Walnut Bleu Cheese Sourdough

I've been experimenting with my sourdough starter recently. I'd like to understand what I"m doing, beyond feeding it once a week and adding more flour to the part I want to turn into bread.

I'm reading The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott, which is a super-informative book about natural leaveners and hearth baking. To hear them talk, the only way to make real bread is to skip the yeast and fire in a hand built oven that burns wood. My boss keeps talking about moving the oven he built several years ago to the farm...I hope it happens. Then I could make real bread.

In the meantime, I offer Walnut Bleu Cheese Sourdough, which apparently is Peter Reinhart's favorite. I made it a couple weeks ago and Eric and I brought a loaf with us to Durham, North Carolina. (Along with some Potato Rosemary bread, which I will post next). This cool cat Gretchen who thinks blogs are lame lives there, and we like her enough to visit. (We like her a lot, actually) Our good friends Leah and Drew came too, and we had a blast. Leah has a blog, which I think is good reading. She and Drew build sweet things around their house.

The coolest part about this bread is the color! It's purple! Do you know why it's purple? You're thinking "The bleu cheese, duh" right? WRONG! It turned purple after I added the toasted walnuts and before the bleu cheese. Weird, I know. It's the oils in the walnuts.

For this bread, make your sourdough as you normally would, and add 25 percent toasted walnuts and 15-20 percent crumbled bleu cheese. This will seem like an absurd amount, breaking and spilling out of the dough at every side, but it will work in the end, even if it requires some guerilla shaping of the loaves. Add the walnuts during the last two minutes of kneading and fold in the bleu cheese carefully at the end of kneading. (Press out the dough and sprinkle one third of the cheese on it, roll it up and repeat this two more times.)

As soon as I really, truly figure out this sourdough thing, I'll post my findings, but in the mean time you can check out The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart (which is a must have bread book. The Authority, some say.)

Here are links to his sour dough bread recipe

Make a seed culture

Make the barm

Make the bread!

(note: if you don't have hours and hours to let your bread rise, or if your starter is new, you can add 1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast to the bread to ensure a 90 minute first rise and a 60 minute final proof. Is this cheating? Opinions differ. You decide. Bear in mind that the bread is definitely less sour if you use yeast.)

...but I recommend buying the book so you can read all about bread and how to bake it.

MMmmm, we grilled the bread with butter for dinner at Gretchen's house. We ate it with local spinach, sausage and chutney.

This post was submitted to Yeastspotting

More bread talk

This was the first sourdough I made with my barm. I'm hoping as it ages it gets more leavening oomph, because without any yeast, this loaf is what I got. It had great sourdough flavor, but barely rose at all. I could see the folds inside from where I shaped it.

So when I make sourdough at the restaurant, I use a bit of yeast, because I don't want to be stuck with 20 pounds of lazy dough on my hands (or the sad dough lumps which would serve as the embarrassing evidence on the rack after baking.) However, the yeast makes the flavor less potent. The first batch I made only had a sourdough after taste. The second I used 1/3 wheat flour and it had a more sour flavor. It was pretty good, actually.

Peter Reinhart's Sourdough goes something like this...

A starter made with 2/3 cup barm, 1 cup bread flour and 1/8-1/4 cup water. You let it stand until doubled in size, about 4 hours, and then stick it in the fridge over night.

The next day, cut up the starter and let it warm for an hour at room temperature. Mix it with 4.5 cups bread flour, 2 t salt, and 1.5-.75 lukewarm water. And if you're me lately, 1.5 t instant yeast. Knead for 10-15 minutes, or use the dough hook in your mixer for 4 minutes, let rest for 5, then mix for 4.

If you add the yeast, you only have to cover the dough in an oiled bowl and let it rise for and hour and a half, and then shape it into boules and proof (rise again) for an hour or so.

If there is no yeast, Peter recommends letting the dough rise for 3-4 hours, shaping, then proofing for 2-3 hours. And if you're me, your dough probably won't rise that much any way. Now that my barm is 3 or so weeks old, I may try the no yeast method again.

Also, sorry to discourage you home bread bakers, but the bread baking in the commercial oven at the restaurant always turns out better than my home bread. The oven at the restaurant gets hotter and has a steaming mechanism that works way better than spritzing the walls of you oven with water.

Steaming, by the way, helps with the development of the crust. It prevents it from getting too hard too fast (which would inhibit the initial rising of the bread).

I'm continuing to feed my starter, and I'm hoping to become more familiar with this mysteriously simple/complicated bread.

I think the crust on these fail loaves was very beautiful, kind of like a painting.

BBA Sourdough Fail

It was a beautiful rainy day, and after several days of preparing my sourdough starter, i was ready to bake.

The previous night I mixed the barm I'd been fermenting with flour and water to make the starter. You can see it above in a plastic bag. Below, you can see how I cut it up into pieces and mixed it with flour, salt and water to make the dough.

The next step was to let rise at room temp for 3-4 hours, until plastic wrap. Maybe the starter was bad, or maybe this is where I went wrong, because I only covered it with a towel, and at the end of 3.5 hrs, it had not risen very much and had a crust on top.

Undaunted, I carried on, dividing it into two boules, which I also set under a towel to rise for an hour.

After an hour had passed, they hadn't rised at all, and we were late for Chinese Thanksgiving* at Fred's house, but I decided to bake them anyway. I went through the whole process of spraying and steaming the oven, and in the end, I just had to turn off the oven and hope they were done.

When we came back that night, this is what we had:

Pasty, dense excuses for bread. And when I looked inside, the crust that has formed during the first rise remained, hiding inside the loaf like an alien, ready to burst forth...

Needless to say, I will have to try this again.

*Chinese Thanksgiving. A tradition that Fred and his friends started in college, where friends get together sometime near thanksgiving and order chinese food and eat on the floor. This was last sunday. I brought a chocolate torte to get feedback on, and we ordered just about every chicken dish that the place had.