One of our favourite local baking guru’s, Yoli’s Bakery owner Nicky Cooper, shares some nuggets of wisdom for baking your own sourdough bread at home …
• Use a scale! You may be fond of your matching set of measuring cups and spoons but trust me, your full cup of flour will undoubtedly be different to mine and whoever developed the recipe you are following. For consistent results invest in a kitchen scale and look for a recipe in grams. There are great baking apps available to convert if your recipe asks for spoons and cups!
• If you are serious about making bread and want a nice creamy crumb with an open structure, like we favour at Yoli’s, you need to work with recipes with higher hydration percentages, much easier when you have a small mixer with a dough hook, really a worthy investment! Trying to mix wet dough by hand becomes very tricky and the temptation to keep adding flour is a bad idea as this changes the balance of the recipe.
• Adopt the attitude of low and slow, to get the best flavour, texture and health benefits from your loaf, long slow fermentations at lower temperatures are best. Besides this is what makes a sourdough a sourdough!
• Stretching and folding your dough while it undergoes its ‘bulk fermentation’ is the best way to ensure strength in the structure of your gluten to give you that desired rise and oven spring during baking!
• My best tip for sourdough enthusiasts who battle to maintain a culture when they are only baking once a week, is to use a pure rye culture, and STORE IT IN THE FRIDGE. It is the most stable of cultures and will last you between bakes without you having to feed and throw away daily, use a small amount of your starter to build the larger pre-ferment the day before you want to make your sourdough, then top up for next week, waste not want not, stoneground flour is expensive!
• Another great tip, use unsweetened pineapple juice in the first 2 days of building phase of your culture, the pineapple juice creates the right PH balanced environment for the wild yeast to thrive and a hostile for the development of harmful bacteria which can cause your culture to turn acid too quickly.
Details: Yolis Bakery, The Market, Ballito Lifestyle Centre
