An active sourdough starter and sourdough bagels (Photos: Getty Images/Jane Lyons)
An active sourdough starter and sourdough bagels (Photos: Getty Images/Jane Lyons)

KaiJanuary 11, 2020

Make a fresh start(er) in 2020 – then whip up some sourdough bagels

Guest writer
An active sourdough starter and sourdough bagels (Photos: Getty Images/Jane Lyons)
An active sourdough starter and sourdough bagels (Photos: Getty Images/Jane Lyons)

Been wanting to join the sourdough club for ages but haven’t managed to find some decades-old starter with a suitably charming backstory? Fuggeddaboutit and make your own bubbly batch, after which you can give these bagels a whirl.

Forget chasing that friend who keeps saying “yeah definitely!” (me), forget staring longingly at Instagram posts of glorious crusty, crackly loaves fresh from the oven and thinking shit, I really do need to get some sourdough starter. Forget your long-standing plans to nervously try and scab some off a local bakery. Forget it all! The time is now. Seize the day. Make your own.

Having a starter is having the ability to print your one-way ticket to naturally leavened heaven. 

Making bread from flour, water, salt and the air around you is pretty magical. It’s delicious, cost-effective, rewarding, at times very therapeutic. It’s just generally pretty fucking great. I recommend watching the Air episode of Michael Pollan’s Cooked series on Netflix for more reasons to love it.

To start, a few tips:

– Electronic scales are extremely helpful for anything sourdough related. Being precise with numbers will pay off in the end. 

– Organic flour is great but definitely not essential. If you can buy organic flour, try to get New Zealand grown stuff. In fact, generally try and get New Zealand grown stuff if you can!

– Although you’ll no doubt come to love your starter like nothing you’ve ever loved before, it’s not a giant scary commitment. If you’re not using your starter, just chuck it in the fridge and give it a good few feeds before you next use it. 

What you’ll need:

  • 1 jar or container (make sure it’s super clean and dry)
  • tea towel
  • scales 
  • white flour
  • wholemeal flour
  • room temperature water

What to do:

Mix together 50g white flour and 50g wholemeal flour in your jar. Pour in 100g water and stir to combine. Cover with a tea towel and place somewhere warm (avoid direct sun) for two days. After two days, it should be starting to bubble and puff. If it isn’t yet, leave it for another day. 

When it’s at bubble-and-puff stage, it’s time to start feeding it. To do this, scoop out 80% of the starter (don’t throw it out – it can be used for a few things, including crackers and sourdough crumpets). Once you’ve cleared it out, add a 50/50 mix of water and flours again – this time, the amount you add can be smaller, eg 25g white, 25g wholemeal, 50g water. Mix and leave for 24 hours. Repeat this process for a few days until a rhythm is going – the starter should start to rise and fall predictably and have a sour smell and taste. This should take five to seven days. 

From here you can either store the starter in the fridge until you’re ready to use it (just bring it out and feed it a few hours before you plan to use it) or crack into using it straight away – in the bagels below or some big beautiful loaves. I find the “country loaf” sourdough recipe from the famous San Francisco-based Tartine Bakery a great guide – there are few online versions of it floating around, but if you can buy or borrow the book Tartine Bread it’s well worth it. Otherwise there’s heaps of baking info online.

Beauties (Photo: Jane Lyons)

SOURDOUGH BAGELS

  • 50g wholemeal flour
  • 100g white flour (first measure)
  • 150g water
  • 1 tablespoon active sourdough starter
  • 600g white flour (second measure)
  • 300g water 
  • 25g water
  • 15g salt
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda 
  • sesame or poppy seeds, or topping of choice (optional)

Mix together the 50g wholemeal flour, 100g white flour, 150g water and 1 tablespoon sourdough starter. Cover with a damp tea towel and set aside for 2 hours.

Add 600g white flour and 300g water and mix well. Cover again and leave for 30 minutes. Mix 25g water and 15 grams salt in a small bowl – the salt might not completely dissolve but that doesn’t matter. Pour the salty water over dough and use your hands to mix it into the dough.

Tip the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead for 5 minutes. The dough might be quite sticky so feel free to keep adding flour to the surface and your hands as necessary. 

Clean the dough bowl you were using earlier and drizzle it with the olive oil, then put the kneaded dough back in it, flipping it to coat it in the oil, and cover with the damp tea towel. Leave for 1-2 hours.

While the dough is resting, line a baking tray with baking paper and sprinkle it with polenta, semolina or flour. Then clear space in your fridge for the baking tray (you can use smaller trays/plates if it’s easier). 

After the rest period, give the dough a fold by lifting one side of the dough and folding it into the middle. Repeat with the remaining three sides of the dough. I recommend watching something like this to see what I mean. Your dough won’t be as wet as the one in the video, but you’ll get the gist. 

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Tip the dough onto a floured surface and divide it into 10-12 even-sized pieces. Roll those pieces into smooth balls, then use your fingers to make a hole in each centre. Once shaped, put the bagels on the lined tray. The holes might start to spring back again, so give them a quick second stretch before covering with a damp tea towel and leaving out for 30 minutes before placing in the fridge for a few hours or over night. Don’t worry if they don’t look perfect – that’s part of the charm. As someone once said, bagels are best ugly. 

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the baking soda. Preheat oven to 225°C fan bake. Working in batches of 3-4 at a time, gently drop bagels into the water and cook for 1-2 minutes. Remove from the water with a slotted spoon or sieve and place on a wire rack then transfer to lined baking trays. If you’re wanting to top your bagels wth sesame or poppy seeds, now is the time to do it.

Bake the bagels for 20 minutes or until golden and shiny. Cool on wire racks then store the bagels in an airtight container – they should last 3-4 days. If you’re not eating them straight away, best to half and toast them. They freeze really well in an airtight bag or container.

Keep going!
lime-dollars

KaiJanuary 10, 2020

Why are limes so freakishly expensive in New Zealand?

Staff Writer
lime-dollars

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that limes get expensive while out of season. But they’re very, very, very expensive right now. Is there something more worrying going on? Alex Braae reports.

There’s nothing like a squeeze of lime juice to make the flavours of a guacamole sing, not to mention to make a mojito possible at all. Unfortunately, picking up a few limes for the purpose right now will probably break the bank.

Prices for the small green citrus fruit have shot up this summer to extreme new highs, with reports of a single kilogram costing as much as $80. That’s many times higher than prices at the peak of the growing season, in which a kilogram can often be bought for a single digit.

Chris Snelson, a grower at Te Puna Limes near Tauranga, says there’s a straightforward reason why they’re so extraordinarily expensive right now.

“I can answer that incredibly quickly. They’re all imported. We’ve got no limes at the moment.”

He said unlike lemons, which can be grown all year, limes only start being picked in New Zealand in February. Right now, those in the shops are imported. “Everything’s coming from the States [at] a huge price and they’re knobbly little things, horrible things.”

Snelson said that we could expect the price to drop dramatically when New Zealand limes begin to be harvested, with retail prices likely to be around $10-$12 a kilo.

But that may not be the full picture. Limes are often expensive, but similar stories from December 2013 showed that the price spike was more like $30-$40 a kilo. So why are they so much higher now?

Limes are an essential ingredient of many fine cocktails (Getty Images)

The answer could have something to do with less stable weather patterns in other parts of the world. Over 2019, lime production in the key growing country of Mexico was absolutely hammered by drought. Freshplaza reported in September that wells are running dry, trees are under extreme stress, and the crop is suffering as a result.

New Zealand’s limes aren’t necessarily imported from Mexico. But this country is part of a global food supply system, which means we are affected by market conditions in other countries.

According to Tridge.com, a global food market intelligence service, limes right now are experiencing an astonishing price spike. In their global index, the average price of limes as of December 15 was 48.6% up on a month prior, and 68.2% up on one year prior.

Petra Mihaljevich, the marketing manager at Auckland supermarket group Farro Fresh, said that prices for limes in their stores right now were more like $40 a kg, so still elevated. She said the supermarket imports from a range of countries, but much of their stock came from California.

Mihaljevich said that according to Farro’s suppliers, “the reason the price is so high is that they’ve had a lot of rain, so their supply has been more restricted, and that bumps the price up”.

California’s long-running drought was in fact broken in the second half of 2019, with above average rainfall. Mexico and the US are the second- and seventh-largest lime-producing countries in the world respectively.

It isn’t necessarily something that can be solved quickly by local fruit suppliers either. “The other thing you’ve got to consider is that they’re probably coming here on a ship, so you’ve got a bit of time in transit,” Mihaljevich added. “You kind of need to plan quite far in advance.”

Such incidents can be expected to continue as food production is affected by climate change, according to a wide range of academic research. It’s not necessarily a linear pattern – in some instances it will have a positive localised effect on particular crops, but in many instances the opposite will occur.

The point was made clearly in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report into land use, which noted that “the stability of food supply is projected to decrease as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt food chains increases”.

So in the immediate term, is there any solution that lime-lovers can turn to? Unfortunately, the answer is probably no – a typical lime tree takes at least three years to start growing fruit after being planted. You can buy pouches of lime juice: they’re better than nothing, but, well, just not the same.

But if the prices do come down sharply again, there’s one good option, according to editor of NZ Gardener magazine Jo McCarroll.

“They freeze brilliantly, with no loss of quality,” she told The Spinoff.

The best way is to squeeze the juice into ice cube containers, but you can also just put whole bags into the freezer and then squeeze the air out, McCarroll suggested. After that, you just thaw them on the bench before using them. Right now McCarroll has about 20 kilos of limes stored like that, which makes her exceptionally well placed to ride out the global turbulence in food production.

Kai