Start your own bread of heaven

There is something comforting in biting into a slice of freshly baked bread, especially if it is sourdough bread. I love the texture and flavour of sourdough.

Supermarkets have caught on and you can find some sourdough breads now on shelves. You can still taste the bread improver used by the factory and the texture is a bit off but it’s not a bad attempt to improve the offerings on bread.

Now, you might think that I bake sourdough bread every other day – you’d be wrong. Mr T actually bakes a beautiful brown soda bread based on a recipe from Patrick Ryan’s book ‘Bread Revolution’ with added seeds and dried fruit. Don’t tell him but I tend to grab a slice or two now and then.

I was lucky to have been given a portion of excellent sourdough a few years ago by Joe Fitzmaurice of Riot Rye Bakery which I minded like a baby – thankfully it wasn’t a baby as it died when we went on a holiday to Canada for two weeks and I left it in the fridge.

Of course, I could just start a new starter but for some reason, I have not done it yet. While chatting to a friend the other day, I remembered a dough I used to have in Germany. It was called Hermann – yes, it had a name.

I am not sure who named it but the idea was that you passed it on. You had to look after Hermann, feeding it regularly and divide it into three portions – one to give away (that was the whole idea), one to bake and one to look after again to start the whole process over.

The starter – as that’s what it was - had a sweet sourly aroma and I used it to bake delicious cakes. After a while it became difficult to give a portion away as everyone was doing the same as I was doing and everyone had the same problem, giving a portion away. So, my starter grew and grew.

For some reason, I only used the starter for cakes – little did I know that I was minding a sourdough starter. For me, it was just Hermann.

Most breads in Germany are made with a sourdough starter anyway – at least in the many bakeries that are still around. When I was a child, there was a bakery at almost every corner and the breads and cakes were baked by skilful bakers.

So there was no need to bake bread at home as the quality of the commercial breads was just too good.

Some of the starters used are almost a generation old and the age and quality of the starter influences the final bread – that might be the reason I haven’t started my own yet.

But thinking of Hermann, I might just do it as I have found an old American recipe that uses dried yeast and equal amounts of water and flour and it gets fed with sugar, flour and milk for ten days. And who knows, I might just pass portions on and have Hermann travel the county!