What’s In Our Bread?
There are four ingredients in Proof sourdough. Flour, water, salt, and levain, which is really only flour and water again, but flour and water that has been left to its own devices long enough to develop opinions.
It is not a long list, and it was never meant to be. A loaf that needs more than that to hold itself together has usually been asked to do something bread was not built for — to sit for a week under plastic, or to taste the same in July as it does in January.
We bake once a day. This has more to do with the dough than with us: fermentation has its own clock, and a baker who tries to argue with it generally loses. The whole day's bread goes into the oven when the dough says it is ready.
The flour is unbleached; it has not been persuaded into looking whiter or behaving more predictably than flour naturally does. Milled wheat has always had a slight cream to it, a little variation from batch to batch, and we have never wanted to correct that.
Water is filtered through a special system installed at our shop. The amount of water changes the character of the loaf considerably — more, and the crumb opens up, glossy and irregular; less, and you get something closer, better suited to a sandwich than to being torn apart at the table.
Salt does more work than people assume. It is not simply seasoning; it slows the fermentation to a pace the baker can actually follow, and it sharpens whatever flavour the long ferment has produced. The levain does the rest — the lift, most of the flavour, and the sourness that ranges, depending on how it has been fed and how long it has been left, from barely perceptible to quite assertive.
None of this is difficult to verify. Pick the loaf up — it should feel like something, neither suspiciously light nor waterlogged. Look at the crust, which should be properly coloured, the kind of brown that comes from a hot oven and nothing else. Cut into it, and the crumb should look like it was made by fermentation rather than by a machine deciding what fermentation ought to look like: some larger holes, some smaller, nothing too tidy. And it should smell of something — grain, a little acid, whatever the crust has caramelised into. Bread with no smell to speak of usually has not much flavour either.
What we have not done is add anything to make the loaf behave better than a loaf naturally does. No dough conditioners to hurry the ferment along, no improvers to fake the structure a longer proof would have given for free, nothing to keep the crumb soft after it has every right to have gone firm.
This is less of a virtue and more the result of the kind of bread we wanted to make, and it comes with the obvious cost: the loaf changes as it sits. Good on the day it is baked and has had time to cool. Very good the next, particularly toasted. By the third day it has settled into something better suited to croutons or a bread soup than to eating on its own, and we would rather tell you that directly than let you find out with a stale slice in hand.
If you keep our loaves on the counter in a paper bag rather than sealed in plastic, they stale the way real bread has always staled — slowly, and mostly at the crust. When it reaches this stage, it is perfect sliced with some fresh mozzarella, tomato, basil and olive oil after being warmed in the oven.
Photo by Tomeo Sonner on Unsplash