Red hot sourdough baking tips

1. Look after the planet by using organic or biodynamic flour, preferably locally grown.
    
2. Look after your body by using fresh stoneground flour – see below for more info.
   
   
3. Look after your leaven – refresh it daily, disposing of 95% each time and keep it at room temperature (18-21°C).
    
4. Make your dough as wet as you can handle.
    
5. Place three red house bricks on the lowest shelf of your domestic oven and preheat it for 30 minutes before baking. The greater thermal mass will give your bread a better bloom.
   
   
6. Turn up your domestic oven as hot as it will go (e.g. 250°C).
   

To learn more, try a sourdough baking workshop.

Why use stoneground flour?

The seed of wheat has three basic parts:

• The bran forms the tough outer covering and contains vitamins, minerals and proteins. This part of the wheat also provides valuable roughage which acts like a sponge to absorb and remove unwanted poisons and toxins from our digestive sytem.
• The germ is the life-giving part of the seed. It contains vitamins B and E. Once milled, the germ can only last 72 hours at room temperature before going rancid.
• The endosperm - the white centre - is mostly starch with very few vitamins. This is the part of the wheat that most of today's store bought milled flour is made from.

For centuries, wheat was milled into flour with large stones which crushed the seed grain into whole wheat flour. People made their flour as and when they needed it, ensuring minimal time difference between making flour and eating the results.

To ensure that modern white flour can sit in warehouses and on shop shelves for months on end, today's millers have had to remove all trace of the bran and the germ - losing at least 22 of the 26 known vitamins and minerals in the process, and all of the valuable roughage our bodies need to absorb and remove unwanted toxins in our digestive system.

You get whiter, fluffier bread, cakes or pastries but you get them at a price: obesity, diabetes, hypoglycaemia, heart disease, bowel cancer and tooth decay are just some of the major diseases on the increase since the introduction of white flour in the 1900s. Many nutritionalists agree that white flour and other refined foods are largely responsible.

Millers have tried to counter the problem through "enrichment" or adding vitamins B1, B2, Niacin and Iron. But these are only a minority of the known vitamins and minerals in the whole wheat kernel.

Why strip the natural goodness from our food, then try to artificially restore part of it back? Wouldn't it be wiser to eat the wholesome natural food in the first place?