Yesterday was another great success for the oven. Great weather, excellent friends (who’ve made their own cob oven), pizza for lunch, then sourdough bread and soup for tea, all cooked outside – I could get used to this!
Last Tuesday I mixed up a new rye starter (25g rye, 50g water), and then on each successive day I added the same again. The bowl was covered but left hanging around in the kitchen. On Saturday I added 100g rye and 200g water to bulk it up a bit, and then on Sunday morning mixed up my bread:
300g Rye starter, containing 100g rye and 200g water
200g Wholemeal
700g White
520g Water
20g Salt
This gave me 1kg of flour and 72% hydration – nice and sloppy and good for a slow ferment. It probably had around 6 hours before it was shaped, and was then left to rise for a couple more hours in a proving basket. It was cooked in a pre-heated cloche – we have La Cloche from here – for about 40 minutes, then had another 10-15 minutes with the lid off. The temperature started around 250 and was just below 200 by the time we’d finished. It had that fantastic sourdough taste to it, which just served to remind me how dull ordinary bread is without butter and other toppings.
Later on Toni mixed up a quick Minestrone soup and cooked it in the oven – soup in a pizza oven! – and we ended the day watching episode of Ashes to Ashes with what may have been the best sourdough bread and Minestrone soup ever made in a pizza oven in Droitwich on a Sunday evening 🙂
(For the pizza dough we just used ’00’ flour with 65% water, 2% salt and 1% yeast instead of the normal 2%, and didn’t use any oil. Need to do more research and testing to figure out what’s best for thin crust wood-fired pizzas, but yesterday’s were’t at all bad!)
Buon appetito!
Shad's Pad 