My girlfriend, @urban.scout, is in love with roosterkoek. Many moons ago, long before I met her, I posted a recipe of how I make Sourdough Roosterkoek. Sourdough is in some sense not traditional, but in another sense original. Before package yeast from the store, people baked bread with sourdough! It was all there was. But recently, this history is forgotten. In any case, the recent "traditional" method of making roosterkoek uses normal package yeast.

My girlfriend's love of roosterkoek and my obsession to tweak recipes lead to the obvious revamping of my older recipe. One can always strive to become better, recipes can always be improved. So please follow along with me so that you can also make your own roosterkoek, a traditional South African bread baked over some hot coals!

Recipe/Ingredients

This is basically a normal yeasted bread, but I had some additional ingredients at hand. So for this revamped recipe, you will need:

• Bread flour,
• Semolina flour,
• Smoked salt,
• Yeast, and
• Water.

Method

This recipe is much easier to follow than my previous one. Sourdough is notoriously difficult to work with. And it is not everyone's favorite. Sometimes you just want that plain and simple bread taste.

Begin by mixing 1000 grams of flour (600 grams of bread flour and 400 grams of semolina) with 650 grams of water.

Cover the bowl. Leave it for an hour or two without adding salt or yeast. This step is called autolyze and it is one of the hidden secrets of bread baking. It does all the kneading for you. See how smooth the dough looks after the two hours:

Now you can add the salt and yeast. I do not even bother to add them separately nor do I worry about blooming the yeast. I have never had a dough flop.

You can then knead the dough a little. You will see how easily it kneads after the autolyze stage. Knead until it is smooth.

Place it back into your bowl and ferment it until it has doubled its size.

Transfer the dough to your workspace.

Flatten the dough and shape it into a rectangle.

I drew the lines in the dough where I thought about cutting it.

And then cut! It is so satisfying.

Flatten and shape the roosterkoeke or breads into their final shape:

And then let them "proof" and puff up a bit. This should not be too much because you still need to handle them.

I started to bake them when they puffed up a bit. As mentioned, roosterkoek is baked over coals. Whilst you cut the bread the fire needed to be going already.

When you have some decent coals, transfer them to the "rooster" or grill.

When they visibly puff up again, turn them around.

Brown them a bit on all sides. You can make them browner or keep them on the light side.

And there you have it. It is really that simple!

All you have to do now is to cut one open!

Having made some fig jam, I see no reason why you cannot overload the bread with jams. In this photo, I used some apricot jam, another favorite!

And the best thing of it all is to hear from your girlfriend that she wants some for breakfast the next morning!

All she needs to be happy is some hugs and roosterkoek! Jokes aside, this new recipe surely beats the older one. I have since made it three times for my girlfriend, and she already asked me to make some again!

If you try this recipe, please let me know in the comments! Have you tried the difference between sourdough and normal yeast? I would argue that it is totally two different products. They taste completely different.

I really hope you will try it! Please stay well and eat well! All the photographs are my own, and the recipe is also my own.