Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own by Whitley Andrew

Author:Whitley, Andrew [Whitley, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Makes 1 small loaf

40g Rye Sourdough Starter (page 160)

175g Water (at 35°C)

250g Stoneground wholemeal flour

4g Sea salt

469g Total

To be on the safe side, use a rye sourdough starter that has been refreshed within the last fortnight or so. It is quite possible to get good results with stuff that has been hanging around in the fridge for ages, but its acidity may have reduced the population of viable yeast cells and it could take quite a while to perk up. If you don’t have time to do a full refreshment, which really amounts to the same as making a ‘production’ sourdough (as described on page 165), do a mini-refreshment, by dispersing some of your very old sour in at least double its weight of wholemeal rye flour and water. It should be about 30°C and as sloppy as runny porridge. Give it 4 hours in a warm place if you can. If absolutely nothing has happened in that time, it will need longer, but you can expect to see some bubbling after a few hours as the yeasts start to ferment.

To make the bread, disperse your old (or refreshed) rye sourdough in the water and then mix in the flour and salt. Knead to develop the gluten and adjust the moisture so that the dough is very soft. Any structure that you create by tight moulding will largely subside during a long proof, so do not expect a fine-domed top to a loaf such as this. Place the dough in a greased small loaf tin, cover it and leave to rise. Do not put the tin in an especially warm place unless you want to hurry the process along. At an average kitchen temperature of about 20°C, this dough should rise in 10-12 hours.

Bake as for any normal tin bread, i.e. in a hot oven (about 230°C), reducing the temperature by about 30°C after 10 minutes or so. Since all the flour in this loaf has been fermented for a long period, the crumb will be markedly stickier immediately after baking than in a conventional leaven system such as French Country Bread (page 182), so it is better to leave it for a day before cutting it. Its keeping quality, however, is remarkable.

Even better, the science suggests that a long rise with lactic acid bacteria from the rye sour will neutralise almost all the phytic acid present in the wholemeal flour bran, making important minerals such as iron, magnesium, calcium and zinc more available to your body than they would be in an ordinary yeasted wholemeal bread.

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