Rosemary olive oil sourdough bread and French sourdough

Meet Popine.

While the country's bakers vainly scour the shelves for yeast products, sourdough starters are enjoying a renewed interest and become fodder for news outlets telling people what to do with their new found free time. (Still hoping to find some of that free time ...)

It's clearly time to at long last introduce Popine, my resident sourdough starter and the namesake for this blog all these many years. First, a disclaimer: She arrived in this country already anthropomorphized, so I'm not responsible for that, merely her upkeep. I started my sourdough adventure more than a dozen years ago when my friend Amy shared a split of a sourdough starter alleged to have been in the same family of French bakers for many, many generations. It somehow came courtesy of an Utne Reader connection, where you can read about her origins.

While I'm sure Popine has morphed over the years to reflect her Minneapolis home, she still retains a French accent. Oddly enough, the best thing to do with Popine is make a loaf of French bread. She has a mild sourdough tang, and has a very nice crumb, both in baguette form or in the rosemary olive oil bread. Her main form of exercise is pizza crusts, in which form she has fed us countless times. The rest of the time she lives in her special blue-and-white crock in the back of my downstairs refrigerator, patiently sheltering in place.

This is one of my first attempts at making this bread with a different type of flour, Sunrise Flour Mill's Heritage Bread Blend. Going to take some experimentation to get the right crust, but that's part of the sourdough adventure.

 

Rosemary Olive Oil Sourdough

Adapted from King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion. 

Ingredients

2¾ cup flour

¾ cup water

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 cup sourdough starter (7 ounces by weight)

1 teaspoon salt

1½ tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves

Method

Put flour in a large glass bowl. Add water and olive oil to sourdough starter. Stir into flour mixture and mix by hand for 2 minutes, until flour is incorporated. You’re not trying to achieve a smooth dough yet at this point. Cover and let rest for 30 minutes.

Knead in salt until dough is smooth, supple and slightly tacky. You don’t want to add more flour if you don’t have to, but if it’s hopelessly sticky, sprinkle on a bit so you can work with it. This isn’t one of those doughs that miraculously becomes less sticky later, in my experience. Knead in rosemary until evenly distributed. 

Place dough in greased bowl. Cover and let rise for two hours, folding dough over once half way through. (At this point, I sometimes put the tightly covered bowl of dough in the refrigerator overnight before its next rise.)

Shape dough into a ball and place on a floured surface. Cover and let rise for 2 hours or more.

One hour before baking, preheat oven to 450 and place baking stone in the oven, placing rack high enough that you’ll be able to slide a pan full of water onto the rack below it later. When ready to bake, turn the dough onto a baker’s peel or parchment paper sprinkled with corn meal. Slide onto baking stone. Place a pan mostly filled with boiling water onto the lower rack to help steam the loaf. Bake for 40 minutes or until golden, opening oven door briefly half way through to let steam escape.

Note: I cut the original recipe in half, because most of the time I make this I bake a single loaf in a stone cloche instead of on a baking stone (letting the dough do its final rise in the cloche and skipping the water in the pan step). But you can double the recipe above; just divide the dough in half right before the final rise. The recipe calls for making the final rise in proofing baskets, but oddly enough that’s one baking gadget I don’t own.

Rating: Just wonderful. While like all bread, it’s fantastic with butter fresh from the oven, it’s also a really good keeper. This makes wonderful toast and slices thinly enough to make sandwiches.

 

French style bread

Adapted from “Classic Sourdoughs” by Ed Wood. Note that this one requires working ahead, but your timing is flexible.

Ingredients

2 cups of sourdough starter that’s been fed fairly recently, not just straight from the refrigerator

4 ¾ cup flour, divided

1¼ cups water, divided

1 teaspoon salt

Method

Combine starter with 1 cup of flour and ¼ cup of water. Cover lightly and let sit for 12 hours at room temperature, or you can speed it up a bit if you’ve got a warmer spot, like a gas oven with just the pilot light, which can cut the proofing time in half. 

Add 1 cup flour and ¼ cup of the water. Proof covered for another 8 hours.

Now for the active bit: Punch down the dough. Dissolve salt in remaining ¾ cup of water. Add to dough and mix well. Mix in 1¾ cup flour. When it’s too stiff to stir, transfer to a floured board and knead in remaining cup of flour.

Divide dough in half. Form into two long French loaves and place in French bread loaf pans. Cover with a soft towel and let rise until the dough rises about 1 inch above the pan sides, 2½ to 3 hours. (If you let it rise too much you’re going to have bread loaves that look like they have muffin tops.)

Preheat oven to 375. Bake loaves for 40 to 45 minutes, spritzing loaves and the oven with a mist of water at the start and twice more at five-minute intervals. Remove loaves from pans and let cool on wire racks.