So let’s get the suspense out of the way and be very clear: this bread is fantastic. By far the best and tastiest bread I have ever baked, and up there for the best I’ve ever eaten, although I’m sure I have, in my philistine way, encountered some great bread along my life’s path and been too busy eating a sandwich made out of it to notice. My apologies, bread. In future I’ll be paying attention.
It smells good. I let one loaf cool down to room temperature last night, like a good little baker, and then cut into it, spread it with butter and marmalade, and ate it for a bedtime snack. It tasted fantastic, but even more, it smelled great. Bread usually doesn’t smell like much unless it’s hot, at least in my experience. Again, perhaps I haven’t been paying enough attention. But I noticed the scent of this bread: just a tang of sour over a wholesome, bready aroma. I kept holding my snack up to my nose and sniffing. Nick laughed at me, then asked for a bite.
So I’ve made a version of this bread three times now (now that I’ve made both, I can see how clearly the Pollan whole grain loaf is based on this one, in proportions and technique). So of course, expert that I am, I have already started to take liberties. Because I’m a rebel. And I’m going to tell you all about it, because I want you to be a rebel, too.
First of all, I didn’t plan ahead. I didn’t make the leaven at all. This, in case you are neither a serious baker yourself nor have been hanging on my every word, expecting a quiz, is the thing you make the night before baking, combining a small amount of starter with flour and water. In the morning, you can test its readiness by dropping a tablespoon into water, and, like a witch, it will float. (I’m sorry, it’s not a good joke, but every time I test my levain I hear Monty Python whispering in my ear “she’s a witch!” Nevermind.)
Anyway, the levain is what you use to leaven the bread. But it’s always looked to me a lot like starter. In fact, you save half of the levain and it becomes your new starter. So I used my starter as levain. It took most of it, but every day I discard 80% of the starter, and when you make a levain you only use a tablespoon of starter, so I figured I would be fine going on to make further starter from the scrapings left in the jar, and proceeded with the bread.
It was daylight savings and I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am, in the accursed standard time. Standard time, much like school days that end at 3 pm and 3 month summer vacations, are a vestige of our agricultural heritage, and that we should catch them up to our current industrial ways. I want to see light when I leave my office at 5 pm, thank you very much. I don’t really give a damn if I have to get dressed in the dark; I’m not awake yet then anyway.
Zoe was up, of course, too, but I left her in bed for a little while and padded downstairs to get some bread going. Nick and I agree that it’s good for her to learn to play a bit by herself and not to expect us to come running every time she makes a sound, and in the mornings we let her stay in bed until we’re ready to get her. For example, I will shower first, and then get her, because it wouldn’t work the other way around. Zoe, I will be the first to admit, facilitates this by putting up with it. We can hear her in there, chattering and moving around, but she usually seems quite happy doing that for a while. She doesn’t scream for us, and so we figure she’s cool. I have no idea if this would work with other babies: this is not a parenting blog. It’s about baking.
Speaking of which. I mixed what I shall now call the levain with the flours and water, and left it to sit, as instructed. And then I went and got my very patient baby.
I also didn’t “fold” the dough as often as I ought to have. It’s a wet dough, much too wet to knead in the traditional manner, and so instead you wet one hand (so that the dough sticks to it less; remember from your childhood that flour plus water equals paste, and early on this dough still resembles paste more than dough), and then slide that hand down to the bottom of the bowl and stretch the bottom of the dough up over the top. Quarter turn, repeat, until you’ve gone around the bowl two or three times. Every half hour for three to four hours.
Well, you can guess how that worked out. Over three hours, I would say that my dough got folded around four times, although it may have only been three, out of what should have been six. Why? Because Zoe and I went to Target to buy a new hairdryer, ours having mysteriously stopped working, and on the way back we stopped at the playground, because I believe that if Zoe suffers through a visit to a big store she deserves to play on the swings for a while. Plus it’s on the way home.
Any form of kneading is there to help develop the gluten, which in turn is what lets the dough stretch rise, because the expanding gas is trapped in bubbles of stretchy developed gluten. This is what gives bread it’s lovely texture and those pretty, yummy, irregular holes. It is important. But I think the holes in my bread are delightful, even without much folding.
What I do want to get sometime soon is a dutch oven with a smaller diameter so that my bread spreads less and rises more. My bread would benefit from some additional height.
I couldn’t even get the rising time or the baking temperatures right this time. The day got away from me a bit, between driving a friend to the airport and delivering frozen meals to other friends who have recently had a darling new baby, and instead of letting the shaped dough rise for three to four hours, it probably sat there for closer to six or seven. Whatever.
As for the baking temperature, the difficulty with that is our smoke detectors, which believe the house is on fire if I set the oven at anything above 375 degrees Fahrenheit. I can sometimes get away with 400, but only if it’s a short bake, and two consecutive loaves take at least an hour and a half. So while they’re supposed to bake at 450, my poor loaves made do with around 380. Zoe was in bed and there was no way I was going to have the damn smoke detector going off every ten minutes. I already cover it with aluminum foil and plastic wrap when I turn the oven on, open nearby windows, and sometimes point a fan at it. If anyone knows a solution for a hair trigger smoke alarm, I beg you to tell me.
The result of the lower baking temperature is an inferior crust. I’ll be the first to admit it. But it’s still a pretty good crust, and when Zoe’s awake I do sometimes crank the oven a little more and just suffer through occasional ear-splitting beeping.
My last apartment had this problem, too, and it drove me crazy. Someday I am again going to live in a place that lets me use my oven properly, and this baker will be very happy when that day comes.
The point of all this is that baking is not the delicate, precise activity that people seem to think it is. I bake a fair amount, and yes, that has given me the confidence to mess around with recipes, but the same is true of cooking--it took time and experience to learn how to throw together a meal without a recipe, or how to go dramatically off recipe to work with the ingredients on hand or the time frame and tools available to me. Baking is weird because you can’t taste as you go, but the same is true of many forms of cooking. A braise in its pre-cooked form is nothing like the final item you eat, and I don’t actually taste my raw meatloaf for salt “to taste”--I just know that I like a lot of salt, and add accordingly.
I hope that my tales of baking misbehavior give others the confidence to try to bake. Yes, every once in a while you will have a spectacular failure, whether through your own errors or because of a badly written recipe. But more often, you’ll get something delicious. Much, much better than you can get in the supermarket, and much, much cheaper than it would cost at that darling artisanal bakery.
Be brave, my baking brethren. It is autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, decorative gourd season, motherfuckers, and a great time to spend cold, grey afternoons in the kitchen (and then colder, dark nights eating baked goods). Yum.
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