Homemade Bread To Die For, Part 2

Good as the bread was that I made by following Jim Lahey's no-knead method, I wanted more complexity of flavor.  Simply put, I wanted to make bread to die for.  I experimented with different brands and types of flour, and I even ground some wheat berries for more flavor.  The results were good but not great.  Cook's Illustrated published an "improved" version of Lahey's recipe that among other ingredients called for half a bottle of beer.  I tried it: it was fussy, and only slightly more flavorful.  Then some favorable reviews appeared of Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson (Chronicle Books, 2010) and I decided to read it. 

"Read" perhaps is not the appropriate term, because in addition to Robertson's text Tartine Bread also features hundreds of photographs by Eric Wolfinger, and they are wonderfully instructive.  Wolfinger had had some culinary training but didn't know how to bake bread.  He did know how to surf, however, so he taught Robertson how to surf in exchange for being taught how to bake.  To his already existing passion for photography, Wolfinger quickly added a passion for baking.  When Robertson decided to do a book on baking for the amateur, a book like Jacques Pepin's La Technique and La Methode that would show as well as tell, Wolfinger was the obvious choice for his collaborator.

In  addition to using so many photographs, Robertson adapted the no-knead technique of Jim Lahey to suit a dough that uses what the French call un levain naturel--imagine a sourdough starter that is not old and sour but young and sweet.  Reading Tartine Bread made me realize why my earlier sourdough bread had been so mouth-puckeringly sour:  I didn't realize that the starter had to be refreshed at periodic intervals.  In other words, depending on how often you feed the starter flour and water, you can control the entire range of flavor from sweet to sour.  If I want to bake a loaf of rye, for example, I'll let the starter become a little sour.  For a loaf of white or whole wheat bread, on the other hand, I'll use a young, sweet starter.

What Kipling wrote about composing lays also holds for making a starter or un levain naturel:

     "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, 

     And every single one of them is right!"

 
Robertson gives one method using five pounds of flour, half white and half whole wheat, and I'm sure it works.  Other methods have you start with organic apples or grapes or malt extract or goat's milk.  I use a modified version of the one Patricia Wells describes in The Food Lover's Guide to Paris (4th ed.; Workman Publishing, 1999) that derives from the near-legendary Parisian baker Paul Poilane.  For reasons I'll make clear in a later post, I have changed the flour to water ratio from 2 : 1 flour to water to 1 : 1 flour to water, so the result is less like a ball of dough than a batter.

If you want to try it, first plan on four days passing before you can mix the bread.  Once you have the starter, however, it will be ready to use or re-use in just a few hours.  The process is simple; it just takes time.

     Day 1:  In a small bowl, combine a scant 1/2 cup of filtered or spring water at room temperature with a generous 1/2 cup of bread or whole wheat flour, preferably organic and unbleached.  The consistency will be similar to pancake batter.  Cover it with plastic wrap, and let it sit at room temperature for 24 hours, more or less.  (If your kitchen is cold, put it in the oven with the oven light on.)

     Day 2:  The starter may have risen slightly, have a few bubbles, and perhaps a slightly acidic smell, or it may just seem inert.  In any case, add another scant 1/2 cup of water at room temperature  and a generous 1/2 cup of flour and mix well.  Re-cover and keep warm.

     Day 3: By now, the starter should be showing signs of life.  If it hasn't, throw it out and start over.  If a few bubbles are there and the starter smells a little bit like a ripe cheese, add the same quantities of water and flour, re-cover and keep warm.

     Day 4:  Almost there.  Here's a picture on the fourth day of a starter based on whole wheat flour-- Creation of the World in a Pyrex bowl!  Taste it:  it should be tangy but not sour (if it is sour, shorten the intervals of feeding).
 

Once again, add 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of flour.  Stir and cover.

     Day 5:  Congratulations!  You have successfully trapped wild yeast and cultivated it into a starter.  The wild yeast, together with lactic acid bacteria, have been consuming the flour and creating an alcoholic fermentation.  A by-product of that fermentation is carbon dioxide, and that, in turn, will cause your bread dough to rise. 

You are now ready to bake.  If, however, your schedule doesn't allow this, just put the starter in the fridge.  If you still can't  free up the time to bake in the next day or so, toss out 1/2 of the starter and add the same amount of water and flour.  Mix it, and return it to the fridge.  Do this every five days or so, and the starter will happily survive.

In the next post, I'll tell you how to use your starter to bake a loaf of bread so good that your friends (should you decide you really ought to share) will exclaim, "You baked this bread?  I can't believe it!"

Homemade Bread To Die For: Part I

This will be the first post of a multi-part series on how to bake an incredibly simple and even more incredibly delicious loaf of home-made bread.

My mother baked bread for much of my childhood, with the result that at some point in my 20's, I began to think about learning how to bake bread myself.  The problem was that there were always reasons not to do it right away.  I promised myself that I'd make bread after I got tenure, or perhaps during my next sabbatical, or certainly after my daughter was born--but whenever the projected time, my baking bread never came to pass.

Flash forward:  I'm now in my 60's, and after something close to forty years of procrastinating, I've finally tried my hand at making bread.  I've read Elizabeth David's wonderful book, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (Biscuit Books, 1994), and I've nurtured my own sourdough starter from the directions in Patricia Wells's The Food Lover's Guide to Paris (4th ed., Workman Publishing, 1999).  Truth be told, though, I don't especially like the bread I've made.  It's sour, much too sour, unfortunately.  And it rises only reluctantly.  My first attempt, in fact, resulted in the world's largest sourdough cracker.  Subsequent loaves rose slightly higher, but only slightly.  They never resembled the pictures in the books I'd read.  I concluded that baking bread didn't seem to be in my future.

Flash forward again: I'm about to fly out to San Diego to spend some time with my mother, now in her late 80's and, after a broken hip, far less mobile than she had been (she had gone fly fishing for steelhead with me when she was 85).  My wife Caroline suggested that I ask my mother to teach me how to bake her bread.  My mother was delighted with the idea. We had a great time, and the taste of her loaves brought back my childhood.

As a mature (ahem!) adult myself, however, I had to face the fact that my mother's loaf was not what I wanted to eat every day.  With butter and jam, it made delicious toast, but her bread was too sweet and too yeasty for my taste (not that I ever mentioned this to her, of course).

In 2006, however, my friend Maria sent me the link to Mark Bittman's interview with Jim Lahey in the NY Times, and it's not an exaggeration to say that my life began to change.  Jim Lahey is the founder of the Sullivan Street Bakery in NYC and the author, with Rick Flaste, of My Bread:  The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method (W. W. Norton, 2009).  Lahey's principal innovation was to come up with a method of creating an oven within an oven.  By preheating a Dutch oven, putting the risen dough into it, covering it, and popping it back into the oven, Lahey had discovered a way for the moisture in the bread dough to create steam within the Dutch oven, and steam is what creates oven spring, the final rise of the proofed bread.  Hitherto, home bakers had had to resort to pans of water steaming away in the oven or throwing ice cubes into the oven:  clumsy, messy, and not especially effective. 

Lahey's second innovation was discovering that if you let the dough rise for six to eight hours or overnight, no kneading was required.  The extended period for rising was not new, but the absence of kneading was.  With these two innovations, Jim Lahey had single-handedly changed the baking of bread.  And since Lahey used commercial yeast, the loaves were not sour.  No longer arcane, no longer complex, Lahey's method allows anyone who follows his directions to produce a really good loaf of bread.  We are all in his debt.

If you're interested, Mark Bittman's column will give you a recipe for white bread and tell you how to follow Lahey's method.  Lahey's My Bread of course goes into far more detail on various kinds of breads, pizzas, and focaccias.  As the old commercial used to say, "Try it.  You'll like it!"