The Essential Book of Fermentation (13 page)

As you can see from the specials board, there is no set recipe for fermenting vegetables, but rather a technique, with the ingredients up to what sounds good to you. The Cultured Pickle Shop does commercially exactly what you do at home to make your own cultured vegetables and drinks, and that is to submerge the prepared veggies in brine to encourage the development of lactobacilli and other beneficial microorganisms. What the Cultured Pickle Shop offers residents of Berkeley is not anything different from what you make at home, but rather it offers convenience for busy folks who may not have the time to ferment their own edibles.

PART 2

A Fine Meal of Bread, Cheese, and Wine In this section, we’ll delve deeply into three fermented foods familiar to everyone that together make up a triumvirate of deliciousness. We’ll visit a breadmaker at work, a cheesemaker at his stainless-steel tubs of sheep’s milk, and a home winemaker who’s decided that homemade bread, cheese, and wine can be nature’s finest foods.

CHAPTER 8

Bread

Is there an aroma more mouthwatering than that of yeasted bread baking in the oven? The scent sums up and integrates the ingredients of great bread: bread yeast, wholesome flour, and spring water. Of these ingredients, the one that makes great bread, not just good bread, is the flour. So in this section, we’ll be examining flour in great detail. The more you know about your flour, the better your bread will be. Of course bread is not a source of live bacteria and yeast—they die off during the bake—but it does contain the metabolic products of the yeasts and/or bacteria that leavened it. Slather it with cultured (fermented) butter, and you are back in probiotic business.

Probably no change in our culture sums up the emergence of the organic ideal more than the change in our most familiar fermented product, bread. Back in the mid-nineteenth century and earlier, one took one’s grain to the mill and the miller ground it into whole grain flour. As long ago as ancient Rome, the upper classes preferred whiter bread, but it wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century and the advent of steel roller mills that supplanted millstones that the wheat berries were reduced to simple starch. The baking industry had finally learned to take the bran and germ from the wheat, giving us the tasteless, gummy, white slices used to hold sandwich ingredients together. It was a utilitarian product, not a palate pleaser. It’s hard to believe we ever got along without the wonderful breads we’ve rediscovered since the 1960s, made the way breads in Europe were made: pain au levain
,
made with natural starter; good baguettes that must be eaten fresh from the oven to be at their best; ciabatta, the Italian word for “slipper,” which is a slack-dough bread with an airy, soft interior and a light, thin crust; quintessentially German dreikornbrot, packed with grains and seeds and bursting with natural goodness; and many other types of fine bread.

My thoughts ran along those lines when I recently brought home a loaf of sourdough from the Acme Bread Company of Berkeley, California, and tore—literally—into its dark brown crust. I ripped off a chunk of crust with my side teeth and crunched in. It had yielding parts, tough and chewy parts, and crisp and crunchy parts with a browned and roasted nutty wheat flavor. Inside the bread was moist, stretchy, and chewy. Its aroma combined a dominant sourness with a satisfying, warm, and yeasty graininess. The smell of this bread brought back memories of afternoons when I was about ten, climbing into the beams of the neighbor’s dairy barn, jumping off into the dry hay, and smelling dusty alfalfa and timothy, oats and chaff, fermenting corn silage, milk and cows, all mingled together. But this Acme loaf is not the bread of my childhood—not by a long shot.

“There’s a big change going on with bread,” says Joseph Rodriguez of Uprising Bread Bakery in Brooklyn. “The top bakers in Paris are going organic. True artisans all over the world are sticking to pure, organic ingredients.” Uprising is an organic bakery started by Rodriguez and Nicole Lane, his wife. The bakery, with two retail outlets plus sales to markets and restaurants in New York City, makes twelve or thirteen kinds of naturally leavened breads daily, including Italian country bread, special breads like potato and rosemary and caramelized onion, ciabatta, and French-style baguettes. “We don’t use commercial yeast,” Rodriguez says. “We’ve created a natural starter culture and refresh it often—it gives a slightly sour flavor to the bread, but not as sour as San Francisco sourdough.”

Natural Starters and Commercial Yeast

Natural starters are made by simply letting a mixture of flour and water ferment through the agency of whatever yeast and bacteria are floating in the air. Because each place on the face of the earth has a unique mixture of microorganisms, each place can produce a starter culture that’s unique to that place. That’s one reason a natural, artisanal bread can show
terroir,
or the taste of the place it’s from. In San Francisco, for instance, the sourdough agents are a pair of microorganisms—the bacteria
Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis,
which is native to the region, and the yeast
Candida milleri
. They propagate together in the dough, working symbiotically to produce that unique, very sour flavor of San Francisco sourdough.
L. sanfranciscensis
produces the sourness by utilizing the maltose sugars in the dough.
C. milleri
uses glucose sugars to produce alcohol and the carbon dioxide that leavens the bread, making it rise as the glutinous dough fills with expanding gas bubbles. Thus, there’s no competition for a nutrient source between the two. Commercial yeast (
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
), however, also uses maltose, which makes it compete with
L. sanfranciscensis
and interrupt the production of the souring compounds. That’s why a natural leaven produces a more idiosyncratic sourdough bread than commercial yeast.

For the recipe for making your own natural starter, see
here
.

Rodriguez says that he and Lane are proud to be a part of the organic bread movement. “Here in the United States and around the world, it’s growing by leaps and bounds,” he says. All Uprising’s flour and other ingredients such as oats, onions, and apricots are organic, “except for nuts,” Rodriguez says. “Organic nuts cost twice as much as conventional nuts, and we just can’t afford them. But all the coffee we serve in our stores is organic, and all our spreads and jams. We push organics.”

Why?

The answer is as much social as it is agricultural. “I grew up in Kansas and met Nicole when she was going to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. We got involved in the organic community, which is really strong in Madison. We used to work in the community gardens.” After Madison, Rodriguez and Lane studied at the San Francisco Baking Institute, a school that has graduated many bakers with a strong commitment to organics. One of their instructors was Lionel Vatinet, a French master baker who now operates La Farm Bakery in Raleigh, North Carolina, and who also uses organic flours. Lionel has been instrumental in educating many fine artisanal bakers in the United States, including Kathleen Weber of Della Fattoria Bakery in Petaluma, California, whom you will meet later.

Vatinet says he likes to use organic flour because of the nutritional punch it gives. “Ten years ago, most bakeries used commercial flour that was bleached, bromated, and full of chemicals used to fortify the flour nutritionally. But I’m from France, as you can tell [spoken in his liquid French accent], and we work with unprocessed flour over there. With organic flour, especially whole wheat, there’s enough nutrition that a human being can almost live on it alone,” he says.

“Identity Preserved” Bread Flour

At Uprising in Brooklyn, Rodriguez and Lane—along with many other organic artisanal bakers around the country—use flour from Cook Natural Products of Oakland, California. Cook Natural Products is one of those enabling companies whose work foments and promotes the blossoming of organic bakeries. Without Cook, or a company like it, artisanal bakers would have a much harder time securing reliable supplies. Its director of Technical Services is Ian Duffy, a former rock climber, cyclist, tofu maker, baker, and instructor at the San Francisco Baking Institute. He was born in Munich, Germany, and raised on delicious Bavarian rye before moving to the United States at about age ten, where the lack of good bread made the move more difficult than it had to be.

“More than half of the flour we sell is organic,” Duffy says, “because selling organic flour is the right thing to do.” The company prides itself on its line of organic flours and other grains, and sells conventional flours and grains as well. “I also prefer the sensibilities of our organic customers. And we can’t compete with ConAgra [a major supplier of conventional commodity flour to the big baking companies of America], so organic is a niche market for us.”

Duffy explained why Cook is unique in the way it secures organic wheat, mills it, and sells it to artisan bakers. “The big conventional wheat growers sell to brokers and the brokers sell it to the big grain suppliers; it operates like the stock market,” he says. “Or they sell to grain elevators at a guaranteed price and the elevators sell to ConAgra and other big wheat wholesalers.

“Since elevator wheat comes from many different sources, it varies in moisture content, weight, and protein content—all important numbers for bakers to know. So millers blend different lots together until they get the specifications they want. They may be hitting consistent specs, but because the blends are from always-changing components, any unique characteristics of the wheat are lost. It’s the wheat equivalent of jug wine,” he says.

“Our idea here at Cook is more like varietal wine. We select certain kinds of wheat we know have definite characteristics like high protein content, and we ask farmers to grow these selected wheats. Then we contract with mills around the country to make flour from them,” Duffy says. Some of these mills are roller mills (using large steel rollers that crush and grind the wheat to fine flour) and some are stone mills (where wheat is ground by huge revolving millstones held a hair apart). Some bakers prefer stone-ground flour because they believe it’s ground at cooler temperatures and more of the enzymes and volatile flavor compounds in the wheat are retained, but there’s some question as to whether this is accurate.

“Then we ship our flour from these contract mills to nearby customers,” Duffy says. It’s a marketing tactic, because “a lot of the cost of flour to the baker is not in the growing or the milling, but in the moving and storing, especially with organic flour.” With organic flour, storage bins and trucks have to be thoroughly cleaned of conventional flour before organic is put in, and that costs more. Trucking is expensive. So the closer the mill to the farmer and the baker, the fresher the flour and the lower the cost.

“For every lot of wheat we mill, we do lab tests to show how the flour will perform. When a baker buys flour from us, he or she knows the lot number and can look on our website to see the lab reports. The more artisan bakers know about their flour, the better for them because they can use that knowledge to bake the best possible bread,” Duffy says. Over a dozen different tests are performed on each lot of wheat and the flour made from it, including tests for protein and moisture content of both wheat berries and flour, hardness of the kernels, wheat color, ash content of the flour, and falling number. The falling number test determines the enzyme activity of a flour sample. The test entails heating measured amounts of water and flour in a special tube. The tube is placed in a boiling water bath and stirred with a plunger until the sample is gelatinized. Then the plunger is placed on the surface of the sample, and the time that it takes the plunger to sink to the bottom of the tube is recorded. Depending on the enzyme activity, the degradation of the starch paste will vary. The higher the enzyme activity, the more the flour is degraded and the faster the plunger reaches the bottom. Generally the baker will find that fermentation progresses more rapidly as falling numbers become lower.