semi-sourdough



semi-sourdough

Bourke Street Bakery

Paul Allam & David McGuinness

 

 

 

semi-sourdough, with brown flour

Today I made a semi-sourdough bread. It has a light sourdough flavour but it does not need the overnight retarding because yeast is added. The recipe for this loaf says white, but I had no white flour left so I just used brown flour, and it worked really well which makes this basic recipe very versatile.

white starter
 

To 540g of white starter, 680g of brown plain flour was added, along with 5g of dry yeast, 275ml water and 12g of sea salt. These were combined slowly for about 4 minutes and then on a higher speed for about 5 minutes.

The resulting dough was smooth and elastic, and left to prove, covered with plastic:

Dough ready for covering with film and proving for one hour.
 

Here's what it looked like after one hour:

It was then knocked back:

and left to proved, covered with plastic, for another hour.

The dough was then ready to be divided into 3 x 500g balls, then rested for 20 mins.

I didn't have the required small loaf tins, so I just used my ordinary enamel dishes, and they worked well. I only had two so had one loaf left over which I put into my normal loaf tin.

Then these were put into the fridge for one hour. The loaves were removed from the fridge and left for a further 1.5 hours until each loaf had grown in size by two-thirds. In the meantime, the oven was turned on to 200 deg C.

The loaves were put into the oven, spraying it with water before closing the door.
After 20 mins, the loaves were turned around in the oven and then baked for a further 10 minutes.

Here they are, straight out of the oven. I haven't noticed this with other loaves, but the crust continued to make cracking sound for about five minutes after they came out of the oven. Is this the normal result of a good crust, I wonder?

PS 17/10/13:
Baking from this book is a dream. I go back to it time and time again, and this loaf has become our everyday loaf. I now use most of the dough for a larger loaf, for the above dark tin, and the rest I make into a baguette and generally freeze it soon after it has cooled. I now have a stack in the freezer and it is wonderful for pulling out on the weekends for lunch.

If you can afford it, buy this book. I doubt you will need another.

I was really pleased with this loaf. It was lighter than the sourdough loaf, but retained the chewy crust. I am especially pleased with the substitute brown flour instead of white. I really had a lovely flavour.

brown semi-sourdough, very light and delicious nutty flavour