The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [28]
¾ cups of Manuel’s sourdough starter (175 ml), or your own
1 ½ cup whole wheat flour (225 g)
¾ cup water, room temperature (175 ml)
DOUGH INGREDIENTS
2 teaspoons active dry yeast (¼ oz or 7 g)
½ cup warm water (120 ml)
2 cups whole wheat flour (300 g)
2 ½ teaspoons salt (14 g) the starter mixture
½ to 1 cup water (120–235 ml) cornmeal for dusting (optional)
Sourdough bread, a specialty of Northern California, Eastern Europe, and several points in between, is flavored with a starter—a small amount of dough that’s allowed to ferment until it’s sour. Since they vary a lot, sourdough starters with especially good flavor are valued highly, and often passed from friend to friend like great treasures. It is in this spirit that we pass Manuel’s starter on to you.
THE STARTER Mix together and keep at about 65°F for 12 to 18 hours. Manuel’s starter, kept at room temperature for 12 hours, makes a moderately sour bread that is very light.
THE DOUGH Dissolve the yeast in warm water. Stir the flour and salt together; add the starter mixture and the water and mix them all together to make a soft dough. Knead until supple and elastic.
Form the dough into a ball and place it smooth side up in the bowl. Cover and keep in a warm, draft-free place. After about an hour and a half, gently poke the center of the dough about ½ inch deep with your wet finger. If the hole doesn’t fill in at all or if the dough sighs, press flat, form into a smooth round, and let the dough rise once more as before. The second rising will take about half as much time as the first.
Press the dough flat and divide in two. Round it and let it rest until relaxed, then deflate and shape into loaves. Divide into two or three pieces and round them. Let them rest and then shape into loaves: the dough will make two 8″x4″ pan loaves, but it is nicer baked hearth-style on cookie sheets that have been dusted with cornmeal (see this page.) Make two or three round hearth loaves, or shape into rolls. Let rise in a very warm, draft-free place until the dough slowly returns a gently made fingerprint.
Place in preheated 450°F oven. Follow one of the suggested steaming techniques. When the crusts show shine and color, turn the heat to 325°F. Continue baking for about 40 minutes for the large loaves, less for the smaller ones, about half an hour for good-sized rolls.
Scottish Sponge Bread
When the demand for bread exceeds what the usual baking will provide, but kneading up more than a couple of loaves at a time is a bit beyond your endurance, this recipe comes to the rescue. It takes advantage of some shortcuts of old-time Scottish bakers who made large quantities of famous bread without the aid of machines.*
One of the tricks they used was to prepare a portion of the dough—the sponge—the night before. This method gives the yeast a head start, so that by the time you’re ready to mix the rest of the dough, the yeast will have built its own vigor and also produced the substances that make for good flavor and keeping quality in the final product. An added bonus is that the prior fermentation develops the gluten somewhat so that later on when kneading time comes, there is less work to do. Scottish Sponge is a real old-fashioned baker’s sponge—or, in this case, a half sponge, since it contains about half of the dough.
In addition to turning out a relatively easy five loaves, this sponge makes it possible to use lower-gluten flours to good advantage. One practical example: a friend bought a bag of pastry flour by mistake, and with this recipe used it to produce marvelously tasty, light bread.
The sponge offers flexibility, too, because on the second day, if you want, you can divide it into parts, adding different kinds of flour to each part, and so make a variety of breads from the same starter.
For the first 12 to 16 hours the sponge ferments with no additional attention required; then it is made into the larger dough, which rises twice, for an hour each time. The dough is then divided and shaped, allowed to rise once more, and baked.
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