The chronicles of Desem, round 2

So yesterday's second big mistake, unreported at the time, was that I didn't take away half the dough before mixing in the new flour and putting it back. That's probably because I conflated two things: cutting off the dry rind from the outside, and managing the quantity of dough. Because my dough didn't have much in the way of a hard rind I mixed 100% of it with the new flour and put it back in its bed until lunchtime today. The result was that the dough ball had risen enough to break through the flour covering it in about six hours, rather than taking until this morning to do it.

Still and all, when I finally got to take the dough ball out of its bowl today, it had managed to create a bit of a rind all over, though the ball still showed structural weakness, with a distressing tendency to almost tear as I manhandled it out of the bowl. I'm not sure if that's par for the course or if I'm doing something wrong...

This time I had all my flour and water ready! Instead of the small, wooden bread-board that I was mixing stuff on before, I decided to use a round, lap-sized, white plastic tray—the sort of thing you put your meal on when eating in front of the TV :). About 20 inches across, this had plenty of room for putting one cup wholemeal flour directly on to it at one side for the ultimate in sticky-handed convenience later on, and a half-inch rim meant that I was going to be able to chase the last bits of flour around the tray without losing a lot of it over the edge. I also had a half cup of water in a measuring jug just next to the tray.

I'm not sure if I'm just clumsy, or if the lack of stiffness of the risen dough was a factor, but I think the pile of cut-off rind contained about 60% of the original ball, rather than the 50% I was expecting. The 40% from the interior was once again quite wet and sticky, but this time once I started mixing in the cupful of flour, it dried out quite quickly (today is the hottest day of the year, if that's a factor), and I ended up adding about half the water in the jug—so about 1/4 of a cup—to get a nice, stiff, and reasonably-sized ball of dough.

Learning #2. Cut the rind off if it forms one, but whether you end up with discarded dough or not, you still have to reduce the risen dough ball by about 50% in volume altogether before adding today's cup of flour and today's water: the dough ball that gets buried in the bowl of flour should be about the same size each time!

I've also had a go at making desem dosas from the cut-off rind. As my wok is a living masterpiece of old burger fat and bits of burned protein from a hundred different sources, I'll pass over the actual frying of the dosa itself in silence and simply comment that although after a good deal of stirring, and cutting and crushing especially recalcitrant bits of dough rind with a knife, I got something that resembled a batter, the dough shows no signs of "dissolving" as I'd been led to expect. Perhaps I just haven't waited long enough: Makiko says to let the batter stand for three hours at room temperature before making the dosas and, of course, I just couldn't wait.

The chronicles of Desem, round 1

After several days collecting tools and ingredients (nobody sells simple room thermometers any more! I ended up buying an enormous garden thermometer in town—at least it's easy to read with my poor vision), I started my first desem dough last Monday, at about noon.

The process is quite straightforward: mix two parts of wholemeal flour with about one part of filtered water and knead it into a ball of fairly stiff dough, and then (this is the fantastic bit) bury it for a couple of days in a bed of dry flour so that there's about three inches of flour all around and below and above the dough. The idea is that wild yeasts and symbiotic bacteria that are floating around in the air and on your hands and what-not will inoculate the dough and start concentrating themselves inside it. In practice, it felt a bit like planting a seed in some soil and waiting for it to germinate and grow.

The recipe calls for wholemeal flour both for the dough and for the bed of flour it hides in, but being on a budget I'd used Sainsbury's strong, stoneground, 100% Wholemeal Bread Flour for the dough and the simple white Plain Flour from their Basics range for the packing. To give you an idea of how much this saves, the wholemeal flour is 95 pence for a 1.5 kilo bag, whereas the plain flour is only 42 pence for the same amount.

Now this all has to go into some kind of container, and I used a huge salad bowl—the sort of thing that might contain a communal salad for the dinner table. I gave it a glass lid using the base of an old microwave cooking container; the result was a mite precarious but it meant that I could see what was going on without having to take the lid off. I put the bowl in a corner of the living room on an old audio stack that I never use any more. The coolest place inside the house, it was still right at the top of the recommended temperature range of 50°–65° Fahrenheit. However it's the height of summer here in England at the moment, and the house central heating has been off for weeks, so I guess that that temperature range is going to be achievable all year round.

I spent the next two days sneaking peeks at the bowl every few hours. Tuesday passed uneventfully, which was only to be expected, but by Wednesday noon I was fairly sure that something was different: the bed of flour seemed to be just slightly coming away from the side of the bowl in a couple of places. Not very exciting, but things got better very quickly. By late afternoon there were definite cracks in the flour at the centre of the bowl. By early evening the cracks were bigger, and the centre of the cracks was definitely raised slightly. By late evening I could just see brown dough peeping out between the cracks, and by the time I went to bed just after midnight, the top of the ball had pushed itself solidly out of the bed of white flour.

So today at noon I took the bowl out of the living room, put it on a work surface in the kitchen and took the lid off. The live dough was by now bulging monstrously out of the surrounding flour, and close up, and without the glass lid, it was possible to see the little bubbles of air (or, probably, carbon dioxide) that were causing it to rise. What I wasn't prepared for though, was the scent.

I'd speculated, of course, as to how it was going to smell. Possible candidates seemed to be: bready; doughy; yeasty (I thought this might be quite likely); musty (I thought it might smell musty if something had gone wrong perhaps). In fact it smelled absolutely delightful, but nothing like you would expect from dough. Imagine freshly laundered bed sheets that have been air dried on a line in the garden, now add a little bit of the smell of a banana, ripe but not too ripe, and finally add a fresh wind coming off a wheat field in the summer. Clean, fresh, and banana-fruity.

I also wasn't prepared for it being wet.

When I'd put the original dough mixture into the bed of flour, it had been a fairly stiff mix. Two (American-size) cups of flour to one cup of water to start off with, and then I'd added more flour until it stopped sticking to my fingers and the work surface. It was easy to knead and work, but definitely on the dry side. What came out of the bowl two days later was lighter of course, being full of air bubbles, but I'd expected it to lose water both to the yeast and bacteria growing inside it and perhaps to the flour surrounding it. On the contrary, it now felt as wet and sticky as it had when I'd originally made the 50%-hydrated 2:1 mixture, and it promptly started tearing as I lifted it out of the bowl. I can only speculate why this happened. Monday had been a very hot, dry day, but today is rather cooler and overcast, and the air feels damper. I'd almost guess that the dough had somehow extracted moisture from the air, but I can't see how that might have happened while it was buried in three inches of flour...

And this is where learning #1 makes its appearance. I now had a sticky, floppy dough which promptly stuck both to the work surface (a large wooden bread board that I'd specially cleaned and left to dry the previous evening) and to my hands, and yet the half cup of wholemeal flour that I was supposed to be adding to it was still in the bag in the cupboard, and the quarter cup of water was still in the filter jar. Disaster! I ended up taking some of the packing flour from the nearby bowl and using that instead, until the dough was dry enough to get it of my hands. All in all that was about a quarter cup of cheap, white flour, and then I washed and dried my hands and got another quarter cup of the wholemeal flour instead of the half a cup that I'd intended, and worked that in. I hope the admixture of a small amount of cheap, bleached flour won't spoil it. In the event, I didn't add any more water at all, as the dough with all the new flour added now felt about as stiff as it had when I'd originally put it into the bowl on Monday.

So learning #1 is this: I need to have the flour and water that I am going to add already laid out in containers nearby, so that I can get them when my hands are covered in flour and bits of wet dough.

Once the dough felt satisfactory I made it into a ball and re-buried it in the bowl of plain flour, making a bigger pit this time since the ball is now about twice the size of the original one. Hopefully this will continue to rise overnight, and increase the concentration of the yeasts and lactobacilli that give it its flavour and leavening power. I'm hoping that by tomorrow it will have got on plan, and have developed an outer rind that I can cut off to expose the inner soft dough, before feeding that with more flour and water and re-burying it again. Makiko (the author of the posts at justhungry.com that I linked to at the top) has a recipe for dosas made from the cut-away rind that I really want to try.