Traditional Flemish Desem Bread: Homemade Sourdough Starter Recipe

Preparation time: 2 weeks Cooking time: 1 hour Serves: 2

Description

Discover how to make authentic Flemish Desem Bread by cultivating your own sourdough starter from scratch. This comprehensive recipe guides you through the two-week process of developing a robust desem culture using organic hard red wheat, resulting in a unique, traditional bread with a distinctive flavor.

Ingredients

  • De-chlorinated water
  • 10 pounds freshly ground hard red winter or hard red spring wheat, organic
  • salt

Method

It takes two weeks to develop a desem. During this period, to help the new starter get going, you need to feed it every day with a small portion of fresh flour and water. You can use your desem to bake with after the first week.

In order to get your starter going a place with a temperature between 50-65 degrees F is necessary.

This recipe is a very detailed description of what needs to be done over the next couple weeks, and can be found here: http://www.astray.com/recipes/?show=Flemish%20desem%20bread%2C%20part%201%20%2B

I also recommend The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking to get the full recipe.

If you are interested in a random tale of mushrooms and desem follow this link: http://www.helladelicious.com/articles/methods-of-mycelia/

Tags

Bread  · Bake  · Sourdough  · Culture  · Desem  · Flemish  · Sourdough starter  · Homemade bread  · Traditional bread  · Wheat bread  · Baking  · Starter  · Natural yeast  · Long fermentation

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