Sourdough. 

Doesn’t that already sound magic? Doesn’t it sound simply ‘yum’?

It almost seems like it’s the stuff legends are made of. Especially those legends that tell you that it’s something really nice but also really, really difficult. So, after admittedly not being too happy about recent bread making results (the last one turned out to be more like a giant cookie), wasn’t it not a little over-ambitious to chase the holy grail?

It probably would be, but we needed magic to regain self confidence. And, we figured that it’s really not that difficult compared to for example macaroons. Sourdough is very easy to do, all you need is some discipline to feed it regularly. We started with 100ml of warm water and added 50 grams of rye and 50 grams of barley flour. And then we just left it in a dark, warm corner. Next morning, we added 100ml of water and 100 grams of rye. And so on..

Now, obviously, if you just keep feeding, you’d end up with a very big pile of sourdough. So, third time we were feeding we removed 100grams of the mixture before, and we decided to use it.

We also learned that most likely we would need a very wet dough to create a light, airy structure. So, since our starter dough wasn’t yet fully developed, we also did the yeast mix with 200ml of warm water, some sugar and some yeast.

We then used 100 grams of rye and 150 grams of spelt together with oil and salt. Mix everything except for the sourdough, let it stand for 2 hours. Add the magic stuff, kneed well (inside the bowl) and let rest again for 1 hour. After that we simply poured the dough into a deep pan (the sound it makes when detaching from the bowl, sucking air in, always gets us excited) and put it in the cold oven. Turn the oven on to about 180 degree and 45 – 50 minutes later you’re ready.

And yes, the trick worked. The bread turned out absolutely amazing! We’re happy again!