In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (2 page)

I started out with two bread books, Joe Ortiz’s classic
The Village Baker
and Daniel Leader’s
Bread Alone
. Both were professional bakers who had traveled to Europe and then recounted stories in their books about the bakers they had met and the recipes they had learned. It was the stories that really hooked me. Leader had an especially infectious tale about his friend Basil Kamir, who had opened a world music record store in an old abandoned
boulangerie
in Paris. When the building was slated for demolition in an urban renewal project, he decided to save the place by firing up the long-neglected brick oven in the basement, thus making it a cultural artifact worthy of preservation. The protest saved the place—which still exists and sits across the street from a row of drab apartment buildings. But in order to preserve the building, Kamir had to make good on his word and become a baker. So he did, putting away his records and helping renew France’s bread tradition. Stories like this were so compelling that I recall fantasizing I might want to meet these bakers one day. I hadn’t an inkling that I was going to bake in any serious way, or pursue such travels, or eventually even visit Kamir’s bakery, but I began, prodded by the simple quest for a decent loaf of bread in a city largely devoid of it.

It took a lot of practice, but I eventually fell into a rhythm. On days when I wasn’t facing a deadline, I’d walk downstairs from my office on the second floor, turn the dough out on the island counter, knead it for a minute or two to strengthen the gluten, then cover it, wash up, and return to the keyboard. On busy days when the phone was ringing I couldn’t bake. Or worse, I’d be in the middle of a crucial phone interview just as the bread was due to come out of the oven. (Talking on a portable headset, I would slide the loaf out of the oven, trying not to miss a beat.) Usually, I could find two days a week in which I could bake fresh loaves, which was more than enough for our household. And when I was on a roll, I’d bake every day, often mixing my dough late in the afternoon or evening, letting it rise through the night in the refrigerator, and then baking the next morning or afternoon. This really worked for my schedule, but for something else as well—the quality of the bread. Though making good bread takes time, the work itself wasn’t time consuming. It amounted to five to ten minutes here or there to take the bread to the next stage, whether feeding my sourdough starter bubbling away in a kitchen cabinet, hand-mixing the dough, or shaping and baking a loaf in the oven. Each was a distinct step that had to be carried out at the right moment, but it didn’t mean slogging away in the kitchen for hours at a time. It involved a lot of waiting while the bread fermented or baked, which meant I could do something else, like write. Once I figured that out, I began baking a lot and the craft began to feel more natural.

This came home to me one day as I slid a loaf of sourdough onto the baking stone in the oven, then set the digital timer on my oven (a KitchenAid electric oven, which I point out only because everyone asks). I had made this bread dozens of times, so each stage was familiar. But that day, as I was working in my office, I forgot about the bread and went about my work until a kind of toasty hazelnut aroma brought me to attention. I stopped, jogged downstairs, and arrived in front of the oven with just a minute left on the timer. I peered inside. The crust was dark, toasted. I grabbed the flat wooden peel, opened the oven door, and slid the loaf off the baking stone. I tapped the bottom and heard a rich, hollow knock—not a deadened thud. That loaf was done. My sense of smell had, in effect, woken me up and told me the loaf was ready. This wasn’t chance. Not then, not now. No matter how long a loaf takes, smell guides me. Like so much else about baking, your senses—sight, smell, and especially touch—are your most valuable tools.

Over the years, I realized I had much to learn, not only about the science of making bread but about the vagaries of this craft, because the recipes were at best a faint map of the process. There are many bread books out there, but books geared to home bakers often tell you just enough to get going and then focus on the recipe. The more I baked, the more I realized that the recipe was the least of my concerns. Far more important were the techniques, which were difficult to explain in a step-by-step format precisely because they depend on touch and feel. So let’s just say I made a lot of bad bread by following very good recipes. I expect if you follow the few recipes I offer in this book you will at first make poor loaves, too (what cookbook author admits that!). But if you keep at it, you will no doubt improve, because your technique and understanding will grow. It was only after baking for some time that I realized: when you get good enough to follow a bread recipe and actually succeed, you’re at the point where you no longer need a recipe. To reach that point, I read a lot, cornered professionals for advice, scoured the Internet for tips, and focused on that key phrase or paragraph in a book that would change my entire understanding of bread, even if the author mentioned it only in passing. And I baked. I baked a lot.

Baking bread depended on recognizing the moist sheen on a well-mixed loaf, the subtle spring of relaxed gluten, or the hollow knock of a loaf removed from the oven. It’s what home bakers knew long ago. How much water did you use in a loaf? Just enough. How long did you bake it? Until it was done. Giant communal ovens in villages had no temperature gauges or timers. Flour was far more inconsistent than it is today, so each batch of dough had to be fine-tuned. Old varieties of wheat were highly diverse and wheat wasn’t even widely available in many parts of Europe until the eighteenth century, so loaves were more often made from barley, spelt, or rye (a weed that grew between wheat). Each of these grains required a slightly different method and opened up endless variation. In Germany and Poland, dense ryes were far more common because it was the primary grain in the cold north. Loaves made with brewer’s yeast were common in England because it was a by-product of a nation of beer drinkers. In Scandinavia, rye crackers were favored because they kept well through the long winter months. And barley was for millennia the common man’s flour, because it grows from Ethiopia nearly to the Arctic Circle and has a thick enough hull to thwart insects. It was hardy, nutritious, and filling, feeding the slaves who built the pyramids and the gladiators of Rome. When sprouted and dried, it became malt for beer.

Bread making is something humanity has done for thousands of years. The impregnation of dough, its slow rise, and the spring upward of the loaf in the heat of the oven, before the yeast died, was a metaphor for life.
The ancient Romans
held an annual festival of the ovens on February 17 called Fornicalia, which shares the same Latin root as fornication. Even in prehistoric times, baking was associated with procreation. Baking was a metaphor for life because bread is life giving.

 • • • 

T
he story of why I began to make bread might end there, but another ingredient played a crucial role. I remember, at age eight or so, chiseling a piece of marble in my father’s basement woodworking shop after I had seen Michelangelo’s
David
. All I managed was the rough outline of a snake, but I worked at it for days. I remember, too, spending hours after school watching a team of carpenters who were building out the interior of a small store in Brooklyn. Eventually they put me to work. After college, I worked in an art framing shop in a second-story loft on the Bowery, just below Houston Street in New York. It was there that I really dove into this enduring interest in hand work.

The area where the shop was located was still seedy then—a mix of vagrants, artists in loft buildings, restaurant supply stores, and junkies who frequented the nearby park over on Chrystie Street. It wasn’t yet home to the trendy eateries and clubs—and the Whole Foods supermarket—that you find there today. Arlan, a painter, and Karl, who had trained as an architect, owned the shop and both were true craftsmen. But the place also had the feel of a private social club, which was part of the appeal. Arlan would often work all day, then return at night to paint in a cramped studio in the back of the loft. Sometimes I’d arrive in the morning to find Karl crashed out on a lawn chair next to the kitchenette after a night of fishing on Long Island. We’d ramp up when things were busy, and drink coffee and chat when things were slow. At the end of the day, after the sanders and table saws were shut down, the frames piled on the tables ready for artwork, we’d pull out the pieces—by Sol LeWitt or Richard Diebenkorn—destined for a SoHo gallery, collector, or museum and just look at them. There were a lot of moments like that in the shop.

If there was an ethos at Squid Frames, it came from the elevation of craft. When a piece of wood was stained and finished particularly well, eyebrows were raised but little was said. The type of things that would score the most admiration were precisely the things that others would not recognize at all, because when the frames were well made, the eye would simply travel to the art.

I also remember the shock of first coming to work and spending hours sanding wood, or trying to sand wood, because I couldn’t manage to do this simple task correctly. The work was dusty, noisy, and monotonous but it was a good lesson, for it forced me to be attentive to the most tedious of tasks. And that was necessary before I could accomplish anything else—not just at the frame shop but really in any endeavor. Thinking back on this two-year experience, the lesson I learned was to pay attention. I also learned that by virtue of constant repetition, the body, or senses, eventually took over in this craft work so that it felt as if my hands were “thinking.” But that didn’t happen quickly. It took a long time to develop, and you can easily lose those sensory skills once you stop. Decades later, I know enough to be cautious near power tools. They aren’t second nature to me any longer, so usually, I leave that kind of work to others. Roger Gural, who once worked as a baker at the French Laundry Kitchen and now teaches bread baking in New York, mentioned something like this to me when we were baking together one evening. He told me that when he went away on vacation for a couple of weeks he could lose the feel of the dough. It took a day or two to get it back. “I usually measure how good I am by how quickly ‘it’ returns,” he said.

And what precisely is the “it” that “returns”? Recognizing the sound of the dough in the mixer, knowing its feel as you pinch it, or the sheen of the dough’s skin during fermentation; these visual, tactile, and auditory cues become the signals for what you should or should not do. It takes time to learn. Repetition keeps those senses honed. But if you stop baking, making frames, or whatever it is that you do, you can lose that sensory edge, just like that.

So when beginning bakers try a “recipe” and get frustrated when it doesn’t work out, they are kind of missing the point. The real recipe is to make bread time and again, until one day it becomes second nature. Beginners can make good, even extraordinary bread. But until they understand the craft, under- and overfermented loaves and misshapen and dense breads will be the rule. That’s what happened to me, but perhaps I saw enough of a promise to keep going. Maybe, too, I knew enough about craft work from my time at Squid to understand the nature of these failures: that they are not ultimately failures. If you take one lesson away from the attempt, then it’s worth it. Maybe, too, I just valued the meditative nature of the work, and the respite it offered.

My own progression as a home baker also mirrored what happened in food culture, as heirloom, handcrafted, and local foods became much more valued. As much as I liked all the bakeries I grew up with—whose breads holds a special place in my memory—I did not try to reproduce their loaves. I’ve moved on, continually trying to find new ways of making bread at home. It was an approach that became clear when I tried, almost in desperation, to make a decent baguette in Paris in the darkest days of the recession.

W
hile this is not a recipe book, I do provide recipes. Many are quite simple, such as flatbread, but others require more commitment and I’ve tried to illuminate this by labeling each recipe
Easy, Moderate,
or
Difficult
. While they were influenced by many bakers I encountered, and the recipes I read, they reflect methods that became part of my baking regime. I continue to make all of these breads today, and I find them endlessly fascinating and flexible. That said, if you’re starting out and really want to learn the craft of baking, I would point you to books highlighted in my bibliography.

In these recipes, I use a scale to weigh ingredients and I measure weights in grams, which can be unfamiliar, especially for someone used to measuring flour in cups or even ounces. While volume measurements are more common, weighing is more accurate. Many baking books also include metric measurements—now the de facto standard at least among artisan bakers. While weighing ingredients might be a foreign concept, it’s not difficult. Nor is it a big investment. The first scale I bought was a small plastic version from a grocery store that cost $9.99. I used it for several years and learned how to bake with it. It broke, and I’ve since graduated to digital scales which can be found for about $25.

I sometimes use the phrase “natural leaven” to refer to the substance commonly known in the United States as “sourdough” or “sourdough starter.” French bakers refer to this substance as
levain
. Rather than pick one term, I use all three depending on the context. But they refer to the same thing: natural leaven, sourdough, and
levain
contain populations of wild yeast and bacteria, which when added to dough cause it to ferment—a process I explain in depth in chapter 2.

Although I provide rising times, they depend on a dough temperature of around 75˚F (24˚C). If your kitchen is 80˚F (27˚C) or higher in the summer, the dough will ferment more quickly. If the rise is moving too quickly, you can add cooler water of around 65˚F (18˚C) when you mix the dough. If the rise is sluggish in the winter, because your kitchen is a cool 65˚F (18˚C), then mix the dough with 85˚F (29˚C) water and ferment the dough in a closed space, such as an oven, with just the light on. The bottom line: you will need to adjust based on your experience.

A word on flours: I use unbleached “all purpose” flour, although all-purpose can mean many things. Ideally, the flour should be milled from hard red winter wheat with a protein level of about 11 to 11.7 percent. Some all-purpose flours aim for protein levels of around 10 percent, which might be challenging for bread making. (You should be able to find this information at a company’s Web site or through a call to its customer service line.) I find “bread flour,” which has a protein level of around 13 percent, too strong for handmade breads, though it is well suited for bagels, pretzels, and pizza. If you do use bread flour, you will need to adjust the hydration by adding a bit more water.

Generally, I bake with Whole Foods’ 365 Unbleached Organic All Purpose Flour (10.5 to 11 percent protein), but I’ve found many other flour brands perform just as well, including King Arthur and Gold Medal flours. I’ve also found that whole wheat flour is more variable than white flour, in the amount of water it requires and the way it performs, because the milling can vary. So once you settle on a brand, you might want to stick with it. I’ve had good success with stone ground whole wheat flour from Bob’s Red Mill, though I’ve used many others as well, including those from smaller, specialty mills as I discuss in the pages ahead.