Foodnerds Claudio del Principe: "Who says baking has to be precise? - Bullshit!"
Claudio del Principe is a jack-of-all-trades: storyteller, cookbook author and initiator of the food blog "Anonymous Chefs". But his greatest passion is bread. More specifically: Sourdough, from which he conjures up the most delicious bread creations with the simplest of means but an incredible amount of know-how.
"Foodnerds" - the new documentary series on "Bluewin"
What is it about? - It's simple: we introduce you to people who really give their all for the best product and the finest food. Whether from Swiss plaice, from animals or fresh from the cooking pot, you will be surprised how much time, experience and passion it takes to conjure up ingenious food from natural raw materials.
First of all: even though Del Principe's Foodblock is called "Anonymous Chefs", Del Principe is no stranger to Switzerland.
Anyone who bakes bread will inevitably come across his name. For years, the Basel native with Italian ancestors has only wanted one thing: to bake fantastic bread from flour, water and salt.
He doesn't use fresh yeast from the supermarket, "that would be like Viagra", but Lievito Madre, a natural yeast that, unlike fresh yeast, has a much more complex, sour aroma (watch the video to find out what role Pinocchio, the baker from Claudio's home village in Abruzzo, plays in this).
Does that all sound very complex? Too complicated to try out for yourself? - The opposite is true: sourdough cultures can also be easily cultivated in the home kitchen. But what a really good loaf of bread actually needs is an incredible amount of time: "A sourdough must be left to rise for 24 or 48 hours, otherwise the taste will fall by the wayside," warns Claudio del Principe, with a mischievous smile on his face as he reverently folds his sourdough dough.
The more you know about bread, the more consciously you can enjoy it. Food taster Patrick Zbinden answers the most important questions in the following interview:
The baking technique shown in the movie is called "no-knead bread" in technical jargon. This baking technique was invented in the 1990s. With this method, bread is made from a very soft dough that has been fermented for a long time without much effort. It is kneaded with little to no effort and baked in a cast iron pot with a lid. Thanks to the baking climate inside the pot, the bread is moist on the inside and crispy on the outside.
Basically: A good loaf of bread should contain as few baking aids as possible, be free from additives and the dough base should not consist of a ready-made baking mix. Unfortunately, both retailers and bakeries sell bread that has been baked with one additive or another. Therefore, a glance at the list of ingredients tells you a lot about the basis of the bread quality: Bread actually only needs flour, water, salt, yeast or sourdough.
Of course, the basic ingredients of bread can also be changed or supplemented. For example, water can be replaced by milk, buttermilk, cream, yogurt, fruit or vegetable juices. Butter also plays an important role in bread such as Zopf. Nuts, seeds, fruit or spices can be added for extra flavor.
The crust flavors are formed from various flour components during baking. The crust of bread baked in a wood-fired oven is often quite thick, which makes it taste like more. Unfortunately, however, not all wood-fired ovens are the same: bread baked in a wood-fired oven is sold in retail outlets, but although the heat comes from wood, it doesn't really have much in common with original wood-fired bread. In a real wood-fired oven bread, wood is first burned on the baking surface and then the coal is wiped out before the bread is baked on the hot baking surface until it is crispy.
