Country Sourdough French Toast - Country Recipe Book (2024)

FAQs

What is country sourdough made of? ›

Made from organic white flour, 15% wholemeal flour, water, and salt, it's the lifeblood of our bakery and is used as the base for many of our breads. The dough is fermented for 36 hours, harnessing the power of wild yeast; the process creates a mellow, mildly sour flavour. It has a rugged crust and a light, airy crumb.

French toast always tastes better at a restaurant because the kitchen often uses better bread and cuts each slice thicker. Chefs also let the bread dry out, which allows these parched slices to soak up the custard for longer.

If the fermentation is off, your dough will not have adequate reducing sugars to achieve a dark, rich sourdough crust. You might notice that if your dough is under fermented, no amount of extended cooking time will make your sourdough brown up. The sugars necessary for the crust to darken just aren't there.

Pain de campagne ("country bread" in French), also called "French sourdough", is typically a large round loaf ("miche") made from either natural leavening or baker's yeast.

Sourdough bread is also an excellent source of antioxidants. Studies have shown that antioxidants like the peptides found in sourdough can lower the risk for certain types of cancer, signs of aging, or chronic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

Ideally, the bread should be slightly stale. A drier bread will soak up all the custard. Bread can be left out with the wrapper open the day before cooking. If you find yourself in a pinch, dry your bread slices in a 275°F oven for 10 minutes before soaking them in the custard.

Ready to find a winner? It's time for a food face-off. A typical stack of pancakes has almost 500 fewer calories than a plate of French toast—as well as 20 fewer grams of sugar. Pancakes keep up their lead with 78% less saturated fat than their French toast counterparts.

Brioche. This is considered the gold standard for French toast because it already has more butter and eggs than most cakes, so once the custard is added, you've essentially got yourself one of the greatest (or worst, depending on whether or not you're a cardiologist) things you can put into your body.

You can insert the toothpick into the base of the sourdough. If the toothpick comes out clean, the bread should be cooked through. If you see wet crumbs or dough on the toothpick then the sourdough is not cooked through.

The loaf is also inclined to over spring resulting in a crumb with big, random, holes or channels running through the loaf. If you over-ferment the dough you run the risk of the gluten structure degrading and the loaf turning into a puddle of goo before your eyes, never to be retrieved and destined for the bin.

Why does sourdough turn black? ›

It's actually quite difficult to kill sourdough starter. And that black stuff isn't harmful, either — it's perfectly safe. The inky liquid is simply telling you the starter is hungry. After 8 weeks in the refrigerator without being fed, what began as a happy, healthy starter (l) was hungry and hooch-topped (r).

Simple ingredients

As we mentioned earlier, real sourdough only uses 3 ingredients (flour, water, and salt). The salt is necessary to prevent over-proofing and brings out natural flavours from the grains (flour).

Sourdough is naturally leavened bread, which means it doesn't use commercial yeast to rise. Instead, it uses a 'starter' – a fermented flour and water mixture that contains wild yeast and good bacteria – to rise. This also produces the tangy flavour and slightly chewy texture you'll find in sourdough.

Sourdough is a stable culture of lactic acid bacteria and yeast in a mixture of flour and water. Broadly speaking, the yeast produces gas (carbon dioxide) which leavens the dough, and the lactic acid bacteria produce lactic acid, which contributes flavor in the form of sourness.

It is believed that the use of sourdough in bread leavening developed in ancient Egypt in approximately 3000 BC and from there spread gradually to Europe, throughout ancient Greece and the Roman Empire until the present.