Tag: sourdough

First spring of my sourdough Lois!

I’m still new to the sourdough owner community and a novice still learning many things with my 6months old Lois. We have had a difficult start, very… but I must say that I am impressed by its behavior for the past few weeks. I am keeping exactly the same regimen and treatments, keeping it in the fridge during the week and outside during the weekend to bake that I have always had. But now Lois is responding in a beautiful way… is it that spring is in the air? I can’t yet explain it and wish it will last… It doesn’t starve in the fridge after 2 days (Lois is/was a glutton), rather the contrary. And anytime I use it to bake it has a much better taste and smell and a faster process. It’s making baking easy and very very enjoyable. So pleased that I decided to use it to make bao again. I filled them with what I had in the fridge: onions and smoked sausages. Chiba prefecture has quite a few pork farms and some make rather delicious sausages, that A. likes very very much so I always have some in the fridge, just in case. So here is the recipe of the bao.

Bao (makes 8 pieces)

For the buns

  • 200g of flour
  • 50g of sourdough
  • A pinch of salt
  • Water

For the filling

  • 1 onion
  • 4 little (smoked) sausages
  • A large pinch of cinnamon

First prepare the bun dough as it needs a few hours to raise. In a bowl mix the flower, the sourdough and the salt. Add water little by little while kneading to obtain a slightly wet dough. Soft and smooth. Leave to raise for some time (a few hours depending on your sourdough, room temperature…). It should raise and at least become elastic with an homogeneous texture. While it’s raising, peel and chop the onion rather thinly. In a pan cook the onions at low heat, with a bit of water. They shouldn’t change color much. Add a bit of salt and the cinnamon. Continue cooking under cover until very soft and tender. Add a bit of water if needed to avoid roasting them. Once cooked, let cool down.

Now your dough should have raised enough. Cut it in 8 equal pieces, and make 8 balls. Roll each of them a floured top into 15cm rounds. Split the onion in 4, and fill 4 of the dough rounds. Roll the 4 sausages each in a dough round and roll them. Let them rest for an hour our two.

Prepare a steamer and steam them for 15min. I put them on a square of cooking paper to avoid them to stick, and put a lot of space between as they will inflate quite a bit.

Finally I served with soya sauce. The sausage bao could be nice with a bit of karashi (Japan kind of mustard), but I didn’t have any…

Stuffed bread or kind of calzone

It’s past 20:00 and A. is done working. I know because I can hear him play a tune on his guitar from my “office”, meaning he is waiting for me to stop working and he is hungry… now is going to be a good time for me to think about dinner if we want to eat anytime soon! I am not in the mood for a Japanese recipe, nor for pasta… I was thinking about a quiche but that will take too much time to bake… so what then?

The rainy day makes me crave for a sunny recipe… I have this ball of campagne bread proving since the morning that has risen to a lovely volume. And this mozzarella from a local cheese farm I am slowly eating into bites as I think… diner is all decided! It will be a stuffed bread or a kind of calzone, with fresh vegetables in and mozzarella.

I turn on the oven to 250deg. I take a piece of my dough, about 10cm diameter ball, and roll it into a 4-5mm thin circle of 40-50cm diameter. Cut my mozzarella into slices, top half of the dough. Wash a tomato, a bundle of spinach, cut them and continue topping the half. Then I fold gently the second half and close it. It kinda look like a giant gyoza!! A bit of olive oil on the top, a pinch of salt, a few tiny pick to make some holes and in the oven for 20min!

The result was really great, crispy crust on the outside, but still a bit melting on the inside, infused with the vapors of the vegetables. Something I will do again for sure!!!

Soup and bread…

What is more comforting than a warm soup when you have spent the whole day outside and the temperature have suddenly dropped? Every year I am shocked by the sudden change of the temperatures in Japan in autumn. There is always one day in November when you start the day wearing tea shirts and short pants, and go swimming in the morning and then turn on the heater and cashmere sweat pants and sweater in the evening are more than necessary. When this time comes, I crave for warm vegetables soups. A. always complains as he prefers them to be velouté. I love any style, but rarely bother using the blender, and prefer listen to A.’s complaint… 😉

One thing that I love with soup is when they come with croutons, but I also have amazing memories of rural vegetables soup with fresh sourdough bread eaten at Mme Fages’s place in Mas Saint Chely. Something that I would be so happy to have, warming up near the fireplace after a mushroom hunt in the cold. That and her chocolate mousse!

Now that I have Lois and make only sourdough bread, it was perfect for this kind of very simple dinner: a piece of bread remaining from breakfast, many vegetables waiting too long their turn to be prepared, a pan with the juice of a long cooked piece of pork. That’s what this soup is made of, and here is the recipe.

Vegetables soup and bread (2 servings)

  • 1/2 sweet potato
  • A piece of kabocha (3cm slice)
  • 1 little turnip
  • 1 carrot
  • 2 bundles of komatsuna or spinach
  • Water, salt and pepper
  • Bouillon of your choice, mine comes from the pan in which I slowly cooked a piece of pork
  • 2 generous slices of sourdough bread

In the pan I cooked the pork I add about 600ml of water and heat. I wash, peel and chop the vegetables and add them to the bouillon in order: carrot, turnip, sweet potato, kabocha, greens. I cook at medium heat until the vegetables are soft or mushy. Add salt and pepper. Blend and serve. Top with the bread roughly cut, and eat right away.

No need for butter, olive oil, no nothing.

Completely in love with my sourdough 🤍🤍🤍

After the slightly difficult beginnings with my sourdough starter Lois, it’s been almost 2months and we have reached a nice cruising speed, I use it all the time now. I’m still a bit surprised that my starter hasn’t done any crazy bubbling so far, on the contrary, it’s been behaving very very well, doing regular foaming but to a reasonable volume, and when in need for food it smells a nice apple flavour.

Cooking bread with my sourdough starter at first was quite tedious, with the impression of starting from the scratch, in particular, I had to relearn how the proving and rising worked, cooking at higher temperatures, with many of my first breads that just imploded when baking, ending up with big cracks on the bottom rather than on the top, or being too dense. I also needed a bit of adjustment with the flour I was using. I am still searching for a steady supply of organic local flour (and I will make a post as soon as I find something that is worth mentioning). The ones I have used during the summer are now out of stock and it seems unsure when they will have stock again. Together with searching for supply, I steadily continued and learned from my mistakes, and now they are all fixed or so, and I have started to obtain a regular shape and beautiful crusts with fluffy crumble on a regular basis. I started playing again with whole wheat, wheat bran,nuts etc… In the end, it seems that lower room temperature and longer times work very well for my sourdough starter. That to say that the sourdough adventure is a beautiful one and the flavour of the breads are uncomparable with those made with yeast (dry or fresh), so even if it took me so long to make up my mind, that it is a hassle to travel with my sourdough back and force between Tokyo and Ohara, it is just a new habit. And if while in Tokyo I use little of the sourdough for baking (until I get my kitchen redone with an oven…), but the one thing that I find really amazing is to use the extra sourdough I have for flat breads and for pancakes. It brings the flavour to a new level, something quite addictive.

  • Flat breads
  • Hazelnut and walnut bread
  • Plain white bread

So if you have a sourdough starter that you don’t use much for bread baking like me, I highly recommend you continue feeding it every day and use it for anything that needs flour and water. If you have other tricks to use your sourdough please let me know I am curious about other uses. Indeed Lois is quite gluttonous and in 4 days it gets quite voluminous!
Actually I have already starting giving parts of it away to friends so if you are interested in a stable sourdough starter, please let me know!

I knew it…

Well… while this week has been crazy busy with work, I also was very excited with my sourdough experiment… and things turned out almost as I expected they would… with utter fun when Lois grew and foamed and in utter disappointment when it stopped, finishing in a nauseous mess that stunk like I couldn’t imagine it would. Sourdough is not for me, I knew it…

Lois on the 2nd day, gently bubbling

I read books, blogs, websites about sourdough before starting (it took me 5 years to get ready for the commitment!!!!) and while I was observing it growing. I wanted to do right, not to waste precious time and resources. Then I was almost desperate when it started to stink, read even more about all the possible tricks, tested them all: sugar, malt, fridge, not fridge, more food, more mixing, rest, splitting it and starting afresh… nothing seemed to have worked truly. Almost 1kg of mixture went down the drain in a terrible smell. The rest is sitting in the kitchen in a desperate hope I can still save it. The smell is gone but no foaming and bubbling as I thought it would… part of the passive mixture was used for pancakes this morning…

But before things went south I had on the third day just enough to make a tiny bread to test it when it was still good! And damned! Even if I rushed it a bit ( temperature went down with the rain so the rising was too slow for the impatient me!) the crust was perfectly crusty, the crumbs were moist and soft, and the taste of whole wheat and sourdough was amazing. Enough to keep me trying to save what is left of Lois… so now I am in this terrible situation where I want to stop hoping I can grew a stable relationship with my sourdough, but I can’t take the final decision to trash it all, as the taste of sourdough bread was so perfect…

Lois

It’s been more than 5 years that I bake weekly or more and since the beginning I was tempted by preparing my own sourdough starter, but the traveling back and forth between Tokyo and Isumi and our almost monthly business trips abroad stopped me from doing it… yet I never fully abandoned the idea, and recently I got a bit disappointed with dry yeast. Even using respectus panis proportions, I felt I couldn’t control the yeast. One day it bubbles in 30min like crazy, the next, even after 2h I barely see a difference… Then, I had long discussions with my best friend M. about sourdough and bread making, saw how sourdough breads look much nicer, with darker crust and soft and moist crumble on IG, and to finish convincing me I should try, I read Robin Sloane’s Sordough and not that the novel convinced me to have my own sourdough, rather it made me more intrigued with this strange life-of-its-own thing. Since we probably won’t be traveling at all this year, and we have 4 days in Isumi, so I just decided it was time to try.

So here is Lois, my sourdough starter in the making… just freshly mixed: 50g of whole wheat flour and 50g of water… well… now, see you in 3 days hopefully with some bubbling…

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