In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (9 page)

I
n a fluorescent-lit kitchen, a baker takes a small, golf-ball-size piece of dough from a plastic container. Maybe he calls it “mother,” “starter,” “sourdough,” or “
levain
.” He plops it into another larger container sitting on a scale, dumps in white or whole wheat or rye flour, pours in tepid water, and mixes it vigorously with his hands. Then he covers the container and puts this mixture on a shelf. When he returns several hours later, the substance is bubbling, and has risen to two to three times its original size. When he removes the cover, a pungent alcoholic smell hits his nostrils. This lively mixture, made with the flour, water, and the invisible organisms residing in the small doughy inoculator, is a wild leaven, more commonly known as sourdough starter. When this now bubbly ferment is added to dough, it causes the loaf to rise, but it’s also responsible for the tang of a bread, its milky soft taste, the chewiness of the crumb, even the caramel-like richness of the crust. Wild yeast and bacteria—the organisms fermenting in sourdough—make this possible.

When I started baking, sourdough caught my fascination almost immediately. I wanted to grab these organisms that seemed to be present in the very air I breathed and conjure up a loaf of bread. But “grabbing” these organisms in the air turned out to be one of the many myths associated with the substance. Sourdough is a bit like magic, because you keep this living substance active with regular feedings of flour and water, yet because the microscopic-level work can’t be seen by the eye, it’s also subject to a lot of rumor and tall kitchen tales. The simplicity of the substance, brought alive on a kitchen counter by a plethora of wild organisms, feels so unlike packages of commercial baker’s yeast, which contain just one strain of industrially manufactured fungi. When I began baking many years ago, sourdough felt raw and elemental, and actually it still does, many years later.

Once you start down this path of baking with natural leaven, a fascination takes hold. But it was a challenge to get it right in the early stages. I was attempting among the oldest of grain fermentation methods, one that dated back at least to Egyptian antiquity, if not the Babylonians before them. Because commercial baker’s yeast was not invented until the mid-nineteenth century, sourdough, along with beer and wine yeasts, was the main fermentation agent in bread for thousands of years. But the difficulty I encountered wasn’t unusual, considering sourdough had even escaped the talents of James Beard, a towering figure for my parents’ generation. In his 1973 bestseller
Beard on Bread
,
he called the method “overrated” and “fickle,” and gave instructions for making a sourdough starter that wouldn’t be recognized today. Bakers had relied on commercial yeast for so long that they had nearly forgotten sourdough. It took another decade for a generation to rediscover traditional methods.

By the time I mixed my first sourdough starter in the late 1990s, the artisan bread movement was well under way. Bakers had traveled to Europe, tasted Poilâne’s famous
miche
, and studied the sourdough method with less prejudice than Beard. It was these bakers who began writing books read by people like me. Gradually the method of making sourdough bread—which is highly reliable, if you stick with it—spread. Now Google “sourdough recipe” and you get more than 4.5 million hits. Still, many baking books ignore sourdough at the outset and start off with simple bread recipes with store-bought baker’s yeast. It’s easier, after all. But this advice usually goes unheeded, especially for a generation obsessed with full sour pickles, kimchi, home brew, and kombucha. This is how it went with me. If I couldn’t make a baguette, then at least I was going to make a proper sourdough, whether I knew how or not.

What I eventually realized was that sourdough is actually more forgiving than commercial yeast, precisely because it ferments at a more leisurely pace. There’s less opportunity to screw up. But that’s not really true for the beginner, who faces a series of tough judgment calls. He can under- or overferment the sourdough, bake the loaf too soon, when it hasn’t risen enough, or bake it too late, when it has lost its internal stretchiness and just kind of lies dormant in the oven, with none of the “oven spring” you should expect in the first several minutes of baking. All of these were rookie mistakes, but I lived through them content that one day I would actually create a decent bread with the four elements: flour, water, salt, and a “starter” culture. Well, that and the most important ingredient: time.

 • • • 

W
hen I mixed my first batch of sourdough, I kept it in a plastic pint container on top of the refrigerator, where it was warm, but occasionally it would burst through the lid and spill out. It was the price of a loaf in our household.

I was following a recipe from Daniel Leader’s
Bread Alone
. Leader relies on a minute amount of packaged yeast to begin his sourdough starter, fermenting it with flour and water. You discard part of the mixture each day, then add fresh flour and water to the remainder—literally “feeding” the organisms that live in the slurry. Eventually, over many feedings, wild yeast and bacteria take up residence, multiply, and turn this once hospitable environment into such a tangy acidic soup that the industrial yeast can no longer tolerate it, so they die off. It’s natural selection at work on your kitchen counter. Now, many bakers might think it would border on sacrilege to launch a natural starter with commercial yeast, because it’s unnecessary. All you need to really start a culture is flour and water. Eventually, it ferments. True, but I’ve tried many methods and for a novice, Leader’s was the easiest. Of course, I, too, had a nagging sense that I was somehow “cheating” by propagating my starter with packaged yeast, which wasn’t available to any pre-nineteenth-century baker.

From there, I moved on to a method by Nancy Silverton, the Los Angeles pastry chef who started La Brea Bakery. I had a special fondness for Silverton’s book
Breads from the La Brea Bakery
, which explored many facets of sourdough. But I was also attracted by her story. Silverton had opened La Brea Bakery in a small store right next to Campanile, the celebrated Los Angeles restaurant she cofounded. The place proved so popular that Silverton and her team—led by a savvy businessman, Manfred Krankl—grew tiny La Brea Bakery into a large outfit, first by hiring a team of bakers and delivering wholesale bread around the city. Then later, seeking to enter more distant markets, La Brea opened a largely automated bread factory. By the time I profiled the company, for a business magazine no less, La Brea Bakery had adapted a Japanese industrial machine to shape loaves in the giant facility out in the Sacramento Valley. The bread dough would pour from voluminous mixers into the stainless steel forming machine. From here, the loaves traveled down a production line onto an Italian-made spiral conveyor belt, almost a story tall. After an eight-hour fermentation, while slowly circling around, the loaves entered a long German tunnel oven where they were partially baked. One of the few workers on hand slashed every loaf with a razor before it went into the oven to keep the artisanal look. At the end of the process, the semibaked bread was flash frozen, then packaged for delivery so that it could be “baked fresh” in its final location. Sales had topped $50 million. And the surprising thing was that the bread was actually quite good, underscoring how sourdough and a long fermentation can lead to surprising results even for frozen, industrialized, “artisan” loaves. La Brea Bakery was a success and eventually sold for tens of millions of dollars—a classic American entrepreneurial story built on the sourdough loaves Silverton had perfected in her tiny bakery.

When I visited Los Angeles to profile the bakery in 2001, I recall sitting at the bar at Campanile one night during its weekly sandwich night, as Silverton held court, creating and dispatching inventive sandwiches from a panini press. I was partial to the grilled tuna, with braised leeks and aioli on a thick slice of sourdough country bread. It suited the bar brilliantly, since the crowded area was more like a casual party than a restaurant meal. But Silverton admitted to me that bread lost its meaning when it was out of her hands, which it clearly was at the La Brea factory. At Campanile, the bread was made by actual bakers in the local, wholesale bakery operation, where there were no robotic shaping lines, no tunnel ovens or frozen bread. Just bakers crafting great bread that eventually ended up in my panini sandwich. Bread could go in any number of directions, but I knew which I wanted, and I assumed she did, too.

In a television segment on
Baking with Julia
—Julia Child’s late-1990s show that featured many renowned bakers—Silverton explained how she made the starter that launched the company. She wrapped a pound of purple grapes in cheesecloth, bashing them to release the juices, then submerged the grapes into a flour-and-water mixture and left it alone for a week. “It smelled awful, looked awful, and I’d throw it away. I did this a couple of times until I had the patience to let the starter run the course of the week,” she said. After two days, the substance looked just as it did when she mixed it. After four days it had a “cheese-like smell, not too pleasant.” After six days, she discarded most of the grape, flour, and water concoction, then fed it with fresh flour and water. Eight hours later the leaven had doubled in size.

Was the initial fermentation sparked by the flour? The grapes? Or a combination of both? I didn’t know, but when I tried the version she laid out in her book, it worked. The only quibble: Silverton called for copious amounts of flour to feed the starter, which was unnecessary.
More than one billion bacteria
cells and 10 million wild yeast cells can be found in a pea-size gram of sourdough, so you don’t need much to fuel a new batch.

I always kept a starter on hand, but unlike others who like to nurture the original creation for years and then brag about its longevity, I made new ones just for fun. Over the years, I’ve fermented raisins, then mixed the raisin-wine water with flour. I’ve mixed honey with rye flour, an especially robust medium for fermentation, as recommended by Jeffrey Hamelman in his seminal work
Bread
. Many starter recipes call for honey, which shouldn’t be surprising, because yeast feeds on sugar. But honey has other attributes that can jump-start a sourdough starter, including
a minute amount of wild yeast
adept at fermenting carbohydrates. Bees also harbor beneficial bacteria in their abdomens, where floral nectar is stored before bees return to the hive. This bacteria acts as an antibiotic on undesirable organisms, helping a young sourdough starter. Honey is also acidic, which encourages the growth of wild yeast. That’s all a longwinded way of saying that honey seems to work when you want to launch a starter—but use raw honey, not the pasteurized stuff.

I’ve soaked figs and fermented them with flour, simply because I like figs. I’ve poured hot water over wheat bran, then used this bran tea to make sourdough starter. This works because
arabinoxylan
—the sugars that reside in bran cellulose—pump up the acidity in the medium and increase the metabolism of sourdough microbes. Minerals in bran also promote fermentation.I’ve sprouted barley in a three-day process in which you keep the grains damp until a little sprout appears, then dry them in a very low oven and grind them into barley malt; add a pinch to flour to energize a fermentation or darken a loaf. I’ve pounded whole wheat grains, then used this coarse flour to begin a starter, because the minerals and enzymes in freshly ground whole wheat flour make an especially active fermentation medium. I’ve also added sourdough to wort—the liquid that eventually is fermented into beer—and then made bread with this high-octane starter. I would recommend trying any and all of these methods. I found I’ve ended up with powerful leavens after each of these ferments matures—and also achieved subtle differences in the flavor profile.