The efficiency of self sufficiency in sourdough bread

Is sourdough bread an efficient self sufficient swap, judged for health, sustainability and real cost?

Bread is probably a bit of a gateway drug for being more self sufficient isn’t it? It feels a bit farmy without needing anything beyond what you’d stock in your average kitchen. It can be gone about in cities and it doesn’t smell of manure. In fact it smells great. So it feels only natural that we look at it as one of the first practises of the self sufficient project. Despite that, I must admit that I was extremely late to the party.

I do not knead. I have no need of kneading. I am needy of kneadilessness. Not only that, I don’t know my starter from my levain, I have no idea of the hydration level of anything but myself and I would have no idea whether my starter is fed or unfed beyond a general sense of bubblyness. I say this not to sound ignorant, though I know it has that effect. But because I think there’s room for more than one type of baker in this world. And if you’re getting into cooking bread because you want to do more for yourself, there’s not always going to be time to get super absorbed by the theory. I’ve always liked cooking so it was only natural to try to get into baking at some point but it wasn’t until I happened upon this fuss free method that I could actually get very excited about it all.

And my way appears to produce reasonably good bread with an absolute minimum of messing around. I just don’t have the time or head for the science of natural yeast growth and I actually find learning about all the theory behind it quite off-putting. Whereas having a ‘magical’ starter which can turn a bit of flour and a bit of water into a lovely soft loaf is incredibly liberating and was the thing that opened my eyes to the possibilities for butter and cheese and soap and all manner of things.

If this were Instagram I’d be holding my breath and waiting for all the negging about my passable loaf

I often find the barriers to entry for sourdough baking seem unnecessarily high. Indeed during lockdown when every hipster worth their salt had something or other rotting away on a counter or in a fridge I did try adopting starters from various friends, but found my mind cloud over at the mere mention of all the steps and processes. It wasn’t until I happened upon a good starter and an ace and really reliable no nonsense recipe that it all began to work consistently for me and my sourdough confidence grew.

We now rely on the bubbly little pot of sourdough starter in the kitchen for all our dough based needs. Every few Saturdays I use it to whip up some pizzas bases for tea, only needing to find passata at the back of the cupboard and possibly stop by a shop for mozzarella. Or if I need to be out all day, I’ll throw together a naan bread, using yogurt and milk, to accompany a warming slow cooked daal which basically cooks itself over the course of the day. The odd Sunday I’ll also use it for a crumpet mix which is, admittedly, a little more hit and miss.

So what follows is an analysis of incorporating sourdough into your life in a sort of sourdough for idiots methodology. Apologies in advance to anyone who is a real aficianado. I’m sure your loaves are a lot better than mine. But I seem to get away with it and frankly, I’m just happy with good enough.

What I should say is that I think all this is down to having a really ace starter which I use regularly. Though I’m a botcher by nature I think in this case it’s worth spending some time/money to get a good one. Mine came from a posh course my dad did; it’s supposed to be a hundred years old or something. He gave me a bit and I spent a long time killing it but getting good loaves but these days I am able to both create a loaf and keep it alive. A cursory check on Etsy does yield all manner of starters for sale though and when I asked my local artisan baker she said she just gives it away. Buy or borrow your rot I say. All these people online recommending making their own obviously are more on the science side of bread theory not the magic side.

Anyway, you get the picture. That sourdough culture, that little pot of rotting flour and water, has revolutionised the way we live our lives, our reliance on the supermarket and in turn inspired me to see what else I can do in terms of short cuts to self sufficiency. Pure magic.

Homemade vs shop bought vs handmade fresh sourdough

Preparation method

This is not and never will be a recipe blog. So I’m not here to recommend the actual steps I take to get somewhere, just analyse what good it did. Having said that, I seem to have adopted a different route so it’s only fair that in this case I note a method. While I do look up recipes for everything outside standard loaves, I have only ever used this one for our every day loaf. Occasionally I chuck in some fennel or throw some mixed seeds on the top or whatever but my ratios stay the same.

500g Flour (strong bread flour - I sometimes substitute wholemeal)

300g filtered water (from my Brita water filter)

150g starter

1 teaspoon salt

I mix all these together with a starter that seems bubbly. Then I cover and allow to prove the first time for at least 10 hours overnight and sometimes up to 20 hours depending on what I’ve been doing and whether the house feels cold.

After this prove I do a single letter box fold and shape into a loaf before allowing to prove again for a minimum of half an hour and a maximum of one and a half hours (actually I often leave for up to four hours but in this case the loaf is crap). Finally I bake in a well heated oven in a well heated cast iron pot for 25 minutes at 250 degrees with the lid on followed by 25 minutes at about 210 with the lid off.

If anyone has any interest in this I’m happy to elucidate more but this recipe is simply lifted from all manner of blogs that publish ‘no knead’ sourdough recipes which are much of a muchness for this one. The best way might be to Google it and get some trickle down knowledge from someone better equipped than me.

Last year I was bought a bannetone for my birthday and this year I was bought a Danish hook, lame and dough scraper for chrimbo but I would definitely not say these are necessary. All you need is a mixing bowl and a cast iron pot. Total gateway drug for self sufficiency.

A foray into naan

Health

If you’re looking to remove additives from your diet, cutting supermarket sourdough and, more to the point bread, is in my opinion the very best place to start. In general terms supermarket breads due to their texture and consistency tend to be packed with preservatives and stabilisers. So even though you think you and your kids are having a reasonably healthy sanger for your lunch, if you’re eating supermarket bread you’re looking to be admitting all manner of unintended ingredients. What’s more, there’s some suggestion that because the fermentation process is kept as short as possible for commercial reasons, it’s not as gentle on the digestion which can lead to intolerance issues.

Once we get on to the torrid world of supermarket sourdough we encounter an all new raft of problems. I mentioned supermarket sourdough to to my partner last night and he retorted ‘yeah but that’s sour faux isn’t it?’ so I’m not sure if the lack of authetniticy in supermarket sourdough is common knowledge now or if he has simply be subjected to my ranting sufficient times to know more than your average barber. Sourdough should contain only three ingredients: flour, salt and water. There has been a lot of smoke kicked up about this recently so I was interested to see if anyone had changed their recipe. But no. Even Tesco Finest sourdough appears to find space in its reasonably lengthy ingredients list for rapeseed oil. Why!? It seems like due to the high commodity value of sourdoughs, the sour faux brigade have come out in strong, adopting the name without the nature of the goods. Anyway, while we might generally choose sourdough for its health benefits over standard bread, that’s not something we can rely on when using a supermarket.

Sourdough bread is better for us than standard bread consumption because the lactic acid released by the fermentation process makes it easier to digest. However, despite the name, it does not count as one of your fermented foods unfortunately. This is because the good bacteria is killed by cooking. It appears that there are gut microbiome gains to be made but they are limited to the person baking so must be as a result of the baking process rather than the consumption since cooking kills off the good bacteria. This knowledge has resulted in me habitually eating a bit of unfed dough but that’s probably disgusting and inadvisable.

I have chosen to bake sourdough because I find it easier and somehow more rewarding than baking bread at home but equally you could go with a standard loaf. I think the main conclusion to draw is that baking at home is much better from an additive perspective than choosing shop bought.

Sustainability

Just to return briefly to our friend Mike Berner Lee, he gives bread a carbon footprint of 1.1kg CO2 per kg produced. However, bearing in mind that the majority of this comes from the wheat growing process, there aren’t massive direct sustainability savings to be made until we factor in avoidance of waste.

During COVID I worked on a project cooking meals for the local hospitlals and as such we signed up to a scheme offering surplus food from the supermarket. It was unbelievable quite how much bread and bread products turned up every day. It became so out of control that at one point the nurses begged to be sent fewer sandwiches they were becoming so overwhelmed with them.

I think wastage is the greatest sustainability challenge of shop bought bread. Despite being packed with preservatives, the shelf life of bread is pretty short and it’s seemingly necessary to have shelves laden with all manner of shapes and styles. This leads it to be Britain’s most wasted food, an industry which yields nearly 50 million tonnes per year.

Just because you baked it doesn’t mean you won’t waste it but there are a number of other uses for your stale bread once you have it at home. We have bread pudding, croutons and breadcrumbs incorporated into our recipes on a regular basis and rarely end up throwing anything away.

Real cost

Shop bought:

A quick straw poll of the supermarkets yields an average price of £3.50-5 a kg.

Homemade:

I find it hard to figure out the time commitment needed for baking your own bread because it’s more about committing to a routine than committing any significant labour time. Someone needs to come up with a really convenient app to remind you to feed prove and bake your bread. I’m going to message the creators of the Tamagotchi and see if they fancy it.

Cost including labour for 1kg

Labour = 8 minutes @ £17 = £2.20 (remembering £17 is the hourly wage cost at the average salaray in the UK)

Flour = 45p

Salt = 4p

Utilities = 83p including preheating

Total = £3.52 for a kg loaf

Obviously there would be significant gains for baking multiple loaves at once but I haven’t got the freezer space for that. I have to say I was astounded by the utilities cost. I haven’t look at this in a long time. Going forward I think I’ll try to arrange my routine to put a number of different things in the oven while the bread is baking.

Handmade:

I haven’t been to a sourdough bakery recently but a little bit of online research yields a cost of approximately £6-7 per kg.

Taste

There’s nothing quite like a loaf fresh from the oven is there? And there’s nothing quite like the smell of one baking. Want to persuade the rest of the fam to get up on a cold morning? Fresh bread, bacon and coffee wafting up the stairs. Hands down winner. I’ve not factored in the cost of not needing an alarm clock actually. That’s one to consider.

Conclusion

Let’s not call it cheating when I admit that sourdough was always going to be high green. Thinking about the way it has slotted into our lives with a minimum time commitment and huge gains to be made for our health and environmental impact is what inspired this project. It was only when I *jaw drop* checked the utilities that I knocked it off top spot. Supermarket bread in general and even sourdough, thought to be the healthier option, is full of crap. But baking your own is both easy and, the way I do it, remarkably low time intensive.

Sourdough bread:

Green for efficient self sufficiency.