iN VIDEO: How a Kamloops bakery makes its popular sourdough bread
Walking through the doors of Harvest Moon Bakery in Kamloops is like walking into a warm hug filled with inviting aromas of freshly baked breads and savoury cheese and herbs.
At 9 a.m., the bakers are already well into their work day. They arrive in the wee hours to fire up the ovens and start rolling dough.
“Baking bread takes a few hours and usually starts early in the morning around 4:30,” said Nicolas Driver who co-owns the bakery with his wife Christy Carnegie.
Driver is the head baker and makes a wide variety of breads from scratch. Sourdough bread is a top seller and he makes four different versions. The version Driver showed iNFOnews.ca how to make was a traditional white sourdough bread.
The process begins with a sourdough starter, a collection of yeasts and bacteria that exist naturally in the environment.
“You mix water and flour together and keep feeding it more water and flour everyday over about a three month period,” Driver said. “You’re breeding up the yeasts in there to ferment the bread and one specific bacteria called lactobacillus which creates the sour flavour.”
Driver said starters can be finicky because they’re natural and don’t behave as predictably as commercial yeasts.
Bakers can use the same starter for years, and it can be upsetting if they lose it.
“You’ve spent all this time working up the mother dough, you’ve built it up, fed it diligently every day with water and flour to keep feeding carbohydrates to the yeast to keep it alive and then it dies,” he said.
Starter has a sloppy, sticky consistency. Driver has been using his starter for a couple of years and every time it gets moved to a fresh, clean container, someone gives it a new name.
The baker takes a few scoops of starter and mixes it into dough.
“Starter ferments the dough, helps give it that poof, and adds the sour flavour,” he said.
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Driver does a preferment by taking a bit of starter, adding it to flour and water and letting sit on the counter overnight before incorporating it into the final dough.
The dough puffs up like a fluffy pillow. It’s then pulled, stretched and flipped to build gluten structure and redistribute the carbohydrates.
The dough rests for a few hours before Driver rolls it out into portions and puts it into loaf pans that look like baskets where it sits for a few more hours rising.
“They’re called bannetons,” Driver said of the baskets. “They can be made from wicker or bamboo or willow. Because sourdough is made with such a high hydration if you just put it on a pan it will turn into a puddle, these help it keep its shape.”
Driver turns an industrial oven up past 500 degrees Fahrenheit and puts trays inside to get them hot.
“We’re going to turn our loaves onto the hot trays and the heat will help them poof up super fast,” he said. “Turning the loaves onto hot pans, they puddle out a little bit then poof up fast in such a hot oven.”
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He then puts the doughy puddles into the oven for a minute or two, then cools the temperature down so they don’t burn. The bread takes an hour to bake.
Along with the traditional white sourdough, Diver makes a spelt, a honey oat, a whole wheat and a rye sourdough at the shop.
“The rye is eastern European inspired, it’s heavy and dense like a brick, and has traditional partner flavours of caraway and molasses,” he said. “Traditional white sourdough is the most popular one.”
Harvest Moon Bakery is located at 107 Yew Street in Kamloops. Go here to see all the treats available.
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