So, this year, apart from odd days away at Conference or in Scotland, I’ve made almost all of our bread, keeping alive a sourdough starter made following S John Ross’s starter page and from various other sources since. My first steps are here.

Since the diet began, I’ve had to cut back on bread quite significantly. You know, it’s been one of my biggest learning points, just how many calories are in bread, pasta and rice. I’ve been pooh-poohing for years any dieters who talk about cutting back on carbs, assuming them to have been misunderstanding how Atkins and other high protein diets work. In fact, it seems you barely have to blink at a packet of rice to have 300 calories on your plate before you even start adding the nice stuff.

But I am still eating some bread, and so I am still making bread.

My parents, who have made all their own bread since time immemorial, use a Kenwood Chef to batch make 48 rolls, which are then baked and frozen and defrosted as necessary. I haven’t been doing this because a) my tiny freezer is full b) no Kenwood chef, and without it, that’s an awful lot of dough and c) I’d get bored of rolls!

What I have been doing is making a huge variety of loaves. With just a few bags of different flour, and a few store cupboard ingredients and a few interesting baking tins, you can have an almost infinite variety of different loaves and rolls.

The early version of the recipe made an awful lot of washing up, so I’ve made some simple changes, and changed my tools a bit.

I no longer wake the starter up by pouring it into a bowl. It’s plenty enough just to bring it back to room temperature in the jar it lives in, and top up the same jar.

When I’m ready, I pour 2 cups of starter/sponge, 3 cups of flour, some sugar, salt and EVOO into the breadmaker I pretty much forgot about when starting down the sourdough route. The breadmaker makes a dough and lets it rise for an hour, then beeps. Halfway through the initial knead you have to check the dough – if it looks like crumbs, it wasn’t wet enough, so you stop the machine, add more water, and start it again. When it’s ready, I give the dough another knead and shape it for the final loaf – in the banneton for a round loaf, knocked square and rolled for a ciabatta type loaf, or divided into two, stretched and rolled for baguettes, or divided into 12 for rolls. Allow to rise for as long as necessary – and this time has shortened as the sourdough mix has got stronger. Now it can fully raise a loaf overnight – even if you leave it in the fridge for a cool, retarded rise.

Bake for 30-40 minutes at 200 degrees. I think I get a better rise out of the mix when the fan in the fan oven is off, and when the oven has definitely properly preheated. I almost think a cooler oven is better.

In terms of variety – there are all the exciting different sorts of shapes, from challa to fougasse. Most supermarkets have a variety of flours, and we’ve had wholemeal, granary, malthouse flours, always mixed with strong white flour. Then there are different grains, like spelt and rye. Then there’s additives: spices, herbs, sundried tomatoes, other fruit and veg, yoghurt, tomato purée, butter and egg yolks for brioche, whole eggs and spices for hot cross buns. Then there’s coatings – eggwash, large grain salt, flour, oats, more herbs and spices.

As I said before, it is possible to make bread without shopping, but I have bought the following things to make breadmaking easier and more fun:

• A banneton – you prove the bread in this, but take it out to cook.
• Baguette proving tray – like the banneton, this doesn’t need to be washed; unlike the banneton, it goes in the oven
• A pizza stone (this was on offer – Amazon might be a better bet. Mine hasn’t arrived yet)
• American measuring cups

Some books

• Bread Matters – have to confess I haven’t read all of this weighty tome
• Bread: baking by hand – mostly for the lovely pictures!

And some things I might be buying soon

• A grignette – a very sharp razor blade for slashing the top of the loaf before baking – sharp knives are no comparison
• A dough scraper – well, I don’t really need that, but it would be a cheap thing to add to the basket if I bought a grignette
• An oval banneton
• A baker’s peel – erk, where would this live!?
• A stand mixer – aargh! No, Amazon, no!

I’ve had my sourdough starter sitting on the side in the kitchen for over a week, feeding it regularly, and using some of the discards to make half sourdough, half yeast risen bread.

It still looks like this:

Looking closely enough, you can see bubbles in the mix from the inside of the jar – but it’s nowhere near as lively as this starter picture.

So I was a little uneasy that it wasn’t ready to make a wholly sourdough risen loaf. It’s still pretty cold in the kitchen, and that might account for the low activity in the starter. Still I tried anyway – and left the rising dough sitting on the boiler overnight.

And the dough went from this:

To this:

Which seems to have more or less risen to double the size of the original dough, which was the criteria for continuing. But leaving it on the boiler also ever so slightly cooked it. The dough was crusty on top.

I had been watching these series of videos from FoodWishes – in particular the last one. I was very impressed that the guy there seems to be using the same ingredients as me, but with vastly better technique and better proving got the most enormous loaf out of the same mix.

I used some aspects of his technique before realising I don’t actually have a baking tray that big, so ended up with two smaller batons instead of one giant one. I don’t have a water spray, so did the best I could by chucking a cup of water into the oven before setting off cooking. (I have to say that still sounds like a really bad idea: throwing a cup of water into an electric oven whilst it’s hot?!)

Anyhoo, these are the loaves that resulted.

So, one of the things I’ve been doing instead of cleaning during the dark winter days is experimenting with sourdough. This is a way of leavening bread without using baker’s yeast, and involves quite a lot of mucking around and takes an extraordinary amount of time to make each loaf.

On the plus side, although you can buy all sorts of expensive equipment to help you with sourdough baking, there’s no need to do so. You can make everything you need with just flour and water, and a baking tray.

Instead of packet yeast, you make an icky mix of flour and water that takes natural yeasts and bacteria (the good kind) out of the air and flour. The flour and water mix needs feeding every day with more flour and water until it gets going, and then can be put in the fridge and fed only weekly.

When you’re ready to use it, you pour the whole starter out into a bowl in the warm and feed it again. Leave it in a bowl until it froths, while you try and clean the manky jar it lives in most of the time. Use most of the bowlful (called a “sponge”) to make the actual bread and reserve some of it to back in the jar in the fridge for the next loaf. The natural yeasts are not as quick as commercial bakers yeast, so it can take the best part of two days to prepare the sponge and prove the dough before cooking.

All this I have learned, mostly from S John Ross’s very down to earth, nice and simple page. I’ve also been dipping my feet into the Sourdough Companion but they are serious bread nerds and even their beginner’s guide is pretty heavy going.

My starter is still quite young, and so I’ve not yet been able to make a full sourdough loaf.

When you feed the starter you’re supposed to discard half of it, but yesterday, I used the discarded bit to make a half-n-half sourdough / baker’s yeast loaf.

(I wouldn’t normally use American cups as quantities for any recipe, but I have just discovered that those plastic Ikea beakers are the right size to be a measuring cup, and suddenly that’s the easiest way to measure.)

This is a hybrid of S John Ross’s basic recipe and some of the dough training recipes from Sourdough Companion.

The sponge
In a bigger bowl than you think you need, put
1 cup immature starter
1 cup warm water
sachet quick yeast

The dough
After the sponge has sat for a few minutes and started to foam, add

3 cups bread flour
2 tsp salt
4 tsp sugar
splash olive oil

Bring the mix together to a soft dough with a wooden spoon and then do a few initial stretches by hand to help form it. Stretch and fold a third over from the back and third over from the front before turning 90 degrees and flipping over to repeat. Although you’re supposed to stretch and knead bread on an oiled flat surface, I’ve always down this in one large plastic bowl, which helps prevent the flour from getting everywhere. Let the dough have its first proof in the same bowl, for an hour or so in a cool room, until the dough has grown.

At this point, I intended to knock the dough back and leave it in the fridge-cold conservatory until the following morning. I though the conservatory would be cold enough to retard the rising (the longer you can leave a dough before it finishes rising, the better the flavour, apparently)

Unfortunately the superhuman packet yeast just kept going through the cold, and by morning it had risen to fill the banneton.

Oh, yeah, bannetons. You don’t have to buy anything to do sourdough, but a banneton is the one thing I did buy. It’s a pretty patterned shaped container you put the bread in for its final proving. It supports the dough, and the pretty shapes imprint the top of the loaf so that the final loaf looks nice. I bought mine here after Christmas, and it was in the post within a day. You flour the banneton so the dough doesn’t stick to it. Make sure you turn it out and don’t try and cook in the banneton!

So this morning, all I had to do was bake the loaf. Time and temperature was the key difference between John Ross and Sourdough Companion. Ross says 170 deg c for 35 mins, without pre-heating the oven. SC says preheat the oven to 210 deg c for at least an hour and then cook for 45 mins. So I fudged it. I set the oven the 200 deg and let it start warming. After about 5 mins, but before it got to temperature, I put the bread in on a baking tray lined with parchment. And the loaf was ready long before the timer sounded – something 25 mins. You can tell when it’s ready because you get a hollow sound when you bang the bottom with a wooden spoon.

Allow to cool before cutting and you can check to see the state of the “crumb” (the bit that isn’t the crust). Are there good size uniform air pockets? Does it look right? How far through does the crust go? Is it all cooked?

This looks OK and tastes OK, was easy to cut and not too heavy. I’ll try something similar for Monday morning, and hopefully soon, the starter will be ready to make bread on its own without the addition of the packet yeast.

Oh – one final thing – I want to try and use this crust topping to make tiger bread that’s suddenly all over the supermarkets.