The night before you want to bake
Next you want to get a measuring cup and take out 1/4 cup of starter and put it into a mixing bowl.
Before you get to work on making the bread, you want to put in 28 grams of whole grain flour and 1/4 cup of water back into the starter container. Mix it through and put back into the fridge.
To get the bread kicked off, you want to put about 28 grams of flour and 1/4 cup of water into a container and mix it through.
After an hour, add the same.
After another hour add the same.
Finally before bed put in double the amount, mix through and leave in a warm place overnight.
The next day
The mixture in your container should be full of tiny bubbles now, this means it has woken up and is active, if it doesn’t have any bubbled or very few then you’ll need to keep feeding it until it is… if it was left in a cold place overnight this could be why.
Measure out 150 grams of the mixture you made and add into another mixing bowl along with:
- 500g flour
- 250ml water
- 25g olive oil
- 10g salt
You want to squelch the mixture between your fingers until it is all pretty moist and a bit of a shaggy mess. Get your hands messy.
Cover mixing bowl with glad wrap and wait about 30 mins for it to rise a bit. This will give it time to become a bit less sticky and easier to knead.
After the 30 minutes, take it out onto the bench and knead before shaping it into a ball and putting back into mixing bowl, covered again with gladwrap.
WAIT
Now is the waiting game, there is no magic time to wait, you just need to wait until the dough has roughly doubled in size, the time for this depends on how active your starter was after you woke it up the night before, how warm your room is etc…
Now it has doubled, line a baking tray with some baking paper – or use semolina – take the dough out and put onto the tray, cover with clingfilm/gladwrap so that the surface doesn’t dry out.
It will have deflated a bit when you moved it, so we want to wait again for it to rise a bit more.
While it is rising, put your oven to its maximum temperature to heat up.
After the dough has risen, take off the clingfilm and give it a slash or two to control where the cracks occur (also to give it an artisanal look)
I don’t have any decent photos of a pre-baked slash, but you could do big slashes or several small slashes the effects are very different:
Run your hands under the tap, then flick off most of the water and rub your hands on the surface of the bread.
Get a small amount of flour and rub that over the top of the dough. (again this helps with the artisanal look)
Finally, put the baking tray in the oven. Immediately turn the temperature down to 220 degrees c (428 F). (the reason we have it start off much higher is that this causes “oven spring” – causing the yeasts to burst and creating one final rise)
I like to prepare a small tray of hot water to put in the oven at the same time as the bread, this – along with the high initial temperature helps to create oven-spring.
After 20 minutes, lower the temperature to 180 degrees c (356 F).
After another 20 minutes you should be okay to take the bread out of the oven.
Always remember you should wait for the bread to fully cool before you slice it, otherwise you can get a gummy crumb to it and it will go stale fast.
Valley Roots 