RECIPE: Award Winning Wheat Bread That Will Change The Way You Bake

Sure, you could use your lovingly maintained starter to bake sourdough loaves (like you did earlier in the quarantine), or you could attempt a kind of fermentation that's not as ubiquitous: naturally fermented loaves using yeast water starters. Instead of relying on flour, water, and the natural yeast swirling in your kitchen, baker Paul Barker wants to get you invested in submerging plants, flowers, fruits, and vegetables in water to ferment, which creates a natural starter for breads and yeasted pastries that reflect whatever flavors you've included. Like a traditional/flour-based? sourdough starter, this botanical water raises dough slower than packaged yeast, producing not only a flavorful bread, but also one that's better for your gut.

Related Reading: These Homemade Sourdough English Muffins Will Make You Nostalgic for Your Youth

Paul's cookbook "Naturally Fermented Bread" dives deep into this concept, showcasing the beauty and ease of botanical baking. Once you've gotten the hang of brewing your own starter, you can follow Paul's recipes for a number of breads and leavened items, like apple and clove buns, root vegetable loaves, and cucumber burger buns. This technique not only highlights the versatility of ingredients, but also prevents waste, allowing you to repurpose certain wilting produce that otherwise would have been tossed into the trash.

Ahead, Paul shares one of his most popular breads from his bakery Cinnamon Square in Rickmansworth, England. He calls it the Church Street Sour, a nod to the street where his bakery stands. This bread is wonderfully sour, thanks to seven ounces of a wheat sour culture, plus the marbling of dark rye flour and white and whole wheat flour. To shape it, you'll roll part of the dough into a ball, dunked in seeds of your choice, before it's wrapped in another disk of dough, the top scored into small petals. Once the dough has proofed, all that's left to do is toss it in a hot oven and wait until it has emerged as a crackly, crusty boule.

Award-Winning Church Street Sour Recipe

I developed this loaf as a tribute to the hometown of my bakery, Cinnamon Square in Rickmansworth, England. Its name comes from the street the bakery resides on, Church Street. The sour culture used within this bread was born in the shop in November 2005; therefore, it has strong provenance in the town.

The Church Street Sour is a moist, flavorful loaf and has an attractive floral appearance due to the special wrapping method detailed in the recipe below. The scored petal cuts obtain a crunchy finish and are great to break off and use with a dip for a snack.

When introduced, this loaf was received favorably by our customers and was subsequently bestowed the title of United Kingdom's best loaf at the 2017 Baking Industry Awards, which was a fantastic accolade from my peers in the baking industry. So, instead of keeping this under lock and key, I would like to share my recipe.

Chilling the dough after a three-quarter proof will make the task of scoring the dough simpler.

Amy Schulman is an associate editor at Chowhound. She is decidedly pro-chocolate.

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