sourdough

Simplicity is Relative, Sourdough Crackers

~ mary_m ~ 1 Comment

February’s cookbook club book was Plenty*. I have several friends who adore this book and I looked forward to exploring it and perhaps expanding my kitchen toolkit to include more Middle Eastern flavors and techniques. As it turned out, however, this was not the right book for me. Plenty is chock full of delicious recipes, and those recipes are chock full of somewhat precise and complicated techniques along with not-so familiar (to me) ingredients. What it is not chock full of, however, is unifying theory or process explanations which would lead me into the recipes themselves. For something I’m not already familiar with, I definitely prefer more prose about why and how to do things, what’s integral and what can be simplified, etc. To expand my Middle Eastern influenced toolkit, I’m going to need a different book.**

The recipe I choose to make, Saffron Tagliatelle with Spiced Butter, was beautiful and delicious, but also gave me hours of grief when my dough was too wet and my pasta roller clearly did not have the same capacity for which the recipe was written. I’m glad I tried it. When I make pasta again, however, I’ll follow some combination of Alice Water’s advice, my brilliant spouse’s advice, and this article on Serious Eats (which seems to agree, on the whole, with my spouse and Alice Waters) and I’ll leave Plenty on the shelf.

Then, after spending way too much time muttering under my breath about complicated recipes being barriers to home cooks, I decided to make something simple. And I did! And it was delicious! And I realized that while it was simple to me, recipes that start with a cup of sourdough starter and involve rolling dough thin enough for crackers, aren’t necessarily simple to others. I may have some work to do on walking my talk. Nevertheless, if you happen to have some sourdough starter and a silicon baking mat or two, these are great!***

Simple Sourdough Crackers

  • 1 cup sourdough starter
  • 1/4 cup olive oil (or ghee or lard or coconut oil or …), plus more for brushing
  • 1 cup (or more) whole wheat flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • coarse salt for sprinkling

Mix starter, oil, flour, and salt together, adding more flour until a relatively stuff dough forms. Knead lightly (for a minute or two) in the bowl, then cover with plastic wrap and let rest for ~8 hours (up to 24 is probably fine).

Preheat oven to 350º.

Divide dough into two halves*** and shape each roughly into a rectangle. Place the rectangle on asilicon baking mat or sheet of parchment and roll thin, covering as much of the mat or parchment as possible while remaining within the confines of what will fit on your baking sheet. (I kept the plastic wrap on top of the dough to keep my rolling pin from sticking without adding more flour.) Repeat with the other half.

Brush the dough with a bit more olive oil and sprinkle with coarse salt. Using a bench scraper or spatula****, cut the dough into cracker-sized***** rectangles. You don’t need to separate the pieces. The dough will put apart slightly while baking so you have separate crackers in the end.

Bake at 350º, for 15 to 20 minutes, just until golden brown. Open the oven door a crack, but leave the baking sheets in for another 15 or more minutes while the crackers crisp up. 

*yes, I am just finishing a write-up of something that happened in February. Sorry.

**maybe it’s Zahav? I haven’t given up.

***I’ll post something more actually simple soon. I promise.

****if you’re using a standard half-sheet pan, aka a regular sized cookie sheet. if your pans are smaller, divide more!

*****don’t use an actual knife or a pastry cutter! It will cut your baking mat and that is sad.

******whatever size cracker you like.

 

Impulse Radish, Eventual Black Bread

slice of borodinsky bread with butter, black radish, and salt
~ mary_m ~ 6 Comments

Last Saturday, I impulse bought a black radish. (These things happen in root vegetable season.) Once I had the black radish, I started day-dreaming about Russian Black Bread, slathered with butter, and topped with thin slices of black radish and some coarse salt, which someone once told me was the right and proper way to eat a black radish. The only trouble was I didn’t have any black bread and I didn’t know how to make it. All I had was a radish (well…, and some rye flour).

After a web search or two for black bread recipes, I found myself overwhelmed by options, so I also consulted a couple awesome friends with Eastern European roots. While neither of them had a family recipe handy, one did help me narrow down my choices. I decided to try something like this Borodinsky Bread, because I was hoping for something with 100% rye.

Over the next four days, I built up a rye sourdough starter. I mixed ~25g of rye flour with ~50g of room temp. water and let it sit out on the counter in a loosely capped plastic container, adding another round of flour and water daily. It started bubbling noticeably the second day. I was getting slowly closer to actually eating my radish.

When I had >270g of sourdough starter, I mixed my dough. (After which I realized the directions I was working from had skipped the step where you simply use ~50g of starter and add equal parts flour and water to make the required 270g. Oh well. Here is the much better description of the same recipe, which I found too late.)

Here’s how it went:

  • 270g rye sourdough starter
  • 230g rye flour
  • 5g sea salt
  • 5g toasted caraway seeds, cracked
  • 20g molasses
  • 15g sorghum syrup (original recipe used barley malt, but I happened to have sorghum so I tried it)
  • 90g water
  • butter for the pan
  • 5g toasted coriander, cracked

Combined everything but the coriander and mixed throughly, but not exactly kneaded. Proofed in a cool room (the basement in November) overnight. It, uh, didn’t rise much.

The next morning I buttered a small (1lb) loaf pan and put half the cracked coriander in it, shaking to get coriander on the sides and the bottom. I shaped the very, very sticky dough into an oval, more or less, and plunked it in the pan. Then I  wet my fingers and smoothed the top, then sprinkled it with the remaining coriander. Covered with a towel and let sit in a sunny spot on the kitchen counter for about four hours. It, once again, didn’t rise much. (I either need to work on my starter’s vigor or add yeast or simply decide that 100% rye bread is meant to be really dense.)

Baked at 400ºF for 10 minutes. Reduced heat to 350ºF and baked for 40 minutes more. Immediately flipped it out of the pan and cooled on a rack.

And then I (finally) had a slice with butter, salt, and radish, and it was pretty darn good.