preferably organic)

Weigh 40g of flour into a food-grade plastic container (I use a 2.6litre, square-bottomed Lock and Lock box). Add 40 ml of water, and beat as hard as you can to incorporate plenty of air. I use the whisk on the right, which I got from Bakery Bits. Then cover with a lid, or a piece of beeswax wrap, and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Mine sits on the kitchen counter.

When that time’s up, add a further 40g of flour and another 40ml of water to your original mixture. Beat again, then cover and store as before.

Day Three: Your starter may already be bubbling. Alternatively, it may have some greyish liquid on top. Don’t worry—either way, add a further 40g of wholemeal flour but this time only 20ml of the de-chlorinated, room-temperature water, so your mixture doesn’t get too sloppy. Whisk again, cover, and keep the mixture warm.

The next day, you have a choice. If you want to make genuine wholemeal starter, add a further 120g wholemeal flour. If you want a lighter starter (which I use for my bread), add 120g strong white (bread-making) flour instead of wholemeal. Either way, add 100ml water as before, and repeat the whisking.

After a further twenty-four hours in a warm place, your sourdough should be bubbly and smell pleasantly fruity. From now on, the aim is to maintain the starter by feeding it each morning.

Feed your sourdough by adding 100g of strong white bread flour (or 75g white and 25g wholemeal) and 100ml of room-temperature water that has been dechlorinated overnight. Obviously, your mixture will grow, so to avoid being overwhelmed you periodically “discard” a ladleful of your starter by either making bread with it, adding it to pancake or waffle mixture to make them fluffy, donating some starter to a friend, or freezing it in case you lose your original starter. It saves you having to start the process all over again.

Making a sourdough starter is quite a long-drawn out process, but it only takes a few minutes each day. It’s worth giving it a try, and once you’ve tasted good home-made sourdough bread, you’ll be hooked!