XXVI – Back to the Basic : My Basic Sourdough with Walnuts, Revived.

  This is a bread using my most basic dough which I’d been using for a long time since I first started tempting to make sourdough-based Pain de Campagne-type bread.  It’s simple, versatile and taste quite good without too assertive or too distinctive. It is good enough to bake as plain, basic sourdough bread but also good with various fillings, like dried fruits, nuts and seeds, etc…..or it was. Actually, I hadn’t used this dough for a long while.  Not because it wasn’t good enough but because I’ve been too busy trying out many recipes I found in books, internet (mainly here!) and experimenting with various combinations of flours lately.

  A couple days ago, I was combing through my ever-fattening folder of bread recipes in the attempt to make it slimmer, getting rid of some recipes I knew (or thought I knew….) I’d never use and re-discovering some recipes I’d clearly forgotten about.  Then I found a very, very old recipe for the basic sourdough bread I used to bake a lot in my early days of ‘artisan’ baking.

  I knew I used to like its flavour a lot those days, but not too sure if I still liked it after having tried many other formulae, some of them with much more complex combinations of flours and other ingredients.  Intrigued, I decided I’d try. It just happened I wanted to bake walnuts bread with ‘a new’ dough.  It’s not quite ‘new,’ but thought it’d be interesting to use it with walnuts, like I used to do a lot years ago, to check if it’s still good for me.

  And here’s the formula and result….

 My Basic Sourdough with Walnuts

 INGREDIENTS

　Levain

       Strong flour  50g

        Water  35g

    Main Dough

       Strong Flour  150g*

       Plain Flour  40g*

         (or AP flour 190g….I guess…:p)

       WW   30g

       Rye   30g

       Wheatgerm (optional)   1 tbls

       Salt  5g

       Levain (above)  85g

       Water   175g

       Chopped walnuts  100 – 120g

METHOD

1. Feed starter with the flour and water for levain 8 – 12 hrs before using until ripe.
2. When the levain in matured, mix it with the water for main dough, loosen a bit and mix with all the flours and wheatgerm (if using) in a large bowl to shaggy mess.
3. Leave for 30 – 40minutes to autolyse.
4. Sprinkle the salt on the dough and S & F in the bowl until the salt is well distributed.
5. Rest for 40 minutes.
6. Do two more sets of S & F in the bowl. Incorporate chopped walnuts during the last S & F.
7. Leave for 1 hr at room temperature and put in the fridge for cold retard for 16 – 20 hrs.
8. Take it out of the fridge, leave at room temperature for 1 hr and pre-shape.  Rest for 20 minutes.
9. Shape in put in a banetton to proof.
10.  Pre-heat the oven @ 240C with Pyrex/cast iron pot with a lid.
11. When it passed the finger-poke test for readiness, turn it out on a board and score.
12. Bake in a covered Pyrex/cast iron pot for 20 minutes at 240C.
13. Remove the lid/cover, lower the temperature to 200C and bake for another 20 minutes.

  (Excuse for the weird colour of those photos. Night light…..)

......and I was so glad I combed through the old files.  Still like this dough. :)