About Bread Flavor

A "Bruschetta".
Even with complex preparations,
some notes of the bread's flavor will be present.

Hello everyone ! I hope everyone is having wonderful bakings :)

Finally, I found some time to write this post. The idea sneaked in my mind since last week but I couldn' t write it down, for a reason or another.
But hey, here we are!

Maybe the most important thing in bread baking, for most people; Flavor, or flavour, taste, is undoubtedly one of the main characteristic we all are conscious of.

To be more clear, think to a person who doesn' t have any bread knowledge.
He, or She, will not notice much of the appearence of the bread, or the differences in texture, but will for sure understand very well the taste. Maybe not all the slight variations or the aftertaste, but the main sensations of sweet, bitter, acidic, I am sure, will be felt.

So, which can be the main flavours in sourdough breads? Just the word sourdough itself can hit your imagination and start wetting your mouth because of the first part: Sour; That is acidity. Acidity force your mouth salivating. And salivating will help to eat that fantastic food we are loving!

Many are the possible levels of acidity in a levain bread. To me the optimal ph of the final product should not be less than 4.0. After that I feel the acidity starts cover other flavors. Of course this is only my humble opinion and there are very good bakers who like more acidic breads.
To be honest, the most important thing for me, is not quantity but the quality of acids in a bread. This is because they will give a very different imprint.

As everyone knows, the main acids produced in sourdough breads are of two kinds:
Lactic acids and Acetic acids. The names alone, tell you which flavor they will produce in breads.
Usually, when producing a certain bread, good bakers tend to choose if the flavor should be lactic or acetic. Therefore they choose or adapt methods that will give the wanted result.

To me one of the most interesting point is that you can have a mix of both, producing some of the most complex flavoured breads (without adding ingredients).
This is the case of some long, retarded maturations in which the two acids will be produced altoghether but in a different percentage.


Which are the other flavors that can charactherize a sourdough bead?
Sweetness and bitterness are always presents.

Much of those tastes balance depends on flour quality, and another part is directly connected with the fermentation method.

Red wheats, in example, have a reddish bran which will give, especially to whole meal flour or high extraction ones, a bitter taste.
Here in Italy we don't have this kind of wheat so it's really uncommon to have bitter flours.

Another consequence of bitterness is when during a fermentation, some byproducts (acids, esters) are produced. They then pass into the final products, and the taste will be affected.
Again, the cooking time/heat will affect the flavour of the bread; Overcooking always lead to a bitter aftertaste or taste depending on the level.

Sweetness, on the counterpart, can be produced by very sweet grains; Such as the grano duro Timillia, Khorasan, some hybrids and so on...
Also I noticed that if a very short fermentation method is used while making the bread, the sweetness will be more noticeable because of less sugars have been processed by microorganisms.

The last, but not less important taste, will be the flavor of the grain itself.
Even if refined flours will end up with little to no grain flavor, the less refined ones will bring the seed charachteristics to your mouth.

In conclusion; I can say being a chef for many years trained my taste sense quite a lot, therefore I always feel when a bread I bake lacks of some particular flavor or have another more persistence or again if an aftertaste is pleasant. The most important thing for me is to try achieve a right balance and complexity of flavor keeping in mind that no one of the main tastes (acetic sourness, sweetness, bitterness, lactic sourness, grain) must be too present or will overwhelm your senses and eclipse other flavours.