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Adelaide is officially home to the country’s best sourdough, with the bakery team behind Frewville and Pasadena Foodland taking out the top honour at the National Artisan Baking Competition on the Gold Coast.
Adelaide’s Finest was awarded Champion Product of the Show for its multigrain sourdough, beating bakeries from across the country in the national competition run by the Baking Association of Australia.
The invitation to compete in the national awards came after their bakery and patisserie teams took out 18 podium places at the South Australian competition in May.
Head baker Peter Soteriou, who oversees both the Frewville and Pasadena locations, said that he was “thrilled” to have his team’s sourdough recognised on the national stage.
“It hasn’t just been me, it’s been a lot of different people who are passionate about bread,” he said.
“I’m still relatively young in my bread journey, and we’ve collaborated with a lot of people over the last three years”.
“I’m learning something new every single day”.
Alongside the top prize, the team also claimed Champion Sourdough Loaf, Champion Viennoiserie, first place for its baguette and ciabatta loaf, and a collection of additional first and second-place awards.
Peter said that at the heart of the award-winning loaf is the company’s two-decade-old sourdough starter.
Known as the ‘Mother,’ sourdough starter is a live, fermented mixture of flour and water that acts as a natural leavening agent for bread as a replacement for commercial baker’s yeast.
Although it was already established when Peter joined the bakery 3 years ago, he said it needed “a little bit of love”.
“One of the first things I did was make sure it was getting the correct feeding times and temperatures at the right times of the day to be effective enough to raise the bread without the addition of any other additives,” he said.
“After that, it was fixing the actual dough recipe to get enough hydration in there, so it has an open texture and correct resting times, so the dough has to sit for a long time before it’s shaped into its final shape to develop that nice open texture and to get a nice crust in the final shape”.
The process behind the award-winning loaf is anything but quick, with the bakery team starting work at 4am, mixing dough before it undergoes bulk fermentation for three to five hours. It is then pre-shaped, rested again, and formed into its final shape around lunchtime before spending the night in the fridge.
That long, slow, and cold fermentation is key to developing flavour and texture, Peter said.
With the loaf now recognised as the best in Australia, Pasadena and Frewville Foodlands continue to cement themselves as amongst the best suppliers of produce in the state.
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