The Sourdough Manifesto

 So much French-style bread made in America has absolutely no connection in taste, texture, or look to true French bread that I have had whole classes of students chasing after that “baked air” product rather than accept the fact that true French country—or city—bread is not light but chewy, substantial, yes, in some cases even rather heavy…. One of the distinctions of true French bread is that instead of being made with plain yeast, it is prepared with a leaven.

~from Madeleine Kamman’s Savoie

 Bread prepared with a leaven, or in French, levain (which you may recognize as the name of a hot new restaurant in town), is what we commonly call sourdough.  Sourdough is trendy, it’s the hip new bread on the block, but of course it’s also the most ancient way of making bread.  Indeed, before the introduction of commercial yeast, it was the only way to make bread as we think of it today (leaving aside “quick breads” leavened with baking powder or soda).

                We use sourdough in many of our breads.  In addition to our off-white, rye, and whole grain sourdough loaves, sourdough is the basis of our walnut and walnut/currant breads (rye), and our olive bread (off-white).    

                It’s one of the paradoxes of our times that, in addition to everything old being new again, foods that were once available only to the aristocracy (like soft white bread) are now considered somewhat downmarket, while traditional peasant fare (coarse wheaten breads) are now embraced by the yupper classes.  Soft white bread is now cheap and plentiful, while whole grain sourdoughs are produced by “artisan” bakers for a discerning (and perhaps, romantically yearning) clientele.  I for one think that, paradoxical, romantic, or not, it’s a switch for the better, a sign of a desire for real food of all kinds, the kind of authentic, local products available at your neighborhood farmers’ market. 

                Sourdough gets its sour taste from acids that wild yeasts (upcoming Fox/Food Network co-production:  Yeasts Gone Wild!!!) produce in the long fermentation required to make true sourdough bread.  You see, yeast occurs naturally in flour, albeit in very small amounts.  It occurs in the air around us.  Different regions have different strains of indigenous yeasts that produce different flavors in the bread—hence the distinctive taste of San Francisco sourdough.  In some places the local yeast simply will not produce a sour bread.  Our local yeast has a sufficiently sour disposition to give our breads a nice bite.  We’re not looking to make an especially sour bread, and we would never add vinegar to the dough, as some bakeries do (if that kind of bread is to your taste, that is of course a matter not up for dispute).

                When I say long fermentation, I mean long.  Our yeasted white bread, for example, rises for about three hours in dough form and an hour in loaf form before baking.  Our potato bread rises for only a half-hour in each stage.  Our sourdough breads begin life as a sponge, a thick batter of starter, flour and water, which, depending on the weather, ferments for twelve to twenty-four hours.  The dough then proofs for six to ten hours, and the loaves rise another two to four hours.  So if you think three bucks is a lot for a little dense loaf of bread, consider that that loaf has been vigilantly nurtured for the last thirty-six hours or more.

                Making sourdough starter is fun and educational.  Get the whole family together, and watch the yeast multiply!  I learned from Mary Falk (who with her husband Dave makes the extraordinary, the truly world-class LoveTree Farmstead cheese which you can buy at the downtown Saturday market) that yeast particularly likes organic rye flour (she gleaned this info from Kiko Denzer, author of the seminal work Build Your Own Earth Oven, a charming book).  With Mary’s instructions I created the starter that leavens our sourdough breads today.  Here’s all you do:

Take three-fourths of a cup of organic rye flour (available in bulk at Mississippi Market), and mix with one-half cup filtered water.  The mixture will be a thick batter.  Cover the bowl with a dish towel and let it sit at room temp for two or three days (the family can do something else during this time).  After a couple of days the mixture should start to smell a bit sour, though it won’t really rise much if at all.  Next, take half the mixture and throw it away.  Add another half cup of rye flour and a half cup of water, and mix it up again.  Leave it sit another day (but have the family ready at a moment’s notice—things will start to get interesting soon).

By the next day the mixture should be smelling quite sour, and looking a bit bubbly.  Throw half of it away again, and this time add three-quarters of a cup of water, and a half-cup each of rye and unbleached white flour.  By the next day you should have a bubbly bowl of pungent starter, and you can send the family on about their business.  Once again throw out half the mixture.  Add water, rye and unbleached white (or white and wheat) flour to make a thick batter.  Pour this mixture into a large glass jar and keep it in your fridge. 

To keep the culture going you’ll have to feed it occasionally—refresh the starter, is the baker’s term. Once a week is fine, though if you want a really happy starter, twice a week is better.  Feeding it just means pouring off about half of it, then adding flour and water to make that thick batter consistency.  When you want to bake with it, it’s a good idea to take it out of the fridge the night before, refresh it, and let it sit out overnight (be warned that in warm, humid summer weather it may foam right over the top of the jar).  If you’re the kind of person who would actually do this, you probably have a cookbook that will tell you what to do next, but we’ll be happy to share our recipes if you ask.

There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with commercial yeast. A crusty off-white baguette is my favorite of all our breads.  Working with sourdough, however, is a wonderfully satisfying, elemental kind of baking, a process that takes you back to bread’s origins.  The dough after its long fermentation gives off a pungent but nuanced aroma, like the fumé of a bottle of young Beaujolais wine (I smell new mown hay, freshly turned earth, the autumn woods on a misty day…that sort of thing).  The dough is a bit sticky, a little tricky to work with, but when you’ve made your first batch of bread using nothing but flour, water, and salt, you’ll understand something about bread-making that you can’t get any other way.  Someday you may even want to become the village boulanger.  We highly recommend it.

 Some sourdough notes: 

~Because of the dense, moist, acidic dough, sourdough bread keeps much longer than yeasted bread, and it freezes very well, also.  If you like your bread really crusty, leave the loaf out of the bag in your kitchen.  When you cut a slice, just set the bread cut side down on your bread board to keep it from drying out too much.  For a softer crust, put the bread in a plastic bag. A good serrated bread knife is a must for slicing this bread.  It needn’t be expensive:  we just bought a J.A. Henckels knife at Target, cost around $11, and it works very well.

~Sourdough bread makes our favorite toast:  a thick slice of toasted sourdough spread with butter and topped with honey has a flavor like the best buttermilk pancakes you ever ate, only crisp.  Try the excellent honey produced by our market neighbor Peter Hughes (and his bees) on his North Country Organic farm near Cambridge.

                ~Some bakeries make sourdough breads which they claim are made “without yeast.”  What they mean, apparently, is made without added commercial yeast.  But a sourdough bread is leavened with yeast.  Bread made without yeast will be a cracker, a roofing tile, or a brick, depending on thickness.

                ~Much of the information on sourdough breads contained in this diatribe comes from Harold McGee’s indispensable, literally encyclopedic On Food and Cooking.  He is also the author of the excellent volume The Curious Cook.

             ~

It’s the Fourth of July, and the strawberries are rolling in from the fields!  Let’s cut all the Frenchie bread talk and get down to some good old American eating.  Buy a quart or two of the supremely fragrant, succulent berries available in the market now, and put them to good use in this tasty strawberry shortcake:

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