Adventures in Sourdough (part 2)

Well after my initial escapade with Sourdough, things have gotten progressively more interesting. The first loaf (Sourdough1, as I now call it) came out pretty well, even though it had been in the fridge for quite a while. It was also (I can admit it now) a bit ‘crusty’, mostly because I probably left it in uncovered for about 10 minutes too long. It was still rather wonderful, I hasten to add. But I can now say this with confidence because Sourdough2 was simply great.

Soudrough2

 

This time around I did it all from scratch, with my (scrupulously clean) own hands. First step, get the leaven working. I scooped the requisite amount out of the jar, into another jar, and added the strong white flour and the wholemeal flour. I should have said that this was all preceded by a mad trip across Dublin through various ethnic and wholefood shops to get ‘the right flour’. I now probably have enough to keep me going until 2018, but who knows. Back to the sequence.

Leaven made and fermented for about 10 hours, I added the flour, leaven and water together into a gloopy mess. The leaven did not float, which made me a bit panicky, but frankly I could see no viable way to remedy that (short of draining the swamp) so I pressed ahead anyway.

An hour later, I added the salt and more water, mixed all together and dumped it out onto a floured board. I had middling expectations at this point. This was all happening on a Saturday night so I kept kneading, folding and aerating it right through a movie and then Match of the Day. Which extended to about two hours as I kept pausing the action. Twist, fold, quarter turn, fold twist, quarter turn. Gradually I convinced myself that it was all starting to look aerated and so around midnight I gently placed the loaf seam side up into a floured mould and put it into the fridge.

On Sunday I had decided to wait until the afternoon to put it into the oven. I took it out of the fridge about three hours before and I could see the temperature change start to ‘rise’ the loaf. I followed the baking instructions to the letter of the law, put the seam side down,  and gave the loaf the bare 45 minutes end to end in the oven. And to my great excitement it turned out really well. Nice taste, not so chewy crust, good flavour, plenty of air bubbles. So very happy that it went well.

About a week later I managed to initiate the cycle that resulted in Sourdough3. Again I went for steady-state and tried to repeat all the steps in sequence, with the ambition of getting to consistency. The one thing I can’t influence is the air temperature however. This one started on a sunny Saturday, and I had left the leaven to ‘grow’ in a covered bowl in direct sunlight. All went well thereafter, although as yet I really have no ‘feel’ for when the dough has gotten to the right point to say ‘enough’ and put it in the fridge overnight. This time around I also didn’t use the fan setting on my oven, though the temperature and cooking times were as before. So probably a cooler oven, without the fan.

Sourdough3

The result (Sourdough3) was not as chewy as the preceding version, it did taste good but I felt it had not risen as much as before, so maybe I didn’t do quite enough ‘folding’ to get the air into the dough. Still pretty good though, and it was all eaten quite quickly (never a bad sign).

And then, a quasi-tragedy. Sourdough4 followed the same ‘build’ pattern as its predecessors, although the air temperature was definitely lower when the leaven was growing. But I went through all the same steps and it felt like the dough was nice and springy when I put it into the fridge. But I (personally, no-one else to blame) erred at the last step. I had gotten a bit over-confident, and as a result I forgot to turn down the oven for the last 20 minutes, as I am supposed to. The end result was a very blackened top (see photo) and a burned finger for me as I dragged it out of the oven (accompanied by some selected profanities). However, and this is the really strange bit. When I cut open the loaf and tasted it, it really tasted good. And there were lots of air pockets in the dough, and a very chewy texture. So I think the dough was fine, the proving and the folding had created good air pockets, and once I could get past the blackish top, I was very happy with what I found. So Sourdough4 was a combination of positives and negatives, and I’ll move on to number 5 with a few more lessons under my belt.

Black outside…

Interior was fine!

Ideally I’d like to get to a point where I can work this into a daily routine, where I start the leaven in the morning, make the dough that night, overnight in the fridge and bake the next evening. But for now, I’ll enjoy building my knowledge and experience.

Music on the move.

I’ve recently become a devotee to Spotify (everything, wow) , though I still insist on buying the occasional CD to ‘stay connected’ and get the all-important liner sleeve notes. I still have my irreplaceable vinyl collection (obviously) since some of those 12 inchers carry almost as many memories for me as a photograph album. But somewhere around 1980 I bought my first ‘separates’ CD player (Denon, since you ask) and it’s still going strong. Of course it’s been supplanted and supplemented by multiple other CD players around the house, and when I am going on holidays and renting a car, I will tend to bring a stack of about 10 CDs (no boxes) to compensate for the God-awful radio stations I encounter. Of course going forward I may well be connecting my iPhone to the car radio, and I recently had the distinctly odd experience of hiring a car WITHOUT a CD player. But old habits die hard.

Allied to this ‘CD packing list’ I tend to buy second hand CDs in markets wherever I go. They’re a bit bigger than the ubiquitous fridge magnets (which I also buy). But they do tend to link (in my memories) with the place I bought them – though mostly the music bears no resemblance to the country, it’s just something I ‘always meant to get’ and suddenly there it is, for a cost of about $2. So some unusual juxtapositions emerge. Here’s five of the best – the place and the music.

1. Teenage Fanclub – Best of

Bought in a second hand CD/vinyl shop in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the strange environment of an earthquake-ravaged city centre I found a small CD shop and stumbled across this treasure from Glasgow’s finest (and one of my favourite bands of all time). This CD took us all round the South Island – down to Dunedin, across to Queenstown and further afield – until finally my long suffering wife said she could take no more. Having said that, by then she knew all the words. A fantastic combination of a quirky, melodic, jangly-guitar band with some of the most fantastic scenery in the world. Heaven on a plate.

2. Grace Jones – Nightclubbing

Picked up this gem in Toulouse, the rose pink city in the Southwest of France. I had gone there for about five days to help my Erasmus-year-headed daughter get settled in. In reality this took about one day, but while she was off ‘getting organised’ I was discovering that this rugby-mad town is packed full of second-hand record/CD shops. And kebab houses. Nirvana. Basically it’s a huge student town, and these are the signs of same. So I think I bought about 10 CDs over a few days where I browsed for hours on end. This funk/crossover gem was one of them and I think it might have cost about 2 euro. Pull up to the bumper, baby.

3. The Travelling Wilburys

I actually paid almost full price for this in Boston in 1989. It had been out a while by then, but I hadn’t chosen to buy it in Ireland. But the combination of Tower records and a weak dollar meant I could rationalise it to myself. So this, and a few other American AOR classics provided the soundtrack to our driving all round New England and even down to Cape Cod. Get your motor running, head out on the highway…I also bought many other CDs (the dollar y’see)…

4. Derek and the Dominoes – Layla

I think I actually inherited a vinyl copy of this in my wife’s record collection when we got married. But we went to South Africa in late 2007 and began to head out of Capetown East toward the Garden Route, the scale of the journeys began to dawn on us. Beautiful scenery, very little traffic, decent roads and awful radio stations. So I got this at a knockdown price in a bargain bin in Capetown, and off we went. It’s actually great driving music, especially when you only need to change gear once every half hour or so. It might even still be my favourite album of all time. I got the ‘Key to the Highway’ indeed. There’s a reason it’s one of the biggest selling CDs of all time from the pre-Spotify era…

5. The Band – The Band.

A family fly-drive holiday to LA, the Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree National Park in 2006 caused a bit of a controversy, given that all members of the travelling party were adult by then. And into music. And into hearing ‘their stuff’ on the entertainment system. So we compromised by listening to the radio quite a lot, and the stations were pretty good, to be fair. I had brought The Band with me, the CD that is. And so we heard quite a lot of that – I was pretty good at sneaking it on when everyone else was dozing, and I ‘had the wheel’ . I didn’t actually buy it in the US, but It’s part of the memory for me. And needless to say, The Joshua Tree by U2 was also on heavy rotation.

It’s ironic that if you asked me what kind of car I drove on any of these trips, I’d struggle to tell you. But I can definitely tell you what I was listening to…

Adventures in Sourdough (part one)

It’s like when the Ray Liotta character in ‘Good Fellas’ said – ‘I always wanted to be a gangster’. I think deep down I have always wanted to have a crack at making sourdough bread. The irony is that while I love bread, it loves me right back, and is a major hurdle to my keeping my weight under a semblance of control. But my fall-back plan is that IF I manage to crack this particular nut, I’ll manage my addiction by making and not (necessarily) eating the product, so my family and friends may become the beneficiaries.

So to kick-start my ‘journey’ – as many of the Sourdough websites tend to call it – I went to a four hour class given by a master Sourdough baker. I won’t name names just yet, to protect the innocent. I have to confess that the mysticism that tends to accompany this topic on the web is more than a bit off-putting, but the foodie in me got the upper hand on the sceptic, so for now at least, I’m bought-in. Back to my class.

First surprise. About 60% of the attendees were male. A few were chefs of some kind, and you could tell by the questions they asked that they knew their way around a kitchen. Some people were ‘failed Sourdough bakers’ – we all had to go around the workbench at the start and reveal (confess) our backgrounds. It felt a bit like AA – not, I hasten to add, that I have any direct experience there. An interesting and diverse group, though.

Introductions over, our master-baker told us in a soft, slow voice (think Zen) that making Sourdough was part-art, part-science, and variables like room temperature, fridge temperature, flour composition, flour mix, quality of the ‘leaven’, oven temperature, the age of the flour and the water all made a difference. By now I was beginning to experience mild symptoms of panic, but I kept them in check (albeit barely). I also scribbled copious notes, in the hope that these would make some sense later.

You’ll be glad to hear that I don’t propose to chronicle the entire four hours that followed. Netting it down though, we each got a ‘chunk’ of dough, we stretched it, twisted it, folded it, let it ‘rest’, shaped it, re-shaped it, and let it prove under a tea-towel. In the meantime the master-baker offered advice, told war stories, observed our efforts, and baked two loaves using different methods. These were more or less torn to shreds by the ravenous class, well before they had cooled down. And in fairness I think they could have tasted better cold, but they were truly excellent. Nutty, chewy crust, flavoursome. Just lovely.

So at the end of the day we each brought our own ‘loaf to be’ home, and I guess the next test will be to bake it and see how it turns out. Having said that, this (first) loaf will be a dough that was created for us. I think the true acid test will be when I have to create my own product end-to-end, and try to figure out a cycle that I can manage around a working day (or days, more precisely). I also need to go out and get the basic materials for MY first 100% effort. So I guess this journey will begin with a trip to a shop where I can find organic strong white flour, fine sea salt and the like. And then, I hope, practice will begin to make perfect.

And a footnote: Sourdough Number1 turned out great (see Pics above, last two) and is almost eaten. It’s chewy, airy, salty and pretty amazing, all in all. Tomorrow I plan a buying trip for raw materials. And then it’s practice, practice, practice. And reading all I can find online about Sourdough. My new tribe. To be continued…