Hey guys!
Today we're going to be making bread.
I've recently started eating bread again, and once I did, I knew it had to be made by
me at home, and I knew it had to be without yeast.
So naturally I navigated towards sourdough.
Today, I'm going to show you how to make it.
There will be two parts: in Part 1 I'm going to show you how to make the starter, just
basically like a wild yeast that's going to make your bread ferment and go up.
And then the second part will be about making the actual bread.
So why sourdough bread?
Let's talk about the benefits.
Firstly, it's much more easily digestible for your body and you'll get much more nutrients
from it.
Secondly, it tastes much much better than the usual yeasted bread.
Its taste is so much deeper, and it's just amazing, you have to try.
And thirdly, it doesn't spoil as easily as normal yeasted bread.
So you can keep it on your worktop for a week and it will be perfectly fine.
It might get a little bit hard, but I'll show you how you can get over that fact a little
bit later.
This kind of bread is slightly heavier than the normal kind of bread, so I guess it takes
a bit of time to get used to.
But it's totally worth it because it's so tasty and so healthy.
You just have to give it a chance to prove to you how good it is.
Let's start from the starter!
You're going to need two cups of wholegrain rye flour and two cups of filtered water.
Make sure you don't use tap water because all the chlorine in the water might kill the
yeast.
The starter will need 7 days, so make sure you plan ahead.
You'll need to mix 1/2 cup of water and a 1/2 cup of rye flour.
Mix them with a wooden spoon, and then leave it there for 24 hours.
Then, every day, every 24 hours, you'll have to feed this mixture with 1/4 cup of the flour
and the same amount of water.
Every 24 hours.
After around 3 or 4 days, you'll start seeing some bubbles coming up, some foaming going
on, and the mixture will start smelling bit like wine.
That's when you know that the wild yeast is starting to grow, and your starter is starting
to ferment.
That's exactly what you want.
It might not even necessarily go up too much because it really depends on the hydration
of the dough, it depends on how much water there is compared to the flour.
But if you see bubbles and a lot of activity going on, that's exactly what you want to
see.
After 7 days, your starter is ready, and you can start making your bread.
You can cover your mixture with either a paper towel or a kitchen towel - anything like that
to make sure that the air can get through, but insects and any kind of things like that
can't get it.
I usually just use a kitchen towel and I secure it with my elastic hair band, and it works
perfectly.
Every time you feed or maybe every couple of days, you need to change the bowl, so put
it in a different bowl and wash the old one.
That's just to make sure that your mixture doesn't get mouldy.
Trust me, it's very very disappointing when you've been working hard to keep it alive
and one day you open it and you find mould inside.
You don't want that to happen, so make sure that you wash it every time or at least every
couple of days.
Now, every time you take some of the starter for making bread, make sure you leave 2 or
3 tablespoons of the mixture for the next batch because if you leave too little, it
might not be strong enough to produce a new batch, and you might end up killing it.
So don't do that.
Id you're going to be making bread fairly often, then you can keep the mixture on the
worktop indefinitely.
You'll just need to make sure that you feed it every single day, roughly every 24 hours.
If you're not planning to use it too often, then it's better to keep it in the fridge.
You'll just need to make sure that you feed it once a week.
You need to take it out, feed it with 1/4 cup of the flour and 1/4 cup of water, and
then leave at room temperature for 3 or 4 hours, just until it goes up a bit and starts
foaming again.
Once it gets there, then you can put it back in the fridge or you can use it for your bread.
If you keep the mixture on the worktop all the time, you can make bread at any time,
you don't have to prepare anything in advance.
It's always ready for you.
I always say that the sourdough starter is a bit like a new pet in the house.
You might even want to give it a name.
So I guess these are all the things you need to know about the starter, and now let's move
on to making the actual delicious bread.