Let's Bake Bread # 4 - To the Ovens!!

Above: Crusty Rye Loaves using the pizza stone method
To the Ovens!!

Stage 4 -: Baking the dough

There are a few methods which I use regularly: loaf tin, cast iron pot or pizza stone. All taste great, and are quite easy methods. With the pot you get a classic round loaf and deep golden colour and are ensured even cooking – great for beginners. With the stone you get a nice ‘earthy’ taste and can make shapes – baguettes or even flatbreads but you do have to check the underside to make sure it cooks properly and place a pan of water in the oven to ensure a humid environment. With the tin you get a very easy to cut loaf, great for toast or sandwiches.

Method

1. Unwrap the dough and set aside at room temperature for 3 to 4 hours, until it reaches room temperature in the middle and is fully risen and doesn’t spring back when you press it with your finger.
   
2. At the same time, pre-heat your oven to 230C for around 50 minutes to an hour.

Cast Iron Pot Method

1. Place the cast iron pot in the oven to heat for about an hour. Wearing oven mits, invert dough into heated pot that has been dusted with flour.
   
2. Sprinkle a light veil of flour over the dough. Slash the dough with a sharp knife or razor to create that classic sourdough pattern but more importantly to help the dough cook. Bake, covered, for exactly 30 minutes.
   
3. Remove lid and bake for a further 10 minutes till dark golden and bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
   
4. Remove immediately from pot and set aside in a wooden bowl or plate to cool for AT LEAST one hour. The bread is still ‘cooking’ at this stage and should not be cut for at least an hour after being in the oven or it will become tough.
   
5. When you can’t wait a moment longer after the hour is up, brew a nice pot of tea and cut off a thick slice, enjoyed with fresh cultured butter.

Pizza Stone Method

1. Place a baking pan filled with water on the floor of the oven. This will provide the necessary humidity for the bread to colour, which you don’t need when you use a cast iron covered pot.
   
2. Invert dough onto heated pizza stone that has been dusted with flour. Sprinkle a light veil of flour over the dough.
   
3. Slash the dough with a sharp knife or razor to create a pattern and to help the dough cook. Bake, for exactly 20 minutes.
   
4. At this stage you may need to turn bread over and bake the underside for a further 10 to 15 minutes so it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. As above, remove immediately from pot and set aside in a wooden bowl or plate to cool for at least an hour before eating half the loaf in one sitting!

Left: My Country-style white loaf cooked on the pizza stone, flavoured with salt and blackstrap molasses for extra colour and nutrition.















Loaf Tin Method

1. Proceed as for pizza stone method, above, ensuring oven has a water bath in it.
   
2. Make sure loaf has proofed IN THE TIN after it has come out of the fridge. When the loaf has come to room temperature and had its final rise in the loaf tin, slash and sprinkle with flour and bake as per pizza stone method.

Note: No more dry, floury-tasting bread! When friends and family taste this bread, you may have to start making two loaves at a time, like I do. Or even more……once you’ve had real bread, there’s no going back.
Next week: Let's make a plaited Brioche.

Let's Bake Bread # 3 - The D'oh!

We are getting ever closer to putting our loaf in the oven. Onto the next stage.

Stage 2 -: Making the dough
Ingredients:
-Your ‘sponge’ mixture (which will be foamy by this stage)
-3 to 5 cups of organic rye bread mix (or half white flour, half rye flour) -½ cup gluten flour (particularly important if your flour is not ‘strong’. Don’t worry about the gluten – the sourdough process itself , known as ‘pre-digestion’ will digest all of the gluten so your bread will be yeast- and gluten-free but without the gluten it may not rise enough)
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses, or golden syrup or brown sugar (optional, but particularly tasty in rye bread)
-2T olive oil (optional)

Method:

1. Take your bowl of ‘sponge’. It should be at its foamiest stage for maximum bread-rising power. What you are about to do is ‘feed’ your starter by adding more flour, but you are making it into a dough, so it will be solid, not runny like when you normally ‘feed’ your starter. What will happen next is that your starter will spend the next few hours ‘eating’ the flour in the dough. It will eat the phytic acid surrounding the grain and the gluten in the flour. It will leave little holes in the bread where it has eaten the flour (this is why bread has that ‘holey’ look ) and will give off carbon dioxide (that yeasty smell).
   
2. To your bowl of starter add the salt, oil and molasses. Stir
   
3. Add 1 cup of rye/wheat flour and the gluten flour. Mix.
   
4. Keep adding flour in half cupfuls and stir. When it’s too stiff to stir, turn out onto floured board and pull together as a dough, adding more flour as needed.
   
5. Keep kneading the dough for about 10 minutes, making sure to add more flour whenever the dough becomes sticky. You will probably be adding more and more flour right up to the end of the kneading time. Unlike regular bread, sourdough bread is very wet and ‘thirsty’. Just when you think you’ve added enough flour and it’s dry and pliable, it suddenly becomes all wet again and you find you need to add more flour to knead it! DON’T WORRY – just keep on adding flour as long as it’s thirsty. Sourdough yeasts, unlike commercial yeasts, are alive and need their food!
   
6. After 10 to 15 minutes of hand kneading, you may be tired but you’ll have a smooth, not sticky ball of dough.
   
7. Place in a greased bowl, cover LOOSELY with cling film (this speeds up the rising process by keeping warmth in as long as you leave air gaps), and cover with a tea towel. Leave in a warm place to rise for 2 to 5 hours, until it has doubled – or tripled if it’s a warm day – in volume.
   

Stage 3 -: Proofing the dough
Proofing is the most important stage: This allows the ‘pre-digestion’ process to take place and for the healthful yeasts to digest all the bad parts of the flour. Very important stage! The longer it ages, the more the slight sour flavour is accentuated. You need around 15 hours ageing to deactivate the phytic acid.

1. You can tell the dough has not fully risen if you poke it gently and it springs back. When it has risen all it can, there will be a small indent left behind when you poke it with your finger.
   
2. When the dough has fully risen, punch the dough down gently. Flatten down into a big circle and let it rest 5 minutes.
   
3. The only tricky part – fold the edges of the dough into the centre and press with your fingertips to seal into a ball. Do not overwork dough. Shape by cupping our palms over the top of the ball and apply firm but gentle downward pressure. Stretch the surface of the dough down under to form a neat ball. Keep pulling and stretching downwards like this around 6 to 8 times, being careful not to tear the surface of the dough.
   
4. Turn dough over and pinch the seam to form a very tight seal.
   
5. Place in bowl and cover with several layers of plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator to age fro 8 to 24 hours, even up to 36 hours.

Next..... Putting the loaf in the oven!

Let's Bake Bread # 2 - The Sponge (No, not the Seinfeld Episode)

Now the moment you've all been waiting for, baking our first Sourdough loaf. This is beyond exciting, and can I say 'good on ya mate' to everyone who's stuck with me so far. You've done a beaut' job to get this far.

Aussie jingoisms aside, thanks for coming on this ride and here's to the success of your first loaf. Let's get started!

Part B
Baking Bread
This is such a satisfying process: you won’t believe what you can do with your own two hands!

Stage 1 -: Making the ‘sponge”
What on earth is a sponge? It’s basically a great big bowl of foamy starter and it’s the basis of a good loaf. It’s the first step in baking:

Ingredients:
-Your jar of starter from the fridge
-1 cup filtered warm water
-1 cup plain white organic flour
- Clean bowl (sterilise with boiling water at this early stage) and wooden spoon.

Above: Look closely, this fully active starter is really foamy and ready to bake bread!

Method

1. Remove your starter from the fridge and pour into clean bowl.
   
2. Add water and stir with wooden spoon till dissolved.
   
3. Add flour and mix. You want the consistency of very thick pancake batter. Add more flour or water to reach this consistency.
   
4. Cover LOOSELY with plastic wrap, leaving a bit of space on the sides for air and cover with a tea towel. I use the plastic wrap because in winter or cooler climates you want to keep the heat in and this really speeds up the process.
   
5. Leave in a warm place (sunroom, windowsill) for between 4 and 12 hours. It will begin to get a few bubbles in the first two hours, then more and more bubbles will form until it’s foamy. At this point it’s ready for the next stage…..

Note: sometimes I’ll age my sponge by leaving it out overnight, especially if it’s slow to bubble, like in winter. By morning it may have a layer of hooch so I’ll mix in half a cup of flour and leave it for another 3 or so hours till it bubbles a second time. This makes a stronger sponge, but it’s not really necessary unless your sponge is having trouble getting going.

Let's Bake Bread # 1 - The Starter (or Leaven)

Traditional Sourdough baking

Now, let's get into this process.

Wherever you live in the world, you can make sourdough. If you live in a humid climate such as Brisbane or Florida, great - those yeasties grow mighty quick in sweaty weather. But if you live in a cool, dry clime, don't worry, it will work for you too!

Summer is over in Bondi and the month of May sees the cool setting in. My bread is not tripling in volume any more and I need to wrap it in plastic wrap and a tea towel and put it near a warmer or heater to get a double rise, but it still looks and tastes fantastic.

That's the thing about sourdough - no two loaves are ever the same, as natural processes are the ones who do the work, and they decide how they're feeling on any given day!


Some people tend to overcomplicate the whole process: 26 steps over 24 hours and so forth. While there are a lot of steps, they are simple steps which require minimal effort (except the kneading). I’ve discovered a few tricks to make the process go quicker and smoother (plastic wrap is so helpful on cooler days!) – a little trial and error of your own will perfect the process!

What kind to make is an endless choice, I generally make half rye-half white sourdough, as rye has the most dietary fibre but lately I've been making wholemeal, but I always use organic flour. I've also made brioche with white flour and even blinis and pocket bread. My favourite thing to make is sourdough pizza, truly unbeatable - you will want to eat every bit of the crust! I will post some pizza photos when next I make some - which is quite regularly in our house! In fact, if it has yeast, then you can use sourdough starter to make it!

This process sounds complex, but take it a step at a time, and it is really quite simple. You’ll be doing it with your eyes closed before you know it!

Part A
Making your ‘starter’
You’ll need:
- 1 big bowl (ceramic, metal etc)
-1 cup Filtered water or a boiled water, warmish (just above lukewarm, around 50 degreesC) (Chlorinated tap water doesn’t work)
-1 cup organic plain white flour
-Wooden spoon
-Sterile glass jar of about 600-800g capacity
-Muslin cloth or paper towel (or plastic wrap if the weather is quite cool)
-Boiling water for sterilising (after the first week or two, you won’t need to sterilise your implements as the lactic acid kills everything foreign that enters its environment, but you will need to keep things pr etty sterile at the beginning as it matures).






















Above: Starter in its early bubbling stages
Method

1. Rinse bowl and wooden spoon with boiling water to sterilise.
   
2. Mix in bowl 1 cup flour, 1 cup water
   
3. Place into sterilised glass jar
   
4. Cover loosely with clean muslin or paper towel
   
5. Leave somewhere warm and airy, around fruit and veg and away from toxic chemicals such as cleaning products. The windowsill is a good place.
   
6. Check daily for ‘foaming action’. My first starter went crazy within 24 hours. Or it could take 5 days. What you are looking for is for the mixture to begin to bubble, a few at first and then lots of bubbles, which will look like (and smell like!) beer foam.

Feeding & Caring for your starter

1. When it starts to foam an d basically double in size, then you have life! But you have to keep it alive, especially in the initial stages. When your starter is hungry, it will be still and flat, with possibly a layer of greyish or amber coloured liquid on the top that will smell funny – like beer – but not ‘off’. This is called hooch, and it’s the by-product of the yeasties when they feed on the flour. It is actually alcohol!
   
2. The idea is to feed the starter before you see this ‘hooch’. The best time to feed it is once a day in the beginning stages. The time to feed is when it has stopped foaming and is just starting to recede in the jar and lose its bubbles.
   
3. Feed it by pouring HALF the contents of the jar into a clean, sterile bowl and mix in equal proportions of flour and water. Put this new paste back into an empty jar. The reason you remove half the starter before feeding is because the starter grows and doubles its weight – if you did n’t remove half of it the starter would overflow and keep growing until it covered your whole kitchen……!!!!
   
4. Discard the leftover (in a few days or weeks you’ll be using your leftover starter as yummy pancake batter but it’s probably not strong enough yet).
   
5. Continue feeding the starter in this way daily for around two weeks and it should be strong enough to b ake your first loaf. It’s a wait, but it’s worth it!
   
6. By this time it will be quite strong and you will not need to sterilise your implements any more, just keep using wooden spoons and make sure your bowls are nice and clean.
   
7. Keep your starter in a jar in the fridge – once it’s matured after a couple of weeks. It doesn’t need to fill the jar, half a jar or less will be enough to keep the generations going. There it will lie ‘dormant’ and you need only feed it once a week with a couple of tablespoons of flour and water.

Note: My first starter foamed and bubbled in 24 hours then decided to go out of action and I couldn’t revive it. Sometimes they begin quickly and run out of puff. Other times they start bubbling really slowly but if you keep feeding them they spring to life. You are dealing with living creatures here, and they set their own pace. It’s really trial and error to get a strong starter, but it’s not difficult. My third ever attempt is the starter I still use today. It’s about 12 months old. If you’re starter is starting to ‘limp’ (i.e you feed it and instead of bubbling a few hours later it is still and hooch-covered) there are things you can do to jump start it. The easiest method is to discard all but one or two tablespoons of starter and in a clean, sterile bowl, rapidly whisk the small amount of starter with a cup of warm filtered water to get the oxygen in, then mix in a cup of flour, pour into a clean jar and wait….)

Extra note: Clean any active starter off your benches, cutlery and dishes while it’s still wet – it turns to cement when it dries. You could tile your bathroom with it! In fact, in the pioneering days settlers plastered the walls of their homesteads with it!

Next Blog: Time to Bake!

To fast or not to fast?

After reading many studies, articles and blogs let me say there’s a lot out there about the benefits of fasting.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that not all fasts are the same.

Now this can be hard to believe because there are so many methods of fasting being promoted and they all claim to fix the same things – LDL cholesterol, IGF, blood glucose, brain cell growth etc. And indeed they all pretty much do, as far as current studies can reveal. It’s what they mess up that’s the question. 

There is a wide selection of fasts to choose from. Do I eat every 12 hours? One meal a day? Do I fast every other day? What about the 5:2 diet? Eat dinner only except weekends? Fast monthly, every three months? It’s enough to do your head in.

I want to make it simple. I’ve read nearly everything out there and I’m here to simplify it all. 

I would say that the biblical model of sporadic full fasting (either 24 hours monthly, or 3 days every 2-3 months) is the healthiest way to go.

The very popular paleo-evolutionary fasting (alternate day, intermittent, 20-hourly etc) known as intermittent fasting or IF, is the least healthy way to fast.

Regular fasting upsets hormones, circadian rhythms, cortisol and fertility. It makes you edgy and puts your body out of whack. But, perversely perhaps, it also fixes LDL cholesterol, IGF-1 and blood glucose, creates new brain cells and generally repairs the body.

“The effect of intermittent fasting on hormones and circadian rhythms is devastating. When one hormone-producing gland gets out of whack, you can bet that others will be negatively affected“ http://www.charlespoliquin.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/971/The_Pros_and_Cons_of_Intermittent_Fasting_.aspx

 

But if you still want to fast, you might be asking ‘do I have to choose one over the other? Fast or not fast?’ Not with Biblical-model sporadic fasting. 

The body can be seen as an engine. The purpose of fasting is to shut down the engine and then conduct repairs. IF is like constantly turning the engine on and off, on  and off, so the engine is constantly in a stretched state of stress. It may be being repaired but at the expense of its proper running, and soon the engine starts to go out of whack. Biblical fasting , on the other hand, only requires fasting every few months. So you turn the engine off, do the repairs, then turn the engine on again. As your rhythms are only out of whack for a few days, your system comes back on line and gets back to normal pretty quick.

That’s how God designed humans, to fast only sporadically. Thus we benefit from all of the repairs fasting enables our body to do to our cells, but we resume our normal eating patterns quickly after the fast and the body’s rhythms can return to normal and stay that way until he next fast in a few months’ time. It may not be the key to quick weight loss, but isn’t it better to be able to sleep regularly and get pregnant if you want? 

Intermittent fasting may be concomitant with fat loss but there are better ways to lose weight, ones which don’t affect your biorhythms permanently.

If you want to want quick weight loss, try the much healthier Vitality Diet (which I posted in the previous post) which is a version of the current CRON diet (calorie restriction with optimal nutrition). The Vitality diet was developed by Hauser over 80 years ago and is identical in many ways with today’s CRON diet, which comes in at 8000KJ per day, which is around 1000KJ under the recommended intake. 

The Vitality/CRON plan focuses on the maximum amount of nutrients for the least calories. We're not just talking the same amount of nutrients on less calories, I mean nearly twice your average daily nutrient intake for a few less kilojoules. That's why it creates such vitality, and not the false alertness and edginess that intermittent fasting creates.

Plus there's the weight loss benefits. Do the Vitality Diet for 10 days and you’ll lose about a pound a day. Then continue with a high-nutrient diet and occasional fasting and keep your protein at no more than 1g per kilo of bodyweight.

The CRON/Vitality diets also leads to lower IGF-1 and lower blood glucose. Patients also report slowed degeneration of organs, tissues and faculties (in balance tests CRONERS over 50 years of age tested as well as a 20 year old). The increase in nutrients plays a large part in this, not just the calorie restriction.

With intermittent fasting we are not focusing on high nutrients, instead constantly switching between fast and feast, which may give us most of the benefits of sporadic fasts but at the expense of our fertility (for women), hormones and biorhythms. 

Most people choose IF because they don’t have the willpower for 3-day fasts, but note that the UK program Eat, Fast, Live Longer pointed to research which promoted full but sporadic fasts over intermittent fasting. It may be harder, but it’s better for us. And really, some things are only worth doing if they’re hard. Trying to make fasting easy will just lead to upsets elsewhere in the system:

"And when you fast, don’t make it obvious, as the hypocrites do, for they try to look miserable and dishevelled so people will admire them for their fasting. I tell you the truth: that is the only reward they will ever get." Matthew 6:16