Polish Sourdough: An Obsession With Bread
Poles are particular about bread; numerous emigrants all over the world tend to complain about a lack of ‘real’ sourdough or little variety of breadstuffs available outside of Poland. Here, the bakery is an institution; whenever possible, Poles buy fresh bread there, not in the supermarkets, and they have so much to choose from.
The classic wheat-and-rye sourdough; wholegrain razowy bread, dark and heavy from the bran; breads sprinkled with seeds or baked with the addition of oat, millet or buckwheat flours. Some of the traditional names are mysterious even to most Poles: few people know that the wheat-rye baltonowski got its name from the Baltona company which supplied food to Polish ships, while pytlowy, or boulted bread, derives from pytel – a mechanism used to clean and sieve flour. And then there is a whole variety of rolls, buns, pretzels and other breadstuffs.
How To Grow Your Own Wild Yeast
Yeast, photo: Franciszek Mazur / Agencja Wyborcza
You can buy French baguettes, Italian ciabattas, our favourite kaiser rolls and graham rolls pretty much everywhere, yet the true, iconic Polish bread is the sourdough, which means there is no yeast added, but all the leavening work is done by a sourdough starter, which you need to make a few days in advance. How? You need to mix rye flour with lukewarm water in equal quantities in a jar, using a wooden spoon, and leave to rest for 48 hours. Then you take some of the starter and mix it with equal quantities of flour and water; for the next 5 days you do it twice a day, every 12 hours. Seven days in, the starter should have bubbles and an acid smell – that’s when it’s ready to use! You should keep in mind though, the sourdough starter is actually a very communal thing – you usually don’t make it at home alone, but take a little from a breadmaking friend or, nowadays, look for someone who has it online.
In a country filled with good bakeries – and those really great, artisan ones are blooming in big Polish cities – it might seem like a lot of fuss to make your own sourdough bread, but many people just like it and believe it to be quite therapeutic; homemade bread triumphed in the first months of 2020 lockdown filling our homes with its warm smell.
Anatomy Of The Polish Sandwich
Salmon sandwich, photo: Agnieszka Kukiela / East News
There’s nothing better than a slice of fresh, crispy-skinned sourdough with butter, but there are other tasty things we put on it to make our favourite, open-faced sandwiches. Slices of ham and cheese, obviously, but also cottage cheese with a bit of radish and chives, a cottage cheese and sardine spread called awanturka (‘little fight’), egg and mayo spread or just slices of hard-boiled egg, and finally smalec – lard spread with crackling and fried onions, with obligatory dill pickles on the side (nowadays often reproduced with beans in a vegetarian version).
We don’t shy away from vegetables: most of the sandwiches mentioned above would be decorated with slices of cucumber, sprinkled with chives or cress. In the summer, we just put slices of tomatoes (preferably of the ‘raspberry’ variety) and a sprinkle of salt on buttered sourdough and call it a day. A surprising number of my friends named the butter and tomato sandwich their ‘desert island’ dish.
Sourdough Soup
Żurek, photo: Katarzyna Klich / East News
Yet we don’t only ferment flour to make bread: we also do it to prepare the starter for one of Poland’s most famous soups: żur. In Poland you can buy it bottled, but it is actually pretty easy to make at home: you need to put wholemeal rye flour, garlic, bay leaves, allspice berries, black pepper and lukewarm water into a clean jar, cover with a cloth, and leave to rest for around a week. When it’s ready, you can start making the Polish ramen filled with vegetables, sausage, mushrooms, horseradish, potatoes, and boiled eggs. Sometimes the soup is even served in a hollowed loaf of sourdough bread: that’s just how much we love fermentation and flour.
