I love sourdough bread in all its varieties and I’ve always quite fancied making it myself. Looking around some of my favourite food blogs recently I saw that sourdough is of those things people are trying out – maybe its the credit crunch that makes us all want to bake bread, I don’t know, but it certainly seems to be on the rise (!).
A bit of looking about, a bit of tweeting and it seemed that the king (and queen) of sourdough recipes comes from Sam and Sam Clarks ‘Moro’ cookbook. It doesn’t seem hard (or maybe it is and I’m just about to find that out) but it requires patience – lots of it – four weeks of it. Like WHAT – I’ve got to wait FOUR weeks before I can even get close to baking a loaf….now I’m not especially renowned for my patience so I decided to go off and look for other starter recipes. But I kept drawing a blank – they seemed too short and they had easy blend yeast in them – like right that’s not real sourdough its just a minor tongue tingle effect.
So back to the recipe from ‘Moro’ and a whole lot of patience.
Here’s what you need and do:
1 bunch of red organic grapes (okay so these aren’t organic but I hope it still works)
Cover and now its just a waiting game – two weeks and counting to next stage……
Strong white organic flour: 500g
Water: 1 litre
Put the grapes in a muslin bag and secure the top of the bag – just so:
Mix the flour and water together to create a sloppy batter that looks like this:
Bash the grapes around a bit with a rolling pin and remember to save the juices to add the mix.
Having added the juice in go the grapes:
Cover and now its just a waiting game – two weeks and counting to next stage……
Ha ha ha, I warn you after a few days it will stink!
But don’t worry, get through the smell and in a month’s time after the feeding process, it will all be worth it.
Blimey! Good luck with it, I keep meaning to try sourdough myself but I honestly didn’t know I would need grapes!
I’ll be really interested to see what happens – ggod luck!
Food Urchin: oh great – I can hardly wait to have a smelly kitchen – just need to keep focussed on end result I suppose.
Helen: I didn’t know it needed grapes either until I read the recipe properly – I suppose thats were the wild yeast action comes from.
Ample Cook: Thanks. I keep taking peep every now and then to see whats happening. Might post an ‘under the bonnet’ photostory of progress.
Ah.
I'm a little further on than you, have had my sourdough starter made for a couple of months
& am making pizza dough, breads every 3rd day, crackers with it.
Mine (Dan Lepard one after buying 2 of his books) has raisins, flour, water & my home-made yoghurt as a starter.
It's always smelt good too in the fridge.
It's truly delicious results when it's done, and you develop your own regime with it.
Happy sourdoughing! & see you soon.
Gill: I’m looking forward to it being ready and starting to make bread etc regularly. I’m hoping it won’t be too smelly once its ‘finished’. We’ll see. Looking forward to the Dan Lepard course in June to learn more.
Oh, my! This has just begun and I can already almost smell it! Can’t wait to see the finished product1