A perfect Easter breakfast?

Could this be the perfect breakfast?    A free range boiled egg fresh from the nest with a home baked sourdough baguette, and nothing else at all except salt, butter, and of course coffee, or in my case, because I'm taking an extended break from coffee , a mug of cocoa (note to Starbucks - why do you have to spoil lovely cocoa by sugaring it and calling it hot chocolate?   Is that even legal?    Doesn't chocolate have to contain cocoa butter as well as cocoa solids?    Cocoa + sugar does not equal chocolate)).

The egg is simple enough.   Just get a few hens, a henhouse or ark, feed and water them making sure they have plenty of access to greenery, keep the foxes off, and they will do the rest, giving you a glorious egg most days of the year, though they will take a well-earned break from time to time.

Soudough bread is another story.    Sourdough or leaven bread (I prefer the latter, "sour" just doesn't sound attractive or accurately describe the wonderfully complex flavour and texture of good sourdough bread) is the ultimate bread.    All bread was once made this way, and all the best still is,  but bakery has moved on and now uses brewers yeast, originally a by product of the brewing industry ("barm") but now produced specially for baking.    It's all part of speeding up the breadmaking process.    If you are a baker, and you have room for say 100 loaves worth of dough in your bakery, using the sourdough process you can make 100 loaves a day, because the sourdough process takes at least 24 hours from from starter to oven.    If you can speed this up to say 2 hours (and you have the oven capacity), you can make 400 loaves in an 8 hour shift or 1200 if you work 24 hours.    The economic pressure to do this is hard to resist and this is what modern yeasts combined with improvers can achieve.   Improvers by the way are not so called because they make the bread better, but because they speed up the "proving" or rising of the bread.

In fact everything that speeds up the process of breadmaking detracts from the quality of the bread and for the best bread patience is required.     In commerce this is generally a recipe for bankruptcy and nearly all bakers will make the lowest quality bread they can persuade their customers to accept and no more, and most likely you or I in their shoes, with a living to be made and competition to deal with, would do just the same.    Even in France, perhaps the greatest bread culture ever, most bakeries now produce only mediocre bread, much of it made in great centralised factories and sent out frozen to the shops who only have to thaw and tan the bread in their ovens.    Such shops can't call themselves "boulangeries" but "depots du pain" and seem to be in the majority with only a few bakeries taking the trouble to make bread from scratch.   But the bread culture lives on in France and many locals will think nothing of a 20 mile round trip to get a decent loaf.    In fact I will be in France next weekend and will be making just such a trip to St Tropez market, passing at least half a dozen "depots" on the way, where you will find "Raymonde"   (markets are a first names only zone in France) an artisan baker who makes the best sourdough bread I have ever come across and whom I seek out at every opportunity.

To make such bread at home is not easy and requires a lot of skill that has to be learned by experience, but is by no means impossible and maybe easier at home than in a professional bakery because we have time on our side and don't face the same commercial pressures.   The only ingredients you need are flour, water, and salt, and for the perfect sourdough loaf don't consider adding anything else.     In France the baguette by law can contain only these three ingredients plus one other, bakers yeast.

Baker's yeast is actually brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.    To make sourdough, you rely instead on the wild yeasts and bacteria that grow on the wheat itself and are present in the flour.      The principal yeasts are Saccharomyces exiguus or Candida milleri, not brewer's yeast (which oddly enough doesn't seem to exist in the wild so must be a cultivated species though nobody quite knows how it was cultivated in the first place).     All you need to do is to make a batter from flour and water, and leave it until it starts to bubble, which will happen in a few days.    You can then start to make bread, but I have found in practice that it pays to build up the sourdough starter for a couple of weeks and wait until it is in rude health before using it.    Feed it daily with more flour and water, then every time you want to bake take half the culture to seed your dough and replace it with flour and water.    It can now live in the fridge and only needs feeding every week or two if you are not baking regularly to keep it ticking over.


I won't give the full instructions for making sourdough bread here.  They can be found easily enough elsewhere, although ultimately there is no substitute for experience preferably under the guidance of an old hand.    I will just say that the other ingredient I find indispensible is steam.   A normal domestic oven is too dry to make good bread.     When you put the loaf in the oven a crust starts to form too quickly, inhibiting the "oven spring" that is so important to getting light bread with an open textured crumb, and you also get a thick hard crust, not the light crunchy crust you associate with the best french bread.    I've tried many ways of achieving this but the simplest and most effective is just to heat up a  brick (I have a nice granite cobble) and put it into a pan of boiling water at the bottom of the oven just as you put the bread in.   It mimics to some extent the effect of a brick built wood fired bread oven, and more prosaically the steam injection ovens that were developed in Vienna in the nineteenth century and which are so good for bread and certain pastries like croissants that became known in France as Viennoiserie.

Be warned though the quest for perfect bread can be addictive.