White Sandwich Sourdough Bread

White Sandwich Sourdough Bread is a different kind of sourdough - it's quite mild in flavour, also quite light. It contains no refined yeast, and most importantly has a very fine texture. So it's ideal for sandwiches!

It's unlike other recipes here, as it starts from a sourdough sponge, and gradually becomes a dough over quite a few additions of flour. I've done it with four stages here, because it's workable and easy. The recipe takes about 12 - 18 hours from whoa to go. Instead of an intermediate proof, it just ripens as it goes - by the final proof (in the tins) it'll just rise up and be ready to bake within an hour or so.

Hearty Wholemeal Bread

Wheat and Barley Sourdough recipe

Using Dry Dough Sourdough (desem)

I don't know why I didn't get into barley grain sooner. Recently, I went to visit an old mate, Mark, from  Mark's Home Brew, my local brewing supplies shop. Home brewers are very similar to home bakers - an obsessive lot, with a lot of very specialised information about fascinating things like fermentation and so forth.

While I was there, he milled some barley grain into a very coarse gruel, and handed it to me in an ice cream container. He suggested I should add it to my powdered sourdough starter, which I've been slowly improving, by adding and subtracting stuff like this over the past year or so. I did as he suggested - indeed, I also fed my desem with it, and lo and behold, they both loved the effect.

White Sourdough 'desem' Bread Recipe

also known as the 'dry dough' sourdough method.

There are different ways to make desem, and the way i've settled on here is one way only - and I choose it because it's easy to maintain, and because of its resilient nature. It also has an absolutely distinct flavour, and if you are a long term sourdough propeller head like me, you'll appreciate it straight away as being one of a kind, as all good ferments become over time. The longer, the better!

Light Wholemeal Sourdough Bread Recipe

made using the dry dough sourdough (desem) technique.

This lovely sourdough bread tastes like a fine wine - deeply sour, but understated. It's a treat for the senses, and will require a bit more commitment than some of the more basic recipes here. But the rewards, ahh, yes, the rewards...

When you have been searching for the holy grail of sourdough breadmaking for as long as I have, to discover someone (in fact many 'someones'...) has visited these shores (desem, or dry dough sourdough) before is both humbling and daunting - people who have breadmaking as their passion, I have observed, have none of the arrogance of coffee snobs. They just learn, and share, and learn some more. We all have failures, because we all experiment, and thus we get any chips knocked off our shoulders each time something doesn't work. It's a lovely thing, and so too is the world of specialist forums. So thanks to 'floydm' for bringing us www.thefreshloaf.com. A great forum, with many great minds freely sharing their breadmaking experiences.