Heavenly Sourdough

Most aspects of cooking involve a degree of alchemy. You take base ingredients, you apply your cooking skills, and pretty soon a delicious meal is on the table.

It seems particularly true for baking, where some butter, sugar, eggs and flour, maybe a bit of baking powder, can morph into a cake in not much more than an hour. But that’s nothing compared to the magic of sourdough bread.

Sourdough has been around for thousands of years. My sister gave me a starter about 40 years ago from a batch that was reputed to be over 100 years old by then, along with Gary Creer’s recipe for bread and pancakes. I kept it going for several decades (sourdough chocolate cake used to be my pièce de résistance). The bread I made was a wholewheat version which required about 20 minutes of robust kneading – it was satisfying when the dough finally had the desired satiny consistency, and the freshly baked bread was delicious – but it didn’t rise all that well and didn’t seem to age well either. To be honest, I don’t think I did that sourdough starter justice.

Well, when lockdown came along and the word ‘sourdough’ kept popping up, I found a method for making a starter from scratch on the King Arthur Flour website. It’s not difficult, and within 4 days I had a nicely bubbling starter, with a fruity-yeasty, almost beer-like bouquet. A sourdough starter is nothing more than flour and water which has fermented with the aid of naturally occurring wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria from the flour. It seems to me that such wild yeast is likely to vary from one place to the next – which was how I explained why San Francisco Sourdough bread was so much tastier than the variety I produced in Los Angeles.

I used to think that there could hardly be a bread more delicious than San Francisco Sourdough - big round loaves with a crispy crust and a soft interior with an open texture and a delicious, slightly sour taste. I would not have left San Francisco Airport without picking up a loaf. It had to be the cool fog and sea breezes of the San Francisco bay that produced such a unique sourdough. My new sourdough starter is much more active than Gary Creer’s ancient one. I do use it once or twice a week, so it gets frequent feedings, and it seems to take only 2-3 hours for the fed starter to be ready again, bubbling and smelling great, as opposed to taking overnight as my old one used to do. We must be blessed with some fairly frisky wild yeast in our neck of the woods.

My sister and I were discussing sourdough again (she had also made a new starter), and she mentioned a no-knead version of bread, baked in a Dutch oven - a heavy aluminium pot with a lid, the kind you use on a campfire to make stew.

So now comes the magic. This bread has just three components - flour and water and a little salt. You stir together flour, a little salt, warm water and some sourdough starter until it clumps into a rough lumpy dough.

You put it in a warm place (I use the oven with just the light on) and an hour later it has turned into a smooth, damp glop.

All you have to do is pull and fold it a few times, once an hour, three times. Each time the dough rises higher and becomes smoother and more pliable; it is an organic entity, gaining in character with each simple manipulation. After the final pulling and folding it goes in the refrigerator until the next day, by which time it will have risen impressively yet again. A final shaping into a round loaf, and that’s it. By now the dough is so completely transformed – it feels almost alive, with a soft, velvety surface not dissimilar to soft skin. You put this little guy in your Dutch oven and let it rise again for 2-3 hours. You cover the pot, put it in a hot oven…. and an hour later you have the most amazing loaf of bread. Does it sound complicated? No, it’s very simple and takes almost no effort – considerably less elbow grease than my old version; all you need is time.

And here’s the truly magical aspect. This bread is even better than the San Francisco version. Of course it is rather more fresh than the loaf you buy at an airport. But the flavour – the crispy crust, and the soft spongy chewy slightly sour inside – well, it can’t be far off whatever bread they serve in heaven.

It gets even better. It turns out that sourdough bread is healthier than the versions made with commercial baker’s yeast. Wild yeast is more resistant to acidic conditions than baker’s yeast, which allows it to work together with lactic acidproducing bacteria to help the dough to rise, and it has lower phytate levels, making it more digestible and nutritious. The prebiotics also help to keep your gut bacteria happy, and it’s likely that your blood sugar levels won’t spike as much – you won’t be hungry again as quickly.

I’ve been making a loaf a week for some time now - I keep it in the freezer and take slices out as needed.. In addition to the Dutch oven, I invested in an electric carving knife, which sure makes slicing the bread easier. Thanks to our amazing wild yeast, we may never go back to Morrison’s Best!

ANNE WATTS