The outdoor pizza oven had not done well last winter. The hastily erected tin roof had leaked, so that a steady drip of water had eroded the clay and left the entire structure sodden, heavy and unsound. Our first task was to try to patch some of the cracks with a new clay mixture – which would only be temporary, as raw and baked clay don’t easily form a good join. Yet by a form of papering or plastering over the cracks, we got the thing back to at least cosmetic acceptability in an afternoon. The test would be to fire it and see whether it held.
We were flying in the dark at best, our clay mixture haphazard, without a sense of the proportions necessary (sand, straw and clay), nor of the quality of the clay we had mined from the estate. Again, either it would stand or it would fall. A professional clay oven builder will have this information, and for a longer-term installation we would need to consult one.
In the end the oven stood up to our demands. A flatbread, a pide and a pizza – then pizza again – and the only fault was that the oven is too small and loses its heat too fast. We will have to replace it with a bigger one. I’d like to use bricks, so that it is weatherproof and permanent. This will involve gaining knowledge, or training.
After a couple of weeks of baking using only commercial dried yeast – allowing extended rising times and smaller amounts of yeast, and getting fine rises and crumb – it was time to try starting a sourdough. At first, the soft batter of flour and warm water was sullen and no culture would establish itself in it. After a few days I decided to cheat, accelerating the process by tossing in a pinch of dried yeast. This would quickly develop to the point of fermentation and result in a sourdough mass that could be used as a starter. And so it did. We gave it a few days to deepen.
Finally the sourdough is ready to test. Strong beery notes and some high, like burnt flour, like the smell of an old bakery. The wheat and rye give off their scents when the dough is kneaded, released by the new levain. A spectrum of notes, more a chord, of aroma. Then as it rises it settles, and as it bakes, the more volatile boil off; what remains is what flavours the bread.
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