My other half and I have more or less given up on giving each other stuff as presents. We already have most everything we need; we share pretty much everything, so buying presents for each other feels a bit like cheating. And in any case, he’s a difficult bugger who always says ‘dunno’ when I ask him what he wants.
Instead, we’ve taken to giving each other experiences. Yes, I know, it’s all very hipster twat, but there are so many opportunities in London to try things you’ve always wanted to under the tutelage of an understanding expert. Last year, I was sent on a gin-mixing odyssey. For Christmas, I gave the man a Fish Market experience, for which he had to get up in the dark and go down to Billingsgate for 6AM in order to be led past stalls of undulating sea-life, taught how to spot the best catches by gleaming eye and rosy gill, and then whisked away to a cookery school above the market to learn how to prepare and cook the fish he’d bought. And for me, he had purchased a voucher to the half-day class of my choice from the Bread Ahead Bakery School.
Hard Cross Buns
I am a pretty keen foodie. I love to cook, and MAN I love to eat. Bread is a particular passion, as far as the eating of it goes – but whenever I’ve ventured into the world of kneading and proving, it’s all gone a bit medieval on me. What should have been meltingly soft hot-cross buns turned to sugared tennis balls as soon as they’ve cooled down. My scones shattered to smithereens at the slightest pressure of a butter knife. And my single abortive attempt at a pizza base resulted in what can only be described as a rubber Frisbee full of hot glue. So I was reasonably sceptical that a few hours playing with flour would rid me of my bread-based Black Spot.
On that basis, I thought I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and so signed up for the Introduction to Sourdough session. I ate a lot of sourdough when on holiday on the West Coast of the USA, and was aware that it was not your ordinary bread: that it made use of mysterious ‘wild’ yeasts floating invisibly in the fresh air; that a sourgdough ‘starter’ could be handed down for generations, spawning thousands of loaves like some sort of artisanal Alien. Even more than traditional breadmaking, sourdough seemed to be a dark art. So I didn’t believe for a moment that this would be the beginning of my own sourdough pedigree line. I hoped for an edifying morning, and to walk away with a few edible loaves crafted under the care of a professional.
Such tea; very brownie
I arrived slightly late to Bread Ahead’s Borough Market headquarters, having been inevitably waylaid by all the temptations of that quarter of London on a Saturday morning. Louise, partner of Bread Ahead founder Justin Gellatly, waved me in, instructing me to help myself to refreshments (coffee, tea, and the most unctuously chocolatey brownies I’ve ever tasted in my life) and take a seat on a high stool with the other members of the class. Everyone was busy investigating the simple kit we had all been supplied with (apron, spatula, scale, small plastic pot), and waiting for self-declared ‘dough anarchist’ and sourdough sage Aidan Chapman to begin the lesson.
Aidan generated an instant sense of excitement about sourdough baking, whilst simultaneously dispelling any fear that we amateur bakers might have felt. His explanation of the ancient simplicity of baking with wild yeast was accessible, whilst still giving his audience a sense of the richness of the tradition and the seriousness with which he took it. But very little time was wasted on talk – almost immediately, we were getting our hands dirty making our very own ‘starter’.
The starter is what makes a sourdough bread sour. It is very simply flour and water mixed together and left to ferment, the wild yeasts occurring naturally on the air and in the flour itself acting on the mixture to give it the characteristic sour flavour from which it takes its name. A bit of starter goes into every sourdough loaf, and whenever you want to take from your starter, you first need to fortify it with a meal of flour and water. Continually baking and feeding, you can keep your starter alive theoretically forever – and not just in a ‘George Washington’s axe’ type way. Over the years, with the accumulation of various wild yeasts and prolonged maturation, a starter will develop its own unique character, some bakers would even say personality. The Bread Ahead bakery makes all of its sourdough from a single starter, which is named Brucie after the Canon from nearby Southwark Cathedral who blessed the starter when it was first made.
My baby!
Once we had created our own unprepossessing pots of gunge, Aidan therefore insisted that we christen them. Most people, in the spirit of the thing, named them after one of their children; having no sprogs, and at a bit of a loss, I called mine ‘Dough-Joe’ – a name plucked from the air like wild yeast. Starters take the best part of a week to mature, so we put our embryonic bread-children aside; for the rest of the session, we would be using the tried and tested Brucie.
Aidan did the best he could to teach us, in a few hours, everything that we would need to know to reproduce at home a process that normally takes several days – simple though sourdough-making may be, one thing it definitely is not is quick.
This required a certain amount of Blue Peter-style “here’s one I made earlier” throughout the class. The bowls of dough we messily mixed up would be whisked away by efficient assistants, and replaced with pre-proved versions that represented what might have been were we to sit around and watch our own rise for between eight and eighteen hours. The rye loaves that we shaped and tinned, rather than being left to rise at room temperature for eight hours, were pressure-proved in a warm room in 30 minutes so we could get them in the oven and out again before lunchtime. But at every stage, we were able to get our hands on the bread, to mix and measure and knead and taste, experiencing in abbreviated form the whole process from starter to slicing. This, accompanied by a reassuring booklet of explanatory notes and recipes to refer to once we went home, ensured that nothing felt rushed or wasted. Aidan’s frequent pauses to ask “does that make sense?” were met with universal nodding heads, and the atmosphere was one of keen craftsmanship rather than harassed assembly-line.
At the end of an enjoyable morning, I walked away with a head full of ideas and a belly full of bread and brownie, a pot of sourdough starter, and two loaves still warm out of the oven – a sturdy, spiced borodinsky and a bubbly round levain. Unable to resist the temptation, I passed by Neal’s Yard Dairy on my through the market and bought a couple of beautiful cheeses to set them off. They were completely delicious, and I spent most of the afternoon in a carbohydrate coma. Heaven.
And not a single calorie was counted that day.
However, the proof of the pudding would be in the (eventual) eating – how much of what I’d learned would I be able to reproduce when left to my own devices, with no Bruce, no Aidan, no baker’s oven? Most importantly, would I (someone who struggles to keep a supermarket basil plant alive) be able to nurture my infant starter Dough-Joe through the crucial first week of life?
To be continued….
Everything is better in a Fairisle Sweater 