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    Simple Sourdoughs: The Curious Peasant : Cookery, Craft, and Culture
    Simple Sourdoughs: The Curious Peasant : Cookery, Craft, and Culture
    Simple Sourdoughs: The Curious Peasant : Cookery, Craft, and Culture
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Simple Sourdoughs: The Curious Peasant : Cookery, Craft, and Culture

    By Victoria Osborne

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    About this ebook

    the curious peasant is a series of digital publications, e books, which look at some of the cookery, craft and cultural skills that we are in danger of losing. The series is published by peasant publishing and written by victoria osborne.

    simple sourdoughs, the first in the curious peasant series, looks at how to make a sourdough starter, how to maintain it and how to bake delicious bread. The book contains a baker's dozen of fantastic contemporary breads.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVictoria Osborne
    Release dateMay 1, 2014
    ISBN9780992908324
    Simple Sourdoughs: The Curious Peasant : Cookery, Craft, and Culture
    Author

    Victoria Osborne

    Born in London, England, Victoria has lived in Sydney, Hong Kong and New Zealand. She now lives in Melbourne.

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      Book preview

      Simple Sourdoughs - Victoria Osborne

      Simple Sourdoughs

      The Curious Peasant

      Lost Skills in Cookery, Craft, and Culture

      Victoria Osborne

      Peasant Publishing

      Wiltshire

      Smashwords Edition

      ISBN: 978-0-9929083-2-4

      Cover design by Ed Tolkien

      Editor: Lisa Cussans

      Text copyright Victoria Osborne 2014

      Simple Sourdoughs

      The Curious Peasant

      Lost skills in cookery, craft, and culture

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ISBN: 978-0-9929083-2-4

      Version 1.0

      Published by Peasant Publishing on Smashwords 2014

      Victoria Osborne has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work.

      Table of Contents:

      Cover

      Frontispiece

      Legal Notice

      Table of Contents

      Dedication

      Why choose sourdough?

      What is sourdough?

      How to Make a starter

      Maintaining your starter

      Baking tips and techniques

      How to make sourdough my way

      The Recipes

      Basic White Sourdough

      Pain de Compagne

      Linseedy Sourdough

      Focaccia with Red Grapes and Fennel Seeds

      Wholemeal or Wholewheat Sourdough

      Sourdough Baguettes

      Sourdough Pizza

      Pretzels

      Walnut and Raisin Bread

      Prune and Pink Peppercorn Loaf

      Borodinsky Bread

      Sourdough with Mixed Seeds and Spelt

      Crumpets

      Bibliography & Links

      Glossary

      Acknowledgements

      Also by Victoria Osborne

      About the Author

      Did you like this book?

      For Tim and Eleanor with love

      Why choose sourdough?

      Many people find the soft, pappy bread available in supermarkets to be very unsatisfying. Some have compared it to cotton wool, and, from a nutritional point of view, it may do you just about as much good. There are often complaints of indigestibility, too. Commercial white bread, for instance, gives me terrible heartburn and subsequent bloating, which I simply never get when eating a slowly fermented sourdough.

      The consumption of rapidly made commercial bread pumped full of additives may go some way to explaining the extraordinary rise in perceived wheat intolerance in recent years. So many people these days are saying that bread doesn’t agree with them, when frequently it is the commercially produced loaves so readily available that are the cause of the problem. On the other hand, a well-made, slowly fermented sourdough is usually a very satisfying, flavourful, and readily digested substance. The staff of life, indeed.

      And keep in mind that with a homemade sourdough, the cook is in complete control of what goes into it. You can play with the recipe until you find a bread that suits your tastebuds, your pocket, and your diet. You can add walnuts, raisins, fruit, vegetables, or seeds. Have more or less salt (but you will need a little salt to help the gluten develop). You can make your bread with a variety of flours: brown, white, wholemeal, rye, barley, etc. Finally, making your own sourdough is not only very rewarding, but it can actually work out cheaper than buying bread commercially. Mind you, it is so delicious that you may well find yourselves eating rather a lot of it!

      Unfortunately, most sourdoughs are not suitable to being made in a home bread maker. The mixing is too vigorous, and the proving time too short, for effective handling of the sourdough. However, if your bread maker machine has a bake only setting, you can experiment with placing your proved dough in the machine and seeing if the results are to your liking.

      What is sourdough bread?

      Most mass-produced commercial breads available in your local supermarket, particularly those bought from a baker or a supermarket in the United Kingdom, are made using the Chorleywood baking process. This is a method, developed in the early 1960s, of baking a light loaf of bread from a low protein flour in as short a time as possible. Industrial bakers have got this down to just a few short hours from the first mixing to the cooked loaf exiting the oven and being packaged ready for sale. The process uses lots of water, plenty of yeast, and a complex mixture of flour improvers, additives, preservatives, and enzymes, all of which help speed up the process and in turn reduce the cost. This also means that the grains in the flour have no opportunity to undergo a fermentation process. The result is a large, light, puffy, and pappy loaf. If you want to find out more about the contents and process of a Chorleywood loaf, I would recommend Andrew Whitley’s superb book, Bread Matters. xxxx

      A sourdough loaf, or at least my sourdough loaf, is the antithesis of the Chorleywood process. Natural yeast is caught in a mixture of flour and water. A wild yeast colony starts to grow, and, with judicious feeding and discarding, soon a vigorous starter mix is created. This is the sourdough culture, which is used in place of commercial yeast. This is, of course, the way bread has been made for millennia. Traditionally a bit of dough from an earlier baking was added to the current bake, in effect carrying over the natural yeast, just as in a sourdough starter but in a more solid form. Some good artisan bakers, particularly in Continental Europe, continue this practice. However, using dough from a previous bake is a little harder than cultivating a culture, which can live in the fridge for lengthy periods between bakes, and this book will concentrate on the more forgiving semi-liquid starter.

      Making a sourdough loaf also takes time. As the natural yeast is slower growing than commercially produced dried or fresh yeast, it takes longer to develop in a dough mix. This additional time allows the dough to undergo a partial fermentation, which, in turn, makes the bread easier to digest as the gluten in the flour is transformed. Making a sourdough loaf, from the initial refreshment of the starter to cutting the cooled loaf, can take anything from 24 to 48 hours, depending on your methods and routine – all

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