Making Sourdough Bread

This past week, my class and I had the opportunity to visit a local bakery. L’assalto Ai Forni is located on the ground floor of a beautiful building, but before it was a bakery, it was the home of the owner, Lorenza for many years. Sadly, an earthquake in 2016 caused the whole building to be deemed uninhabitable. Determined to bring the building back to life, Lorenza renovated and transformed part of it into the bakery that stands there today.

Lorenza doesn’t use brewers yeast to make her bread, instead she uses a sourdough starter. She prepares the sourdough starter herself, which is a mixture of just flour and water that is then left to ferment. For more information about the fermentation process of sourdough, check out this link: https://bakerpedia.com/processes/sourdough/! Lorenza also prefers to use ancient grain flour, instead of regular flour. Since ancient grain flour has not been genetically modified, it results in a more nutritious and more fragrant flour. She supports the local companies and farms around her by buying all of the flour she needs from them.

Finally, my class and I were able to make our own loaves of sourdough bread! The recipe is very easy, and only technically requires two ingredients. First, we weighed 450 grams of ancient grains flour and added it to our bowl. Second, we measured 300 grams of lukewarm water and added it to the flour. Next, we mixed the flour and water together by placing our hand in the center of the bowl and making a circular motion until evenly combined. Our dough then had to sit for about 30 minutes to allow for the gluten network to develop.

The last ingredient that we needed to add to our dough was the sourdough starter. I mentioned this before as well, but this was made by fermenting a flour and water mixture. The amount of sourdough starter needed for a recipe is determined by taking a percentage of the flour. Our recipe needed the amount of sourdough starter to equal 30% of the flour, which was 135 grams. After our dough was fully mixed we placed them aside for Lorenza to bake in the morning.

After all the hard work we put into preparing our sourdough bread, it was finally time for some lunch! Lorenza and her team prepared a few of their most popular pizzas for us to try! The pizzas included a wide range of toppings such as potato and artichoke, salami and arugula, mushroom and cheese, and tomato sauce and sauteed greens with mozzarella cheese. It was all very tasty, and I will definitely be going back for more!

Thank you so much L’assalto Ai Forni for teaching us all about sourdough bread!