Making the bread

Here we go then - it's been a week since I started the yeast capture, and now I'm ready to put it to work. I mixed up an ordinary batch of dough - one pound of white flour, a little over half a pint of water (cold in this case, as I don't want it to get going too fast). I had to check and stop myself just adding a packet of yeast without thinking.

Into this dough, I added about three quarters of my starter dough - broken up into little chunks.

I kneaded that all together for ten minutes and returned it to the bowl - it will be left in a cool room to prove overnight (that will actually only be about five or six hours).

In the morning

I got up just after seven to find it looking like this:

- which is just fine. Unlike fast-proven bread doughs made with active dried yeast, this one didn't deflate at the slightest touch, in fact it took some effort to 'knock back' (meaning the second kneading - done to make the gas bubbles in the dough more uniform, resulting in a better texture in the finished loaf)

After knocking back, I formed it into an oblong shape, put it on a tray and left it in the airing cupboard (where the hot water tank resides) - half an hour later, it had doubled in volume - I slashed some diagonal cuts in the top and put it in the oven to bake. I didn't use any egg or milk wash - just put it in plain.

After about twenty five minutes, it came out looking like this:

I was pretty pleased with that - it had 'sprung' quite a bit in the oven and had doubled the height. The slashes in the crust obviously weren't deep enough - they should have opened up more - but I'm not crying over that.

The aroma was just fantastic! - and distinctly different from what I normally experience when I make bread - it's a sort of intensely fresh bakery smell - the 'sour' in 'sourdough', I suppose, although not in any kind of an unpleasant sense of that word.

So lunch consisted of slices of buttered wild yeast loaf, garlic and chive goat cheese, ham, salad and a couple of the pickled walnuts I made last year (which, incidentally, are also very good).

The bread is very crisp and crunchy in the crust; substantial, but even and springy in the crumb. The flavour isn't as striking, unusual or distinctive as I was expecting - there are certainly subtle complexities to it - and that's enjoyable - but the experience is really just that of eating very nice bread.

So all in all, it's been an unqualified success, and a hugely rewarding experience. I've still got some of the dough culture set aside for something in a few days time.