When I tell anyone about Ballymaloe and what I've been doing for the first half of 2016, it doesn't take long before I'm asked what my favorite thing to cook is. It's a fair question, but hard to answer. I usually side step by giving a widely encompassing answer - "bread". I don't repeat myself in the kitchen very often, but bread of some form is always a staple. One week it might be pita or focaccia; lately, I've been losing sleep (literally - I pulled a batch out of the fridge to finish proofing at 4:30 this morning) over perfecting croissants, but there's always bread. What follows is the method and a little back story behind the staple version of my staple food - my weekly sourdough loaf. Following along at home is encouraged.
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| Spoilers |
I didn't work at
The Herbfarm long by any measure - just a weekend, but I learned a lot while I was there. The biggest take away is the bread recipe I've been playing with at home ever since.
The bread they serve there is a seedy rye loaf baked in the wood-fired oven behind the kitchen. I haven't figured out how to build a wood oven into my third floor condo yet, but I've been having lots of fun trying to work some of their ingredients into my at home techniques. I change my recipe a little each week, but it all starts with feeding my starter and soaking flax seeds. I've written about sourdough starter a bit in the past -it's a 1:1 combination of flour and water which houses wild yeast. I usually feed mine with equal parts rye and bread flour. Flax seeds are something I hadn't really used before Herbfarm. The bread guy there showed me that they soak whole flax seeds in water before folding it into their dough mixture. Ground flax gets used a lot in vegan baked products as an egg replacer - when soaked, the flax and water makes a sort of gel that acts as a binder. I'm no vegan, but the flax soaker in my sourdough performs a similar function - it adds moisture and tenderness to the crumb, almost as if it were a dough enriched with egg or fat. It also binds the dough together more tightly than just water, resulting in a slightly denser crumb - this is not a loaf of bread with golf ball sized holes in the cross section.
8:00AM Day 1
- Feed starter
- 25 g bread flour
- 25g rye flour
- 50g water
- Soak flax
- 35g toasted flax seeds
- 35g water
Once fed, the starter can hang out in a covered container on the counter top to do its yeast-thing. I usually give it about 8 hours, but you'll know it's ready for mixing when it looks bubbly and deflates a little when you tap the side of the container.
4:00PM Day 1
- Mix and autolyse
- 100g starter
- 70g flax soaker
- 215g water
- 250g bread flour
- 50g rye flour
- 30 minute rest
Autolyse is a fancy word for leaving your flour-water goop alone for a while. By mixing the starter, flour, and water together until just combined, then letting it rest, you allow time for the flour to absorb your water and for gluten formation to begin. It also lets the yeast start to do its thing before you finish your dough by adding salt. Salt is important for the flavor of your loaf, but it inhibits yeast activity. Giving your bread a chance to hydrate and rest before final mixing and kneading will help ensure a more even texture in your bread once baked, and make your life until then much easier.
4:30PM Day 1
- Final Mix
- 8g salt
- 35g toasted millet
- 30g rye flakes
- 30 minute rest
After a short autolyse, its time to mix in your salt - usually about 2.5% the weight of the flour in your dough (this is called a bakers percentage - most bread recipes have ingredient lists given in percentages relative to flour weight to make things easy to scale). The mix-ins are where you get to have a bit of fun. Lately my sister has got me on kind of a millet kick. The rye flakes I think add a bit more texture to the bread and give some surprise extra rye-y bites. I've also tried sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, and hemp seeds. I'd keep the total weight of your additions (including the flax above) at or below 30% of your flour weight, but within those bounds, go nuts. At this point I mix everything into my dough by hand. Stand mixers are not known to be gentle machines, and they'll break up all your seeds. The dough will probably be sticky icky at this point, but that's a good thing. Just run your hand under the tap for a second and do your mixing quickly while it's wet - dough won't stick too badly to a wet hand. Usually I mix everything by closing my hand over the dough and squishing it in between my fist a few times. It feels pretty cool and gets the job done. Once everything looks evenly mixed, take a break for a while and let your dough relax, it'll become more malleable with a little time.
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| Everyone in the pool |
5:00-7:30PM Day 1
- Stretch & fold
- 6 sets
- 30 minute rest after each
I don't do any traditional kneading for this bread. I don't machine knead because I want to keep all the seeds and whole grains in tact, and the dough is too wet to hand knead with any real success. Instead, a combination of time and stretching does all the gluten development. Stretching and folding is exactly what it sounds like. At 30 minute intervals, I'll reach into my dough-bowl, grab the bottom of the dough, stretch it out as far as I can, and fold it over itself. Repeat this 6-8 times a set, turning the bowl 1/4 turn after each fold. You can feel the dough tighten up as you continue to fold it, eventually it should feel like it will hold its shape indefinitely. The added benefit of this long stretch and fold process is that it gives more time for enzymes in the flour to break down the starches, developing a deeper, more complex flavor than you'd find in a quicker breads. None of these steps take a lot of time individually, but this is a loaf of bread that does need some babysitting.
7:30-9:00PM Day 1
The easiest part! After 6 sets of folds, cover your dough with some plastic wrap and let it hang out. It probably won't double in size after an hour and a half, but it should swell noticeably, and spring back when poked. 90 minutes is basically the minimum time I bench rest, I've gone 3+ hours on cold days when the yeast might be especially sluggish.
9:00PM Day 1
The last step for day one is shaping. There are a lot of ways to shape bread, but I like to do a series of small, gentle folds on an un-floured work surface. Un-floured is important because the dough will stick a little, and you can use that friction to spin your dough into a tight boule after the folds.
Once shaped, the boule goes into a banneton dusted with rice flour (which, for some reason, dough never sticks to, it's seriously magic). This gets covered and put into the fridge for 12 hours. I find that my bread shows signs of over-proofing after 24 hours in the fridge, so somewhere between 12 and 16 is my sweet spot.
8:00AM Day 2
I bake my bread in a cast iron dutch oven. The cast iron holds heat well when the dough is transferred into it, and the tight fitting lid traps steam during the first part of baking, helping develop the bread's crust. I also bake my bread really hot - the cast iron goes into the oven and I preheat to 500F for an hour. It'll take a minute or two to drop your bread into the oven and the long preheat helps minimize heat loss.
9:00AM Day 2
When you put bread dough into a hot oven, you get a thing called "oven spring". All the water in the dough starts to expand as it turns to steam, and the yeast goes all hyper-active before it burns out, rapidly developing a lot of gas which translates into all those beautiful little holes in the crumb of your bread. But the dough can't contain all that gas, it has to go somewhere. Scoring gives you a way of directing that gas out of the loaf in a decorative pattern. You don't have to score a loaf, but if you skip it the crust on your bread will look cracked and fractured as steam breaks through the weakest points on the surface.
Once the bread is in the oven, I turn down the heat to 450F and bake, with the lid on the dutch oven, for 25 minutes. Once that time is up, the lid comes off and you can bask in the glory of the oven spring.
With the lid off, the heat goes down again to 425F, and I bake for 30-35 more minutes, until the loaf feels light and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
After nearly an hour in 400+ degree heat, your loaf probably deserves a rest. There's still a lot of hot air trapped in that gluten web, and if you cut into it too soon, your bread may collapse. I usually try to rest a loaf for at least an hour before taking a look (and, more importantly, a taste):
