In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (15 page)

Now, why all the fuss about Tartine bread? Well, it’s very good. It has a mild
levain
flavor with a hint of acidity, open holes in the crumb, and a magnificently crackling dark crust. All of these qualities reflect the long fermentation that’s central to the Tartine method. While the ovens are tied up with cakes, tarts, and pastries during the day, the bread bakers are busy mixing and shaping their loaves. Then, when the ovens finally free up late in the afternoon, the bakers remove the loaves that have been rising in the walk-in refrigerator since the day before. They spill the loaves from their
bannetons
, or baskets, onto the canvas loading belt, swiftly slash them with a series of cuts and then load them into the oven. Then with the push of a button, they inject a blast of steam, and, in a highly unusual maneuver, turn off the oven, so that the falling heat approximates the wood-fired hearth on which Robertson was weaned. When the crackling torpedo-shaped loaves start coming out, they fill the bakery with toasty, chestnut aromas that are incredibly enticing.

Like so many methods that bakers adopt, Robertson began this two-day baking regime out of necessity. Years earlier, in Point Reyes, he couldn’t handle mixing and shaping the dough, chopping the wood for his masonry brick oven, and baking all in one day—if he and Liz were going to have a life. So he stretched the process over two days. To make this extended fermentation work, he relies on a relatively small amount of what he calls “young” starter in the dough. This sourdough has risen only for a few hours so smells rather sweet, favoring lactic acids, rather than the sharper acetic acids that come in a more mature
levain
. When he first described this approach in
Tartine Bread
, I was surprised because most sourdough recipes call for far larger amounts of leaven. But there’s no hard and fast rule about how much starter to add to a dough, though the differing amounts, along with their hydration and temperature, can dramatically affect the way the final loaf turns out. If he had used a greater amount of leaven in the dough, for example, and kept it at a warm temperature of 78˚F (26˚C), the bread would be ready to go into the oven in five to six hours after it was mixed—not twenty-eight or thirty hours. But it wouldn’t have the complexity of taste, the dark crust, and porous crumb that makes the loaf a Tartine loaf. The relatively small amount of sourdough and the cool overnight rise means this dough needs a long, languorous fermentation, which is perfect if you’re planning on mixing one day, baking the next, and yes, sleeping at night, as he was, in the cool climate of Point Reyes.

I found this method tricky to achieve in the summer swamp of Washington when blasting air conditioning lowers the temperature to only 80˚F (27˚C). Starters, especially liquid ones, can overferment in those conditions and develop too much of the acetic acid that Robertson’s trying to avoid. My fix is to use a stiff leaven in the summer. All else being equal, this takes longer to ferment than a liquid sourdough starter and gives me a longer overnight window to achieve a mildly acidic flavor profile. Another way to slow down the leaven in the summer is to mix it with cold water and to add salt (but don’t forget to reduce the salt in the final dough by the same amount). When it’s really warm, I use that approach. The way to maintain your sourdough arises from your particular needs, desired flavor profile, and careful observation of the starter ecology. It really is like farming because you’re nurturing these microlivestock in a way that reflects the local climate—and mine wasn’t northern California. To get a similar taste, I had to do things differently.

Like that of most bakers I’ve encountered, Robertson’s method influenced some of the things I did, but the real eye-opener came at the bakery itself, where, it might be said, the exacting guidelines went out the window. “All this stuff is done by feel, every step of the way,” Yanko told me. “I mean the calculations guide us, but how the dough feels, how it rests on the bench, all of that determines what we do.” Even the flour changes with the seasons. Just a couple of weeks before I’d arrived on one of my several visits, they had altered the blend of white flours from Central Milling in Utah that they use in the Tartine country loaf. “We’re constantly changing things,” Yanko said.

This flexibility is especially applicable to the amount of water you add to the dough, which increases as the dough is progressively developed. It echoes something that Pichard in Paris told me: “Add as much water as the dough can handle.” What’s too much? I saw that years ago when I was mixing a
ciabatta
loaf, that extremely moist Italian dough that creates huge airy holes. I had added so much water at the outset that the gluten never came together. I was stirring a soup in my KitchenAid mixer, and the gluten was just swimming around, not hooking up. I had added too much water, and all at once. Had I added the water gradually, the gluten would have had a chance to form its connecting bonds, and then absorb the additions of water.

“We hold back maybe 10 to 15 percent of the water,” Hart told me one day at Tartine, “and then just keep adding it, because we mix by feel.” As the dough mass is stretched and folded, they hydrate the dough even more, until it’s a highly elastic substance that has sucked up as much water as a sponge. While this method is often called “double hydration,” it’s more like triple hydration or perhaps constant hydration at Tartine, since they add the water until the dough looks sufficiently gloppy, but still strongly elastic. What’s enough? Well, again, that’s a judgment call by the baker and in part depends on the flour one uses. In my case, I just keep sprinkling on a couple of tablespoons at a time, after each rest, and fold and pinch the dough until the water’s absorbed.

Another surprise in their technique was in the final shaping of the loaf, which I got to try on my first visit to Tartine. It mimics nothing so much as origami. Usually, when shaping a loaf, you cut and weigh the dough for the size loaves you want, then gently fold it into a rough shape. This preshaping builds up a slight bit of tension in the skin of the dough, making it easier to manipulate into the final shape after a brief rest. Since Tartine’s loaves are so fully hydrated, though, the preshaped loaf kind of collapses into a one-inch-thick pancake on the wooden counter during its resting period. Then, when it comes time to shape the bread, they do a series of folds, and folds upon folds. Their hands work quickly and automatically as they wrap the dough into an airy, taut package. It was far more intricate that any technique I saw in Paris—or anywhere else for that matter. Now, I could try to describe this folding technique, but there are so many pulls and folds, each stretching the skin of the dough around a loose and pliable interior, that a verbal description wouldn’t do it justice. Robertson doesn’t even bother mentioning it in his bread book.

But after watching him shape a few loaves at Tartine, I tried it on the butcher block counter. Robertson was standing beside me. The counter was nearly devoid of any flour, so you have to live with potential stickiness. (Beginning bakers make the mistake of throwing down flour, when the loaf starts to stick, but when you do so, the loaf can’t “grab” the counter and achieve a taut skin. It kind of flops around instead.) I went to work, folding this way and that, trying to be quick about it. When my somewhat mangled loaf was done, he said it was “okay.” He was kind. It was clear it would take a lot of time and practice to get this shaping technique down. “I’ve been doing it eight months and I still haven’t got the hang of it,” Hart told me during one of my visits. I could tell that he hadn’t, because he didn’t look particularly relaxed and fluid when he shaped the bread. It was the same with a visiting baker from Sweden. But at least they could accomplish the task. I couldn’t. I even took a video of the technique to try to remember what they were doing, but even then, watching it repeatedly, it was still hard to figure everything out. You can’t slow down or stop during the shaping process. If you do, your hands will be stuck to a gloppy mass. Every time I tried the technique, the wet, delicate dough stuck to my fingers or the skin of the dough ripped. It’s an impossibly precise but relaxed technique in which your fingers—not your brain or eyes—figure how to manipulate the dough.

But here’s the other thing about shaping: I’ve hardly ever seen two bakers shape loaves in exactly the same way, at least in the United States, where many bakers are self-taught or learn at the elbow of another baker. In Europe, there might be a higher degree of consistency because of schooling and formal apprenticeship. Some eschew the preshaping step, so I tried that for a while as well. Others insist on preshaping. I’ve concluded that there’s really no one right way to shape a loaf of bread, but there are many wrong ways, which often arise from too much pressure or a misjudgment about the amount of flour on the shaping surface. By pressing on the loaf, the inept baker condenses the crumb, and ends up with something resembling a brick. With too little flour on the counter, the skin of the dough rips, releasing all the pressure you’re trying to create. Too much flour, though, means the loaf just rolls around.

Ultimately, you need to stretch the outer skin of the dough without compressing the air bubbles that have accumulated inside. It’s like containing a sponge with a rubber band. But achieving this is tough, and takes practice. Once you do get it, though, you’ll see the skin is elastic and becomes even more so as the loaf rises, so that by the time it’s ready to go into the oven, you can slash it swiftly with a razor. The slash will open slightly and you’ll notice air bubbles inside the cut. Once it hits the steam of the oven and the loaf rises, the
grigne
will burst open. The look is aesthetically pleasing, a distinctive, dark crust surrounding an airy interior, which might describe the Tartine loaf.

But this is hard to achieve and can’t be done if all the preceding steps haven’t been properly carried out. As Tim Healea of Little T American Baker in Portland, Oregon, said to me when we were discussing this in his bakery: “Each defect along the way gets kind of magnified in the process.” Proper shaping won’t correct a badly fermented loaf. And bad shaping can ruin a properly fermented loaf. Each step needs attention.

 • • • 

W
hen I got the call from Waters’s office that day in early 2010, it was before all these trips to California. So the thread to this West Coast baking lineage really came through books, occasional tastings of bread when I was traveling, and practice. But I still was apprehensive when asked to bake for forty guests at the $500-a-plate dinner at Bob Woodward’s house. I tried to figure out how much bread I would need to make and realized I could probably do it—five big loaves and several baguettes. I then called the baker and author Peter Reinhart, whom I’d met a couple of years earlier. “That’s not a lot of bread,” he said, and he encouraged me to give it a whirl.

So began my first gig as a professional baker. I quickly settled on breads I made time and again and eat at home—a
pain de campagne
(country loaf) made with sourdough and a mix of white, whole wheat, and rye flours; a
pane casareccio di Genzano
, an airy, white, big loaf crusted with wheat bran that I picked up from Dan Leader’s
Local Breads
; and my baguettes. Then, I worked out a time line. I would need to begin Friday to have the breads ready on Sunday afternoon.

I started by feeding 50 grams (about a quarter cup) of sourdough starter Friday morning, the seed of the leaven that would eventually feed forty people. I refreshed this substance three times, building it in size so that by Saturday evening, when I needed the ripe starter to make my doughs, I had more than 1.5 kilograms of sourdough, filling a small plastic tub. With that steady feeding every eight to twelve hours, the starter was bubbling, itching to impregnate the dough. This itself was a good sign, for a robust starter will always make better bread than one that seems weak, slack, and slow to ferment.