Hot Cross Buns - Photoblog!

Lionel's friend Mr Yeast is making an appearance today. I know this is primarily a sourdough blog, but I have made this recipe for Hot Cross Buns many times before and it's not failed me yet. I will some day attempt a sourdough fruit bun, but Good Friday is no day for trying something new- you know you want buns that you will enjoy. And enjoy these we did! 

Also, rather than describing the entire journey of these buns I thought I'd just give you a bit of a photoblog of the process. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. 

Enjoy :)

Crusty Semolina Sourdough

While it may not be a cardinal sin to choose any old recipe from 'Wild Sourdough' to begin my Sourdough blog with, I decided that for the sake of simplicity I would begin with the very first recipe in the book. I would leave committing cardinal sins to later on, at which stage I'll just delve willy nilly into the book and choose recipes at random while laughing maniacally. How evil of me.

The weather had turned for the better and I no longer felt that turning the oven on would increase my chances of self combusting. Melbourne's longest streak of 30 degree + days in March had ended, and about time too, someone really should have told the weather bureau earlier that Autumn had actually begun. Bread baking could commence once again, and what better bread to make but one that I could blog about, the first recipe from Wild Sourdough, the 'Crusty Semolina Sourdough'.

Sourdough bread is not a quick bread to make- it generally starts the night before and then takes most of the next day to rise and then bake. But the outcome is worth it, and it's not like you have to stand around and watch the dough rise all day, it can easily be planned around other things. And so it was, the night before I started by preparing Lionel's clone in readiness for the next day.

I will write a blog post all about how I feed Lionel and how he works sometime soon, but for the meantime just know this- I feed Lionel every night. But on a night when I'm making bread I will split Lionel in two and feed each version of Lionel. One will be fed as per normal and set aside, while the other will be fed based on the bread I am making. Sometimes this is with more Rye flour, sometimes white or wholemeal wheat flour. It's also usually a large amount than I would usually use. 

The creation of Lionel's Clone (ie: the leavven for this bread)

In this case it was with white flour, so I took a teaspoon of Lionel and mixed it with 200g flour and 200g water (yes, the water is weighed!). This creates a nice sticky wet dough which will be put away for use in the morning. Basically what is happening here is that the teaspoon of Lionel (which is good bacteria*) reacts with all this new flour (i.e.: food) and it gets busy becoming active again. By the morning this will be evident in the fact that the leaven mixture will have bubbled up and grown in size.

(* Look, I'm not all that up with the technicalities of how it all works, so maybe it's not bacteria as such, but it's something small and it's kind of living and it feeds on flour. And is called Lionel)

Before & After: The leaven just mixed & the next morning

One thing I've come to learn with sourdough baking is start early and don't have anything planned for that night. No matter what the book says, different conditions- namely temperature- affect how long the bread will take to rise. So with this in mind, I started in the morning, knowing that the bread would likely not be out of the oven till closer to, or after dinner. 

Stage one of this bread, like most in the book I believe- was fairly simply; mix all the ingredients together until it forms a cohesive mass. The ingredients being the leaven, white flour, semolina flour water and salt. The only caveat is that the salt and leaven should not touch each other- at least not before they are mixed together. The salt in a large concentration can kill the bacteria in the leaven. So I mixed and as expected, came up with a sticky, ragged lump of dough. A 30 minute rest for both the baker and the dough is now in order.

Following this rest it's time to give the dough a good stretch (traditionally known as kneading- but what you're really doing is stretching the gluten strands in the dough). The suggested method for the doughs in this book is called air-kneading, which involves picking the dough up, stretching it, and then slapping it down on the bench. All very dramatic sounding- but it's probably more amusing to watch. Any form of kneading will do though, as long the gluten is being stretched. This method works best for wet and sticky doughs. I kind of did a combination of this air kneading and a regular knead- my dough wasn't too wet. After this knead the dough was much smoother and ready for it's rise!

The Ingredients  |  The sticky ragged lump  |  Smoother after kneading

The previous time I made this bread I noted that I thought the dough was too large to fit into my Banneton (see photo), but that was the first time I'd made bread from this book and I didn't know how little sourdough rises compared to yeasted dough. So this time I thought I'd give it a go. It fit fine, and didn't rise too far. The day I made this it was quite cool so the dough took about 6 hours to rise (although the book had said 4. See, told you).

Rising in the banneton

I'm always a little scared of this next part. Tipping the dough out of the banneton can make or break the perfect shape of the loaf, and it can also risk de-gassing the dough and ruining all that rising time. Thankfully it came out well and I was slightly loathe to slash the top as it looked so perfect. As there will always be a final burst of growth in the oven, slashing the surface creates a break point in the surface of the loaf so you can guide where it breaks. It's perfectly acceptable to leave it as is, it will simply crack randomly over the surface, which can give for a nice rustic looking loaf. So it's just up to personal preference and how you want your loaf to look. Personally I like slashing the loaf as I think it gives a nice finished look. Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo after I had slashed, but you can see the outcome in the baked loaf.

Out of the Banneton  |  Baked!

A good hot oven is perfect for baking in- and I'll explain in a later post about my moisture plus oven and the bricks I place in it. So the loaf went in at 235c and baked for a total of 40 minutes or so, with a drop in temperature to 225c after 15 minutes. I baked the loaf until it was a nicely golden brown all over- and hollow when tapped. Then you have to leave the bread until it is fully cooled before cutting into it- hard I know, but it's still cooking as it cools.

We had this bread for breakfast the next morning and it was amazing! My only criticism was that the crust softened a lot during cooling so wasn't as crusty as it could be. However without a wood fired oven I might not be able to achieve this result. I'll look into it though as there might be a trick to help the crust remain crustier!

I did actually make a yeasted "Many Seed Bread" this day also, so will post about that another day. 

Oh dear, I think I need reminding that I'm writing a blog and not a book! See you next time!

Introducing Lionel...

"Hello I'm Lionel"

You've come to this blog for some exciting adventures with Lionel right? So why then are you staring at a mug full of what looks like mud? I'm sure you're all a bit puzzled and eager to press on and solve this mystery, "The Mystery of the Mug of Mud", but patience, my crime solving readers, we'll get to that. First up we have to travel back in time a little to where it all began. Back to the dawn of time. Or the noughties to be more precise.

I've always been interested in cooking and baking- not only in the process, but in the outcome and the eating. I've also always loved bread, whether it be a simple  white loaf, a French stick, a foccacia or a sourdough with a crust so crusty that some serious gum damage could ensue if not eaten with care. I'm also a bit curious when it comes to food and find myself wondering "could I make that at home?" So when it became evident that, yes, bread is possible to be baked at home, and not necessarily in a machine, I was curious.

I played around with many yeasted breads, picking up tips from a wide variety of books. Mr Yeast was a fairly consistent and manageable fellow, and lent himself to a wide variety from ciabattas to hot cross buns, but I was still curious- could I do the bread making without him? Would he ever forgive me? Could I live with myself if I left Mr Yeast on the shelf and tried out something new and exciting- sourdough!? Well, of course I could, Mr Yeast is after all an inanimate object and doesn't have any feelings.

My first sourdough leaven lived in the fridge. He was a mixture of flour and water and according to the books I was reading, he could be kept indefinitely in the fridge as long as he was refreshed every couple of months. They also assured me that the thick black layer on top was perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. The stench was quite normal too. Apparently. I think I perhaps tried to bake one loaf with it which resulted in a stodgy brick that even toasting couldn't rescue. So it was back to Mr Yeast for the time being. Had he been more than a can of dried pellets I'm sure he would have been pleased.

For Christmas 2010 my beautiful wife gave me the gift of sourdough- a sourdough bread baking course to be quite precise. This was to be at Red Beard bakery in Trentham- a bakery whose sourdough bread we had sampled on a few previous occasions. They made damn fine bread and I was eager to learn their secrets, come home with a stash of loaves and most importantly a sourdough leaven to use in my own bread baking.

It wasn't until October 2011 that I was able to make the trip to Trentham to take the course which ran on a Sunday for 6 hours. The course was amazing, from the tips and tricks to the thrill of baking our own loaves in a wood fired scotch oven. I'll go into more detail of the course in another post, but for now let me introduce Lionel.

Lionel was borne of two organic potato skins, some rye flour and filtered water. It's all very technical as to what happens, but essentially good bacteria grows in the mixture and it is this that is added to flour and water to make sourdough bread. A sourdough leaven or starter. To keep an active leaven one must feed it every night- bit like a pet- to keep it alive. Once again I'll go further into that in another post.

So that photo up the top- that's Lionel. And he just can't wait to get into all the breads I'm going to be baking! But as I'm a softie at heart I couldn't neglect Mr Yeast forever, and it so happens, Lionel and Mr Yeast are now firm friends. So while this blog will focus mainly on sourdough breads from the book 'Wild Sourdough' I will also be making some good old yeasted breads also.

Welcome then, to the Adventures of Lionel & Friends!