sourdough

Lively Up Your Day

If you like to start your morning with a little kick, may I suggest these English muffins? Made with both sourdough starter and yogurt, their tang can be toned down with a little raspberry jam, or turned up with a gloss of unsalted butter.

Either way, maybe they will rock your morning like they rocked mine — as I was finishing my muffin, I felt that rumbling and shaking that in this neck of the woods can only mean one thing: earthquake. It was a little one, as most of them are, but an earthquake nonetheless.

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Apple Cider Sour Rye

If you like assertively sour bread and a dark, flavorful crust, you will like this bread. If you don’t like one or both of those things, please skip it.

Although I started out thinking this bread would be an adaptation of the Normandy Rye from Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery, it turned out this bread didn’t want to be that. Instead it wanted to be more sour and more rye. Although at about 41% rye flour I suppose it qualifies as only a light rye, the flavor is not light at all.

The crust on this wants to get really really dark, and you should let it. The crust in the photo below looks like it is burned, but it isn’t. The sugars (which are in extra abundance here from the cider) have caramelized to give the crust a deep, sweet flavor that contrasts very nicely with the sour crumb.

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Sourdough Pancakes

Today is Pancake Day, so this might be a good time to post my favorite sourdough pancakes, the only pancakes I ever make any more. My photo does not do them justice; anyone who can enlighten me about how to get pancakes and syrup to sit still for the camera, please speak up.

Also, anyone who can offer a plausible explanation for why every pancake recipe under the sun makes exactly 14 pancakes will win a prominent place on my list of culinary geniuses.

For the lightest pancakes, fresh mature starter is the best, but I have used refrigerated, several-days-old starter for up to 50% of the total. Pure Vermont maple syrup makes everything good.

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Roasted Potato Bread, Two Ways

I made a lot of potato bread this weekend.

My intention was to make a simple sourdough bread with the addition of roasted potato nuggets that would stand up to the dough rather than receding into it, lending appreciable color, texture, and potato flavor.

The first time around, that wasn’t exactly how it played out, but I was still pleased with the bread. I roasted the potatoes at 350F so they were soft but not overly brown, with a few cloves of crushed garlic that I removed after roasting. Even having been left unpeeled, the potatoes did disintegrate almost completely into the dough. The result was a beautiful soft crumb with no discernible potato flavor, making it excellent for sandwiches (even PB&J) as well as accompaniment to the fantastic eggplant parmesan I had at the home of old East-coast friends who are now our neighbors (yes!).

As much as I liked the first loaves, I had not achieved what I set out to, so the following day it was more potato bread. This time I roasted the potatoes at a higher temperature (450F) so they developed more of a crust and a deeper flavor. The 3/4-inch pieces stayed semi-intact during mixing, giving the best of both worlds: a soft, mottled tan crumb studded with golden potato chunks and a definite potato flavor throughout. Definitely not a PB&J bread this time.

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A More Sour Sourdough

Norwich Sourdough, which was My New Favorite Sourdough when I wrote about it last year, is still my number-one no-fail go-to bread. (In fact, I was thinking of renaming it Three-Compound-Adjective Sourdough.) It’s mildly sour and goes with just about everything.

For those times when a more assertive tang is the order of the day, this variation serves nicely. It’s essentially the Norwich sourdough formula but with 50% more rye flour and 33% more levain. Just as Norwich Sourdough is based on Jeffrey Hamelman’s Vermont Sourdough, this is adapted from Vermont Sourdough With Increased Whole Grain, both from the essential Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes.

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A Good Rye

I spent the first few decades of my life believing I did not care for rye bread. Clearly I had a bad experience somewhere in my childhood, and those early associations are nothing if not tenacious. It’s a bread that’s fairly easy to avoid in this country, if one is so inclined, and I was.

The breakthrough came when we made a version of this lovely simple rye bread in my first class at SFBI. At the end-of-the day tasting, not wanting to eschew it completely and risk exposing myself as a bread wimp, I opted for the smallest piece on the cutting board. Happily, I found myself won over by its rich, earthy flavor and chewy texture, and kicking myself for all those wasted years of rye abstinence.

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