Farine

Crazy for Bread

You are here: Home / blog

Bread in a box

The facts

  •  A few weeks ago, I noticed a stack of bread kits for sale in a Midwest grocery store. I had never heard either of the item or of the company before but I was immediately curious
  • I snapped a picture with my phone and started asking questions
  • Floyd Mann, the selfless soul and passionate amateur baker behind The Fresh Loaf, directed me to his review of the product
  • I purchased the Cook’s Edition kit for one of my sons who had never baked bread before but had expressed an interest
  • A firm believer in beginner’s luck, he decided to try and make the bread for Christmas Eve dinner
  • So he mixed the dough on the 23rd in the afternoon and let it proof at room temperature for eighteen hours. He baked it around noon on the 24th
  • He used his convection/microwave oven because a turkey was occupying the conventional oven
  • The rule was that I would document the process but offer no help, so that he would be in a real average Joe’s situation. I couldn’t hold my peace however when I saw him:
    – Draw ice water from the fridge to dissolve the yeast
    – Pet the dough like you would a puppy instead of developing the gluten by pulling and folding
    – “Shape” the proofed dough by patting it gently on the head for a few minutes
  • Also the instructions that came in the box were written for the complete kit which includes a special pot in which the shaped loaf is supposed to proof and bake. Although they do suggest baking the loaf in a Dutch oven in case you didn’t purchase the pot, they also recommend pre-heating said Dutch oven which precludes using it to proof the bread. Stumped, my son asked me what to do. I suggested he line a colander with a floured linen and use it as a makeshift proofing basket
  • Such was the extent of my intervention
  • And now…
The story
                

The verdict

  • The bread came out really well and was received with a rousing chorus of oohs and aahs, soon to be followed by much merry dipping when a small bowl of olive oil was put on the table
  • A longer fermentation (the instructions suggest up to twenty-four hours) would have made it more flavorful but it needed to be ready for dinner
  • As explained in the booklet, the baker may need to use additional water at the mixing stage so that all of the flour is completely hydrated. My son added one tablespoon
  • The lid is taken off at half-bake for better browning. We thought the bread would turn out darker than it did. It might mean that convection isn’t the way to go when using a Dutch oven or that the oven isn’t properly calibrated
  • The kit yields three loaves total. Although refills can easily be procured, my hope is that after the third one, the baker will no longer need to bake from a box
  • That would make the method an excellent introduction to making real bread at home for would-be bakers who have no patience for bread blogs… 

Baking with natural starters: a bread workshop in Victoria, BC

I may not be a wiz at math but I know a winning formula when I see one! Take two experienced and passionate bakers, mix in two eager helpers, sprinkle with six enthusiastic baking students. Add two very active homegrown natural starters (one white, one rye), four completely different doughs, a copious dose of elbow oil (the students mixed everything by hand), a dash of late fall weather and a lovely Victoria farmhouse. Let the whole thing ferment, dusted with bread love and lore, and what you get is a fantastic introduction to baking with natural starters.


breadsong with the 80%-rye bread and Diane with the Norwich Sourdough

The workshop was the brainchild of two of my baker friends, Diane Andiel and breadsong. Diane is a full-time community programmer for the district of Saanich in Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia; she is also a farmer (she raises cows, goats and chickens) and a baker. She knows all the slow-foodies there are to know on the island and they all know her. Many of them buy her bread every weekend. A British Columbian as well (albeit a mainlander), breadsong is a marathon baker and born instructor who loves nothing more than sharing both what she makes and what she knows. She is also a full-time certified general accountant and a member of the team of volunteers which standardizes formulas for the Bread Bakers Guild of America.
Taken separately neither of them might have been bold enough to take on teaching a bread class but put the two of them together and all bets are off. Emails pingponged for weeks across the skies of British Columbia, from misty shores to mellow valleys, from pregnant fields to pounding surf. Formulas fluttered back and forth; some were forcefully driven to the ground; others blew slowly away, never to be seen again; four made the final cut: Diane’s version of the Norwich Sourdough, Jeffrey Hamelman‘s 80% rye (a honey-walnut-spice variation), his whole wheat multigrain and Ken Forkish‘s 75% whole wheat.
On the actual eve of the workshop, as dusk darkened the windows, four women could be seen sitting around the kitchen table: Diane and breadsong, Melanie (a baker from Northeastern Washington who had come to help) and myself, the designated blogger. A giant platter of homemade cookies was brought in from the cold; mucho munching ensued, fueled by steaming tea and riotous retelling of bread (mis)adventures. Then we all got down to business: breadsong made final adjustments to the class handouts; Diane mixed a batch of Norwich sourdough, then shaped the one that had fermented all day and set it to proof. Melanie and I started scaling the ingredients for the doughs which were to be mixed in the morning.

A variety of grains was set to soak…

…spices were roasted and ground for the rye bread…

…and the various levains got fed.

Then, save for the silent squish of slowly rising dough, the house hushed for the night.

Things picked up fast in the wee hours of the morning: doughs needed to be mixed and set to ferment for the students to later shape, proof and score, proofed loaves had to be baked and everything step and ingredient checked and re-checked and checked again.


At 9 the students filed in. Although they were all there for the same reason (to learn how to make naturally leavened bread), their motivations varied: some had mastered yeasted breads and wanted to “graduate” to levain; others had never baked bread but loved the idea of making everything from scratch; one had just gotten a stone-mill grinder and wanted to switch to whole grains; another had a gluten-sensitive wife and was hoping that naturally leavened breads would be easier for her to digest, etc. But one thing was clear: they were all determined to make the most of the workshop.
By way of an introduction, Diane explained that the class was an experiment as neither she nor breadsong had ever taught bread making before. She stressed that since sourdough baking couldn’t possibly be a one-day project, the students would see all the steps of the process but not necessarily in chronological order. Two doughs were ready to shape and the students would start with that; then they would mix four doughs from scratch. The most urgent task was to shape the Norwich sourdough which had bulk-fermented (a technical term for what the students might already know as the first rise) overnight.


Shaping


Two things to remember when shaping:

  • Keep your hands dry and floured
  • Don’t use too much flour on the bench (the table or countertop) or you will compromise the crumb (since the gluten in the added flour isn’t given a chance to develop)



Desired dough Temperature

Mixing




Dough development

Fermentation & temperature

By the time the various morning tasks were done and over with, everybody was both famished and excited. Lunch was vegetable soup and Norwich bread, followed by tea and cookies made with homemade butter. Talk about keeping the troops happy!


Norwich bread

Two student-shaped loaves

breadsong’s rye bread

Each and everyone of the students took home two containers of starter (one wheat, one rye), some rye flour, two fully baked loaves (one Norwich and one 80% rye) and two doughs to finish fermenting, then shape, proof and bake at home (the 75% whole wheat and the whole wheat multigrain), all wondrous presents for a bread lover and would-be sourdough baker. But as exciting as all these goodies were, the most precious thing the students left with was surely this advice from Diane and breadsong. Reflecting on their experience, they said that what had helped them the most over the years was:

  • Properly maintaining and caring for their sourdough starter (wheat, rye)
  • Using a scale (weighing ingredients) and a thermometer (to monitor dough temperature)
  • Allowing flour time to fully hydrate (as an aid to mixing)
  • Calculating water temperature prior to mixing
  • Controlling fermentation: maintaining appropriate temperatures when fermenting the starter and the dough 
(a Brød and Taylor proofer is a useful tool); 
  • Properly developing the dough when mixing
  • Watching the dough, not the clock, to determine whether it has fermented (risen) enough
  • Baking with steam.
I couldn’t agree more.

Maintaining a white starter and preparing for a bake

If there is a secret to Diane Andiel‘s gorgeous breads, it is that her wheat starter is extraordinarily vivacious. If it were a person, it would be a soprano! It erupts into singing bubbles any time she walks by, you know that slight “crushing paper”sound a starter makes when it is happy? You have to see it (and hear it) to believe it. I asked her how she maintained it and being a woman of few words (but action galore), she wrote back what follows:

I keep the starter on a twelve- hour schedule for at least three days leading up to a bake. Morning and night it is refreshed so that it will do what I need it to do. When I am not baking for a few days, I will feed it once a day or refrigerate it for three or four days without feeding.
I keep it on my kitchen counter and do not worry about the temperature of the room. In winter at night the kitchen is very cool and in the hot summer I must be more observant because it will move much faster and may require an extra feeding.
The ratio we used in the class to build the levain was 
100 % flour
120 % water
20 % liquid starter
This levain had twelve hours to ferment before being added to the final dough.

No pampering, no frills! Tough love rules! I find that very interesting especially if you consider the extent of the tender loving care breadsong bestows on her own starters. And yet, both get wonderful results. From my own experience as a baker, I would say that starters are a bit like kids. They like a routine and they like limits. I once had a starter that I normally fed once a day. Having read somewhere that starters are happier and more energetic when fed twice a day, I put it on a morning and evening schedule and guess what? It was never the same after…
But since the starter I am now using is Diane’s (she gave me some to take home), rest assured I shall stick to the two-meals-a-day schedule: I want it a soprano too!

Related posts:

Maintaining a rye starter and preparing for a bake

When breadsong took the lid off her container of rye starter during last month’s Baking with Natural Starters Workshop in Victoria, BC, there was a collective gasp of surprise then a few seconds of reverent silence before we all exclaimed about the extraordinary honey-like aroma. Breadsong took a long sniff and said that while she had sometimes detected beautiful fruity aromas in the heat of summer, she had never picked up on such a honey scent before. We speculated about what might have caused it: it could have been a simple mass effect (she doesn’t usually mix such a large amount of starter); it could have been the flour (she had been stayting with Diane for a couple of days and using Diane’s rye flour instead of the one she uses at home; it could have been the presence of countless wild yeast cells in Diane’s kitchen. We may never know. What I do know for sure is that I have never seen or smelled such a rye starter as hers. So of course I asked her if she could explain in details how she cares for her starter and what she does to prepare it for baking. Below is what she wrote back. Thank you, breadsong!

“When I took Jeffrey Hamelman’s rye breads class, he recommended a schedule for maintaining a rye starter at home. I try to follow a similar schedule, feeding my rye starter every other day when I am not baking.  If planning to bake, I’ll increase the feeding to daily, then twice-daily feeding, just before building a rye levain for a bake.
When well-cared for and regularly fed and refreshed, the rye starter contributes lovely aroma and flavor to the baked rye bread, so I try to keep up the feeding schedule. I can’t always maintain this schedule if time is short or if away travelling, but the rye starter seems to bounce back quickly when the feeding schedule is resumed.
The rye starter is maintained at 100% hydration, with feeding being equal parts rye starter, water, and flour (30g rye starter + 30g warm water (un-chlorinated) + 30g whole organic whole rye flour). The top of the starter is dusted with rye flour after feeding, to help make the starter’s expansion and ripening more visible. I place an elastic band around the container, at the level the starter is right after feeding, to help me see how much the starter rises while fermenting.
Temperatures in the low 80’s are recommended dough temperatures for sourdough rye breads in Jeffrey Hamelman’s book, so  thought I’d try 80F as a target temperature for fermenting the rye starter when getting closer to bake day, to try to make sure the rye starter has lots of vigor prior to building the rye levain.
I aim for a rye starter temperature of 80F after feeding. If I’m not planning to bake soon, I let the rye starter ferment at room temperature  until the rye starter has peaked or matured (has domed, doubling in height compared to its height in the container when freshly fed; has cracks on the surface ;  with lots of fermentation bubbles visible along the sides of the (clear) container it is fermenting in). After the starter has peaked, I refrigerate it to prevent the starter from over-fermenting before the next feeding (I don’t like how the starter’s consistency breaks down when it over-ferments).
When getting closer to bake day, I use the Brød and Taylor proofer to keep fermentation temperature of the rye starter at 80F – the rye starter really seems to be happy at this temperature.
As an example of the feeding schedule I use, to prepare for a Sunday bake:

  • Monday morning, feed starter and let ferment at room temperature until  it peaks, then refrigerate
  • Wednesday morning, feed starter and let ferment at room temperature until it peaks, then refrigerate
  • Friday morning, feed starter and let ferment at room temperature until it peaks, then refrigerate
  • Saturday morning, feed starter and let ferment at 80F until it peaks, then leave at room temperature
  • Saturday evening, feed starter (upping the quantities, if necessary, considering the amount of rye starter needed to build the rye levain); let ferment at 80F until it peaks, then leave at room temperature
  • Saturday night or early Sunday morning, when rye starter peaks, build rye levain for Sunday bake (fermenting at 80-83F preferably, sometimes fermenting at a cooler temperature, hoping to time it so the rye levain will be at its peak at a convenient time for mixing)
  • After building the rye levain, feed rye starter and let ferment overnight or until it peaks, then refrigerate until Monday morning.  If building a rye levain of 100% hydration or less, will dust the top with rye flour to help make the starter’s expansion and ripening more visible.”

The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day


As indicated in my last post, I haven’t had a chance to bake much from Jeffrey Hertzberg’s and Zoë François’ new book, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day, since I bought it last week but I like what I have seen so far.  The two recipes I tried yielded very good bread.
The knot and the two batards shown above were made from one batch of European Peasant Bread: they had a nice flavor (the dough calls for a bit of dark rye flour and a bit of whole wheat flour and the long slow fermentation does add a welcome complexity). As for the loaf below, it was baked this morning from what was left of the Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Bread dough and I already know it will be excellent.

Plus I like the whole idea of mixing dough at my leisure, then letting it cold-ferment for a long while (sometimes up to two weeks) to finally bake from the fridge whenever we need fresh bread. I am sure it helps to have a bit of baking experience, especially when it comes to shaping and such. However experience is what one get by actually doing, observing, experimenting, taking notes, etc. If you don’t like the way a bread turns out, change something (hydration, room temperature, rising time) next time around and see what happens! For instance, I already know I will make my next batch of peasant bread a little bit wetter to try and get a slightly more open crumb.

I bookmarked several breads from the book, including the Wisconsin beer-cheese bread, the sauerkraut rye, the Moroccan anise-and-barley flatbread, to name just a few, and I am looking forward to giving them a try. Kudos to Jeff and Zoë for providing bread-lovers with a “real bread” alternative to industrial bread, especially in areas where artisan bakeries are few and far between, and for empowering all of us home bakers who are looking to make a variety of good breads with minimal fuss!