Sourdough Recipe¶
First of all – this is a basic recipe which comes from the community Lakabe in Navarra, Spain.
We learned it in Masia la Torre, a project located in the beautiful mountains northwest of Valencia.
Before you can actually start baking the bread, you need to create a sourdough which takes up to nine days.
You basically only need a hand full of flour and luke-warm water (which should not be warmer than 40 degrees),
a more sophisticated version wants to add a bit of honey and – very importantly for an unknown reason :)- one hazelnut!
You store this mixture in a warm place and kneed it from time to time. Every day you add a new hand-full of flour and mix it in the dough with some luke-warm water and you do so for about nine days. What you then have is the basic sourdough, the so-called “motherdough”.
To bake bread…
You prepare the motherdough one night before the actual bread-baking and convert it into the pre-dough:
Mix one part of the motherdough with equal amounts of water and flour; then let it rest over-night.
(Keep one part of the basic motherdough if you want to keep sourdough for another bread-baking session..!)
The next morning you add water, flour and salt.
To have two kg of bread-dough take 0,5 kg of the predough, 0,6 l of water, 1 kg of flour and 16 g of salt.
(A tip how to make sure the salt goes well into the dough: dissolve it in warm water before adding it to the dough.)
Kneed this mixture well and let it then rest for one hour.
After the rest take the dough and cut it in pieces of the weight, you wish for the bread (e.g. 750 gr).
Kneed it into homogenous, round forms -best with passion and patience…
Make sure you get out all bubbles and try to achieve a smooth surface in the end – it’s easiest to kneed from the outside to the middle quite fast and strong.
When finished, let the dough rest for another two hours.
Now kneed it again into round forms – but this time very short and soft.
If you wish you can roll these round doughs into seed-mixtures, or you leave it blank like this.
You bake it for bbb minutes at bbb degrees.
Now its ready, your own sour-dough bread!
Don’t forget to take some of the new bread-dough and mix it with the part of the motherdough that was put aside.
If you do this procedure everytime you bake bread, you’ll never run out of motherdough…
Bon appetit!
