Another Natural Leaven

Over the last couple of days I have been following another method of making and using a natural leaven. This process comes from French bakers and is known there as a chef, but the principle is much the same as that described earlier. The main difference in this method is that the entire leaven is used to make the dough and then a small amount of the dough is saved before baking to start the next one. The advantage of this method is that, if you are not baking every day, the leaven will store well in the fridge without attention; you only refresh it when you make a new dough. I have seen examples of this method where it is instucted not to leave it more than three days, but I have successfully restarted it after up to three weeks (if you are going to do this make sure it is in a clean, sealed container and that the resulting bread is cooked at high temperature for a relatively long time).

As this is a natural leaven it is slow to get going and very varaiable from place to place, so you may have to adapt the recipe yourself to suit the culture, but the results I get here are a deliciously tangy bread (the taste develops over successive use) with a very firm crust. To encourage the formation of this crust I often increase the humidity of the oven by putting a heat-proof dish with a small amount of water in the bottom both before and during baking. This recipe also benefits from being one that can be left for its second rise, or proving, out of the fridge overnight, so it is ready to just pop in the oven in the morning and doesn't take up fridge space.

I hope you experience similar results to myself, this recipe (or rather its product) has been appreciated by all who have tried it, including the French friend I was helping to move house today, so give it a go.

Be busy baking.

PS In case anyone is keeping track of my baking schedule; I posted on Thursday, baked the above bread on Friday morning, pizza for five on Friday evening (2 Englishmen, 3 Italians), and the above bread again this morning as well as Ciabatta which, as I'm sure you all well know, follows pizza every time.