Freestyle Chickpea and Sourmilk Bread

Just about every type of food that can be dried and ground up is sold in flour form by Barry Farm.  Using the buckwheat flour for pancakes has been a long-time love of ours, but we were a bit dumbfounded about how to use the chickpea flour we impulse bought.  We've also been flipping through Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz for tips on making home-fermented foods like Kim Chi.  Rather than just listing recipes (we hate following recipes), Sandor takes the time to explain the basic frameworks behind everything.  That way you are encouraged to improvise while still being assured of edible results.  People may think of sourdough bread-baking as annoyingly exacting, but with the right strategy you can throw almost anything in and thus have fun while doing it.

We won't get into the details of making a sourdough starter; we simply mixed water, rye flour, and a bit of honey in beaker and shook it up.  We added a package of dry beer yeast to kick start it, and it was ready after a few days at room temperature.  Now that it lives in the fridge it only has to be fed once a week.

In a large mixing bowl we added two cups of wheat flour, one cup of chickpea flour, a cup of starter, a tsp. of honey and about a cup of milk to make the sponge.  It has the consistency of pancake batter and starts bubbling after a few hours.  We left it at room temperature for a day so that the milk and flour could ferment and add interesting flavors.

Then, it was time to make the dough.  The trick is to slowly mix in enough flour (we used equal parts white and chickpea) so that the sponge takes on the texture of something you can knead without it sticking to everything crazily.  The consistency was checked each time so that we didn't add too much flour and thus dry out our dough.  We also added small amounts of salt and baking soda, and another dash of honey.  Then we "pounded it out" on a cutting board like it was an attractive woman from the jersey shore.  Basically, this involved pressing it down, folding it in half, and repeating that over and over.  At times the dough started becoming sticky again so we just dusted everything with more flour.

At the end of the kneading the dough is no longer that sticky but not dry, and viscoelastic to the touch like those bizallin' memory foam mattresses.  We had so much dough that we could make a loaf, plus some sandwich rolls.  We didn't stress out too much over loaf forming techniques.  As someone from The Wire might advise, "do what you feel".  For giggles we coated the top with olive oil and caraway seeds.

It would probably be annoying to wait a few hours for the kneaded dough to rise, so we kickstarted the process.  We heated the oven to 300 °F and then shut off the heat.  Then, after covering all our embryonic breads with wet paper towels, we put them in the oven with the door propped open.  As long as the towels stay damp they won't stick and and the breadtop won't develop a dry skin.  This trick really accelerated the rising.

We then baked at 400 °F.  The loaf finished in 40 minutes, the rolls in 25.  The only disappointment was that none of the caraway seeds stuck to the bread.  But overall the bread came out very tasty and not-bricklike.  When working with microorganisms, they sometimes have a life of their own -- leading to some situations that the brahs over at the frathouse really laughed about:

Gawd, at least shut the door you crazy bread!  We live here too!