I arrived at Blue Grouse on a Sunday: a mixing and shaping day at the bakery. A few hours later I left exhausted (just from watching) and humbled at how little I knew before I walked in. But most importantly, I’d caught the bug for making the perfect loaf of artisan sourdough: crusty on the outside, tender and tunneled on the inside with a mellow, sour flavor.
“There are few things as satisfying in this wonderful world and through all of human history as a slice of hot, freshly baked sourdough bread with a schmear of butter.” — Anonymous
FFTA went home to build and feed our starter, mix, shape and bake sourdough rye and country bread for weeks with greater and lesser degrees of success. Here are our observations on what happened as well as a link to a simplified recipe for a crusty Tartine sourdough loaf from one of my favorite blogs, The Kitchn.
The Sourdough Past is an Illusion: FFTA’s New Om
You might remember my post about sourdough bread, The Magic of Wheatberry Flour in Sourdough Bread. In it FFTA used yeast and sugar to create sourdough starter. But for an artisan sourdough recipe, during the tutorial Ben recommended Chad Robertson’s book Tartine Bread. In it Robertson recommends gathering the wild yeast from the air and the flour, and making your own, natural yeast. With 4.5 stars and 3,800-plus reviews on Goodreads, this is a widely loved, comprehensive, simple and straightforward book about how to make the perfect loaf of artisan sourdough.
Although I understand some of FFTAs readers’ reluctance toward the several-day bread making process, the rewards are far greater than the effort so don’t be intimidated. There is a pattern to it all: create your starter, feed your starter/leaven, mix your dough, wet-shape your dough, dry- shape your dough, steam bake and eat. And for those who are really hesitant to try this bake? Thank goodness for our artisan baker friends like those at Blue Grouse Bread, who make it for us!
Are High Altitude Adjustments Necessary? No!
Here is a link to the delicious Sourdough Rye Recipe…
FFTA discussed high-altitude adjustments, that we now have learned from Blue Grouse are not relevant in wild-yeast scenarios. FFTA now considers ourselves more enlightened and competent though not advanced artisan sourdough bread bakers. We have learned that to become an artisan bread baker takes many hours of practice. So dear readers, put in the time and you will reap the benefits. We are making bread once a week and are in the groove!
K.I.S.S. and James Beard’s Evolution
I left Blue Grouse that day with the humility of how simple it all was and how overwrought the CSU Extension recipe I shared with you two years ago was. Because, although dear reader, sourdough seems like a complex process, it’s not: all it takes is water, flour, salt and time. Or, as my Medill Journalism professor Mr. Heaney used to bark at us, “K.I.S.S., or, Keep it simple, stupid!”
All humility aside, FFTA was in good company for awhile, however dated. James Beard’s bestselling book, Beard on Bread, that I turned to for recipes many times since its publication in the 1970s, did not include sourdough recipes. This was Beard’s take on it back then:
“Sourdough and salt-rising starters are homemade leavening agents, both very unpredictable. You can get better results if you use yeast as well and your bread will be lighter and have more flavor–but that is something you can decide for yourself.”– James Beard
Beard passed away in 1985 but since then the irony is real: Nancy Silverton became the 2014 winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef Award for popularizing artisan sourdough bread in America! So if James Beard-ites can evolve to recognizing and baking wild yeast, organic artisan sourdough, why not FFTA?
Bread is Back, Baby!
Bread is back, baby! Did you give up bread during the recent gluten-free craze? All of its minerals and nutrients? The only bread FFTA did not give up was sourdough because we can eat and digest it!
But how did we get here, to this place of ever-growing appetite for artisan sourdough bread? What happened to make sourdough the Top Loaf of the bread world? Perhaps it is the alignment of sustainable eating, and the importance of healthy gut bacteria in sourdough bread. Maybe because it is made of locally produced wheat, and the inexpensive ingredients are available to everyone. Or it’s the alchemy of the starter: that by mixing water and flour after a few days, as the starter captures the wild yeast in the flour and the air, you can have a natural, bubbling leavener. Or it might simply be the tangy sour flavor of a good, crusty-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside slice of bread spread with cool butter.
Starter Myth Destroyed : “It’s almost impossible to kill your sourdough starter,” says Ben Rossman, co-owner of Blue Grouse bread. Ben says they’ve closed the bakery for a couple of weeks during vacation and come back to remove their starter from the fridge, pour off the grey liquid on the top, feed it and use it.
Perhaps it’s the whole organic food revolution of the last 20 years that has caused us all to be aware of the “dangers” of the white bread of our childhood that is laden with emulsifiers, fats, preservatives, sugars and salt. And as we learn more about how food is raised, with or without pesticides, GMO or non-GMO, we are discovering literal strength in focusing on building better foods for better health and a longer life.
Anyway, here we have arrived in the post-gluten-free age, not wondering whether to eat sourdough bread, but when.
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