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Birotes Salados (Mexican Sourdough Bread)
Birotes are a popular sourdough bread from Guadalajara, Mexico with a history tracing back to the Second French Intervention in Mexico in 1864. The salado (salty) version is used for savory applications like the famous Torta Ahogada (drowned sandwich) which is filled with pork, refried beans, and pickled onions; and then drenched in salsa.
The bread isn’t particularly salty, but the term salado distinguishes it from sweet or yeast-leavened versions. I did read on a Guadalajara tourism blog that some bakers brush the dough or the just-baked breads with saltwater to ensure an extra crunchy crust, but I couldn’t find this in any recipes I looked over. Nonetheless, the key characteristic of birotes salados is their crustiness, which allows them to hold up well to being saturated in sauce.
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Looking at birotes, you might think they’re just sourdough demi baguettes with a different name, but traditional birotes have beer, lime juice, and egg in them because of a unique starter build. I learned about the birote sourdough starter in a video of Karl De Smedt, the manager of the world heritage sourdough library in Belgium. In the video, De Smedt tours the Guadalajara bakery of Fernando del Río, who shows his process of feeding the birote sourdough starter beer, egg, lime juice, sugar, salt, and flour.
While I suspected it would take many feedings to make my starter have a similar microbial profile to that of del Río’s forty-year-old birote starter, I still wanted to experiment with this — see how the starter and the dough developed, and how the bread tasted. I looked online for standard ratios of birote starter ingredients, but couldn’t find them, not even among recipe blogs in Spanish, so I created my own build influenced by the lime and beer ratios in the birote dough of Bryan Ford in New World Sourdough.
Ingredients that go in a traditional Mexican birote starter.
The delicious birotes in the photo above were made with Ford’s recipe, the only modification being that I used whole grain yecora rojo flour for half of the flour. Ford’s recipe uses a flour-and-water sourdough starter, and his final birote dough has 8.3% beer and 2.3% lime juice, no egg. My final birote recipe below has 5.3% beer, 2.1% lime juice, and 7.5% egg; and these ingredients go into the starter build. The resulting birotes have a comparatively soft and spongy crumb, likely because of the egg, but the crust is still quite crunchy.
Birote sourdough starter build
I was sure my starter would take a while to get lively with this complicated feed, because protein, fat, alcohol, sugar, and salt all are known to impede the growth of sourdough microbes, but this wasn’t the case. The starter doubled in about three hours. Quite possibly, the starter was actually boosted by the yeast in the beer that I used (homebrewed) and by the pH lowering lime juice, but my off-the-cuff theory about why egg is traditionally in the starter is that maybe it helps slow the starter’s development in a warm climate.
2.5 hours after mixing, kept warm in a lit oven
I used yecora rojo wheat flour for half the flour in my birotes because I wanted some flavor and fiber of whole wheat, and because I thought it would be neat to use a wheat variety with origins in Mexico. Yecora rojo was developed by the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture and the International Maize & Wheat Improvement Center around 1970. It’s a robust flavored wheat with relatively strong gluten.
All the ingredients mixed together at once for an easy process
The whole grain flour and the very large amount of sourdough starter in my recipe, almost 50%, make the process fast. I chose not to retard (refrigerate) the dough at any point, but you can if you want to, most conveniently at the end of the bulk fermentation.
Speedy 3-hour bulk fermentation; pre-shaping and final shaping combined into one step
The birotes then proofed for about an hour, during which I began the pre-heat of my oven and stone. I used my usual method for steam: putting a boiling cup of water in an aluminum pan that has a pinhole in it.
I noticed that the birotes on the edges of the stone that were exposed to the most steam had the best oven spring. The next time I make these (or baguettes or ciabatta), I plan to try inverting a roasting pan over the dough for the first 10 minutes of the bake to hopefully get more even steaming.
Fully proofed birotes and baking on a FibraMent stone
Birotes Salados (Mexican Sourdough Bread)
Birotes Salados are crusty delicious Mexican breads with a fascinating history that dates back to Napoleon and a unique sourdough starter fed with beer, lime juice, egg and more. Make the bread for healthy snacking and sandwiches of any sort, or go all out and use the birotes for traditional Guadalajaran drowned sandwiches (tortas ahogadas) which are filled with refried beans, fried pork (carnitas), and pickled onions and then soaked in a couple of salsas.
Ingredients
Starter Build (311g)
Final Dough (1187g)
Instructions
Starter Build
Final Dough Mixing
Shaping
Final Proof and Baking
Shopping List
All Purpose Flour
Yecora Rojo Hard Red Spring Wheat Berries
Yecora Rojo Whole Grain Flour
Sourdough Starter (Live)
Mockmill 100 Grain Mill
Breadtopia’s Choice Kitchen Scale
$18.00Danish Dough Whisk — Large
Dough Rising and Storage Bucket w/Lid – 2 qt. Round
Flax Linen Baker’s Couche
Baguette Flipping Board
Parchment Paper Sheets — 200 Sheets
$19.00USA Pan Cookie Sheet
Bread Lame
FibraMent Oven Baking Stones
Expandable Cooling Rack
Birotes Salados (Mexican Sourdough Bread)