The Art of Sculpture
Art in the Spotlight
By Kate Perry
Winter is made for spending quality time in the kitchen baking, and what could make your house smell more like home than bread? Sourdough bread, a popular choice for the home baker, is unique in that it doesn’t require yeast but instead uses a starter – which is a live culture of fresh flour and water. Once combined, the culture will begin to ferment and cultivate the natural yeasts in the air. Yeasts and bacteria from the atmosphere are unique to the house that’s baking it; the flavours and textures produced by their fermentation processes make your home-made loaf specific to you. A portion of the starter is added to the bread dough. These friendly microbes digest carbohydrates in the flour, releasing gases for rising and creating the flavorful by-products that make sourdough bread delicious. The microbes are also a useful prebiotic for our own gut bacteria, and may even reduce some IBS and similar gut symptoms experienced with other bread products.
If, like me, you have struggled to make your own, the next best thing is buying it from your local bakery. I visited with Ross Bread’s head baker Kellie Hamlin to ask her about making their regularly sold-out sourdough bread.
Tell me about your sourdough.
We have three starters here, a rye for the caraway rye bread, a miche which is 100% whole wheat, and an all-purpose, which is the biggest one and is about thirteen years old. Being older means it has a lot more yeasts in it than you might have at home making it for the first time, and we feed them every night with flour and water, so they continue to grow. Our sourdough bread we make in one shift. We used to do it overnight, leaving the dough in the fridge to ferment and rise at a slower pace, but we adjusted the recipe and timing about three years ago, adding more starter, cutting the production time to between three and four hours which works really well. It’s now one of the quicker breads we have, and one of the easiest. I do like to make it at
home myself.
What is the best thing about sourdough?
I personally love the sour taste and great crust. I have noticed that if you don’t use a sourdough starter, it’s harder to get such a crispy, crunchy crust. Sourdough is great for the gut too.
What one recommendation would you have for home bakers?
Patience! It takes a long time to learn the craft. Baking is unforgiving, so having patience is the most important
thing.
