Blue Poppy Seed Sourdough Dinner Buns

I feed my starter once a week, and when I do this I pour everything into a plastic bowl and add 1 cup AP flour and 1 cup water and let it proof. This used to take more than 10 hours, but these days my starter is ready in a few hours.

When my starter is ready, I put half of it inside its container and feed it with 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup water. I use the rest of it to bake bread.

Now, this week I wanted something different. I wanted something different but not difficult or complicated since I had been dealing with some annoying things related to my water purifier for two days.

So I just made bread according to S. J. Ross's recipe adding around 1 Cup spelt flour into the mix and divided the dough up into 16 parts and topped them off with blue poppy seed.

The result was warm wholesome sourdough buns that tasted great with garlic parsley butter.

Here's the recipe.

Blue Poppy Seed Sourdough Dinner Buns

Ingredients

2 Cups Sponge

1 Cup Spelt Flour

2 Cups AP Flour*

2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

5 Tsp Brown Sugar

2 Tsp Coarse Spanish Sea Salt

1 Tbsp Blue Poppy Seeds

*Approximate amount. Depending on the state of your sponge and other conditions, you may need more or less.

Step 1: Add the spelt flour to the sponge and mix it.

Step 2: Add the sugar and oil and mix some more.

Step 3: Add the rest of the flour and knead it until it is more or less mixed.

Step 4: Let it rest for 30 minutes and then knead it around 100 times.

Step 5: Let it rest for another 30 minutes and then knead it around 100 times.

Step 6: Let it rest for another 30 minutes and then knead it around 100 times.

Step 7: Let the dough rest until it has risen to around twice its original size. If you create an indentation with your finger and it does not spring back your bread is risen.

Step 8: Divide the dough into 4. Roll these into thick logs and then divide these into 4 again. This will give you 16 buns.

Step 9: Cover your baking tray with oven paper and put some coarse corn flour on it.

Step 10: Place the balls of buns on the paper and cover with a kitchen cloth and let them rise for 1-2 hours.

Step 11: When they have risen, dampen the tops of the buns with luke warm water and sprinkle blue poppy seeds on them.

Step 12: Put a steaming tray of boiling water on the bottom of the oven and put the oven tray in place. Close the oven and turn it on. The temperature should be set to 175C (350F).

Step 13: Bake for around 30 minutes.

Step 14: Serve warm with dinner!

Sourdough Herb & Olive Bread

When I fed 'Zlatan' this weekend, I kept separating his children into different bowls and making more and more 'Zlatan' and ended-up with too much sourdough bubbling all over the place, so I made a Sourdough Chocolate Cake which turned out to be a delightfully moist cake, but we were impatient and took it out of the bundt pan too quickly and guess what? It became unsuitable for photography. However, I can tell you that it tasted great and that I'd make it again. I also baked a loaf of bread and made two medium sized buns yesterday with some spelt flour thrown into it but I still had more sponge.

So as I write this, I'm making more of Jim Lahey's No Knead Baguettes and am trying out a new recipe from Sarah's Musings: Sourdough Focaccia.

Sourdough Herb & Olive Bread - Adapted from the Sourdough Focaccia recipe from 'Sarah's Musings'

You start out by mixing these together:

1.5 Cups Sponge (a starter that has been proofed)

1 Cup Finger Warm Water

1/4 Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1 Tablespoon Dark Honey

1 Cup AP Flour

This mixture was fermented for 1 hour.

Then, I mixed in:

1/2 Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil

2 Tsp Fine Sea Salt

...and more AP flour.

It should be noted that when using yeast, I prefer to mix in some AP flour first before I put in any oil or salt which the yeast do not like. I am not sure this makes much difference, but if you have had experiences with your bread not rising, this might help. Yeast feast on flour and this will help them multiply, but salt and oil will hinder them from propagating.

Now, Sarah's recipes says 4 cups flour, but flour varies in absorbency and starters/sponge can have more or less water in them, so although this gives you a very rough idea of how much flour you might need, the rule of thumb is to always trust your eyes and hands more when making the dough. I used around 4 cups + a little more flour, but you might need more or less.

So I put in as much AP flour was was necessary to make a smooth elastic dough.

I kneaded it for 5-7 minutes until it was smooth and elastic.

Then I put it back in the bowl to rest.

Sarah used a clean oiled bowl, but I have found that if you're a lazy and messy cook like me, your bread will not die if you just put it back in the dirty (dirty with yeast and flour) bowl you used to ferment the sponge. I guess this is why she's presumably a good homemaker, and I'm not - but I digress...

I covered the bowl with a cloth and let it rise for 1.5 - 2 hours as stipulated.

I then mixed in some herbs: 2 tsp oregano, 2 tsp thyme and 1 tsp rosemary.

I also mixed in 100g of oil cured black olives (pitted and chopped up).

I then lined a pan with more extra virgin olive oil and pressed the dough into the pan just like I did when I made Ilva's sweet focaccia. I wondered about letting it rest for another hour as Ilva's recipe did not require this additional step, but then I thought: It's sourdough and it will rise more slowly than the dried stuff I use.

So I let it rest for 60 minutes.

I was going to brush the dough with more olive oil, but like Sarah's, mine spilled over from the bottom of the pan on top of the dough too, so all I did was sprinkle some fleur de sel over it before I put it into the preheated oven.

Unfortunately, my biggest rectangular pan wasn't big enough and the thickness of the dough was more like 3 cm rather than 1.5 - 2 cm.

I baked it at 230 C (450 F) for around 25 minutes. I had a feeling it should bake for at least 30 minutes, but the top had become quite brown so I took it out of the oven.

...and here it is - a bread baked along the lines of a focaccia bread, but more robust. It is sinfully delicious when you have it with herb & garlic butter. Whatever you decide to call this bread, the crust is crisp and the inside of the loaf is lovely and moist. Don't forget to let it rest for 20 minutes before cutting it.

Summary of ingredients used in this recipe:

1.5 Cups Sourdough Starter

5 - 8 Cups AP Flour*

1/4 Cup + 1/2 Cup + 4 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil*

1 Tbsp Honey

2 Tsp Fine Sea Salt

2 Tbsp Fleur de Sel*

2 Tsp Oregano

2 Tsp Thyme

100 g Oil Cured Black Olives

*These are approximate portions. Use more or less depending on what's needed. The amount of fleur de sel you will sprinkle on top of your focaccia for example is really up to you.

Note: I don't watch football, but Ronny does. Guess who named the starter? On a more serious note, when you bake bread with salt sprinkled on top, it will make your bread damp. You either need to consume everything right away or if you have leftovers, you can preheat your oven to 200C and warm the bread for about 10 minutes. I like to sprinkle more fleur de sel over the bread when reheating them.

Spelt Flour Sourdough Bread

This is my attempt at incorporating spelt flour into my weekly sourdough baking.

I've been looking at incorporating different grains and seeds into my bread because when you have bread around the house all the time, it can get a bit boring to have the same bread week after week. A German friend had suggested using spelt flour and I happened to find 500g of it at a health food shop in Torremolinos so I snapped it up and it was there sitting in my cupboard waiting to be used.

It was a good thing I did some minor research before I embarked on this attempt as it seems spelt flour has different properties from regular wheat flour. Although it has a much higher protein content which is nice, it apparently has weaker gluten which means that you have to modify your bread baking a bit. Apparently you can overknead spelt whereas this isn't easy to do with wheat flour. I suggest you stop kneading the bread when you think the dough feels good rather than sticking to a fixed time or number of folds any recipe stipulates.

As usual I prepared my bread according to S. John Ross's recipe, but I also incorporated some elements from The Fresh Loaf. Shiao-Ping's baking is very precise and I'm sure that if you followed her instructions to a tee, your bread would be stellar, but I just pulled out easy to incorporate elements into my routine because following every detail was a bit too overwhleming for me.

The only modification I made to S. John Ross's recipe was that I let the bread rest and knead/folded it 3 times before I molded it into a loaf for the final proofing. I also wet my hands when I kneaded/folded the somewhat harder dough (due to the spelt?) to keep it from sticking to my hands. I did this alternately with dusting it with a bit of AP flour.

Anyhow, my spelt flour seemed to absorb water more readily than AP flour (even though spelt is supposed to be less absorbent), so I only added 1 cup AP flour and 1 cup spelt flour to the starter to form my dough this time. The type of spelt flour I used was organic and unbleached.

Further to this, I thought I'd try baking this loaf with a preheated oven and used Shiao-Ping's baking temperatures and times. This meant baking the bread with steam for 20 minutes at 230C and then baking it for another 25 minutes at 220-210C. Before the loaf went into the oven, I dusted it with a bit of AP flour.

The result?

The bread had a much thicker, crunchier crust with a lot of flavor.

However, as a result of introducing too many variables, I'm not sure whether it was the repeated kneading/folding, the preheated oven, the spelt flour or a combination of all of these that created this nice thick pleasantly crunchy crust.

Maybe someone can enlighten me.

Note: I feed my starter sometimes with whole wheat flour and sometimes with AP flour. Sometimes it's half and half. Because I fed my starter with 100% whole wheat flour last week, the starter itself was already pretty thick and dark when I started.