Canapé Company / Thursday, 6 March 2014

Purple sage, pumpkin & walnut sourdough ciabatta made with love in the canapé company kitchen

The beast finds residence in Kelburn canapé company kitchen

In the canapé kitchen we are thrilled to have a gorgeous and very talented new pastry chef Jo. She has developed her signature bread which she is making for us for our autumn menus being a truly delicious "purple sage, pumpkin and walnut sourdough ciabatta".

It takes 3 days to create one of these loaves starting with feeding "the beast". The beast is an addition to our kitchen that we are very excited about. This brew has been bubbling away for over 10 years. The history fascinates us as the beast originates from a kitchen in Owen Street Newtown and a sample was given to Jo by a friend.

Here's Jo's description of how "taming the beast" came about! And how she creates her beautiful breads.

To make your own beast at home is pretty easy. It’s basically made of flour and water and fermented by wild yeast from the air. The nickname came from having to feed our ‘beast’ like an animal as neglect it and it will die. A starter living at room temperature needs to be fed daily. You can slow fermentation down by putting the beast in the fridge for up to a week. Then feed it for a couple of days at room temp to bring it back to life. Nick made our first sourdough loaf at home around five years ago when I gave him the river cottage bread book for Christmas. At the time we were making all of our own yeasted breads at home. I think it was a few years later when I started commercial baking that I truly understood how to tame the beast and started to bake sourdough bread for a café. Once you get to know your starter you can adjust it to give the right amount of tang or sourness to your bread according to your personal preference.

I like to make my sourdough breads in the traditional way, that is without adding any commercial yeast to the mix. I prefer a long slow fermentation for optimum flavour, nutrition and keeping qualities. Unlike yeasted breads that stale really quickly, sourdough keeps well and is often still good for toast a week later. The first version of the sourdough ciabatta involved roast potatoes, and was developed to use up leftover potatoes. This quickly became our favourite sandwich bread and I played with various flavours often just using up leftover herbs and vegetables we have lying around. You can also make a great fruit bread that tastes divine when toasted.

All of my sourdough breads are made the same way. I add a portion of the beast to a flour and water mix and allow it ferment overnight. When you check it the next day you can see signs of life and your mixture should be bubbling away. To this I add more flour, with some salt for flavour. My ciabatta also gets a good slug of olive oil to give the bread softness and the flavours are added towards the end of mixing. The dough is then left at room temp for a few hours to rise and is folded a few times to help develop that lovely holey structure. At this stage I pop the dough overnight in the fridge. This is known as retarding, and the cold slows down fermentation.

The next day the bread is shaped and proofed before cooking the normal way.

With the first sample of our mini sourdough ciabatta's with purple sage, pumpkin and walnut we created canapés with goats cheese, prosciutto and rockmelon caviar. Another canapé we tried has rocket, lamb fillet and beet root caviar.

Autumn is in the air this week in Wellington so look out for our new season catering menus next week.

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Purple sage, pumpkin & walnut sourdough ciabatta made with love in the canapé company kitchen

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