GAIL's Potato and Rosemary Sourdough Loaf, 650g

Product Information

am:Feed sourdough starter with flour and water. Depending on how active your sourdough starter is, it could take between 4-12 hours for it to be active enough to bake a loaf of bread. Transfer to flour banneton or bowl with tea towel and cover with plastic. Place in the refrigerator for 12-15 hours. The Next Day

In a large mixing bowl, combine warm water, flour, sourdough starter, and salt with your hands, a wooden spoon, or dough whisk. Allow the dough to rest for 30 minutes for the water to hydrate the flour.This process is called autolyse, which allows all the flours to become hydrated.

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In a large mixing bowl, combine warm water, flour, sourdough starter, and salt with your hands, a wooden spoon, or dough whisk. Tom Molnar jokes that he is turning into a ‘bread philosopher’. It was a personal quest to bring Londoners a good loaf that led the affable American to co-found the Gail’s bakery chain in 2005 and he, and many of the brand’s original bakers, are still on that mission.

I love how eating good food tugs at an invisible, interconnected web of food-memories we’ve constructed over the course of our lifetimes. This complex web, with scattered connections between foods, smells, experiences, and memories, is gradually filled in and ever-evolving: it shapes the corpus of foods we enjoy, giving them significance in place and time. Perhaps the construction of this web is instilled at a primal level, maybe it’s a way we’ve evolutionarily progressed to favor foods that provide proper nourishment by exciting our senses, pushing out hollow foods that provide nothing or are uninteresting. I believe it’s one of the many reasons we’ve stayed alive for so long, eating the things we need instead of those we don’t. This crustruns the most striking gamut of colors from dark mahogany to light yellow. There's no doubt the extra sugars in the potato helped this crust color nicely in the oven. While it may look craggy and hard, it's actually quite soft and when toasted, it becomes super svelteand crunchy.Turn the oven temperature down to 475, remove the lid, and bake an additional 25 minutes or until browned. Storage: My version of potato bread is a spin on an Italian bread laden with mashed/pureed potatoes. In taking cues from my approach to making gnocchi, I like to roast the potatoes instead of boiling them. I find this gives the potatoes a nice color and texture; plus, it helps dry the flesh out, preventing unwanted water absorption that could later be released into the dough.

Potato and rosemary are a classic pairing but you could substitute the rosemary for another spice such as thyme (which is what I tried for my first few attempts seen below), or omit it entirely for a cleaner, more potato forward flavor. Speaking of rosemary, I find not all rosemary plants produce the samelevel of potency in their leaves. Some plants, like mine, are quite pungent and strong while others are simply not. Start with the recommended 1% rosemary and scale up/down to suit your taste after youtry thefirst bake. As with my previous polenta sourdough with rosemary, I like to keep the spice light so it doesn’t obscurethe other flavors throughout.

Questions & Answers

I hope this sourdough bread with roasted potato and rosemary, with its deep, rich flavor and surprisingly light texture, helps you form new food-memory connections for you and whomever you share your loaves with. Perhaps now my Dad's desire for potato bread is satiated, at least until I develop my next recipe. When the news came out there was some confusion over whether there was any overlap with us, but there never was even though Luke was involved in both,” says Molnar. “There was a lot of noise in the media about Patisserie Valerie potentially buying us in 2018, which was false. That was not a serious thing, but I think that’s why a lot of people got the association.” Now 1,000 people work in the company’s north London HQ (‘the mothership’), which supplies all Gail’s bakeries, as well as the wholesale clients such as restaurants, airport lounges and boxes at Wembley stadium. The original idea was Bado’s, following a discussion with her flatmate about food waste and how edible bread could be re-used in a new product. Cover with a lid or plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise until doubled in a warm place.This is called bulk ferment.