why use water in breadmaking when you can use real beer?

Making sourdough bread (“paine facuta cu maia”) fills people with dread with talk of petulant starters, the best “hydration” levels, steam in the oven, crumb texture and crust and so on and so on…. If you like all this uber science (and sometimes we all need to access our inner nerd)  a good read is here at The Fresh Loaf  or my much thumbed Dan Lepard’s “The Handmade Loaf”. But all this exalted highfalutin talk, whilst enlightening kind of misses a basic point: that people were making bread from natural home made yeasts for centuries before modern yeast as we know it was first commercially produced in the nineteenth century and they didn’t have food blogs or star artisanal bakers to show them how.

So why not have a go at baking like your grandmother: get your hands sticky and have a go with your flour, your starter, your oven and be sensitive to the weather on the day you bake.  Its never going to be a disaster and you are going to have a whole load of self satisfying fun.   Now for the purists adding beer to sourdough probably isn’t right – for a start the beer gives the bread a nutty sweet smell that is not entirely sour.  But what it does do, and you really need the unpasteurised good stuff for this, is add its own yeasts and enzymes.  And so your sourdough bread which might be a bit sluggish at rising if you are not entirely used to it, is probably going to rise more easily and be lighter.   I’ve used the Zaganu “Bere Bruna” here which is  unfiltered and unpasteurised and therefore a living product that helps the bread  develop and adds its own flavour too.

You Are What You Eat

Bread has been part of our diet for 30,000 years. It does not make you fat but it has suffered at the hands of the misinformed and popularist faddy diets.  Bread and in particular wholemeal bread is an important source of B vitamins (thiamin, niacin and folate) and minerals (Iron, zinc and magnesium) and while being mainly a source of our daily carbohydrate it does also contain protein. It contains only traces of fat.  Wholemeal bread, particularly that made with rye flour and enriched with seeds and nuts can help regularise blood sugar. 100g of bread which is approximately two chunky slices depending on the density of your bread contains 266 calories. 

Continue reading “Beer Sourdough with Wild Garlic Salt Crust”