Rock has decided to blog for the first time in possibly a couple of years! He always wants me to edit his English but… I’m not going to. Here he is!
Bread is one of the principal forms of food for man from the dawn of time. Archeologist found proof of stone-crushing barley and wheat use to make floor thought to be 7500 years old. In the British Museums’ Egyptian galleries, you can see loaves which were made and baked over 5000 years old.
My rye bread is actually quite easy to bake. The difficult part is to get the sourdough starter strong enough to make a delicious loaf. This part can take weeks or you can ask a friend to share some of them with you. Linzi was kind enough to share hers with us. The starter is actually natural yeast. The recipe is simple; 100 gr of floor, 100 ml of water and a tablespoon of yesterday mix all together. You repeat this until the mixture double his size in 6 hours. Every day you need to feed it. If you don’t bake, the major part of the mixture will be discarded. This ratio is sufficient to bake a bread and have enough left for a feeding.
When the sourdough starter doubles his size in 6 hours and the smell is very sour, you can put together the ingredients to bake your bread.
2 cups of all-purpose flour / 1 cup of rye flour / ¾ cup sourdough starter / 1 ¼ cups of warm water / 1 tablespoon of honey (optional) / 1 and ½ teaspoon of salt
I mix the dry ingredients, flour and salt, first in the mixer bowl. Then, I mix the water, the sourdough starter and the honey in a different bowl. The honey is optional but it will give you a nice brown color and a boost for the yeast. Add the wet ingredient into the dry ingredients and mix until combined; cover with a dishtowel and let sit for 15 minutes.
Using the dough hook, knead the dough for 5 minutes at medium speed. Most likely you will need to add flour. The goal here is to have a dough that is still clinging to the bottom of the bowl but clearing the upper part of the bowl. The dough will be wet and sticky so don’t use too much flour.
Transfer the dough into a medium size bowl coated with a little of oil; I use olive oil. Cover with a plastic sheet and let rise for 3 hours. I turn and fold the dough once or twice during the first rise. The texture of the dough will change rapidly from a stick ball to a firm, none sticky, very elastic dough. The smell will get stronger too.
After 3 hours, I turn and fold it again. I form a nice ball and transfer it on a parchment paper. I use an upside-down bowl to cover the dough for the second rise, about 2.5 hours.
20 minutes before the end of the second rise, I put a pizza stone in the oven and turn it to 450 F. This will permit the stone to warm up nicely.
When ready, I dust up the dough with some flour and make some cut in the middle, about 1 cm deep. Set the dough in the middle of the pizza stone and bake for 30 min.
Then remove the bread from the pizza stone and transfer it on a cooling rack.
Et voila!
I really like this bread. We tried different kind of flour. If you use 3 cup of all-purpose flour you will get a better rise and the final product is less dense. The next experiment will be with spelt flour.
eating in moose jaw 