Flour & Water

We keep two sourdough starters. Extravagant I know. This is mainly down to nostalgia but there’s the odd occasion where there are benefits of maintaining two at different hydrations or water contents. Sanj is getting on a bit now, born in my old flat, named after a flatmate and good friend he’s been with us throughout our baking journey. Clare, his classier other half has nobler heritage and hails from 200 year old Lapland stock if you buy into that kind of thing. I don’t. Granted I like the story and want to be part of a baking lineage, but my own view is that your starter quickly adapts to the local microflora, ours having long ago acquired a Bristol accent.

As an experiment I wanted to start a new starter. One born and bre(a)d in Bristol [sorry]. I mixed equal parts flour and water and left it on the counter. Repeated this once a day discarding 3/4 of the mixture and after a week baked a loaf. It really was that simple.

I lie. Baking’s not simple. Baking the perfect loaf’s a Sisyphean task, but one where you’re rolling dough not boulders and even the disasters taste great. Getting you own starter going is simple though and well worth the effort - amazing what you can do with just flour and water.

Seven days of starter evolution and the resultant loaf

There are plenty of well written guides online for making our own starter so I won’t dwell on the specifics, I like this one for example. Although my personal tips would be the following:

• Use a decent organic flour with as much whole grain as possible
• Rye makes a welcome addition, it has more soluble sugars than wheat and typically higher amlyse activity, all of this equates to more food for the starter
• Don’t bother with fancy glass Kilner jars, granted they look nice but with regular feedings and cleaning they smash far too easily. This grows tiresome. Cheap plastic containers like soup containers work much better
• And finally if all of this still sounds too daunting, give us some notice and we can bring some of our starter along to an event for you (assuming you pass our extensive starter adoption vetting process)

Life of a pizza

Feels like we've had several seasons worth of weather condensed into the last couple of weeks. Last time I wrote I was making pizzas in the snow wearing all the layers I own and yesterday was well and truly shorts and t-shirt weather - has spring finally sprung?

We had some friends over last night, the namesakes of our sourdough starters actually and with one veggie in the house it was time to test out some more meat free topping combinations. The highlight of the bunch being a variation of a birds' nest topping with ribbons of asparagus (British asparagus I'd like to add), lemon zest and quail's eggs… there may have been a tincy bit of dry cured pancetta on one side too, perhaps that's why it was my favourite…

I'm rambling now. What I was originally planning to write about was video app I've been playing around with, Vine. It's essentially the video arm of Twitter and makes short (6s) looping clips. You can find me on there under my twitter handle myperfectpizza and what better way to road test a new video app than try and document the full life of a pizza.

So here it is, 1.26 million words worth*:

Feeding the starter:

Mixing the dough:

Knocking back:

Making the balls:

Forming the base:

Top and cook:

Mushroom and wild garlic:

Birds' / Piggies' nest:

*working on the assumption that each picture's still worth 1000 words and assuming Vine shoots each of my 7, 6s videos at 30fps. Apologies.

Introductions - Part 2

Moving on to the next members of the family, this time the little ones, Sanj and Clare. These are our sourdough starters. Sanj, I made from nothing more than flour and water in my old flat, and he takes his name from my old flatmate. Clare, Sanj's more sophisticated other half, came along later when I attended a baking course at the E5 Bakehouse and they both sit happily bubbling away in the fridge in their own booze. We feed them once a week, usually on a Thursday as this way they're pretty lively for baking on a Saturday and they're used every weekend we're home be it for loaves, bagels, pizzas or even naans.

We've toyed with quite a few different recipes and have finally found one which we're really happy with - that warrants a post of it's own. Although if you're interested in starting making your own sourdough bread I'd thoroughly recommend the course E5 Bakehouse run, they're a really friendly bunch and the course packs in loads of information and techniques in one day.

Here's the photo journal of this week's efforts: