Sourdough bread

Bread is one of the simplest and most satisfying things you can cook. Made with only four ingredients – flour, water, yeast or sourdough starter, and a pinch of salt – it’s incredible the transformation that takes place through the action of the yeast. And homemade bread is far superior to anything you can buy in the shops. Thanks to my sourdough starter, I have scarcely bought a loaf of bread at any time in the past year.

I use my breadmaker to make my homemade sourdough bread, and there are two different techniques that I use – the first of which makes a more rustic loaf, while the second is finer and closer to the kind of texture you would expect from a shop bought loaf. I discovered the second method completely by accident, but it makes a nice loaf of bread so I have stuck with it.

The yeast in sourdough is less active than commercial yeast, so making bread with it is a slower process. To get around this, I normally start the process either before I go to bed or before I leave for work, and just let the sourdough starter do its thing. The timings provided are approximate – sometimes it will take longer, sometimes quicker, depending on the temperature. The bread is risen when it’s doubled in size.

Ingredients

3 ¼ cups of strong white bread flour

1 cup water

½ cup sourdough starter

Pinch of salt

Method 1 – rustic texture

Place all the ingredients in the breadmaker and put on the dough setting. Allow to rise for six hours. Then turn the dough out onto a well-flour surface and knead to knock out the air. Place the dough into a grease loaf tin and cover with a lightly oiled sheet of cling film. Allow to rise for a further three hours and then bake in a very hot over – 240C – for about 25 minutes. The bread is ready if the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when you tap it. If the base of the loaf looks a bit pale, stick it back in the over for 5 minutes to brown.

Method 2 – finer texture

Place all of the ingredients in the breadmaker, save for one cup of flour, and put on the dough setting. This will create a sticky batter. Leave to ferment for six hours. Then add the remaining cup of flour and turn on the breadmaker’s dough setting for a second time. The dough will be a lot stickier than for the first method, but this is normal. Grease a loaf tin and then grease your hands to transfer the sticky dough from the breadmaker to the tin. Cover the dough with a lightly oiled sheet of cling film and then continue as for the first method.

NB: If you're wondering why I use the breadmaker to create the dough but not to bake the bread, it's because I prefer the taste of bread baked in a very hot oven. It's perfectly possible to bake sourdough bread in a breadmaker - you just allow the bread to rise in the tin, and then when it's ready you turn it onto the bake-only setting - but it doesn't come out quite as perfectly as if you bake it in the oven. Using the breadmaker to make the dough still saves a lot of time and effort, and baking it in the breadmaker still makes a tasty loaf.

Happy first birthday to my sourdough starter

Last year, when Wikus bought me my breadmaker, I decided to experiment with creating sourdough starter instead of using commercial yeast. Yeast occurs naturally in grains and fruit, but the concentrations are far too low for breadmaking. In the days before commercial yeast, bakers would therefore maintain yeast cultures created just from flour and water. Because the cultures are made from naturally occurring yeast strains, sourdough starters are less efficient and require longer rising times. However, they also lend the finished bread a better, more complex yeasty flavour with a subtle lactic tang. For this reason, sourdough bread is now a fashionable (and expensive) product. But it's also easy to make at home.


To create your own sourdough starter, you'll need a kilner jar. Mix half a cup of flour with half a cup of water in the jar and leave at room temperature, uncovered, for 24 hours. Add another quarter cup each of flour and water, stir, and cover with the lid. Repeat daily for two to three weeks. You'll need to tip half the mixture away at various stages otherwise you'll have way too much. Over time, the yeast culture will begin to develop and strengthen, and by the end, your concoction will be strong enough to make bread. After that, you can keep the starter in the fridge and just feed it every time you use some to make bread.

I used organic rye flour to kick mine off, switching to wheat after a couple of months. At the beginning, you're best using mineral water rather than tap water, because the chlorine risks killing the yeast. Once your starter is established, you can switch to tap.

I'll devote a subsequent post to using the starter to make bread.

Pizza two ways

For my birthday last year, my husband bought me a breadmaker. Up until this point, I had always been a breadmaker sceptic. Bread has an unearned reputation for being difficult to make, and I couldn't see why it was necessary to buy an inconveniently large and ugly machine to do a job that can readily be done with your hands on a clean work surface.

To my surprise, however, I am a convert. The inconvenience of breadmaking is all in the waiting. It's an enterprise which takes time, and unless you're planning to spend ages hanging around the house, it isn't always practical. Breadmakers still require advance planning, but they unshackle you from the kitchen.

One of the great benefits of owning a breadmaker is that it makes it a whole lot easier to make delicious homemade pizza instead of ordering takeaway or buying a piece of horrible refrigerated cardboard from Tesco. It's so easy that, providing you remember to put all the ingredients in the machine before you go to work, it is something that you can knock together without much effort after a long and tiring day in the office.

Today, I decided to make two pizzas - the first was a blue cheese and red pepper pizza, based on my normal recipe, and the second was a more experimental tomato-free pizza bianca with potatoes (carb overload!), garlic and rosemary.

The recipe below is for two pizzas, but you can easily vary the quantities depending on how much you want to make.

Ingredients

For the dough - both pizzas

3 cups of strong white bread flour
1 ⅛ cups of water
½ teaspoon of salt
1 sachet of yeast
1 tablespoon of olive oil

For the tomato sauce - first pizza

400g chopped tinned tomatoes

1 tablespoon of tomato puree

1 clove of garlic, crushed

Juice of 1 lemon

1 teaspoon of dried oregano

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Additional toppings - first pizza

120g grated mozzarella (use the cheap stuff for pizza, and don't use mozzarella in brine, otherwise you'll end up with a very watery pizza!)

65g blue cheese - gorgonzola is good

½ red pepper chopped into strips

Toppings for the pizza bianca - second pizza

250g new potatoes, boiled and sliced

1 small red onion

Sour cream or creme fraiche

4 cloves of garlic

4 sprigs of rosemary

Salt and pepper

Method

For the dough

If you've got a breadmaker, just bung all the ingredients in the breadmaker an hour and a half in advance, and put it on the dough setting. If you are doing it before you leave for work, use the timer delay to start the programme an hour and a half before you get home.

If you don't have a breadmaker, mix the flour, yeast and salt in a large bowl and then add the water. Using your hands, combine the ingredients and knead until they form a ball. Once all the ingredients have come together, tip the dough onto a clean work surface and then knead with the olive oil for 5-10 minutes. Place the dough back into the bowl, cover with clingfilm or a damp tea towel, and leave for an hour and a half.

Once the dough is ready, divide it into two pieces. Then take two lightly oiled baking trays and place the dough halves in the centre. Using the flats of your hands, gently stretch the dough to cover the tray. You should aim for it to be around half a centimetre thick. Then set aside for 20 minutes while you prepare the other ingredients. To stop the dough drying out, you can cover it with a piece of lightly oiled clingfilm placed directly onto the dough.

For the sauce

Put some olive oil in a pan over a medium heat and gently fry the garlic. After about a minute, add the tomatoes, lemon juice, tomato puree and oregano. Season with salt and pepper and then simmer for 10 minutes. You don't want this sauce to be too chunky, so if necessary, use a potato masher to make it smoother.

One of the secrets to a good pizza is to be sparing with the tomato sauce. The amount here is enough for 2-3 pizzas, so freeze any that you have left over. It will also keep in the fridge for a few days.

Assembling the first pizza

Using a spatula, smear a quantity of the tomato sauce evenly across the base. Then sprinkle the grated mozzarella evenly across the sauce. Then break the blue cheese into small chunks and scatter them across the pizza. Then scatter the slices of red pepper over the pizza.

Assembling the second pizza

Using a spatula, smear a thin layer of sour cream across the base of the pizza. Season well with salt and pepper, and then finely chop the rosemary and garlic and scatter them over the sour cream. Arrange the sliced boiled potatoes evenly over the sour cream layer and season again with salt and pepper. Then finely slice the red onion and scatter that over the potatoes. To finish, dot the pizza with small dollops of sour cream.

To bake

To make pizza, you need to get your oven really, really hot. This will ensure a nice and crispy base which is soft and chewy inside. I set mine to 240C. Once the oven is at the right temperature, put the pizzas in for 15-20 minutes. The pizza on the lower shelf may take a bit longer. Once the cheese or sour cream is turning golden, they are done. Take them out and leave to stand for a couple of minutes before slicing and serving.

Variations

I reckon the quantities here will serve 3-4 people. If you want to make less, reduce the quantities for the dough to 2 cups of flour and 3/4 cups water.

The great thing about pizza is that the number of potential toppings is huge. For a regular pizza, I always use tomato sauce and mozzarella as a base and then vary the other ingredients. So instead of blue cheese and red peppers, I might use Monterey jack and jalapeños. Or spinach and ricotta. Or caramelised onions and goats cheese. Use your imagination!