I started baking my own bread back in 2004. I’d just come back to Australia after 4 years in the Middle East. I’d learnt to enjoy many meals eaten with flat bread. It is almost impossible to buy fresh flat bread in Australia, it is all long life bread. This bread has to be heated before being eaten as it tastes so stale, not to mention the added chemicals to give it the long life.
So I taught myself how to make flat bread. I always used commercial yeast then. It was a few more years before I started experimenting with sour dough, it took a while (a long while) to perfect the technique. Now it is second nature and I am able to adapt any bread recipe to my sour dough. So if you are starting out, don’t be disillusioned if it doesn’t work out first time around. Persevere and it will become second nature to you as well.
I am not going to go into how to make the starter culture. Your bread will be much more successful if you are able to obtain the culture from someone. If starting from scratch, be prepared that it will be a number of bakes before your bread rises really well.
You don’t need much starter, just a teaspoon. I store mine in the fridge in between bakes and only bake bread about once every 2 weeks these days. Because of the length of time between bakes, I wake up my starter a day before baking.
I take the starter out of the fridge in the evening, mix it with a bit of warm water so it is completely dissolved then add a few tablespoons of flour until it is a thick paste. I do the same thing the next day. This gives me a nice activated starter with which to work with.
So 2 days later, first thing in the morning, I take a biggish spoonful of this mixture and mix it with 150mls of warm water until it is completely dissolved. Then add approximately 1 cup of flour. Stir to combine. It should be a thick paste. It needs to culture for 6-8 hours. It will have changed consistency by this stage and be full of bubbles. Use a bowl that is big enough to hold the full loaf of dough.
Take a spoonful of this mixture and put it in a jar for next bake. This is vitally important. I have lost count of how many times I have given people starter and they tell me they made a beautiful loaf of bread and forgot to leave starter for the next bake. Could they have some more from me? Sigh
Add 450mls of warm water to the bowl and stir until the levain is completely blended into the water. I like to add my salt to the water so it is dissolved and dispersed homogeneously into the mix. That’s 2-3 teaspoons of quality salt, believe me the bread tastes really odd when you forget to add the salt!
Stir in 4 cups of flour. I like to use a mix of whole and white wheat flour. The mix will be quite sticky.
Now to stretch the dough. As it is sticky, kneading it is too difficult. Instead the dough is “folded”. Using you wooden spoon, turn the edges of the dough on itself. Then do this every 15 minutes for one hour. Then every 30 minutes for one hour. After one more hour, pick the dough up, it will not be as sticky now, and fold the whole lot in half or quarters, allowing it to hang and stretch a bit. Now place the dough into your well oiled baking dish.
Leave it to rise on the bench for an hour, covered with a damp cloth. Then place it in the fridge for 16 hours. If you are working, this time may be lengthened. Just bring it out of the fridge when you get home from work. Let the dough and container come to room temperature for a couple of hours before baking.
Bake in a preheated oven at 180oC – 200oC for about an hour.
Because the dough has been in the baking dish in the fridge for so long, sometimes the bread doesn’t just pop out of the dish. I leave it for a some time after running a blunt knife around the edges before the bread falls out of the container. If it is late in the evening before I’ve finished baking the bread, I wrap it in a tea towel while it cools over night on a cooling rack.
It is much easier to slice the bread once it has cooled completely. I slice mine and place in the freezer sliced. It is easy to knock off frozen slices and I get to enjoy the bread over a longer period of time. If you are a big family and eat a lot of bread, you will probably skip this step
