Gertzkrautenbrot

Isn’t it fantastic when the sun comes out after this dismal winter. This is the fifth day of clear blue skies – even makes your bread looks happy.
Anyway, you know how it is with busy people. Gert – I bake bread for his restaurant – told me about two years ago he had a pile of Dutch sourdough recipes that he would translate for me. Took him about a year to get round to it. A further year on I’ve done nothing with them so he takes precipitous action and orders some sauerkraut bread. Morning of the mix I think I should probably have a look at the formula:
“Sauerkraut Bread
1 liter sourdough
500g Wholemeal Flour
2 chopped and fried Onions
200g Raisins
300g Sauerkraut
1 tbsp Herbes de Provence
200g grated Cheese”
With this I am supposed to arrive at 800g loaves. Put the numbers through my patent Earschplittenloudenboomer spreadsheet formula developer guessing 50% water as a starting point.
First catch your sauerkraut. Well, first catch the bus to Bangor whose supermarkets are the pinnacle of its culture. Obvious place to find sauerkraut is in a German supermarket. Scour Aldi before asking an assistant. “What’s that” is the response. Scour Lidl, same question, same response. Head for Morrisons but detour without much hope into the new Asda “superstore”. “Do you sell sauerkraut?”.  “Sour what?”. “Take me to your pickle section”. And there, next to the Branston, were shelves of large jars of the stuff. I shall never knock Asda again.
I haven’t taken to liking tins but even at 50% water the dough was extremely wet plus, given the massive proportion of starter, I thought I could treat it as a preferment, shaped the dough with wet hands and gave it a single rise in tins.
I gave them 50 minutes at 210C + 10 minutes out of tins at 180C + 20 minutes with the heat off and the oven door. Probably nothing like the original baker’s intention but I thought they came out pretty well.