According to macrobiotics, sourdough bread is healthier than yeast bread and you can keep it much longer, even out of the fridge. Making sourdough and turning it into bread afterwards is an exciting and even a bit magical experience. Every reason to try it out.
Origin of sourdough
Imagine the face of the person who long ago badly cleaned his bread trough and made dough again in it. Suddenly he had to leave and did not return until several hours later. He looked at the dough in the trough and there was more in it than before. It felt a bit spongy and had acquired a slightly sour taste. From unleavened bread to bread that rises: that’s about how it went.
How do you make the sourdough yourself?
Baking with sourdough can be done according to a simple recipe. The sourdough is obtained by stirring water and flour and then leaving it in the open air. You don’t use just any flour. According to some sources, rye flour is best, according to other wheat flour. So some experimentation is in order here. If you don’t feel like it, you can also buy a starter package in the health food store. After mixing the ingredients, the fermentation process begins. The lactic acid bacteria grow in the paste and thus initiate a fermentation process.
- Day 1: Take a handful of flour, mix it with water to form a paste and cover with a damp cloth. Then let it rest.
- Day 2: Leave to rest and moisten the cloth again.
- Day 3: Add some flour and water and stir everything together well. During the day you can stir again. From now on it is natural dough and can be used eg in dessert preparations instead of baking powder or yeast. Natural dough tastes less sour.
- Day 4: Same as day 3.
- Day 5: Also as day 3.
Now you have a jar of sourdough and you can prepare your sourdough bread.
The classic sourdough bread preparation
- ½ kg of flour
- 1 teaspoon of sea salt
- 100gr sourdough
- good quality water or seitan rinse water
- mix the flour with the salt
- add the sourdough and mix everything
- gradually add water to the mixture until you get a well pliable dough
- knead for about 10 minutes
- shape the bread
Baking tin or tray in oils or dust with flour. Place the bread on the baking tray and cover it with a cloth and let it rise for at least 6 hours in a warm place. Often it is made in the evening and then left to stand all night and in the morning the bread goes into the oven. Keep the cloth moist as much as possible. Test the dough in the normal way by piercing it with your finger. When it is no longer resilient, it is ready for the oven.
Put it in the preheated oven on position 6 or 200c ° ?? 250c ° with a jar of water in the oven. The bread is ready after about 1 hour. Flood it with some water when it comes out of the oven. Keep the loaves so that air can reach.
Baking sourdough bread, the wet way
Making sourdough bread is nice and easy if you make the dough very wet and leave it long enough. You achieve good results in the following way. Take the sourdough out of the fridge the day before and add the flour and water again so that it is nice and creamy. Put the sourdough overnight in a warm place, usually the heating. The next morning the sourdough is light and active, if not, you have to make new sourdough.
ingredients
- 500gr flour
- 1 teaspoon of salt
- ca 50gr sourdough
- ca 500cl of water, you usually don’t need all of them
materials
- sturdy wooden spoon
- kneading bowl
- bowl with airtight lid
- bread pan for approx. 1 kg dough
- Grid where you can place the bread to cool
When making 10 loaves of bread, an oven full you need 5 kg of flour. Add 1 teaspoon of salt per 500gr of flour to the flour. Stir it well. You put the sourdough together with 4 liters of water through the flour. Keep some water on hand to make it like a paste. You stir the dough with a sturdy wooden spoon. It sticks to everything and you can’t really knead it, but it is easy to mix it with your hands. This dough is not really liquid but more sticky than dough usually is. Stir all this until you have a homogeneous mass and then clean your hands by sprinkling dry flour over it to rub off the rest of the dough. Now take away a tennis ball dough and keep it in the fridge for next time. Put it in a bowl with some water
Then weigh a kilo of dough and put it in the bread tin. This way you fill 10 bread molds or 4 farmer’s bread molds. Pour another splash of water on the dough. Leave everything for a maximum of 24 hours. Then it is also clear why the dough has to be so wet, otherwise it dries out very much and the rising slows down or stops, this also happens if it is too wet. Also during this period the molds are placed in a warm place with a towel over it. Checking is really necessary here. The common way to check sourdough bread is to push your finger into the dough. If there is a small hole in the dough, the dough is ready for the oven. If you notice that the dough is still very elastic, it still has to rise. With this wet method of dough preparation, you cannot use this finger method and you can better monitor the rising. When it has risen by half, it is time to put it in the oven anyway.
The next day the loaves have risen about 1/3 to ½ and can go into the oven. The first 15 minutes you keep the oven around 150 ° C. Afterwards, the oven goes to the highest setting from 180 ° C to 220 ° C. About an hour later the loaves are ready to be removed from the molds. Then you can leave them in the oven for another 15 minutes without the baking tins. The sourdough breads you make like this are at their best when they have been allowed to dry out for about three hours. They often have large holes in the soft part and are very airy. You can easily freeze the bread.
Enjoy your home baked bread.