Name: Rossella Di Palma
Class Year: FF 1999
Country of Residence: Italy
Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory?
Since the lockdown started, Italians began baking bread at home. This quickly made impossible to find brewer’s yeast and high quality flour. I do not normally eat bread, but since my mother does, I wanted to try to make bread at home, with a bread machine first and baking it in the oven later. Given the fact I could not find any yeasts at the supermarket, I decided to try using the kefir I grow daily.
Homemade Bread (with kefir based sourdough)
Serves 4-6 Takes approx. 5 hours minutes/hours and a few days to obtain the kefir sourdough
Ingredients:
For the kefir sourdough starter:
Day 1
Flour (0, for bread) 100 g
Kefir 50 g
Mix them well in and let the mixture rest for 24 hours in an open container. Keep it at room temperature.
Day 2
Discard 100 g of the starter, add 100 g of flour and 50 g of water (not chlorinated) and mix well. Let rest for 24 hours. The mixture will start rising after 3 or 4 hours, but you should not use it until day 5
Days 3-4-5
Repeat as in day 2 – the mixture will continue to rise and you you can start using your sourdough starter as of day 6
Making bread
Day 6
You can now use your starter to bake bread (see recipe below). To keep your starter for future use put 100 gr starter +100 gr flour and 40 water in an airtight container and mix well. Keep the starter in the fridge. The starter will have to be re-freshed (fed) with 50 g of flour and 50 g of water and a teaspoon of sugar.or 5o gr of kefir at least every 6 days, or more often. Before re-freshing bring the sourdough starter at home temperature.
Ingredients for the bread:
- Flour 400 g
- Water (or Kefir) 230 g
- Salt 10 g
- Oil a tablespoon
- Sugar (or honey) 1 teaspoon
- Kefir sourdough 130 grams
Instructions:
Put water, salt and oil in a bowl (or in a bread machine), add flour on the top and then the sourdough starter and the sugar on the top. Knead everything by hand for at least 15 minute, or choose program “Knead” if using a bread machine. Note: if you use a bread machine, you can simply pick program 1 (which shall be standard bread) and let it do the job.
If you do not use a bread machine, let the dough rest for at least 2 hours (or until its size doubles), then re-knead in the desired shape and let it rest again until it doubles.
When it is ready, pre-heat the oven at 250 °C (475° C) and bake the bread for at least 10 minutes at this temperature to make it raise well, then decrease the temperature to 200°C (400° F).
Note: the dough can be used to make pizza and focaccia as well.
Source:
Invention, I googled around and mixed several recipes, my step-sister, who is more experienced with baking, helped out with the baking temperatures and times.