Full Transcript
[00:00] So what we're going to do now is we're going to show you how to make some sourdough bread. It's sourdough got quite fashionable, it's quite trendy, it's on a lot of restaurant
[00:13] menus. Sourdough is trendy since about 5,000 BC, it's the oldest form in 11 bread. So why do we all think that we have a big tradition with sourdough bread when your granny might have made it? This is why her granny is granny used to make it, this is why we're all trying to get back
[00:27] to it. The revolution, the big future of food, the future of bread is about going back, but going back to the past. And this is what we're trying to get back to, beautiful, beautiful sourdough's, naturally fermented, we've got our seeded sourdough, we've got a rye, we've got a malt house, as
[00:41] I say, you get a hundred different types. What we need in order for us to make some sourdough bread is to make our sourdough starter or our sourdough culture. The process is very, very simple, it's simply just a mix of flour and water.
[00:54] So we've got 50 grams of flour until we're adding 50 ml of water, we stir it together and that is simply it. So now what we're going to do is you leave that cup, sit out, in your kitchen, gently covered
[01:08] and be in temperature overnight for about 12 hours. So the moment we're surrounded by wild geese, it's a good strain of bacteria, it exists everywhere, you breathe it in every day, and then basically over process of using simply just flour and
[01:20] just water, it eventually picks up that bacteria in the air. And that bacteria starts to ferment, it starts to live off the protein within the flour, so it starts to rise and collapse. Realistically, it takes about seven or ten days to make it, but for a lot of people I know,
[01:33] I say I'm not making it low, we're better to take seven or ten days to make it, but the idea is once you get up and go in once, that's virtually about it. As long as you don't use it all, you'll never run out. So realistically, you only have to do this one time in your life.
[01:45] So we mix it together, flour and water, and then 12 hours later, it looks a little bit like this. Next stage, we will be due to mix this another 50 grams of flour and another 50 ml of water.
[01:58] Stir it together, and that's it. Again, we let it sit overnight. Day three, we repeat the process, and then on day four, we can already see it's starting to become lovely and bubbly, you can see all these little bubbles coming lovely and active,
[02:13] and this is just sign a life standard for them, this is exactly what we're looking for, starting to ferment. It's all a good thing in life. Fine, beer, cheese, bread, all based on the same principle.
[02:25] So you will find a starter take on it, and a kind of sweet kind of vinegary smell, but don't worry, that's exactly what we're looking for. And if you find a little bit of liquid starting to come away from it, don't worry about that lighter. It's part of straight back in. So we're going to give this another day, and we'll feed it again one more time, and then
[02:41] by the time it's ready, I'm most likely on about day seven, but don't worry if you find that maybe on quite day six or day seven, it's not exactly there yet. Don't be afraid to give it an extra day, because it will differ depending on the environment
[02:56] which is kept in. So if it needs an extra day, just give it an extra day. But now we've got our lovely, active sourdough, it's got that lovely vinegary smell. You can see it's been rising up to glass, this would have started about here earlier on,
[03:10] and I was climbed up here, so it will continue to rise, and then it will drop back down. So at this stage, it's basically ready to go. Well, if I'm completely honest, this is day two, this is day four, and this is year nine.
[03:25] So I've had this for nine years, so as long as I don't use it all, I'll never run out. So all I'll simply do, for example, after we make our bread today, I'll have 200 grams left over, I will simply stir in 200 flour, 200 water, and tomorrow it's ready to go again.
[03:42] Because I keep mine at room temperature, I have to feed mine every day, but for the home baker, we might only bake maybe once a week, or a week ends, a bit more time, can become quite an expensive pet to keep, to keep feeding this thing every day. So what you can simply do is just keep yours in the fridge, because it's based on bacteria
[03:56] cold, won't kill it, it'll just slow it down. So for example, you're going to bake in a Saturday morning, take it out with the fridge on a Friday, just leave it sitting in your kitchen, just to take the chill off of it, not even, say whatever way you have, for example, 200 grams, stir in 200 flour, 200 water, leave
[04:13] it sitting in your kitchen, next morning it's going to be lovely and bubbly, lovely and active, ready to make your bread. Take what you need to make your bread, whatever's left over, back in your fridge, that's it. So if a little once a week cycle, and you find it kind of gets better with age, the flavor starts to develop.
[04:26] So even if you're not baking, you still have to feed it, because technically it is alive. So if you're building up too much, just bend some away, just keep back enough to keep it going. And the easiest way to work off is whatever weight you have here, same way to flour, same way
[04:42] to water. It could not be simpler. Now, in order to make our Saturday bread, we got our Saturday starter, as it takes about a week. Get it going today, you'll be ready by next weekend, ready to go perfect and make your
[04:56] bread. If not, you could always get down to your local baker, most real bread bakeries will happily give you some starter. If you check out realbredarlin.org, it's got all the real bread bakers across Ireland,
[05:08] and most of them, like myself, are quite happy to give you a little bit of starter. We can't get your own going. So we did one. We're going to make enough for two loaves, great thing about this is that we can bake two loaves. We can pop one in the freezer, and we've got one to dry fresh in the day, and the sour
[05:21] dough comes back great from the freezer. So we've got 800 grams of strong flour. So in two days, we're going to add 460 mills or 460 grams of water.
[05:34] We're taking about 10 grams of salt, salt and a sense of ingredient. Salt acts as a natural flavor enhancer. So we've got our flour, we've got our water, we've got our salt, and finally we just need
[05:46] a little bit of our sourdough starter. So we're using 320 grams. Just make sure you don't use it all. Like you would any other recipe, just add your yeast straight in, in this case, our sourdough
[05:59] starter. So once your ingredients are all in, just start bringing everything together. So I want to do a roughy comes together, just dump it straight out on the table.
[06:13] The gluten forms once we add a liquid, but the moment the gluten is quite weak, so we want to build up the strength of our dough by what we call kneading. The idea of kneading is you simply stretch and work the dough.
[06:25] So you will find that your dough is a little bit wet, a little bit sticky, generally everyone's reaction at home is immediately reached for some flour and keep adding it in there. But if you keep adding flour, the dough will quite happily soak it up, and then the more it
[06:39] soaks it up, the heavier dough becomes the tighter your bread will be. So when it comes to kneading, you will get a lot of recipes suggesting the best technique, how best to knead. To be honest, the one piece of advice I give most people is think about somebody you don't
[06:53] like and just go for it. So I just tend to use the heel of my hand, a little short stretch, and just use my fingers. Just kind of pin the dough between here and here, I just hook it back, and if you can pick yourself up a little dough scraper, absolutely great.
[07:06] It's almost like a little extension of your hand. We'll all back to get it again and keep working away. So most recipes would suggest how long to knead for, most must say eight to ten minutes,
[07:19] most of our line. But the thing is it's very difficult for a recipe to be exact, because everybody's a little bit different. Some days are just tired, the dough will always tell you when it's ready, the thing called
[07:32] a window pane effect. You see it's getting elastic, it's getting there, but as I stretch and work it out, it's just ripping, it's tearing, and that's just a dough tellery, it's not ready, so it just needs a little bit more work. So just keep on going. But if you do have a mixer at home, feel free to use it, the dough hook is going to do exactly
[07:50] the same thing that your hands are doing. When a failure dough is trying to change, you can even see already a beautiful and silky, how lovely and smooth it has always become. Like you saw earlier, where we tested it initially, it just kept ripping, kept tearing, so
[08:05] I take a little bit of oil in your hands, it would stop the dough from sticking to you, nice and gently stretch the dough, work it out, you can see the kind of the shadows, the membrane behind it, that's exactly what we're looking for.
[08:17] So earlier, that just ripped and terrible, now it's holding, it's elastic, it's got the strength we need, that's exactly what we're looking for. So bring your dough back together, back into one piece, into your bowl, and now we're going
[08:31] to let it prove. We'd say we don't, however, because it's a more natural pose, everything tends to happen much, much slower. So where most yeast recipes prove for about an hour, this one, we're going to be looking about three hours, so you need to give it plenty of time.
[08:44] So we're going to let this prove for three hours, so when you come back to it, you're going to be looking at something like this. What we need, we're going to do now, is we're simply knocking out our dough back, because as much as we say, the longer you prove it, the better, you can't over prove your red.
[08:59] Simply take out your bowl and try and make it into a round ball, and don't, again, don't overthink it, make it into a ball, you will simply knock it back, knock all the air from it. So you're kind of back to where you would have been about three hours ago.
[09:13] So now, what we need to do at this stage is we need to shape our dough. So with the quantity of dough that we've made, it gives us perfect portion to make two lovely sized doughs. So when we're shaping our bread, we use it proving baskets, because it's going to be proving
[09:27] for another three hours, it would just slowly stare it to prove out and go very, very flat. So by using the basket, it gives the dough support, it encourages it to take on that shape, so instead of proving out, it proves up.
[09:41] But if you don't have a basket, you could use absolutely anything. In a tray, a box of bowl, it's simply just something that's going to support and help your dough out. And probably I'm sure all of us have a pyrex dish at home, if you don't have what your mom
[09:57] has, your grand has, always kick around everywhere, we just take a little bit of flour and dust it all over. And just by coating it with a little coat of the flour, I'll stop the dough from sticking. So the best thing to do is simply take a clean tea towel, you could use your mixing bowl,
[10:10] you could use whatever you like. Pop your tea towel in, and again, it's a good, generous coating of flour, just to make sure that the dough won't stick. So all that to do now is to shape our dough.
[10:22] So no matter what we're shaping, we always call it a start from a round base. Again, try not to use too much flour, it's a very gentle coating if you find your doughs a little bit soft or a little bit sticky. Simply flip your dough over, take all the little edges and push them down to the center.
[10:38] You go to the next one and then it overlapped the last round, round, you go in, see the naturally starting to curve round. So flip your dough over, put your hands out and simply drag them forward.
[10:52] You'll find that the dough lifts up, turn about 45 degrees and go again. And we will keep repeating, each time surface of the dough is getting a little bit tighter. Roll around, and then we have a perfect little bit of dough ready to go.
[11:08] Pop it into our basket upside down. And it's an interlinked pyrex dish with our tea towel, just so it doesn't stick, it
[11:23] doesn't have flour. With the tea towel, we simply tuck it straight in. So we've just took the dough in and we're going to let it prove again. It needs to prove about another of three to three and a half hours, but the great thing
[11:37] about this dough is, at this stage, you could go and put it straight in the fridge and they can sit there all night long, no problem whatsoever. Because when the sourdough is moving lovely and slowly, like with some yeasted breads, we tend
[11:49] to over-proven the fridge, the sourdough really lends itself to be proven overnight. We leave it there all night, first thing tomorrow morning, come back, take our dough out, turn it straight out and into our oven, we're baking it away.
[12:07] Our sourdough has been proven, the batter's second proved now, we have some shaping, we've got one in our lovely proven basket, and our second one in our pyrex dish, so just stage it already to bake. So you do shove a nice little bounce to it, you should be able to touch it and there's no
[12:20] fear of a collapsing. So if you were kind of touch it and you felt the whole thing was going to drop, you've over-proved it. So the idea is, you should know for next time, catch it a little bit sooner, so the idea is we catch it on the rise. Have your baking tray ready, if you're using a proven basket or if you're looking to have
[12:34] one at all, just simply like a sandcastle, just turn your dough straight out. So you can see all that beautiful pattern which the dough picks up from the basket, and that's what kind of gives this dough a lot of its traditional markings.
[12:46] So then we've also got our lovely little pyrex dish, and it's a great way to kind of improvise at home. We took it in for the last couple of hours, so we're going to gently waken them up.
[12:59] And all you do, very simply, just in case it's going to stick, we'll just put a little bit of flour on our dough. So we take our lid, you pop your lid on, and you literally just flip it upside down.
[13:15] So take the lid off, nice and gently, just remove your flour detail.
[13:29] Most professional ovens are fitted with steam, the idea being for the first 8 to 10 minutes of your bake, your dough is still rising. So by having steam in the oven, it allows the dough to open up and kind of stops the crust from forming, because all for what can happen is, if you don't use steam, the crust forms,
[13:44] the dough hasn't finished rising, and sometimes it can break through the surface, so I guess it's be bowled out to the sides because they look for any weakness in the dough, or sometimes it just won't be able to rise at all. So by having steam in the oven, it protects the dough and allows it to continue to open up.
[13:57] And that's also what helps to create your lovely little crust. This is why the pyrex dish is so great, it's so brilliant, because no matter how crappy your oven is, you don't even have to steam it, because basically once we pop the lid on,
[14:09] it's going to almost self steam, it creates its own little chamber, and it will steam the bread, and does the perfect job for us. Before we do that, though, we're going to score our bread, it kind of dates back to when we're not all in the central ovens, each village would have one every day to maintain it,
[14:21] so in the only way to turn your bread apart is how you mark it, so it's called to bake your signature. When we're scoring our bread, we use a razor blade, things to remember when you're using it, it's not a bread knife, so you don't start doing this, it's nice and confident, so really
[14:33] sharp knife at home if you can. Then you're in full control, and don't be afraid to cut into your dough. Let's make sure you cut all the way through.
[14:51] So by scoring it as well, as well as aesthetics, it also helps you control how the dough rises and gives the dough somewhere to go. So when it comes to baking your bread, don't be afraid to turn the temperature of your oven up. We all have a tendency to cook absolutely everything at 180, it's like the universal setting
[15:06] on the oven, but with bread, we need those good high temperatures, so really crank it up. So you're looking at about a minimum of 230 degrees, so we need the high temperature, create that lovely, lovely crust. A great way in which we can create steam at home is by, as we pop our bread in, popping a
[15:22] little pyrex dish. Once you preheat the oven, just turn it right up, put it in a roasting tray, it's pre-heated, and all I'm doing is taking some hot water, which is going to release.
[15:39] That lovely blast of steam into our oven, which is going to help your bread rise.