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Anyone who has ever tried it knows how it can be, at least at the beginning, to try to bake bread at home. After all, it’s flour, water, salt, caraway, yeast — what could be difficult about that. There is certainly a difference whether you bake bread with commercial yeast or with a sourdough starter. Just preparing the starter takes a few days. Very easily it can happen that after a few days your starter dies. Then you’ll have no choice but to start a new one. Or today you can buy one. Baking with commercial yeast is easier, but bread made with sourdough is much tastier.
So how to make the bread?
If you have a cultivated starter, mix the required amount with water and rye flour. Make the dough, the levain, and let it rise somewhere warm. Nicely on the windowsill in a bowl, covered with a cloth. Usually it takes some time. Meanwhile weigh out the next portion of flour; you can use wheat or rye again, salt, water and caraway. When the dough has risen, add the other ingredients, work them into the dough, put it into a pan or into a basket, and cover and let it proof again. When the dough has nicely risen, preheat the oven to min. 250°C, and put the dough into the hot oven. Put a tray below, and pour hot water into it. The dough must be steamed. Bake like this for about 10 – 12 minutes, then lower the temperature to 200°C, and bake for about 40 minutes. Reduce the temperature gradually. It is better to bake at a lower temperature for a longer time. The bread will then be well baked inside as well. You’ll know it when you cut it that it doesn’t stick.
And that one extra ingredient for unbeatable bread
Few of you would think that the ingredient is ordinary apple cider vinegar. Just add 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar to the dough. You’ll see that the bread will be really excellent. You can also add vinegar to dough for doughnuts; they will be excellent then. It may seem a bit amusing, but next time you bake bread, try it. You can make apple cider vinegar at home, and if you don’t feel like it, you can buy it in the supermarket.
Baking is not just work, it’s an art
Anyone who has tried baking bread at home will admit that the first ones weren’t much. Don’t be discouraged by failure, and keep trying. Every flour is different, every starter is different, and so are yeasts. And every oven bakes differently. When bread used to be baked at home in the oven, the housewife had to heat the oven correctly. Otherwise the bread was underbaked, or overbaked. It was an art. But homemade bread stayed soft until the family ate it.
