Month: October 2016

I loved #SourdoughSeptember and I made another two sourdough loaves to the Bojon Gourmet recipe, this time with N7. I wanted to see if the beer flavour was more pronounced, and just to practice, practice, practice sourdough techniques.

Biggest lessons learned:

1 – don’t think you can make two loaves of sourdough bread before work, and still get in on time.

2 – don’t walk away from the oven without checking you haven’t knocked the temperature dial a bit.

3 – always pay full attention to the recipe.

4 – don’t put a cup of water on your carefully written out testing notes…

So the jottings that follow cover what I did a bit differently to last time. I did some time shifting basically, beginning the process at 5.30pm with a sourdough starter that I took out of the fridge to warm up a bit at 1pm.  Here’s a link to the original recipe that I’m basing the N1 / N7 Sourdough on, with lots of fiddling around…

Rather than using my stand mixer, I decided to try the Magimix. It did not go well. In fact I thought I had broken it (luckily not). Too much dough for the Magimix. It took me one hour to get to the proofing stage.

I put the dough in a large bowl with cling film over the top out in my fire escape overnight. There’s never any room in my fridge (it’s tiny), so I treat my fire escape like a larder…

Next morning at 6 I brought the dough into the kitchen to warm up a bit (would have left it for longer if I’d had time). It had risen very well, and looked good. I shaped it into two boules and popped in my airing cupboard inside a blown up bin bag as per Boujon Gourmet’s recommendation.

The first loaf went into the oven at 8am (I’d put the oven on around 7.10am with my Le Creuset casserole dish inside to heat up.

This time I just used cornmeal on the bottom of the dish – I didn’t bother with the baking parchment, it didn’t seem to affect the bottom of the loaf.

I must have knocked the temperature dial at some point, as when I checked at 20 minutes, it had been cooking at around 235 degrees, and I can’t read in my notes what I did next because of the cup of water!  I think that I turned it down to about 205 and looked for another 10 minutes.  Whatever I did, the loaf looked fine.

I turned the oven back up to 225, which is where it should have been (it took around 5 minutes to get back up to temperature).  Cooked for 20 minutes, and then another 10, forgetting to turn the temperature down – doh!  The loaf was a little bit burned on the bottom but not too bad.

Both loaves tasted great.  I didn’t feel as though the N7 loaves tasted more beery than the N1 loaves.  In fact, I preferred the taste of the N1 loaves.  For some reason, the rye flavour was more pronounced…

#SourdoughSeptember was brilliant and there is a loaf in the oven right now, made to Dan Lepard’s recipe using a beer barm.  I have used Hammerton’s Life on Mars so am thinking of this loaf as a Barmy Bowie Bread…

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