Why local stoneground flour is worth seeking out

Stoneground flour is milled slowly between stone wheels, and that gentleness matters. The germ stays in the flour, along with its oils and much of its aroma, rather than being sifted away as it is in most roller-milled white flours. Freshly milled flour from a nearby watermill, windmill or small stone mill smells sweet and nutty, a bit like hay and toasted oats. Flour that has sat in a warehouse for months loses that. When you bake with it, you can taste the difference in the crust alone.

There is a practical trade-off. Stoneground wholemeal and lightly sifted flours absorb more water, ferment faster and carry coarser bran that can cut through gluten strands if you handle the dough roughly. Treat them as a different ingredient rather than a swap for supermarket strong white, and you will get a far better loaf. Ask the mill what wheat it is, when it was milled and whether it is a strong bread flour or an all-purpose one. A bag with 12% protein or more will give you a reliably open crumb.

Building a starter you can actually rely on

A starter is just flour and water colonised by wild yeasts and bacteria. It takes a week or two to become dependable, and it will become dependable if you keep the routine boring. Begin with 50g of stoneground wholemeal or rye flour and 50g of warm water — around 25°C, left to stand for an hour if your tap water is heavily chlorinated. Stir, cover loosely and leave at room temperature.

• Days 1–3: once a day, discard all but a tablespoon and feed with 50g flour and 50g water.
• Days 4–10: feed twice a day if the kitchen is warm, once if it is not.
• Ready when: it doubles within four to six hours of feeding, smells of yoghurt and apples, and tastes sharply sour without acetone notes.

If it smells of nail varnish, it is hungry — feed it more often. Keep it at 20–24°C, away from radiators and open windows. Once it is reliable, store it in the fridge and feed it weekly, bringing it out the night before you plan to bake.

Matching your dough to your flour

Start at 70% hydration and adjust from there. For a 500g flour mix, that means 350g water, plus 100g active starter and 10g fine salt. Wholemeal-heavy flours often want another 20–30g of water; the dough should feel like a firm earlobe, tacky but not sticky enough to cling to your fingers.

An autolyse helps enormously with stoneground flour. Mix the flour and water only, leave it covered for 45–60 minutes, then add the starter and salt. The bran softens, the dough becomes extensible and you need far less kneading. If your flour is very coarse, sift out the largest bran flakes, pour a splash of boiling water over them to soften, and fold them back in after the salt. That small step gives you the flavour of wholemeal with the rise of white.

Shaping, proving and baking a crusty loaf

After mixing, use four sets of stretch and folds spaced 30 minutes apart instead of kneading. Then leave the dough to bulk ferment at room temperature. At 20°C this takes four to six hours; it is ready when it has grown by half again, feels jiggly and shows a few bubbles at the edge of the bowl. Warm kitchens speed this up dramatically, so watch the dough rather than the clock.

Turn it out, shape it into a tight round, and place it seam-side up in a floured banneton or a bowl lined with a tea towel. Cover and put it in the fridge for 12–18 hours. This cold prove develops the sourness and makes scoring far easier.

Preheat your oven to 240°C with a covered cast-iron pot inside for at least 40 minutes. Tip the loaf in, score it firmly at a shallow angle, lid on, and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the lid, drop to 220°C and bake for another 20–25 minutes until the crust is deep brown. The internal temperature should reach 96°C or above. Then — and this is the hard part — leave it on a rack for at least two hours before cutting.

Reading the loaf: common problems and quick fixes

• Gummy crumb: underfermented or cut too soon. Give the bulk more time and be patient after baking.
• Tight, dense crumb: a weak starter or too little water. Feed the starter twice a day for three days before your next bake.
• Pale, soft crust: oven not hot enough, or too little time without the lid.
• Flat and slack: overproofed. Shorten the bulk ferment by an hour next time.
• Large holes just under the crust: shaping trapped air. Be gentler at the final shape.

Fitting sourdough into a British week

The rhythm that suits most people is simple. Feed the starter on Thursday evening. Mix the dough on Friday morning, fold it through the day, shape it in the evening and leave it in the fridge overnight. Bake first thing on Saturday, and the kitchen smells extraordinary by nine o'clock.

Keep your local flour somewhere cool and dry, and buy it in smaller bags if you bake fortnightly — wholemeal stoneground flour goes stale and eventually rancid within a few months. A small handful of your last dough, kept back and added to the next batch as old dough, will deepen the flavour each time. Soon enough, the loaf on your board will taste of a particular field, in a particular county, which is something no supermarket flour can offer.