toast them in the oil for 3–5 minutes, until golden and crunchy – it usually takes a bit longer than you’d expect. Scrape all the crumbs into the bowl with the pumpkin seeds and buckwheat. Season with sea salt. Pour into a jar or airtight container once cool, or use immediately.2 Make the butter by blitzing the shallot, salt and garlic cloves in the small bowl of a food processor or mini chopper, followed by most of the herbs (saving a few for garnish) and the lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper, add the diced butter and blitz to make a green butter. Scrape out of the food processor and into a bowl by the hob.
3 Toast the sourdough and rub it with the garlic. Keep warm in a low oven with the plates while you cook the mushrooms.
4 Place the pan back over a medium-high heat and pour in the rapeseed or neutral oil. Add the mushrooms with the thyme and a pinch of salt and fry for a couple of minutes, until they are caramelised and losing their moisture – they will shrink a little and you want to see some nice dark colour on them. Turn the heat down slightly, add all the butter, stirring to melt, and baste the mushrooms with it. Taste, season to your liking and maybe add a little lemon juice to pique the flavours. Serve spooned over the warm toast with the crumb scattered over.
TIP: Look out for a mix of girolles, chestnut, oyster, blewit, black trompette and cep/porcini. If you love wild mushrooms as much as I do, it’s worth investing in a mushroom brush, but you can also use a damp kitchen towel to get rid of any dirt or grit.
Simple sourdough
Proper sourdough bread is a truly magnificent thing. It’s bread made the old-fashioned way, slowly and reverently, without the use of any industrially produced yeast, but rather leavened or raised with a starter culture made from naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria that awaken when flour and water are mixed together. The resulting fermentation yields something altogether more flavourful and satisfying than mass-produced bread, and in recent years we’ve seen a sourdough revolution, a movement of artisan bakers the world over who are re-embracing the craft of making slow-fermented doughs and beautiful, delicious and nutritious loaves. A really good loaf of sourdough takes time to make, but it becomes the basis for so many good, quick meals that it more than pays you back for the time you’ve invested.
Now, while I do think that squishy white bread still has a place – I can’t imagine a bacon sandwich made with sourdough or, worse still, a chip butty – after interviewing bakers and chefs and tasting this delicious style of bread at many restaurants over the years, I became fascinated by the process, and obsessed with mastering the art of making sourdough at home. The idea that it was possible to raise an army of hard-working yeast who would obligingly leaven loaves of bread, producing gut-friendly acids that make that bread easier on the digestion, more nutritious and tasty in the process, had me hooked.
There are books and courses dedicated to sourdough, and if you want to delve deeper I’d recommend these books for further reading – Do Sourdough by Andrew Whitley, The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard, and Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast by Ken Forkish – but please don’t be intimidated. For centuries people have been making bread this way, simply using flour and water, without technical equipment, and once you begin to wrap your head around the process, anyone can bake loaves at home, and really enjoy the journey of discovering what works for you.
The gist of it is that you create a leaven by mixing together good-quality flour and water. The yeasts and bacteria already present in the flour thrive and multiply in this wet environment, feasting on the sugars in the flour and creating carbon dioxide (the bubbles that will eventually raise your bread), and lactic acid, which give the bread its signature sour flavour. You have to feed the starter initially to help the network of yeasts and lactobacilli become strong, and once this starter is a happy and lively culture, you introduce it to more flour and water and allow it to continue its work, creating a fermented and flavourful dough that is then baked into delicious bread.
This is a simple, entry level recipe and it’s relatively hands off. The trick is to let the bread work around your schedule, rather than keeping you prisoner. This method consistently delivers loaves of good bread that I base many meals around, and I hope you will too. You will need a few things to get started, but none of them are outrageously expensive or unattainable: an ovenproof ceramic or cast-iron pot to bake your bread in, good-quality organic wholegrain rye flour, some digital scales and a sharp knife or razor blade for slashing the dough before baking. I use a casserole pot I found in a charity shop to bake mine, but you could use a small Le Creuset, a Pyrex dish with a lid or a stewing pot. Please use this as a jumping off point for your sourdough experiments. I’m convinced, when you see what a natural, simple and satisfying process it is, you too will be hooked.
My simple rye flour starter
The first step is to create a happy starter to levain your bread. All you need in order to make your own is some really good-quality wholegrain flour, some filtered water and a sterilised jar.
You need to make the starter about a week before you want to make your bread and you will have to tend to it– for literally a couple of minutes – every day to start with. You should only have to do this once, and then you can keep your starter dormant in the fridge, refreshing it a day before you want to make bread. A good-quality, organic wholegrain rye flour starter creates beautifully leavened and tasty, wholesome bread, but as you get more confident with sourdough you can start to play around with different starters such as wheat and spelt. Wholegrain flours are better for making starters as the bran of the wheat grain is rich in bacterias and yeasts and organic flour is always a better option as there are no yeast and bacteria-killing chemical pesticides and fungicides involved in its production.
1 In a jar, mix 2 heaped teaspoons (about 20g) of rye flour with 40ml lukewarm filtered or spring water to make a thin, pourable mixture. I use a butter knife to mix the flour and water together, incorporating as much air as possible. Scrape down the sides of the jar, rest the lid on top of the jar so that it’s sealed but not tightly closed, and leave in a warm place. In the summer you should be fine to leave your jar anywhere, but in colder months you’ll want to seek out a warm spot on a shelf above a radiator or in an airing cupboard as the starter needs a certain level of warmth to get going. Just don’t forget about it! I set a reminder on my phone to feed mine as I’m a bit forgetful.
2 The next day, add the same amount of water and flour again, mixing and repeating the cycle. Repeat again on the third and fourth day, but this time using 40g flour and 40ml water each day. By the fourth day, you should be seeing some promising signs of life in the form of small bubbles.
3 On the fifth day, tip off 100g of the starter (to use in the Sour Cream Sourdough Crumpets (see here)) and replace what you’ve lost with with 50g each of flour and water. Leave this to ferment for 12 hours, or until it’s looking really nice and bubbly and smelling good and yeasty. By the sixth day you should be good to get baking – see recipe overleaf. Once you’ve used your starter for the recipe overleaf, keep the rest (there should be about 150g) in the fridge, refreshing as per the recipe below each time you want to bake.
TIP: Always scrape down the sides of your jar before you put the starter back in the fridge to make it less likely to go mouldy.
REFRESHING YOUR STARTER FOR BAKING
Every time you want to bake a loaf of sourdough, you now have the wherewithal, but you will need to refresh and replenish your starter a couple of days ahead to do this as it will get sluggish in the fridge. Just tip your starter into a bowl, add 100g each of wholegrain rye flour and lukewarm filtered or
