The bread sort of dominated Sunday. Saturday, Zoe and I went out to the markets and bought a ton of food, then also hit the playground for a good while. During her nap I made the chili, couscous, banana bread, and ginger bug. Then once she was in bed for the night, I got started on the bread.
Because the bread is, at minimum, a two day process. You can make it three days if you want, but I couldn't stand to delay my gratification quite that long. I’d already waited a week and a half for my starter to gain enough strength.
So Saturday night I made my leaven and soaked the grains. Making the leaven is pretty much exactly like feeding the starter, except that I used twice as much flour and water, to make extra. Then I put the flour for the bread (mostly whole wheat, some all purpose, and I was out of rye, so just those two, contrary to the instructions) in a large bowl with some water, mixed them up with my hands, and covered the bowl with plastic wrap. What this does is soften the bran of the whole wheat bread, making for, in Pollan’s words, “a more voluminous loaf,” and begin the process of breaking down the complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, which will make for a browner and more flavorful bread. Basically, Pollan is trying to avoid those super-dense, not-very-flavorful hippie loaves of whole wheat bread that those of us with hippie parents remember un-fondly. (I should say here that my mother’s bread was very good. But I know the loaves to which he refers, and they were not.)
Sunday morning I had originally planned to take Zoe to the art museum, but then I reread the bread recipe, and realized that we were going nowhere. I would need to do stuff to the bread dough every hour. Okay then.
Half the leaven went into the bowl with the damp flours, and the other half became my new starter. It’s sitting on the kitchen counter next to the ginger bug, with a cloth draped modestly over the two bowls.
The leaven and dough together rest for 20-45 minutes, and only then do you add the salt, dissolved in a final 50 grams of water. The sum total of ingredients that go into this bread is whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, water, and salt. And, of course, wild yeast, caught and carefully nurtured.
The morning passed in a pleasant alternation between playing with Zoe--she loves learning letters!--and stretching the dough. Every 45 minutes to an hour, I wet one hand, to make the dough stick to it less, and slide it down the side of the bowl, then stretched the dough up and folded it over. Turn the bowl, repeat seven more times. It was, I fully admit, considerably easier than kneading, which it took the place of, but also much more time consuming. It would be impossible to knead a dough this wet, however, so this was the available option.
By the time the “bulk fermentation,” as it’s known, was complete, around 4 hours later, Zoe was in bed for her afternoon nap, so I could divide and shape the dough without molestation in the form of a 26-lb toddler attached to my legs, begging for my attention. If I’m the only parent available, Zoe wants all of me. She’s not interested in this bread stuff. She wants mama. So the timing was good. I cut the dough into approximately equal halves, and then they rested for yet another 20 minutes before the shaping could commence.
I’m not terribly good at shaping dough, as I believe my Anadama bread photos have demonstrated. But the only way I’m going to get better is with practice, so I did my best to follow Pollan’s directions of for stretching, folding, and rolling the dough, and then plopping each piece into its own bowl, with the more attractive side facing down.
Then I put a towel over the bowls and left them there to rise for two hours. It was a pleasant break. This was the moment when I could have put them in the fridge and waited to bake til tomorrow, and I hadn’t had to go to work the next day, I might have done it. I was feeling a little worn out with cooking and baking for the weekend. Except, of course, that I then used the rest of Zoe’s naptime for regular cooking, because fancy breadmaking aside, we’ve got to eat, and getting a meal on the table on a weeknight in time for Zoe’s dinner is really hard. I am a glutton for punishment. But we’ve got enough leftovers in the fridge to last nearly the entire work week.
Finally, finally, nearly 21 hours after I first built my leaven, it was time to bake. Now, Pollan advises that I preheat my oven to 500 degrees, but if I turn my oven to 500, the fire alarm goes off. Sometimes it even goes off at 350, just to spite me. So I set it for just under 450, and shrugged. The pan, a Dutch oven with a lid, preheated in the oven as well.
After 10 minutes, I pulled out the very hot pan and lid, and then carefully dumped one bowl of dough into it (aha! This is why the nicer looking side when facing down in the bowl). Of course, the dough landed mostly to one side, but Pollan assured me that this was okay. I don’t have a single-edge razor blade lying around with which to score my bread, so instead I used scissors. I’m sure there’s a good reason why you’re not supposed to use scissors, but they worked okay, it seems to me. Someday when I’ve learned a lot about the internal workings of bread this is going to be one of the statements that haunts me, I suspect, but for now I’m standing by it. I got a much cleaner cut on the top of my bread by snipping at it with scissors than I would have gotten with my knives, which need sharpening.
Lid on, pot in the oven. The oven temp was now supposed to come down to 450--presumably those extra degrees were to compensate for the time the oven door was open and losing heat--anyway, I left the dial where it was.
After 20 minutes, I took off the lid, and it was indeed risen and browned. Good. Another 23 minutes (really, Pollan: 23-25 minutes? Do you think my oven is that precise?) and I pulled it out. It was, indeed a “dark mahogany,” and when I took the bread out of the pot, using an oven mitt, of course, and tapped on the bottom of the loaf, I heard the promised “hollow percussive sound.” I win!
I didn’t wait until it was completely cool before cutting in to that first loaf. Are you nuts? After all that? No--I managed to hold off long enough to get the second loaf in the oven and dinner for three on the table, and then I reached for the loaf.
“Don’t do it,” Nick said. I had just been telling him about how important it was for the bread to cool properly.
“Oh, I’m doing it,” I said, brandishing my bread knife. I sliced open the loaf. Steam rose from the cut, smelling of fresh bread and a hint of sour. The crumb was beautiful, not perfectly even, but with a great texture. Maybe it could have risen just a tad higher, but not bad. The crust was crisp. It looked, certainly, like one of the best loaves of bread I’d ever baked.
I slathered a piece with butter and gave half to Nick, put a bite-sized piece on Zoe’s plate, and took a bite.
I’d also had a really busy day, and I wasn’t loving the rest of the meal at that point, either. It all tasted fine to me, but not great, and it felt like a little bit of a failure. I’d worked so hard: and now this? We were gonna have to eat the leftovers all week, too. That, after all, was the point of making so much food.
I’m happy to say that by Monday, most of this bad feeling was gone. I guess I was over-tired. But Monday when I opened my lunch container of duly-packed leftovers, I loved it all. So that was good, and I’m now scarfing down the rest of the leftovers, slightly transformed each night (cabbage and bacon pasta! potato and cabbage patties! chicken with anything!), quite happily.
As for the bread, I’m also coming around to it. Sourdough whole wheat is a new flavor for me. Those are two strong flavors--the sour and the whole grain--and I’m feeling my way forward as to whether I like them together or not. But I’m also interested in giving myself a chance to decide, rather than just one taste. There are many wonderful things that I didn’t love at first bite, and I want to educate my palate. Often that takes several tries, as well as an open mind. Whole wheat pasta didn’t taste right to me when I first ate it, and now we use it almost exclusively, with all sorts of sauces.
This bread isn’t a blank canvas. I can’t spread the chicken liver pate that I made last night on it. Doesn’t taste right. But it’s really good with cabbage (and I’ve got a lot of cabbage) and with chicken (ditto). The strong flavors compliment each other. It also makes terrific toast, slathered with butter and peach jam. I’ve been eating it for breakfast.
In that first rush of disappointment, I thought about putting my starter away for a little while. You can, in theory at least, tuck it into the fridge and let it go dormant for a time. I considered taking a break from feeding the darn thing every night, which is easy but does require doing every single night. But I’ve decided not to, not yet at least. Next weekend I’m going to try the recipe that Pollan’s is based on: Chad Robertson’s recipe for the bread he sells at Tartine. I understand that the recipe, as he published it, is 27 pages.
I would never have had the courage to try that one first, but looking over it now--in technique, it’s almost identical to Pollan’s. This is, of course, because Pollan learned from Robertson. And my bread came out really well, speaking of it as a loaf of bread: pretty good rise, good crumb, good crust, good complexity of flavor. Not perfect, certainly, but for a first sourdough loaf, pretty darn good.
Next week, I’ll try something new.
Thank you for this honest review!! i saw Pollan's documentary on Netflix last week, and have been scouring the internet trying to find out WHERE I could find his recipe! So, it's in his Cooked book?? Thank you!
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