BREAD AND BAKING

Intro Sourdough bread - The Culture Recipes Where to buy what you need Flour Equipment

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Where to buy what you need: Flour

• Molen de Put on the Galgewater (just by Rembrandt's house), www.molendeput.nl) is a really-truly flour windmill (although the mill itself is actually a reconstruction dating from just 1987, amazingly) and produces excellent strong stoneground flour, with wheat, rye, wholemeal and various other varieties. Really good value too, and they sell in 1, 2.5 and 5kg bags (€7.55 euros at time of writing). It's not organic but the miller can tell you where the grain comes from, and it's usually this country. Open nearly every Saturday from 11-5, but check the website before you make the trip.
  
• The Zaailing on the Hooigracht has a good range of flours, all organic (from De Nieuwe Band, stoneground in Mechelen (BE), plus Demeter flour), and also sells 5kg bags (around €10). They carry Doves Farm Organic in all familiar UK varieties, although that will set you back more like €3 the kilo...
  
• The Brandnetel on the Vrouwensteeg also has a good range of the same Dutch/Belgian organic flours, and although they don't put large bags out on the shelves (it's a small shop!), they also sell 5kg bags - just ask at the counter.
  
• The Albion Reformhuis on the Terweeweg in Oegstgeest has a similar selection, also with bags up to 5kg. Prices are €9-13, as at the Brandnetel.
  
• Ekoplaza on the Breestraat is a little disappointing, with a very small range of flour and only 1kg bags.
  
• If you wanted a day out and to be totally bewildered by the variety available, you could go to the Zandhaas mill in Santpoort, just north of Haarlem, www.molendezandhaas.nl, where they sell every kind of flour and grain you could possibly imagine, in bags of up to 25kg, with varying extraction rates. I can recommend a visit, although you may well end up spending more money than you intended...
  
• Additions to bread in the form of seeds - sunflower, pumpkin, linseed and the like - add delicious texture and flavour. There is a lovely Reformhuis market stall on the Saturday market around the Stadhuis which sells almost everything, and the 'Vrolijke Noot' nuts-and-snacks stall on the Wednesday market outside Dille en Kamille also has a good selection. The olive-and-Middle-Eastern type stalls on both the Saturday and Wednesday markets also sell some or all such ingredients. Otherwise any or all of the Zaailing / Brandnetel / Albion / Ekoplaza shops have seeds etc., but note that you will generally pay appreciably more than on the market.

Where to buy what you need: Equipment

You will need some form of the following.

• A plastic container with a lid to contain your sourdough culture; a large ice-cream carton (or Tupperware, if you will) is great for this.
  
• A bowl big enough to hold your mixture for kneading: for the two-loaf quantities I give here, any large plastic or china mixing bowl will be fine.
  
• A surface to knead on. I find that a wooden surface is somehow not quite so good; something about how it absorbs water from the dough, I think? A plastic / stone / ceramic counter-top works well, but wood is fine as well.
  
• Something to allow the bread to rise in. The mixing bowl and the baking tins are just fine for this. Many books advocate 'proving baskets', which are great for giving loaves interesting ridges on the surface, but the bowl/tins approach works for me.
  
• A place to leave your bread to rise undisturbed
  
• Something to bake the bread in or on. I prefer a loaf to be loaf-shaped (easier for making sandwiches...), so I use two-pound bread tins. By this I mean something like this - in this country it is often called a cakevorm and you can buy them in kitchen shops. But these are optional; you can simply make a round loaf on a flat baking sheet if you want.
  
• An oven
  
• Some scales; the digital kind are useful for the small fiddly amounts when you're using rye starter.

Good shops to find any of this kit which you don't have (apart from the oven ..) are: KitchenArt on the Nieuwe Rijn in Leiden; Dille en Kamille a few doors down (and many euros cheaper in general) and Oudshoorn on the Haarlemmerstraat diagonally opposite Hema.

Helpful but not essential

A plastic scraper like this. KitchenArt on the Nieuwe Rijn sells several amazingly cheap and cheerful versions of these for only a couple of euros. Really useful for kneading and for scraping dough off the counter-top, but a flat-bladed knife also works.