ChewsWise Blog

ChewsWise Blog

Bread Baking Posts

Whole Wheat Sourdough with Orange, Fennel and Raisin

Orange bread 

Last week, the NYT magazine had an article about Jeff Ford, a well-regarded artisan baker in Madison, Wisconsin, rhapsodizing about the benefits of sourdough bread. But the companion recipe amazingly featured a loaf made with yeast. 

Now I've got nothing against commercial yeast -- I use it -- but to write a whole article on the glories of sourdough and then ignore it in the recipe makes as much sense as talking about the extraordinary qualities of wild salmon and then providing a recipe for tilapia. 

I know why the editors did it -- sourdough isn't instant or easy. It's about commitment, and it takes time and most people don't have a vat of wild bacteria and yeast sitting out on their counter that they feed everyday like me. Mind you, there's not a lot of work involved in making sourdough bread, but like all bread, the process unfolds in hours and days, not in minutes. You don't work during those hours. The sourdough does.

Luckily though, the Times web site did include sourdough recipes from Ford, including an unusual orange, fennel, raisin whole wheat and rye loaf that was very intriguing. Usually, whole grain recipes sweeten loaves with honey to temper the assertive and bitter bite. This recipe used orange juice, orange zest, and raisins instead. (He calls it Raisin Rye Bread, but I don't because I taste very little rye in it.)

Making sourdough can be challenging, and making whole grain sourdough doubly so. In the past, my 100% whole wheat sourdough experiments were brick-like, so I gave up in favor of a pain de compagne that had about 25% whole wheat and 10% rye in addition to the white flour.

But I gave this recipe a try and was pleasantly surprised. It had a very complex but not overpowering flavor and the sweetness of the raisins and the slight acidity of the orange juice lightened the loaf. 

My only significant modification was to bake the loaves at 460F instead of 500F. Why? Because I am used to baking at that temperature and it works for me. I feared the higher temperature would overcook the crust before cooking the interior, but maybe next time I will try it. 

One other note about this recipe: follow Ford's suggestion and let the dough rise overnight in the refrigerator (or outdoors, as I did, since the temperature was around 50F -- ideally you want 45-55F but a refrigerator works). That long rise adds immensely to the complexity of taste. 

- Samuel Fromartz

Here's a slide show of the process. And check out yeastspotting on Friday for this and other great breads.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Baking Baguettes in Paris - The Afar Story

Time to Rise, Afar Magazine (PDF) 

It was surprising, shocking, that in the depths of the recession I got a chance to travel to Paris and work in a boulangerie making baguettes. This was a long-held dream of mine, since I've been baking bread at home for a decade.

It came thanks to Afar magazine, which launched last month and highlights "experiential travel." Aside from my article, there's terrific reads on bog swimming in Wales, a piece about Berbers in Morocco, and oh yes, South African bunny chow -- a national dish. All in all, Afar is a kind of a hipster's National Geographic.

If you want to check out my article, here it is ("Time to Rise" pdf). In it, I recount my experience and explain why French bread went downhill for a long time before it came back in the early 1990s. (It also features Paris bakery recommendations by David Lebovitz, with whom I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon.) 

When I returned from Paris, I came up with a home-baked baguette that topped bakeries in DC in a blind tasting competition and caused a bit of a stir on the Net (see Bittman and Wild Yeast blog). The winning baguette recipe is here for those who want to try it, but it calls for a bit of sourdough starter. Happy baking.

- Samuel Fromartz

Organic in France - La Vie Verte

If you want a green view of what's happening in France, check out the blog La Vie Verte by my friend Denise. She covers a wide range of topics, with a recent post on how farmers in the rural southwest of France are faring with the organic label. It seems that for some, the costs and inspections aren't working and a few are letting their AB (Agriculture Biologigue) label lapse in favor of a more local emphasis. In many ways, it mirrors some of the issues faced by small farmers in the U.S.

She also talks about an exquisite French flour milled on site by a local farmer -- the baker in me is pining for it but shipping flour from France doesn't make a lot of sense. Plus, we have great artisanal flour here from places like Anston Mills, which any serious baker should try.

And while you're at La Vie Verte, get a load of that black gascony pig.

- Samuel Fromartz

A Cook, Not a Foodie, with a Taste for Onions

Among friends, I've been called a foodie because I'm into food and love to cook and bake. But I don't think of myself that way -- I'm not really into following the top chefs, don't watch the food shows on television and am not on a perennial search for the latest hot restaurant. I do enjoy a good meal once in a while, but I'm very careful -- I've had too many experiences where you lay out a big chunk of change for a meal and then wonder what you've spent it on.

I just like food, simply made, that tastes good. So I rate a couple of ethnic places near DC, like Hong Kong Palace, as the most enjoyable places to eat (with the best value), along with a couple of fine dining places, like Palena. But mostly, I've found I like to cook at home. Ingredients can count for 90% of the result. Like the cucumber I picked from the garden yesterday, sliced up and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. Or the Copper River sockeye salmon I recently had the pleasure of eating up in Alaska, fresh out of the water. "With fish like this, the only thing you can do is screw it up," a chef said. Visiting a fisherman's house, we ate the fillets off the grill with a bit of seasoning and not much else. Perfection!

I've thought about this reading Michael Pollan's essay in the Times magazine, "Out of the Kitchen, onto the Couch," which points out that people have forgotten how to cook. Food has become largely about entertainment, rather than engagement. You watch, rather than participate. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is the story for many. More and more people are buying prepared foods, eating sandwiches, not cooking.

How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

I take Pollan's point. As an avid bread maker, it's clear to me that most people have forgotten what real bread tastes like, if they've ever had it. But once they do, especially kids, there is an element of shock and awe. Now bread making is viewed as an arcane craft, but once people made bread regularly at home. It doesn't take a lot of time or work (the bread rises on its own). It's just intimidating.

I often tell people interested in baking that you have to make a few bad loaves to learn how to make good ones. In baking though, the bad ones are usually edible. So you eat them and try again. But that applies to anything worth doing. Make mistakes, eat the bad stuff -- if you can -- and do better next time. (Sometimes, mistakes can even turn out quite nicely as they did for Susan at Wild Yeast, when her baguettes became ciabatta). 

You can also make really great stuff easily (and cheaply). That was the point of my previous post on home-made ice tea for 6 cents a glass. Cucumbers with a dash of salt is another. And here's another dead easy recipe, onions with vinegar, from Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. It's especially good with fresh onions now in season at the farmers' market.

Bassal bel Khal (onions with vinegar)

2 sweet  onions, red or white
2-3 tablespoons vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1 tablespoon mint (optional)

Peel and cut onions in half. Slice thinly. Place in a bowl and sprinkle with the vinegar and salt. Stir. Cover and let sit for at least one hour. As Roden says, the onions "will become soft, lose much of their pungency and absorb the other flavors." I've made them with the mint and without. Both are good. This dish is especially good with grilled meat or fish or tofu.  (To avoid crying while cutting onions, cut them on a counter next to your stove and turn on the flame. It will burn the gasses that make you tear. Then turn off the flame!)

This isn't about being a foodie. It's about making good, simple, food. 
- Samuel Fromartz

In the News - Baguettes, Gardens, Fish

Susan over at Wild Yeast blog tried my baguette recipe and the results were stunning. Just take a look at the pictures to see her results. If you have a great loaf nearby and want a simple treat, dip a piece of bread in a good olive oil and sprinkle a few grains of fleur de sel on it. I gave this tip to my friend Roger, a former newspaper reporter now blogging for the California Olive Ranch.

In other links, Obama Foodorama has an astute analysis of the White House garden and Michelle Obama's mission to change the way the nation eats. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the Queen mother has planted an organic garden in a corner of Buckingham Palace. (Maybe that's why Michelle Obama was gently putting her arm around the Queen.) NYT also has a piece on rooftop gardening, which in part has been spurred by tax incentives.

Clare Leshin-Hoar stirs the pot in the WSJ, with a piece on how CSAs (community supported agriculture schemes) have come to the seafood world, with CSFs (community supported fish). Fish lovers in Boston can buy a share of the catch, though with this caveat: not everything is sustainable (cod, for instance).

In follow-up news, the campaign to stop Nobu from serving endangered bluefin tuna has not yet yielded results. Although partner Drew Nieporent told the New York Post, "At the end of the day, we are going to do the right thing," so far that has meant doing nothing. They are clearly betting this campaign will blow over and they will continue to serve bluefin tuna until it is literally gone.
- Samuel Fromartz

Reflections on Best Baguette in Washington D.C.

Baguettes

By Samuel Fromartz

Once in awhile, when you put a lot of work into a task and actually get a decent result -- well, you get to gloat, at least for a few minutes. So excuse me while I do so, because my humble, home-made baguettes just topped every bakery in Washington, D.C., in a blind tasting competition.

On the one hand, this result was unexpected. I mean, I’m a writer by profession. I’ve always been a writer, well, almost always. But I love to cook too, and at times have become passionate about it. I’m also drawn to crafts, and to crafts people; whether the craft is putting words together or making a whole grain sourdough loaf.

But in distinction to writing, baking has been a private endeavor. It was just something I did to break the tension, when my arms tensed up from typing too much, or when I just wanted to leave the computer screen and do something with my hands -- to make something tactile.

This grew into a regular practice. Starting many years ago, I stopped buying bread, because I made enough. A few loaves a week, we’d eat one and another would go into the freezer. I became adept at sourdough, using the natural yeast present everywhere. It was like conjuring something out of thin air.

My motivation was simple. I just wanted good fresh bread. Who can argue with that? It wasn’t a business. There was no market to worry about, no bosses or rent, nothing. Just baking pure and simple without any distraction because I had absolutely no larger intention. It was pure craft.

The parameters of the task were clear and challenging. You have just four ingredients: water, flour, yeast and salt. So often, we think of all the stuff or things we need to do something -- the equipment, the newest gizmo. And I did buy a few things, like bench scrapers and a couche (a linen cloth to support the shape of baguettes) and a baking stone to try and mimic the conditions of a hearth oven. But that was pretty much it, not much more than $100 over, what, a decade? Plus the ingredients, like flour, seeds, walnuts - or whatever else I choose to put in the loaves.

Then, there was the baguette itself, which is deceptively simple and hard to master. There’s the soft, slightly sweet crumb, the uneven and slightly chewy and bubbly interior, the crisp crust, delicately toasted in sections, and the aesthetic appearance, which comes from the slashes running down the top of the loaf.

When I began baking, this was the first bread I tried to make. It was an absolute failure, too dense, tasting of yeast and lacking  a crisp exterior. I tried many times to make it, then just gave up. Decided it couldn’t be done at home. I went on to bake other loaves and over the years learned a lot more. I could have condensed this process had I even taken a few baking classes, but I didn’t. I learned from cookbooks and developed the technique on my own (since baking is more about technique than a recipe -- again the craft of it).

But the allure of the perfect baguette was always there, so I’d go back to it now and again, but never approached what I thought even a half decent loaf should be.

The breakthrough first came maybe two years ago with a sourdough baguette, which I let rise in the refrigerator overnight. I was somewhat surprised by the results, since I had finally achieved the interior bubbly structure I sought. So for a while I stuck with those loaves, thinking they were pretty close to what I wanted.

But then I thought, to really be a baguette, the loaf should be lighter. With the aid of a Peter Reinhart recipe, I made a loaf without any sourdough. It had the bubbly structure, but I felt the taste wasn’t quite on par with sourdough. He also used bread flour, which I felt it was too strong, leaving the interior crumb too chewy, so I switched to all purpose flour -- a misnomer because it really tells you nothing about what you're using. The actual flours I bake with -- King Arthur Unbleached Organic All Purpose Flour or Whole Foods 365 Organic All Purpose Flour -- were ideal because they are both made with hard winter wheat suited to artisan loaves.

The final breakthrough came by reading a description of the baguettes made by two of the most influential bakers in France, Eric Kayser and Dominique Saibron, in historian Steven Kaplan’s book Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It. Both bakers added sourdough to their baguettes in minor amounts along with yeast, and though Kaplan’s book is a contemporary historical narrative, he gives just enough information about the technique to craft a recipe. And more importantly, he talks about why bakers apply certain techniques, which can be more valuable than any recipe. Kaplan, by the way, is the world's foremost historian of French bread.

Then, in the midst of the recession, I got the unlikely opportunity to travel to France for a new start-up magazine, Afar. They liked my idea of working in a boulangerie -- something I had always dreamed about (and describe more fully in the article which appears this summer). I ended up at boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel in the 9th in Paris working beside Thomas Chardon, a young baker who took me through all the tasks of baguette making. We made a couple of hundred loaves each morning, repeating the techniques so that they become an extension of your body. It was exhausting but highly gratifying, and could be applied to the home kitchen. I also had the great fortune to spend a morning with Prof. Kaplan discussing bread.

When I returned, I just redoubled the work and began to get consistent results -- ones I was finally happy with.

So why did my baguettes win?

In France, my baguettes would have been decent, nothing to write home about especially in comparison to what is available. But because they take a full day to rise, they are also superior to loaves mixed and baked within a couple of hours. And that describes many of the loaves in the DC competition -- approaching the idea of the airy, white, bland bread that also widely swept France but has been roundly rejected by a new generation of artisans.

A key insight for me came when Loic Feillet, the baker and owner of Panorama in Alexandria, Va. -- who actually trained with Kayser in France -- mentioned that he offered a true baguette, but his wholesale customers revolted. He could not convince them that his loaf, made with with a hint of sourdough, was superior. So in essence, he dumbed it down to their idea of what a baguette should be.

The lowest common denominator may do wonders for a business, but it has never been the path to greatness. Working in my kitchen, I never had to worry about that. My only customer was the ideal loaf that I had tasted on occasion and had in my head. All I had to worry about was to do better next time.

So what’s next? A hearty rye perhaps ... it doesn’t matter. The point is to keep my hands moving, connected to my mind and to that ideal of taste I have. To keep the craft alive.

The winning baguette recipe is here. Happy baking!

Fromartz baguette clinic gets a little Ink in DC

So, I spend a week in Paris and suddenly I'm an expert on la baguette? Well, truth be told I've been trying to make these little long loaves for about a decade and thanks to soon-to-be-launched Afar magazine, I got the chance to take my technique to a new level by working at boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel in the 9th in Paris.

Then my friend Tim Carmen, a food writer here in D.C., was intrigued so we held a clinic. He did a good job at making the loaves as he recounts in this blog posting at Young & Hungry and in the pictures he posted.

OK, now I know I've talked about posting more bread recipes on ChewsWise, but breadmaking is less about a "recipe" than it is about technique. And technique is the toughest thing to describe, though I'll give a hint: Time is the most important ingredient. The dough we worked with was rising 36 hours old by the time we shaped the loaves. But I promise I'll give more details as soon as I can.
- Samuel Fromartz

For the Home Baker, Time is a Friend

Norwich Sourdough

Norwich Sourdough

In the age of speed and instant gratification, time is an enemy. We want things now. We don't want to wait. We want results. And so, for time-pressed bakers, we have products like yeast that can speed things up.

But if you are concerned about things like the flavor of bread, the texture of the crumb, and the crunchiness of the crust, and even its color, speed is an enemy. Rushing will mean an inferior result. So many of the techniques artisan bakers use, either with sourdough, which takes successive "feedings" to grow into a loaf, or refrigeration, which dramatically slows down the activity of yeast, are meant to stretch out time so that all the crucial characteristics of a great loaf can develop.

For someone always in a rush, slowing down the baking process can be irksome. But for a home baker, the slow development of dough actually works in your favor.

How so?

Because it means you can fit baking into your own schedule, mixing the dough after dinner, putting it in the refrigerator, and then baking off the next day, when you have time.

For example, for the batard pictured above, I refreshed the sourdough late Thursday night. Then I mixed the dough with the bubbly starter early Friday morning. While I was working, the dough went through a 2-1/2 hour first rise, and then I shaped the loaves around lunch time on Friday, when I had another window of time. Since I couldn't bake in the afternoon, I put the loaves into the refrigerator to slow down (or retard) the dough.

They rested there, for about 8 hours, the sourdough doing its mojo - the flavor, crust, internal holes all developing - until late Friday night when I baked them off. (I was a bit skeptical they could be baked straight out of the refrig, as Susan at Wild Yeast suggested, but they turned out just fine -- oven spring, crunchy crust, with a hint of rye.)

Norwich Sourdough

I often time this process to bake on Saturday morning, but I had a compost meeting at the garden (no joke!) so I decided to bake Friday night instead. And since the loaves were made purely with sourdough, they tend to improve with a bit of aging and were scrumptious for breakfast the next day. Sourdough loaves will also last a week without going stale -- one of the qualities of working with natural yeast.

"Norwich Sourdough" is an advanced recipe, so I wouldn't steer a beginner to it. But even if you start with a recipe like Jim Lahey's fantastically popular and easy no-knead bread (which makes a decent enough loaf) you can follow my point. Mix the dough at night, then bake it off the next day, when you have time, since the no-knead dough can rise from 12-20 hours. (I'll probably write more about no-knead dough in the future, but if you do follow Mark Bittman's recipe in the Times, add 1/4-1/2 tsp more salt than he recommends. If you're starting out baking, the video is also worth a look.)

In Lahey's recipe, you don't knead. The long rise of the dough develops the gluten necessary to make the loaf. So if you're trying to fit baking into a busy schedule, time is on your side. The slow rise always wins the race.

- Samuel Fromartz

 

What Is it about Baking Bread?

Sourdough Baguettes

sourdough demi baguettes

I’ve been baking a lot of bread lately and I’ve begun to think about why. Of course, there’s the immediate aroma and taste of fresh bread. There’s the delight in giving bread to friends and neighbors. And then there is the work itself, tactile and supple and real at a time when we're battered by things we can't control - like the the financial implosion of the economy. At times like this, it's good to be close at home, working with water, flour, yeast and salt and feeding your family.

I’ve been baking now for about a decade, with periods where I baked little, or like now, when I bake rather constantly. Working at home, it’s not hard, since the “work” part of bread is rather minimal. For the breads I make, I mix up the dough in the afternoon or evening, and then let it rise slowly through the night, baking off the loaves the next day. This breaks up the work and lets me control the schedule -- which isn’t always the case when you’re working with a living thing.

Delmontel baguettes

I’ve also wondered how to explore this activity, whether it was right for ChewsWise or another blog, but decided, I’ll just write about it here, so I’m launching a new category, “bread,” to talk about this activity. After all, what can be more “sustainable” than making bread.

So I’ll start off with a few pictures, and in the future will be posting some recipes and thoughts about techniques for the home baker.

I also had the opportunity recently to visit Paris and to work at the elbow of a master baker at boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel (whose baguettes are in the bin on the left). I will be writing about this in a new magazine being launched this summer, Afar, but will expand on it here too before too long.

It’s funny, but recently I've been getting more and more requests from people to learn how to bake. In the past few months, I’ve got four people hooked and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. People are looking for something real and solid to sink their hands and teeth into. What is better than bread?

Pain de Campagne

Sourdough pain de campagne with pumpkin, flax and sesame seeds