My sourdough adventures had quieted down for a while, until a chocolate sourdough bread recipe I saw on Lezzet got me excited all over again. The idea of combining sourdough's natural flavor, which develops slowly over time, with the aroma of chocolate really appealed to me.
According to the recipe, you end up with a soft, tender crumb, a crispy crust and a slightly bitter taste that lingers on the palate. It can be served at breakfast or tea time as an alternative to dessert. One serving is 220 calories, prep takes about 6 hours, baking 40 minutes, and it serves 6.
My first attempt reminded me once again how important patience is. Sourdough can't be rushed; you have to wait for the dough to rise, and then let the smell of the oven fill every corner of the house. The result is a truly new experience for anyone who's tired of classic bread recipes.
I'd say this chocolate version has now become my weekend ritual. Feeding a sourdough starter is already enjoyable, and once a bit of chocolate goes in, things get downright gourmet. My advice to anyone who wants to try it: make sure your starter is lively before you begin.
Source: Lezzet
Maurizio Leo of The Perfect Loaf has written up the Grain Gathering, hosted by the WSU Breadlab and the Washington State Department of Agriculture from July 19 to 21 in the Skagit Valley. It was the first gathering in eight years, with the theme Nourishing Communities, and he went as a home baker among breeders, farmers, millers and professional bakers.
The highlight for him was a mobile bakery and mill built into a truck by Marc Benoit, with an oven, mill, mixer and workbench all powered by a solar array. Working with grains such as Hollis, Chimacum Confluence and Elwha River Spelt, the crew baked sourdough country loaves, focaccia, baguettes and bialys. The point of the truck is a shorter chain from field to loaf, with the farmer's name on the bag and more of the money staying with the grower.
Two ideas kept coming up. First, commodity grain gets anonymized, so care for soil and the farmer's effort go unpaid. Second, most wheat is bred for yield, uniformity, disease resistance and baking performance, and flavor and nutrition are missing from that list. The Breadlab puts them on the scorecard, breeding varieties like Skagit 1109, Salish Blue and Ruth, and then milling and baking them to see how they perform.
For home bakers, his takeaway is modest: swap one grain for an identity-preserved variety, or buy directly from a farm and mill at home. His own baking is trending toward more whole grains, named varieties and fresh-milled flour, though he admits good sifted flour still has its place.
What I like here is that fermentation is part of the answer but not the whole of it. Starting with grain that has flavor gives your starter something worth working with.
Source: The Perfect Loaf
Pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut are a Polish classic, but one article reminded me that almost any vegetable can be lacto-fermented. The authors note that old recipes are coming back into fashion, and more and more people are happily experimenting with preserves.
The process is simple to describe: lactic acid bacteria, working without oxygen, convert the sugars in vegetables into lactic acid. That acid is what gives preserved vegetables their long shelf life and characteristic sourness, and ferments are also a source of probiotics that support the gut and help the absorption of minerals.
Among the unusual choices are red beets, the base of homemade beet sour, with a sweet-sour, slightly earthy taste and a beautiful ruby color. Then come carrots, whose natural sweetness comes through when fermented, and which take on a spicy finish with chili or ginger. Garlic loses its sharp bite after fermenting and becomes milder, good for sauces, pastes, and sandwiches. Finally there are radishes, which gain crunch while their heat mellows; they go well with dill, garlic, or bay leaf.
I like this approach, because it shows that pickling doesn't have to end with one jar of cucumbers. If the garden produces a generous harvest of radishes or carrots, brine is a simple way to extend their life. In autumn, when the house gets cooler, fermentation simply takes a little longer.
Source: ESKA.pl
I recently read a light guide to homemade fermented foods, and I think it is good enough to share here. The core idea is simple: many ingredients can be fermented, from vegetables, fruit and grains to milk, legumes and even eggs, as long as the process is well controlled.
The ten recipes covered are quite varied. There is kimchi with napa cabbage, grated radish, garlic, chili and ginger, left in a sealed container for about two days. There is traditional sauerkraut, soaked in chlorine-free water and fermented at room temperature for 3 to 7 days before going into the fridge. There are also garlic pickles, two versions of cucumber pickles, and a sourdough sandwich with cheddar, turkey and cranberry sauce cooked in a pan.
The part that interested me most was the drinks and protein recipes. Kombucha is made from black or green tea, sugar, a kombucha starter and one SCOBY, fermented in a shady spot for 7 to 10 days, then bottled for 1 to 3 days to carbonate. Tempeh is made from 250 grams of soybeans soaked for two days, dehulled, boiled, dried, mixed with starter and incubated for roughly 30 hours at 30 to 40 degrees Celsius. Yogurt and fresh cheese are on the list too, with temperatures and times included.
I should be honest about one thing: the health claims in the article mostly cite other books and websites without clinical evidence, so it is best read as general information. The tempeh measurements are also a little inconsistent between raw and cooked soybeans. Even so, as a list of ideas for starting fermentation at home, the article is practical and easy to follow.
For anyone here who is just getting started, my personal advice is to pick the simplest recipe first, use a truly clean container, and note the temperature and fermentation time. From there you can learn which flavors suit you best.
Source: HaiBunda
An interview caught my attention in which food technologist Mario Sánchez Rosagro points out something many of us have noticed without naming it: kefir has moved from the herbalist's shelf to a large part of the supermarket fridge, and with so much variety it is hard to know what we are buying.
His thesis is that around 80% of the kefirs sold in Spain may not be entirely kefir. The Codex Alimentarius definition describes a culture prepared from kefir grains, in which lactic and acetic bacteria live alongside yeasts. If the ingredient list shows only selected bacteria and no mention of yeasts, the product resembles kefir but is not one. There is also a European legal gap that does not help clarify the term.
There are useful nuances for anyone fermenting at home. Authentic kefir can have a slight fizz from the yeasts and minimal traces of alcohol (around 0.004–0.005%), which the expert considers a sign of traditional fermentation rather than a fault. Thickness does not reveal a fake either: it depends on how it is strained or on the dairy solids added afterwards, not on the grains.
To buy wisely, he recommends checking that the kefir-specific ferments and yeasts are named, that the label mentions live and active cultures, and preferring versions without added sugar. He also points out that it resembles sourdough in that bacteria and yeasts work in balance, even though the substrate and conditions differ.
Personally I think it is one more good reason to grow your own grains: at least you know exactly what is in the jar.
Source: Directo al Paladar
As someone who works with sourdough, this story really moved me. In the high-altitude villages of Şavşat in Artvin, Türkiye, where winter snow can exceed two metres in places, sourdough village bread is still made by a method preserved for generations.
My favourite detail is the dough trough. The troughs are carved in one piece from the trunks of old linden trees. Linden is odourless and resin-free, and it's also a good insulator: even when the room drops below freezing, it keeps the dough warm for hours, so fermentation proceeds slowly and evenly without a cold shock. The trough is never washed with detergent; leftover dough is scraped out with a wooden spatula and wiped with a dry cloth, so the natural flora in the wood passes into each new dough.
Here the starter is called "ana maya" (mother yeast) or "hamur başı". After every bake a fist-sized piece is set aside, fed with local flour and kept in a cloth bag in a cool larder. The flour is a blend of local yellow wheat, hulled red wheat and a little rye, stone-ground whole in water mills.
The dough is kneaded in the trough for more than half an hour. After a first rise of 4–6 hours it's divided into 2–3 kg loaves and baked in dome-shaped stone ovens heated with oak and hornbeam. The thick crust keeps the moisture inside, so the loaves can stay fresh for 20–30 days in a cool larder.
The suggested way to get a similar crust at home: use a baking stone or a cast-iron pot, and put a bowl of boiling water in the oven for steam during the first 20 minutes. And patience: don't cut big loaves straight out of the oven, but let them rest on a linen cloth for 8–12 hours.
Source: Mutfak Magazin
A recipe has appeared on the Plötzblog that was originally intended as an introductory bread for the April 2023 Alm course: Rye-Yellow Grain Bread, a wholegrain sourdough made from rye and yellow-kernel wheat.
Yellow-kernel wheat is a type of wheat with a very yellow bran and yellow flour inside. The yellow pigments make the flour and bread look less “wholegrain”, and the bread tastes quite different too. It is important not to be fooled, though: there are many different varieties within yellow-kernel wheat as well. For this bread, a mix of several varieties from the grain breeding station Cultivari in Darzau was used.
The rise comes entirely from the sourdough. The recipe uses a mixed sourdough of wholegrain rye flour and wheat flour, which is started with a soft rye starter (TA 200) and left to ripen for 12 hours at 20 °C. Then the main dough is made. The exact quantities and steps are in the recipe itself, where you can also adjust the amount of dough.
What appeals to me most is the idea of not seeing grain as an interchangeable raw material, but as something with its own variety and its own flavour. If you have a sourdough starter and would like a bread that doesn’t look like the usual wholemeal, this is a good reason to go looking for yellow-kernel wheat.
Source: Plötzblog
New on the Plötzblog: a pumpkin seed graham bread, a pure wholewheat sourdough. Its special feature is an ingredient that is usually thrown away. When pumpkin seed oil is pressed, a residue called pomace is left over; it is dried, ground and baked into the bread here, for flavour and health. In addition, extra pumpkin seeds give the bread something interesting to bite into.
Graham flour, a fine wheat grist, brings bite and dietary fibre to the bread. The recipe makes an important note: the dough must be kneaded thoroughly and shaped firmly. If that succeeds, the description promises a really fluffy wholegrain bread that is raised only by sourdough, with no added yeast at all.
The sourdough is started with a soft wheat starter (TA 200) and ripens for 12 hours at 20 °C. The recipe also includes a note on how to control the temperature of sourdoughs and other doughs precisely, in case the kitchen climate fluctuates.
I like recipes that turn leftovers and by-products into something good. And a wholegrain bread raised entirely by sourdough is always a small proof of what a well-kept starter can do.
Source: Plötzblog
Here is a sourdough that celebrates the end of summer. Breadtopia's Harvest Corn Sourdough uses two kinds of corn: a porridge made from field corn or fine cornmeal, and whole sweet corn kernels folded into the dough.
The idea came from a small bag of last year's frozen corn the author found while restocking the freezer. Every year they buy a dozen ears from a local farm stand, boil them, cut off the kernels and freeze them. A useful tip from the post is to scrape the cobs with the back of the knife to get the sweet corn milk, and not to skip the blanching step, because it stops the enzymes that would otherwise change the corn's flavor and texture in the freezer.
The numbers are straightforward. The dough is 390 grams of bread flour, 280 grams of water, 80 grams of starter and 9 grams of salt, plus the cooled porridge made from 60 grams of fine cornmeal and 100 grams of boiling water, and 120 grams of sweet corn kernels. The corn porridge and kernels are laminated into the dough about an hour after mixing, followed by two rounds of stretching and folding. Hands-on prep is around 40 minutes, and baking takes 35.
Fresh or fresh-frozen corn is recommended over canned because it is sweeter, and home-milled yellow dent corn is mentioned as a good choice for the porridge. The author serves it as a table bread alongside late-summer vegetables, or for sandwiches, toast and even French toast.
It is a fine reminder that sourdough is a great carrier for seasonal ingredients. I like that the porridge step adds moisture and corn flavor without complicating the process too much.
Source: Breadtopia
Breadtopia's latest sourdough starts from a bread by Öfferl Bakery near Vienna, described by the bakery as nutty to spicy and juicy. A friend sent the baker the recipe, and what stood out immediately was the water temperature: both the levain and the final dough are mixed with water at 42 degrees Celsius, about 107 degrees Fahrenheit, far warmer than usual for sourdough.
The author even wondered whether it was a translation error, but read the German original and found that the higher temperature is probably meant to favor certain lactobacilli that give yogurt-like, dairy flavors. To be safe, they built two overnight levains, one with 107 degree water and one with 75 degree water. By morning both had doubled, but the warm one smelled more lacto-sour while the cooler one was nutty and less sour. I find that a neat, simple demonstration of how temperature steers flavor in a ferment.
The bread also uses a scald, where some of the ingredients, here khorasan, rye, flax, buckwheat groats and sunflower seeds, are mixed with boiling water. That gelatinizes the starch so the dough can hold more water, which may explain the juicy crumb.
The adaptation is baked in a small Pullman pan, with spelt in place of einkorn and khorasan in place of emmer, and the author suggests adjusting grains and seeds to whatever you have, aiming for a loose and sticky dough. A scale and a thermometer are essential here.
I'm tempted by the idea of tuning the levain temperature on purpose rather than just following the room. If you like the sour side of sourdough, this is a good one to bookmark.
Source: Breadtopia
I came across an interesting article about a common belief: that eating sourdough bread makes you less likely to gain weight. Taiwanese dietitian Yang Sihan pointed out on social media that it is a myth.
First, the difference between the two breads. Sourdough relies on wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria cultivated from flour and water, and its slow, long fermentation gives it a gentle sour aroma. Ordinary white bread uses commercial instant yeast, so it ferments quickly and has a softer, finer texture. However, per 100 grams, the calories and sugar in the two breads are nearly the same. Eating sourdough does not mean you take in fewer calories.
So where does sourdough's value lie? The article lists three points. First, the long fermentation partly breaks down the gluten in flour, which may be easier on people who feel bloated or have trouble digesting bread. Second, natural fermentation breaks down phytic acid, helping the body absorb minerals such as iron, zinc and magnesium more easily. Third, sourdough has a low to medium glycemic index, so blood sugar rises more gently. It does not swing up and down the way high-GI white bread does, which can leave you hungry again quickly, so it helps you feel full for longer.
Personally, I think this is a sensible way to look at it. Rather than treating sourdough as a diet food, it is better seen as a gentler choice for your gut and blood sugar. For anyone who enjoys keeping a starter and baking their own bread, these points are a nice reward for the long fermentation. The original article also notes that these are the author's own views and do not represent the position of the republishing outlet, so it is wise to take them with a little flexibility.
Source: HK01 (reprinted from United Daily News)
This is a curious development for anyone who follows natural fermentation. Two of Spain's biggest home-delivery pizza chains, Telepizza and Domino's, have launched sourdough-based options at almost the same time.
According to the article, Telepizza has introduced sourdough dough across its whole restaurant network. You can choose it for any pizza on the menu for an extra euro or so, whether you order online, eat in, or have it delivered. The chain promises a lighter texture, deeper flavor, crispy edges, and a soft, airy interior.
Domino's, for its part, presents Madrízzima, a pizza that combines sourdough with extra virgin olive oil and a double fermentation process with a long rest, aiming for a more open crumb and a more complex flavor.
The piece also reminds readers why sourdough has become a symbol of quality. Natural fermentation, used for thousands of years, gives more complex aromas and a lighter structure than the quick fermentation of industrial production. It points out that in delivery, competition is no longer about price or speed alone, but about how customers perceive the quality of the product.
It's interesting to see such a craft technique turn into a large-scale marketing argument. I'll be curious how closely that industrial sourdough resembles the jar of starter many of us keep at home. Still, as a sign that the public values slow fermentation, it's good news.
Source: Directo al Paladar
