Seeded Sourdough

Deciding to toast the sesame seeds in this seeded sourdough bread, gives the bread a wonderfully nutty flavour. You can of course add any seeds you fancy, I chose sesame, sunflower and pumpkin.

for this bread you will need:
for the ferment,
1 tablespoon of starter from the fridge
100g of Strong White Flour
100g of Strong Wholewheat Flour
200g of water.

For the main dough,
All of the ferment
700g of Strong white flour
200g of Strong wholewheat flour
75g of whole sesame seeds, toasted in a dry pan on a low heat for a couple of minutes.
75g of pumpkin seeds
75g of sunflower seeds
650g of water
20g of salt.


Begin by creating the ferment, I leave mine in my rather cool kitchen all day to get on with growing. This means I put the ferment ingredients together at around 8.0 and leave them covered in a 2 pint pudding basin until 10.0 at night before adding all the main dough ingredients apart from the salt.

Create the main dough by putting together all the ferment and all the main dough ingredients, apart from the salt, and mix to form a soft dough, leave covered overnight.

In the morning, add the salt , mix in thoroughly, this takes just over a minute in my food mixer. Leave the dough to rise, stretching and folding it every hour for 3 to 4 hours. The dough will become stronger and holds its shape slightly more as this process goes on. You should find it grows and becomes more billowy, stretching and folding the dough needs to be done increasingly gently so as to avoid losing as much of the precious gas as possible.

Divide the dough into 3 and shape into long oval loaves, place the dough into well floured baskets to prove. I flour my proving baskets with rice flour rather than wheat flour, it seems to be more effective at preventing the dough sticking to the basket. Tip each loaf out onto a hot baking stone, slash the top before baking in a hot (220C) oven for 30-35 minutes. I sprayed the top of each loaf with water and scattered it with poppy seeds just prior to slashing.

Notes:
You can add more seeds than I chose to, the lightness of bread however, depends of gluten forming large stretchy bubbles and the addition of anything that compromises the elasticity of the gluten, even the addition of bran, will affect this, creating a less lofty loaf.
This bread is particularly good with cheese, I found a Peyrigoux, a soft cheese made in the Aquitaine which was brilliant.