Now, modern bread is full of chemicals, all so the ferment takes barely an hour. Reach into your plastic bread and remove one floppy slice. Try to spread with butter that is a bit cold. Bread collapses because it is crap, industrial crap.

Forget that shit. Open the bread bin and pull out a loaf of sourdough bread, cut a slice. Try to spread with the somewhat too cold butter. Butter will spread, bread will stay in one piece.

Sourdough, unlike the plastic crap sold in plastic bags to peasants and pissants is real, is sturdy.

A sourdough ferment is at least 12 hours. It is a lactic bacteria ferment, not an industrially constrained/accelerated yeast explosion.

Longer ferment = more flavor. No chemicals. Time.

Supermarkets—do not sell real bread. Or good meat or health fruit & veg.

Thanks Franko—that looks really delicious!

Tomorrow I will start the starter—pics will follow.

At the Adelaide Central Market there are 2-3 bread/bakery stalls. One of these had a wholemeal rye round loaf that smelled and tasted fantastic! I took a loaf when visiting friends living outside of Bathurst. When I opened the boot of my car their dog tried to jump in and they asked if I had a cake in there. Nope, just a loaf of bread, real bread. Unfortunately, that bakery must have closed or changed hands and that bread is just a memory now.

Rye has gluten but it is not the same gluten as wheat so 100% rye bread does not rise. It IS leavened bread but nice and dense and delicious.

When was the last time you thought the bread you ate was delicious? Never?

Now, wheat breads, even sourdough breads, rise. The outside of the dough is, of course, a bit drier than the inside, more so after a minute or so in the oven. So just before the loaf of dough goes into the oven the top of the dough is quickly slashed. Dough can rise without exploding. That is why real crust, firm and chewy, looks like this: