Makes 1 loaf
Equipment round proving basket
DF, V+
This is the most popular loaf at the bakery. It has a devoted following among regular customers – one family buys ten at a time for their freezer! – and the most frequent first loaf for new customers. It’s also popular with the restaurants we sell through. It is earthy and honest with primal qualities, no doubt the second leavened bread made by man. Under any analysis, made with well sourced ingredients this loaf is as healthy as it gets, with the seeds providing a protein
hit as well as extra fibre and layers of extra flavours. Yet despite all this goodness and history, it’s still an everyday loaf that every member of your family will enjoy. We make this in both a tin and a round shape. These instructions are for the round loaf, but you can use any of the alternative shaping instructions from other recipes.
Day 1
50g strong white flour
50g water, at hand warm temp (32–37°C)
Active wheat starter (see below)
Mix the flour and water with the whole
quantity of the starter and leave loosely
covered at room temperature overnight.
35g sunflower seeds
35g pumpkin seeds
35g golden flaxseeds
15g sesame seeds
335g water
Soak the seeds in the water and leave at room
temperature overnight.
Nutrition Note:
We soak the seeds for a couple of reasons. The first is to do with the bread-making process. If you don’t soak the seeds they will absorb water from the dough, resulting in a drier dough and a heavier texture in the bread. So soaking the seeds guarantees a much more consistent loaf. The other benefit is that you activate them, which makes them release additional nutrients so that they are easier for your body to absorb.
Day 2
100g recipe starter made on Day 1
Water and seed mix from Day 1 (above)
335g strong white flour
40g rye flour
8g salt
Extra seeds for topping
1 In a large bowl combine the recipe starter with
the water and seeds and mix gently.
2 In another bowl combine the two flours and
the salt.
3 Add the flour mix to the first bowl and mix
using one hand until a dough forms. This takes
only a couple of minutes. It’s a good idea to
use only one hand, leaving the other one clean
for using utensils, etc. Use a plastic dough
scraper around the bowl to make sure all the
flour is mixed in. Cover the bowl with a shower
cap or damp tea towel and leave it to rest
at room temperature.
4 After 5–10 minutes, give the dough a fold in
the bowl. Use slightly wet hands to prevent
the dough sticking to them. Pull a section
of the dough out to the side and fold it into
the middle of the ball. Repeat this going
around the ball of dough until you get back
to the beginning (four or five folds). Use the
scraper to turn the dough upside down, cover
the bowl and leave for another 5–10 minutes.
Repeat this three times. After the final fold,
cover the bowl again and leave to rest for
1 hour at room temperature.
5 Turn the dough out of the bowl onto a lightly
floured surface. Stretch out one side of the
dough and fold it into the middle. Repeat
this with each of the four ‘sides’ of the dough.
Put the dough back in the bowl upside
down and leave to rest for another hour
at room temperature.
6 Shaping a round loaf: Once the dough
has rested, turn it out onto a lightly floured
surface. Stretch one side of the dough out
and fold it into the middle. Repeat this all
around the outside of the dough until you
get back to your starting point. Flip it so the
seam side is facing down. Use your left hand
to hold the dough in place and use your right
hand to rotate the dough, tucking it under
and tightening it as you go around (if you are
left-handed you might want to use your right
hand to stabilise and your left hand to rotate).
The idea here is to increase the strength of
the dough without tearing it. The final surface
of the dough should be taut to the touch.
7 Put the remaining seeds in a bowl. Brush the
top of the dough with water and dunk it in the
seeds so that they are evenly spread over the
top. Place the dough so that the seam is facing
up and the seeds face down in a round proving
basket. There is no need to flour the basket
as the layer of seeds will prevent the dough
from sticking.
8 In the bakery at this point we put the dough in
our cool retarder cabinet for it to prove slowly
overnight. This helps it to develop more flavour
and become even healthier as it ‘pre-digests’
more of the gluten and ferments even more
probiotic qualities. Your version of our retarder
is your fridge – and you can leave the proving
basket in it overnight, covered with the tea
towel or shower cap. Take it out as you are
heating the oven. It’s fine for it to go in cold.
However, if you would prefer to speed things
up a little, at this stage you can simply leave
the dough in a warm place (ideally 24°C) until
it has more or less doubled in size. This should
take 2–4 hours. To test when the dough has
proved enough, press your finger about 2–3 cm
into it, then remove. If the dough pushes back
out slowly it is ready. If it springs back quickly
it is under proved; if it doesn’t spring back at
all, it is over proved. There isn’t much you can
do about that. The bread will be edible, but
more liable to collapse.
9 Preheat the oven to 250°C/fan 240°C/
Gas mark 10 or the highest temperature on
your oven. Place a roasting dish in the bottom
of the oven to heat up. Fill a cup with water
and place to one side ready to use. Also put
a flat baking tray in the oven to heat up.
10 When the oven is up to temperature, take the
hot baking tray out, lightly dust it with flour
and then turn the dough from the proving
basket out onto the tray. Slash the dough with
a sharp knife. Make sure that when you slash
you use one quick, smooth action, do not saw
at the dough. This will give you a much cleaner
line. In the bakery we use a single diagonal
slash down the loaf, but there are endless
variations you could use – be creative, define
your own distinctive pattern.
11 Place the baking tray in the oven and pour
the glass of water into the preheated roasting
dish at the bottom of the oven. The moisture
from this makes the dough lighter, helps
to set the crust and gives it a lovely sheen.
12 Turn the temperature down to 240°C/
fan 220°C/Gas mark 9 and bake for
approximately 30 minutes. To check if the
bread is baked through, tap the bottom –
it should sound hollow.
13 Leave the bread to cool for at least an hour
before eating. If you eat it when it’s still hot,
it will not have settled and so will be more
difficult to digest.
Making Your Sourdough Starter
A sourdough starter is how we cultivate wild yeast in a form that can be used for baking and has been done for thousands of years. The easiest way to make one is simply to combine flour and warm water and let the mixture sit for several days. In theory, you will only need to do this once in your life and it is unique to you.
The start is the magic, the genius, at the heart of everything we do and everything in this book. It’s an ancient technology, discovered by accident and passed from generation to generation. It forms the basis of transformation foods with unbelievable powers of preservations and flavour.
A lot of people are intimidated by the idea of making and keeping a starter, but it really doesn’t need to be daunting and is in fact something a child could do, getting a starter going takes 2 minutes a day, over 5 days. It’s really not that much effort at all. If you use it on a regular basis, maintaining it just becomes part of your bread and baking routine, and if you do not use it as regularly, or you’re going on holiday and are worried about leaving it for a while, don’t be. It can cope!
Keep your starter in the fridge unless you are using it every day. Bring it out to top it up, then return it when you have finished using it in your recipes. It will be fine there even for a few months without being used. It may separate in the meantime, but don’t panic, just mix it back together. To get it going again you want to really overwhelm it with food. So throw half of it away and add 100g flour and 100g warm water. Leave it overnight at room temperature and the next day it should be active again, i.e. bubbling away. It really is that straightforward.
At this stage you could use it, but we would actually recommend throwing half of it away again and topping it up with however much you need for your recipe. We find that by taking that one extra day with a rejuvenated starter you get a much more active starter, resulting in a better flavour and rise in your bread.
A sourdough start is also known as a ‘levain’, and sometimes a ‘mother’ (because it keeps producing babies).
In the bakery, we have three bread starters: wheat, rye and brown rice for gluten-free baking. For our basic sourdough, we use the wheat starter. This has an almost cheesy smell to it and a slightly more mellow flavour than the rye starter.
Wheat Starter
Equipment A container with a lid or a clean jam jar
Day 1
- 1 tsp strong white flour
- 1 tsp water, at hand warm temp (32-37oc)
Mix together the flour and the water in a container with a lid. We recommend mixing with your hands rather than a spoon. As disgusting as it might sound, we all have naturally occurring yeasts on our hands, so this can give your starter a real boost.
Leave the mixture overnight at room temperature. Cover it with the lid but do not make it airtight. A screw-top jar with the lid partly done up is perfect. You want the yeasts in the air to get in, but you also want to stop the mixture drying out.
Day 2
- Wheat starter made on Day 1
- 1 tsp strong white flour
- 1 tsp water, at hand warm temp (32-37oc)
Throw away half of the mixture from Day 1. This is because you want to almost overwhelm the bacteria/yeast in the starter with food, by adding more flour than the weight of the original mixture. You could do this by adding more flour and warm water and not throwing any away, but you would very quickly end up with an excessively large amount of starter.
Stir the flour and water into the remaining mix and leave again at room temperature overnight.
Days 3 and 4
Repeat Day 2
Day 5
By now you should notice your starter has bubbles in it. This means it is ready! Don’t worry if it smells acidic or cheesy, this is completely normal and each starter will create its ow unique fragrance. Now you have your own living, bubbling jar of healthy microbes that you’ll be using for years to come.
How to use your starter in baking
Now you have your active starter you’re ready to start sourdough baking. The first thing to remember is that to make sourdough recipes you will need to build up your active starter (using all of it) the day before your bake. How to do this is detailed in each recipe under the heading on Day 1.
Having built your starter up, you will need to use most of it for the recipe (in the recipe we refer to it as the Recipe starter). What you don’t use, you retain as your ongoing active starter for your next recipe – you don’t want to have start from scratch each time! This all sounds more confusing that it really is.
Trouble-shooting
If the starter isn’t obviously bubbling, keep repeating Day 2 until it starts to. Quite a few factors can affect how long it takes a starter to activate, temperature being one of the main ones. If you begin your starter in cold conditions it may take longer to get going. Also, the general environment can have an impact. In the bakery, as we are making bread every day, there is so much yeast in the atmosphere that we find starters can take just a few days to get going, whereas if a kitchen is more sterile, it’s likely to take much longer.
Modern Baker: A New Way To Bake by Melissa Sharp with Lindsay Stark (Ebury Press, RRP £26). Photography by Laura Edwards. Available from amazon.co.uk