Rising damp
Sourdough's the best thing since sliced bread. We find out how to grow a healthy starter from a master baker.
Words by Sam Bradley.
Illustration by Bernd Pegritz (detail from image above).
I can't bake. I can't get a soufflé to rise, cloud-soft and Parisian; whipping sugar and eggs into a pearly whorl of meringue is well beyond me; even simple creations like the classic Vicky sponge strain my meagre skillset. The only thing I've ever been able to make is bread.
Emily Cuddeford has no such issues in the kitchen. She's a breadmaker and baker at Twelve Triangles, a bakery in Edinburgh treasured for its loaves, passionfruit custard-filled donuts and strong coffee. Chief among Twelve Triangles' doughy delights is its sourdough. I called Cuddeford, who took a pause between putting cakes into the oven, to talk about baking, rare breads and the best toast in the world – and to see if she had some trade secrets about creating a decent sourdough, ahead of my attempt.
Cuddeford's always been a baker, well before she started baking for a living. "I've always baked since I was a wee baby girl. There's hilarious photos of me at about three years old, whisk in arm," she tells Counterpoint. "I wasn't very well when I was younger – I left school when I was thirteen so I had a lot of time at home and a lot of time with books," she says. That time at home, with Nigella Lawson, Diana Henry "and a bit of Delia" for company allowed Cuddeford to development a passion for baking and a flair for experimentation.
"I think that's where a lot of my love for recipe development has grown. What if we changed one thing, or added another process, or browned the butter before we make the sponge?" It's proved a helpful instinct for breadmaking, she notes, "because there are thousands of variants that change every single day. It constantly keeps you guessing." "I've never had any formal training – I'm from an arts background. I got my acceptance letter to university on the same day that I got a job offer from my first kitchen job. I decided to go to university, but took a year out and started working in kitchens. I went back and did my final year but worked in a local grocers and used to make cakes and salads and stuff for them and realised that a) I could make more money and b) it was much more enjoyable."
As a professional baker, Cuddeford started out making "the traditional kind of stuff" such as cakes and tarts. "Then I started to get into croissants and lamination, and finally sourdough. I wanted to be able to produce something for people that was an everyday product and a necessity rather than just treats." The best bread in the world? "At home, I probably go for a seeded number, you get a little extra flavour coming through that and a bit of crunch." And for toast? "Porridge loaf. It's super super creamy inside and we toast all the oats, so you get loads of flavour through. That with good butter and jam is amazing."
Cuddeford's current bread obsession is miche, a traditional communal loaf from France. "It was made for a community, so it's a loaf that has lots of different kinds of grains in it," she explains. "Everyone would get together and use the communal oven to bake it, and you'd take away your quarter, your fifth or sixth or whatever back for your family. Traditionally it's quite large and low in volume; it's quite a heavy, damp sour, so it'll last you the week. I love the story behind it." Fittingly Twelve Triangles' miche, which Cuddeford developed earlier this year, combines a whole range of different flours: ancient einkorn, Canadian white flour and stone-ground flour from Yorkshire ("It's 85% extraction, which is a geeky way of saying they haven't sifted all the bran out like white flour – so you get a lot more flavour and nutrients from it").
"Someone asked us to do one for a wedding, so I baked a giant four kilo loaf which I think is one of the most fun but nerve-wracking things I've done. It takes three days and you've only got one, so if it goes tits up, there won't be time to make another. "But it's such a lovely idea for a wedding to have that big centrepiece, that you have your family, your community of people that are there for you, so that was a really lovely project to work on. They perfectly understood what that bread was, and what the point of it was."
“I wanted to be able to produce something for people that was an everyday product and a necessity, rather than just a treat.“
By most estimates sourdough was the first leavened bread ever made, created by bakers in the Fertile Crescent before the pyramids were built. Because it takes longer to make than bread made with baker's yeast, sourdough was largely discarded in the 20th century, giving rise to the cheap, white loaves ubiquitous in supermarkets today. Over the last decade sourdough has returned to our cupboards, heralded for its digestability and deliciousness. The crucial difference between sourdough and other kinds of bread is that it's made with a live yeast culture, which is fed and maintained over time, rather than with baker's yeast. Having only worked with baker's yeast before, I was curious – and daunted – by the task of making my own sourdough.
As an amateur breadmaker, I was eager to take in any of Cuddeford's tips before I tackled my first sourdough starter. She warns me of the "big variations" that can affect a loaf's final form and taste: the temperature of the flour, water and atmosphere the dough is made in; the type of flour used; the proportion of starter used; the PH of the water. The key points, she says, are to keep the dough between 24 and 26 degrees while it ferments, and to maintain the mix of flour and water during feeding. "Everything is in proportion to the flour. Normally a bread is around 20% starter to flour, but you can make it with anything from 2% starter up to 50-60% starter – so you can go from a very mild tasting bread to a fast-acting and quite heavy, waxy sour tasting bread."
"A lot of this I learnt the hard way by it going massively wrong, and I've definitely sat on the bakery floor before having a small cry," she says. "It's really fun but there are days when I don't understand what's gone wrong."
Cuddeford's own sourdough starter is maintained with a feeding cycle not unlike that of a baby. "We feed it twice before we use it. We calculate all our recipes, all our dough quantities so we make as much as we need with enough left over to feed it for the next day. It's a perpetual cycle... it makes our starter much healthier. And also like a child, it enjoys routine. It's very temperamental."
I try my best to follow Emily's advice but while the starter successfully bubbles to life, my first loaf comes out of the oven gummy, moist and so dense it's closer to brownie than bread. But I'll refresh the starter, and make fresh mounds of dough - and with each attempt, the flavour will grow.
Bernd Pegritz is an illustrator from Germany.
