We never buy bread, it’s the one thing I never managed to get over in the Anglo-Saxon world. In the old country bread is a core part of the diet, and the quality of it, even of the run of the mill bread found in the supermarkets, is very high. In contrast the bread found in the English speaking world is, let’s not sugar coat this, generally atrocious; even the ‘artisan’ bread you might be able to buy at a premium price if you live in a big city rarely matches my expectations of a good loaf.

And so we bake. In the early days of our marriage, when we lived in Canada, it was Linda who did the baking, then later when we moved to Scotland we started using a bread maker to save some time, and eventually in the summer of 2017 when, yet another, bread maker died, I decided to try making a proper bread myself, thinking it can’t be that hard.

It is not. Out here on the Internet you can find all sort of ideas trying to add some sort of a mystique to the making of ‘real’ bread … we humans seem adverse to admitting that something that produces great results can be very simple. Bread is just water and flour, and if the flour and water are of decent quality it’s quite hard not to produce a good loaf (which raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about the supermarket bread).

These days I regularly make two sourdough breads: a midweek loaf (a dense, low effort, tin-baked 90% rye), and a weekend loaf (a slow, cold, fermented 30% rye). We love them both, but the latter is, IMHO, the best bread this side of the Channel. 🙂

Sourdough Starters

There is lots of nonsense out there on this subject. To get yourself started, mix an equal weight of water with an equal weight of flour in a kilner jar with the rubber seal removed and leave it somewhere warm (this is called 100% hydrated starter; there is nothing magic about this, it’s simply that the water to flour ratio in the bread dough makes big difference to how easy the dough is to work with, and so keeping the starter at a known, always same, ratio, makes it possible to control this reliably, while the 1:1 ratio is about right for dealing with the starter itself). Depending on how warm it is, it will start fermenting in a day or two.

How you manage your starter depends on how often you use it. If you bake a loaf each day, you might just as well keep it at room temperature all the time. I only use it once a week, so I keep 80g of it in a small kilner jar without the rubber seal in the fridge, and feed it up to the required quantity before use. If your house is warm, it is enough to do this a few hours before it’s needed. Here it is quite cold, so I feed it up a bit over night the day before, and then to the full quantity in the morning. Either way, the starter should be well active (bubbling) before you use it, do whatever you need to get it to that state (sometimes when I forget to feed it in a timely fashion, I use a warm waterbath to speed things up).

Feed it up to the quantity that is required + what you need to set aside for the next time — do not do this common, but infuriatingly inane, thing of throwing away half of it every time you feed it, this is just a pointless waste of good flour.

The starter will keep in a fridge without feeding for a couple of weeks at least without any adverse effects, just let it revive feeding it up over a couple of days at room temperature before using it. (If you have a dehydrator, you can also dehydrate some as a ‘back up’, that will keep pretty much indefinitely.)

I maintain two different starters for my loafs. One is made out of strong white bread flour, and is used for the 30% rye loaf, the other is made of whole grain dark rye flour and is used for the tin baked 90% rye loaf. The reason for this is that rye flour dough is lot more acidic than white flour dough, and this has impact on the make up of the bacterial culture; if you use white starter for pure rye dough it will probably not rise as well, or take longer to rise.

Tin-Baked 90% Rye

A simple, low effort, loaf. The flavour when freshly baked is pretty special, but this loaf also keeps well.

  • 60g of strong white flour,
  • 540g of whole grain dark rye flour,
  • 10g salt (adjust to preference),
  • 3-4 table spoons of seeds (my favourites are brown flax and black sesame),
  • 520g water,
  • 180g of rye flour starter,
  • 2-3 table spoons of oil (rapeseed, olive, etc.).

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then add the water and mix thoroughly, work in the starter, and finally the oil. Dump it all into a tin, cover with aluminium foil, and let it raise to a bit less than double the size before baking it.

I use a round cake tin with removable bottom (7.5” diameter, 3.5” tall; for this size and quantities it’s ready to be baked when it rises to just below the top edge). The removable bottom makes it easy to get the loaf out, plus I also cover the bottom with grease proof paper, to prevent it sticking to the bread (the same paper can be reused many times), and grease the sides of it with oil.

I bake my bread in the Remoska (for both the economy and convenience), for an hour with the aluminium foil on, then ten minutes with the foil removed. I then remove the loaf from the tin, and put it back in up side down for another ten minutes to firm up the crust at the bottom (when using a normal oven, this is not needed; in that case I bake at 160C for 1h 10min with the foil on, and 10min without).

The small amount of white flour makes the loaf more cohesive; it is not necessary, but I think it makes for a better loaf. The addition of the oil makes the loaf last longer, it will keep well for at least a week; without the oil it will dry out a bit quicker (the one downside of adding the oil is you can’t use this bread for breadcrumbs). This bread also lends itself well to freezing; I slice it before putting it into to the freezer, and then defrost in a toaster as needed.

Cold-Fermented 30% Rye

This is my favourite loaf; it takes considerably more effort than the tin-baked one, but it is worth it (the actual hands on time is not that long, but the process as a whole is).

Quality of flour is everything when it comes to bread. Because this loaf has a high rye content, which makes for a heavy dough, it needs a really good quality strong white flour to offset that (strong flour is a flour with high protein, aka gluten, content; its what gives the dough elasticity, and varies quite a bit even between the different strong bread flours).

The biggest factor in controlling the flavour of a sourdough bread is the fermentation temperature. Warm temperature favours yeast-type bacteria in the starter, whereas cold temperature favours the lactobacillus bacteria; it is the latter that is responsible for the sour taste. I like my sourdoughs to be clearly that, so my personal preference is for slow cold fermentation.

The quantities given here are what I mostly use, but are by no means set in stone. Even small adjustments, e.g., reducing the rye content to 250g of the 800g, make a noticeable difference to the character of the loaf, without any real risk of things going wrong, with the caveat that a significant reduction of the rye/wheat ratio requires some reduction of the water volume, to avoid the dough being too runny, as rye absorbs considerably more water than wheat.

  • 300g whole grain dark rye flour,
  • 500g strong white wheat flour,
  • 16g salt (adjust to preference),
  • 570g of water,
  • 240g of white starter,
  • seeds or flakes to put on the top.

Mix the dry ingredients, add the water and work it in. Let it sit for about an hour in a covered bowl at room temperature to allow the water to fully penetrate inside the flour grains (this makes the dough easier to work with). Then work in the starter; while it is possible to do this entirely with a spatula, it is much easier using bare hands (when the dough starts sticking to them, just wet them under a tap).

Let the dough sit for half an hour, then work it with a spatula for a few minutes, repeatedly pressing it in the middle to flatten it, then folding the outside over. Repeat again after half an hour, and then once more. You will notice change in the feel of dough over this time, by the third round it should feel quite springy and will peal off the spatula.

Let the dough rest for a bit again before kneading it. The dough should remain quite firm for the kneading, and not rise much; in the winter when the temperatures are below 20C, I leave it for about 3h, but in the summer when it gets warm half an our can be all that is needed.

Dust the liner in a proving basket with some white flour, then spread the excess on a suitable working surface, and dump the dough on it. Use a baker’s knife to peel it off, and spread the flour underneath it again before laying it back down. It should now be possible to work it with your hands alone (but should it stick again, just use the knife).

Work the dough for a few minutes. Start by flattening it down, then folding the edges over like an old-fashioned envelope, do this a few times, lifting it and spreading the flour underneath in between, to keep it from sticking down, then move onto shaping the loaf toward its round shape by squeezing it from the side instead of folding over.

After about 10min swipe any excess flour off the work surface, spread the seeds generously onto it instead, and then tip the loaf onto them topside down. Push in the seeds along the sides to ensure good cover, then lift the loaf and place it the seeded side down into the proving basket. Sweep the excess seeds into a suitable container for the next time (using lot of seeds is key to getting a good coverage).

The seeds help in preventing the bread from sticking to the basket, but they can dramatically alter the character of the loaf as well. My favourite are brown flax seeds, but I find they create lot of mess when slicing a big loaf, so I use them only when doing a half sized one. For the full size one, I use rye flakes.

Cover the proving basket, and put it in the fridge to rise over at least 12h, but preferably longer (I usually prove mine for about 20h). Keep an eye on how it’s rising — if it rises too much, it is because it rested too long before the kneeding; just make a mental note of that and bake it sooner, it will still make a great loaf. (This loaf can, of course, also be proven at room temperature if you can’t afford the long proving time; it will be quite a different, but still great tasting, loaf.)

I again bake this loaf in the Remoska (the Grande is needed for the 800g of flour), 1h 5min to start with, I then lift it out, put a trivet underneath it, and give it another 10min to firm up the bottom crust (I have never baked this one in an oven, so can’t offer you the times for that, but the basic rule of baking bread is the inside of it needs to reach 95C, which can be tested with a kitchen thermometer).