Wholemeal sourdough recipe for bread or pizza dough

This wholemeal sourdough recipe is great for making real bread and healthy pizza in a bread maker.

Background to my wholemeal sourdough recipe

This recipe is many years old, as is the sourdough culture. I collected it, would you believe, during a backcountry ski trip on the Bogong High Plain. “Thanks, Nick.” This is the same Nick that you may have heard on the ABC advocating against the compulsory wearing of safety helmets while riding bicycles. I hope his bread is safer than this.

Back to the wholemeal sourdough recipe

This wholemeal sourdough recipe makes bread that is solid but it does not have adequate strength for making sandwiches that are portable. However, it is great as breakfast toast and ‘egg in wholemeal bread‘, lunchtime; egg on toast, grilled cheese and tomatoes on toast etc. It is equivalent to 2-3 slices of ‘commercial wholemeal bread’ in terms of satiety and keeps the return of hunger away much longer.

I choose to have a low salt diet to reduce the risk of hypertension and add no salt to my bread or other food. However, the addition of salt in the mix is said to improve the function of the yeast.

Sourdough

Many people think sourdough is not yeast based. If that make them happy and feel better about their diet so be it. However, sourdough is fundamentally lactobacillus which is in a symbiotic combination with yeast. Together they produce more lactic acid than yeast alone and is the source of the ‘sour flavour’ and this improves bread structure, particularly for bread made from rye flour.

The sourdough culture also provides amylase enzyme that can break down the wheat starch into glucose and maltose sugars that can feed the yeast and enables it to make carbon dioxide gas as the leavening agent to make the dough rise. They also result in a more acidic bread with a complex flavour that appeals to many people. The use of sourdough also compensates for low gluten levels in the bread mix and means that no formal bread improver is required.

“Sourdough was the main source of leavening for breads until the mass production of commercial beers made the byproduct of yeast easily available for bread making. It also is the main ingredient of Aussie Vegemite.

However, I find that the addition of an egg to my mix adds to an improved bread structure. Also, I add a small amount of dry yeast to make this heavy bread a little lighter. I have recently learned that mixing water or liquid sourdough to some of the wholemeal flour and allowing some hours of soaking (prior to breadmaking steps) improves the loft of the loaf. 

The mysteries of the wholemeal sourdough recipe and its safe maintenance

At first, I was a little apprehensive about keeping my sourdough ‘plant’ with the desirable bugs and not unwanted bugs and moulds. However, this is not an issue as a well-maintained sourdough culture ‘gravitates’ towards an appropriate and safe mix of bacteria, yeasts and enzymes that are fit for the purpose.

“Take the old adage; we are what we eat. It is proving true with our new knowledge about our healthy gut biome that is critically influenced by what we eat. It is similar for sourdough culture, what it becomes is dependant mainly on what we feed it with.”

Mothy The Elder

Any undesirable organisms are ‘overgrown’ in the regeneration cycles. “Psssst…..the seeding source of the culture is not so critical (sorry to Nick who donated my starter culture while skiing together), because wheat contains traces of yeasts and bacterial spores and amylase that can start a culture in water. “To your friends, this should sound a lot better than saying that you just started the culture from some sweepings from the pantry floor.” Although, I am sure it would work just as well because it is the nutrients, fermentation conditions and reculturing of what is on and in the wheat that dictates a safe and suitable outcome.

Lastly, the threaded area of the culture jar )vegemite Jar) will get messy and is out of the controlled fermentation conditions. Consequently, it is a good practice to frequently clean the jar and lid at the regeneration step to keep unwanted mould spores out of your culture. This is most practically done by tipping the residual culture into a fresh clean jar and washing the old one.

Feeding the beast

I restrain my culture in a glass Vegemite jar (~370 ml) with a plastic lid (a good rule for safety with fermentation is ‘NO METAL’ other than stainless steel.

After regeneration, I use a bit more than than 300 ml of the culture for a loaf of bread and keep the remainder in the jar to start the next culture. I add a heaped spoon of wholemeal flour and a teaspoon of sugar and top up with clean water (after flushing water that has been standing in copper pipes as traces of copper inhibits many micro life forms).

If the culture is not to be used for some time while you are away on adventures, store it in the refrigerator. Otherwise, keep it in a warm place that does not exceed body temperature as heat kills the yeast. If the culture has not been used for some weeks, just tip most of it away and feed it again, in a fresh clean jar and lid, with flour, sugar and a little yeast and top up as usual. I periodically add a 1/4 teaspoon of dry yeast to the culture to keep it yeast dominant and it uses up the teaspoon of sugar for its rapid growth.

Now for the dough recipe

• 370 g DIY wholemeal flour,
• 170 g plain flour,
• 1 egg,
• 320 g of your sourdough culture (vary this quantity depending on the stiffness of the dough,
• 1 spn sugar (for the yeast to eat as it will not end up in the bread) and
• 1/2 tspn of dry yeast.

Add the ingredients in the order indicated above. slope the flour to one side of the bread maker bowl and add the sourdough to the lowest point. Add the sugar and yeast to the top of the pool of sourdough. This order is critical for uniform success.

Set the bread maker running with a wholemeal program. I do this at night to use cheap power and to spare my day time solar electricity to feed into the grid.

Note 1: Many bread machine recipes start by adding the yeast to the bottom of the bread maker bowl. “In fact, it is almost universal. Probably just fools copying the ignorant!” Pulses of heating are subsequently used to warm the mixture to prepare for mixing, fermentation and rising. This means that the temperature of the bottom of the bowl (directly above the heating element) gets very hot and can kill most of the yeast. To suggest doing the yeast addition first is the worst possible way and shows a total lack of understanding of the living process that is involved. “I hope I don’t sound like a grumpy old man who is as sour as his dough?”

A better alternative recipe

Since starting this post I have compared notes with walking friend, who also mills his own flour to make his own bread. His recipe is to soak the wholemeal flour for some time before starting the bread-making process. This improves the bread quality.

Consequently, if I have the time, I put all the ingredients together and set the bread maker to a dough program and it thoroughly mixes the dough immediately (without any waiting for heating or ruining the yest). When this is finished, any time afterwards, I set the program running for wholemeal bread making as normal. This loaf rises better and is considerably lighter.

 “Now I don’t know why the makers of bread-makers don’t provide such a program with pre-soaking and mixing programmed-in? At least this two-stage method has no chance of ruining the damn yeast! And while I am on the soap-box, why don’t all bread programs start mixing from the start, the warming will be better, the fermentation will be better, the wonderful bread chemistry can start sooner and again there is no chance of buggering the damn yeast!”

Grumpy The Aged Male Homosapien

 

Pizza dough

For the Pizza dough, just use the same ingredients and mix using a dough program on the bread maker. Use a drizzle of olive oil around the mixing bowl to help release the dough cleanly from the mixing bowl. Slowly work the oil down the wall of the bowl with your oily fingers. Quickly, the dough wil release from the bowl. Then the dough can be easily tipped out onto a bed of wholemeal flour. Flip from side to side while spreading or rolling, rubbing in the flour on each side. Spread on oiled pizza trays and leave to rise under a cloth in a warm place. The topping is up to you, but please look after your own gut biome.

Tim