Flour Power
First published in the TasWeekend magazine (The Hobart Mercury)
It’s just flour, water and salt. That’s it. No yeast. No preservatives. No other raising agents. True sourdough, if you ask Cam McKenzie from Cygnet’s Woodfired Bakehouse, is made from a natural leavening - a fermented form of flour and water. Naturally leavened bread expands during the resting period and creates a moist, fine-grained texture. Sourdough has an extended shelf-life and increased nutritional profile, but also much better flavour. “Sourdough is what real bread is,” McKenzie says.
One of his regular customers loves his sourdough so much that she forces herself to cut it up and freeze it in two-slice portions so she doesn’t eat the whole loaf in one sitting. McKenzie says customers have broken down in tears in his bakehouse after tasting his sourdough because it’s transported them back several decades - to a time before mass-produced, yeast-heavy bread - when sourdough was the only type of bread we ate. His hands-only baking method is unusual and coupled with his wood-fired cooking technique used by bakers in the middle ages makes for, McKenzie says, a really special tasting bread. “I went back 500 years because it’s the best way to cook it. It’s batshit mental to even think about doing this commercially so it wasn’t an easy choice, but it makes for a better product.”
Sourdough that is handmade and naturally leavened is a kind of magical food,” McKenzie says. “When you ferment flour and water together it grows and has a life and you put it in the oven and capture it into a really nice loaf of bread that gives life to the people who eat it. He says when people try real bread for the first time they are gobsmacked by not just the taste, but the energy it gives them. “There has been a whole generation of bakers who have missed out on what real bread is.”
Alistair Wise is a regular guest on Chris Wisbey’s ABC radio show and is the baker behind Sweet Envy in North Hobart. He says the best thing about sourdough is that every baker makes different tasting bread because their environment (their water and the flour they use) is unique to them. “Tasmania has some fabulous, little sourdough pockets,” Wise says. “Sourdough tastes like where you are at that moment so you end up with all these little sourdough niches.”
McKenzie takes it one step further and says the taste of sourdough is different even if its made in the same bakery with the same recipe. “Even if my baker is following my recipe in my kitchen, his sourdough will be different to my sourdough,” he says, “Sourdough baking has an artisan quality like spoon carving - it’s the little nuances and character each person puts in that makes their sourdough different. Bread tastes the way it’s been manipulated - the way it is stretched and how much it is stretched changes the character of the bread.”
For South Hobart’s Phoebe Nimanis you can’t go past the simple table loaf created by Apiece bakery at Launceston. Their stall is the first she visits whenever she’s at the Farmgate market. Their table loaf was the first naturally leavened bread she tried and she says she’s well and truly hooked. “Tasting the table loaf was a bit of a revelation for me,” Nimanis says. “I’ve decided if I ever had to choose a meal for my last supper it would be their table loaf with some good quality olive oil. Over the course of a day I will cut and eat most of a loaf.”
The baker behind the Apiece table loaf is Ian Lowe. Everything he makes is hand-cut, hand-shaped - and made the old way. He’s a bread junkie. He loves bread so much that he loses sleep over it. “Simply put, bread is my favourite food,” says Lowe. “Always has been, always will be. Baking is my obsession I can’t turn off.”
Before moving to Tasmania in 2010, Lowe worked with some of the top chefs in New York including Gordon Ramsay. He says he’s inspired by the few dozen European bakers who still use natural leavening. “We were the first bakery in the entire southern hemisphere to use only sourdough for all our products, not just bread,” Lowe says. “What still sets us apart is the fact our traditional breakfast pastries like doughnuts, croissants and brioche are made entirely free of commercial yeast.”
Lowe has been baking bread for more than 20 years and has a global reputation as a sourdough master that sees him regularly welcoming bakers from all over the world into his bakery. They stay for month-long, sometimes longer, stints at Apiece to observe and learn the art of baking naturally leavened bread and shaping every loaf by hand.
Annalisa Macaluso is a Phoenix baker who has just spent two months at Apiece.”It’s a real place of learning,” Macaluso says. “Their emphasis is on simple, old-world techniques with a focus on flavour.” She says Ian happily shared his sourdough tips. “He poured out every drop of knowledge from his mind in the hopes that a baker like me from the other side of the world would take back a passion and respect for a fading craft.”
Despite being a teacher to many, Lowe says he sees himself more as a student of bread. “I’m mostly self-taught, but any time I travel it’s for learning,” he says. "I recently came back from several months in Germany and France where I got to spend a lot of time in and around many of the best bakeries there. Experience is the best teacher. I freely share everything I know because a lot of the information I put out there is original to me as a result of my own research.”
Lowe reads everything he can get his hands on about sourdough fermentation. “I obsessively read about as many bakers and chefs as possible,” he says. “I’m a junkie and a formula whore.” When a new scientific article is published he applies its findings in his kitchen laboratory. Lowe taught himself basic chemistry, biochemistry and microbiology so that he better understands the microbiome of his favourite food. “There are only 20 researchers in the world who study this and I am in contact with them all,” he says. “It is the microbiology of fermentation and specifically the fermentation as a baker that I am obsessed with. I’m trying to bridge the gap between science and artisan baking.”
His Instagram feed is one of the most popular among sourdough baking enthusiasts and has close to 32,000 followers. Lowe says it acts as a non-systematic conduit for his always-on-the-go mind and is where he shares the fruits of his research. “@apieceofbread is more about bread education with walls of texts I’m surprised anybody wants to read,” he says. It’s also fodder for his first book. “I want to free the professional and amateur baker from a particular recipe, so she can create her own formula, and make any product from any type of flour and using any method of fermentation of her choosing."
Even as a kid Lowe says he adored handmade, imperfect, old-world breads and pastries because of their contrast to the industrial and pre-packaged baked goods he was used to. In the 1980s he tried a sourdough roll for the first time at a Steakhouse in Texas.“They were small, tidy-white and with mouth-puckering sourness,” Lowe says. “Looking back on it, they were probably yeasted, retarded and artificially sourced with acetic or lactic acids from a packet mix. No matter. I was hooked.”
Lowe says no technique or ingredient is off limits at the bakery depending upon the end result he’s trying to achieve. He uses a bacteria and yeast rich starter - a small amount of dough that is regularly fed by adding flour and water to breed the living organisms that make the yeast rise and give sourdough its tang. “We do not use any commercial yeast,” Lowe says. “All our stone-ground flours come from Wholegrain Milling in Gunnedah in New South Wales and all our roller-milled flowers from Laucke in South Australia….our pastry takes 48 hours to ferment at room temperature and our breads take 36 hours.”
Pigeon Whole Bakery sourdough bakers invest the same amount of time into their products. When TasWeekend caught up with their sourdough master Jay Patey he was in Italy on a European bakery tour culminating with a Munich bakery trade show. Pigeon Whole is our state’s biggest sourdough producer making between 800 and 2000 sourdough loaves a day in 8 different varieties. Their display wall of neatly presented loaves includes ciabattas, rye breads, micelles and bagels. Apart from mixing the dough in a mixer, every other process is done by hand. They charge between $6.50 and $7.50 a loaf. Customers can watch the bakers busily working behind the bread displays.
Patey told us he believes sourdough is having a resurgence. “Sourdough is huge in Tasmania. We really love real bread here. And I don’t think it will ever stop,” he says. He says he has a loyal clientele who only buy bread from his bakery. “We have loyal customers who excitedly come into the bakery after European holidays because they haven’t been able to find bread as good away as they can buy at home from us,” he says. “They say: ‘thank God - we haven’t had anything this good since we’ve been travelling’.” Patey says often customers will return not long after buying a loaf of his sourdough because they’d already eaten half before they’ve even arrived home. “That happens quite a bit,” he says.
Pigeon Whole Bakery uses the best quality organic flours possible. Its whole grains are sourced from New South Wales that are sustainably farmed and milled with no chemicals or sprays or pesticides. Patey says he also uses flour sourced from Oatlands. “Tasmanian farmers are growing more experimental crops in heritage type grains which is exciting for bakers.”
He says his most popular is the stone ground sourdough. “It’s just really versatile people can make sandwiches or toast with it, its great with cheese or an antipasto or soup.”
He runs three sourdough making classes at the Agrarian Kitchen every year that always fill up quickly and then sell out. “There are a lot of great home bakers out there,” he says. His tips: “practise, practise, practise and make sure you start with a really quality flour.”
