“To me, sourdough is the quintessential way of baking bread. We fully respect the work of the farmers and the millers who have dedicated their time and passion to produce beautiful flour. It’s simple, but mastering simplicity is complicated,” says Grégoire Michaud, the Swiss chef behind Wan Chai’s Bakehouse and artisanal bakery Bread Elements, which supplies sourdough breads and pastries to restaurants and hotels. He adds, “Flour is our paint, the oven is our canvas and sourdough bread is our art.”
Michaud has 25 years of experience baking for five-star hotels and three-Michelin-stars restaurants, and is the author of five cookbooks including Artisan Bread, which was published in 2009. Here, he shares his recipe for the perfect sourdough bread to make at home.
The Sourdough Starter
Ingredients
- Water 100ml
- Raisins 30g
- Wheat flour (strong bread flour) 50g
Method
- Measure the water in a jar and add the whole raisins.
- Cover it, and let it ferment for about 6 days in a room temperature place.
- Strain the raisins out of the fermented water and measure 60 ml of it.
- Mix the 60 ml with the flour, place in a covered plastic or glass jar.
- Leave it for 24 hours at room temperature (25C).
- The starter should have fermented into a bubbly soft dough
The Sourdough Bread
Ingredients
- Wheat flour (strong bread flour) 400g
- Whole wheat flour 70g
- Rye flour 30g
- Water 400-450ml
- Sourdough starter 100g
- Guerande salt 10g
Method
- Mix the 3 kind of flours with the full portion of starter, the salt and 400 ml of water.
- Mix it into a homogenous dough that has a bit of elasticity.
- Possibly add some more water or not, depending on the absorption of the flours (You want to obtain a very soft texture of dough and it will be sticky).
- Keep the dough in a container for an hour, then with wet hands, fold it like a tri-fold wallet.
- Keep it another hour at room temperature, always covered hermetically.
- Then shape your loaf by folding it very gently and place it in a bowl with a floured kitchen towel.
- Cover it and let it proof at room temperature for another 45 minutes.
- Place it in the fridge at 5C overnight.
- The next day, flip it over on a baking tray or inside a cast iron pot.
- Score the bread with a very sharp blade or knife and bake it for about 40 minutes at 200C.
Editor
Emma Russell
