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World Bread Day 2012: Pear and Spelt Bread

Today is World Bread Day 2012 and to celebrate the renewed interest in artisan bread-baking throughout the world, I am happy to participate in the bread roundup with this flavorful Pear and Spelt Bread from Hanne Risgaard’s gorgeous book, Home Baked – Nordic Recipes and Techniques for Organic Bread and Pastry. The recipe is on page 142 and originally titled “Pear and Sourdough Bread.” I adapted it slightly, using freshly milled whole spelt instead of sifted spelt flour and no commercial yeast at all (the recipe calls for fresh yeast).

World Bread Day 2012 - 7th edition! Bake loaf of bread on October 16 and blog about it!

We share a pear tree with our neighbors and even though the tree is technically in their garden, they kindly let us pick the fruit on their side of the hedge as well as ours. I make jam and jelly as well as galettes and crumbles and we all share in the bounty. This year, I received Hanne’s book when the tree was at its most prolific and I knew I had to make the bread. What a treat! 

Giant Kabocha Scone

It all began with a word, potimarron, which is the common name in French for scarlet kabocha (also known as red kuri squash or orange hokkaido squash). That word may not look or sound like much to non-native French speakers, but to these French ears, it evokes two of childhood’s cold weather pleasures, pumpkin (potiron) and chestnuts (marrons).
We didn’t have jack-o’-lanterns (or potimarrons for that matter) in France when I was growing up but my grandfather grew huge potirons (Cinderella pumpkins) in his vegetable garden (my grandmother made sweet pumpkin soup every fall) and the fragrance of roasting chestnuts was ubiquitous in Paris in late fall and winter: as soon as I was old enough to go to my weekly piano lessons by myself, my mother would give me a few coins so I could buy myself a cornet de marrons chauds (a paper cone of hot chestnuts) when I exited the métro at Place de l’Étoile. I would stick the hot cone in my coat pocket and one of my hands would remain warm all the way down Avenue de Wagram where a bitter wind always chilled me to the bones.
I remember the chestnut man too. He was dressed all in black and wore a thick tweed cap with flaps that covered his ears. He rubbed his hands constantly and when he removed one of his knit gloves to rummage for change in the tin box where he kept his money, I could see that his fingertips were red. As I left clutching my cornet deep inside my coat pocket, I could hear him start calling again in a singsong: “Chauds, chauds, les marrons chauds…”(Hot chestnuts, hot chestnuts) and while I dearly loved my white-haired and soft-cheeked piano teacher, this scratchy little tune has remained alive in my memory when, sadly, her polkas, sonatas and mazurkas have long since sunk into oblivion.
So when I first heard (or read, I can’t remember) the word potimarron and long before I had a chance to see or taste the actual squash, I was already under the spell. When I finally managed to get my hands on one of these bright beauties, the spell worked its magic and I fell in love.

Of course the kabocha is an easy squash to love. Since its skin is edible, while it does have to be washed, it doesn’t have to be peeled. It can be sliced open, seeded, then steamed or roasted. It can also be cut into chunks and added to a soup where it boils happily with other vegetables. It cooks rather fast in fact. Its flesh is both creamy and dry and does taste a lot like buttery chestnuts. It is also choke-full of vitamins, fiber and oligo-elements.
For all these reasons, when I saw a potimarron cookbook in a bookstore in Paris last March, I couldn’t resist, all the more because its author was Cléa, a French blogger I greatly admire for her imaginative and flavorful cuisine. We now live in a part of the country where kabochas are commonly grown (among many other beautiful and tasty winter squashes) and having so many creative kabocha recipes at my disposal means we can take full advantage of this local crop without ever feeling bored or tired.
Witness the giant scone breadsong  and I made for breakfast a couple of days ago. She was in town for a BBGA-sponsored baking class which I also attended and she stayed over at our house. I did the mixing and breadsong kindly did the shaping, giving me a personal demo of her scone hand-“laminating” technique (she normally shapes the dough in a rectangle but it is easy enough to reshape it in a circle once the “laminating” is done).
It was indeed a learning experience to see breadsong at work: seemingly heeding secret orders, the dough shaped up for her in a way it may never have for me. I had thought it was really dry and would require the addition of buttermilk or yogurt but breadsong said, no, it would come together as it was and she was absolutely right, it did. Sheer mastery! Thank you, breadsong, I will always trust crumbly scone dough from now on and also, always, always, “laminate”as it does indeed make for a much airier texture. My heartfelt thanks to you too, Cléa, for being a fellow kabocha lover and for sharing your many ways of enjoying this magnificent squash! 

Ingredients:

  • 125 g cooked kabocha puree (I steamed big chunks of the unpeeled kabocha, then ran the cooked squash through the foodmill. I tried using the food processor but it wouldn’t work: I would have had to add some liquid, which I didn’t want to do)
  • 20 g olive oil
  • 50 g fresh goat cheese, crumbled (Cléa used fresh sheep’s milk cheese but I didn’t have any)
  • 1 egg
  • 100 g emmer flour (I milled emmer berries I had on hand. If you don’t have access to emmer, you may want to replace it with all-purpose flour or white whole wheat flour or equal parts of all-purpose and regular whole wheat flour)
  • 150 g oat flour (Cléa uses corn flour but I didn’t have any)
  • 10 g baking powder
  • 6 g sel
  • 25 g dried apricots, chopped
  • 25 g hard sheep’s milk cheese, grated (I used a Basque cheese but I suspect Manchego would work fine too and it may be easier to find)
Method:
  1. Pre-heat the oven to 350°F/180°C
  2. In a big bowl, mix together the kabocha puree, the oil, the goat cheese and the egg until mostly incorporated (I used a fork)
  3. Add the apricots and the hard cheese
  4. Transfer to a work surface and quickly work the dough into an 8-inch circle (it will look impossibly crumbly at first)
  5. Cut in six with a dough cutter without detaching the slices
  6. Bake for 30 minutes
  7. Enjoy warm or cold (it will keep well for a few days in a ziploc bag).

The Giant Kabocha Scone goes to Susan for Yeastspotting.

Barley & Wine Crackers

Dawn Woodward, owner of Evelyn’s Crackers in Toronto, Canada, and the author of this recipe baked at the Kneading Conference West 2012: inspired by the flavors of Greek biscotti and Baco Noir, an Ontario wine, they are are among her favorites although she no longer offers them for sale.

They can be baked as sheets and broken off in odd pieces after baking or they can be pre-cut with a pizza cutter and separated neatly afterwards. Your choice… I tried both and I thought the triangles were prettier and really not much more work but it is a matter of personal preference. Either way, they come out crispy and flavorful. The fragrance of the red wine is clearly discernable, boosted by the hint of exotic spices and the heat of the black pepper: I can understand getting addicted.
Probably written with a crowd in mind, the recipe printout distributed at the Conference would have yielded way too many crackers, so I simply halved everything and still got plenty. Also it may have contained a typo: when I added up the weights of all the liquids, I found that it called for more liquids than solids which doesn’t seem the way to go for crackers. So I added in more flour. I used white whole wheat instead of regular whole wheat. I decreased by one third the amount of spice but you can add it back if you like really bold flavors. What follows is my adaptation of Dawn’s recipe.

Ingredients:

  • 700 g white whole wheat flour (I used Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill‘s)* 
  • 165 g barley flour (I used Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill‘s)
  • 20 g fine sea salt
  • 10 g quatre-épice blend (or you can mix and match cinnamon, black pepper and clove according to your taste)
  • 75 g red wine (all I had left) + 50 g water (or 125 g red wine, if you have it)
  • 125 g extra-virgin olive oil
  • 20 g wildflower honey
  • 450 g water, at room temperature
Method:
  1. Mix together all the dry ingredients in a large bowl
  2. Combine all the liquids
  3. Create a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the liquids while continuously stirring
  4. When the mixture gets too thick to stir, turn out onto the table and knead until smooth and soft (Dawn notes that the dough will be pliable but slightly clay-like due to the barley flour)
  5. Let rest 10 minutes then divide in 50 g balls and roll out into long ovals (Dawn suggests 75 g but when I rolled out the bigger balls, I got ovals that were too long for my half-sheet baking pans). Another option is to divide the dough in 150g balls and roll it out directly onto parchment paper 
  6. Optional: dock or prick all over with a fork (I found the crackers baked more evenly that way) and pre-cut in desired shape with a pizza cutter
  7. Place on parchment or bake directly on tiles in pre-heated 375°F/191°C oven
  8. Bake until crisp (start checking after 10 minutes)
  9. Cool on a rack
  10. Enjoy!

* I used to bake a lot more with white whole wheat flour when I first introduced whole grain breads to my family but I had pretty much stopped doing so a couple of years ago: I found it too bland and by then everyone had gotten used to the fact that I would put in some whole grain in most breads and had actually learned to enjoy the taste.
But then I discovered Fairhaven’s white whole wheat flour: it is still very mild (certainly not as flavorful as some of the red wheats I love so much) but it is speckled with bran which makes it both beautiful and fiber-rich and I find it a good substitute for all-purpose flour in many recipes where wheat doesn’t play a starring role.
I realize many of you live too far away to have access to this particular flour but there may be a mill in your neighborhood or a natural food store selling bulk artisanal flours and it might be worth a look in case in case you’d like to try your hand at baking with stone-milled white whole wheat.
As for me, I like supporting my local mill, mostly because the miller, Kevin Christensen, is committed to organic grain: he is a firm believer in sustainable agriculture and by sustainable agriculture, he means organic farming. Living right on the Washington Coast as he does, he witnesses first-hand the damages chemical run-offs cause to fragile marine and river ecosystems: it happens regularly that beaches are closed and shellfish harvesting prohibited because of toxic algae blooms. So he works hand in hand with farmers and bakers to promote the demand for organic grains as a way to support healthy farmlands. That is a goal I can relate to.

These barley & wine crackers are being sent to Susan for Yeastspotting.

Andrew Whitley’s Spicy Buns

Related post: Daily Bread – An Andrew Whitley Workshop

If you have been reading Farine for a while, you probably know that I am not a huge fan of anything sugary but these buns truly make the cut: the recipe calls for very little white sugar, most of the sweetness coming from dried fruit. Moreover they contain a healthy amount of wholewheat (55%) and they are leavened by what is apparently called a flying ferment, a lovely British term I had never heard before. It basically means a quick milk-based ferment that makes for a more active dough than when the yeast is simply added to the flour at mixing time.
I adapted the recipe somewhat, increasing the flour a bit (American all-purpose flours, while not as strong as Canadian ones, still seem to require more water than their British counterparts), replacing part of the raisins with dried cranberries (both for their tartness and their cheerful color) and adding dried orange peel (from Penzey’s Spices).
Andrew’s recipe calls for soaking the fruit in water, juice or brandy. In Victoria, Diane Andiel (who helped organize the workshop and was in charge of the ingredients) had been kind enough to pre-soak them for us in Grand-Marnier and the taste was exquisite. I opted for orange juice this time but I might go for the Grand-Marnier at holiday time, especially since the orange-cranberry bouquet of flavors make these buns excellent candidates for a Christmas breakfast, brunch or tea.
Those of you who would rather follow Andrew’s original recipe will find it in his book, Bread Matters, on page 254.

Ingredients (for six buns):

Flying Ferment

  • 70 g wholewheat flour (I used Cedar Isle Farm flour kindly brought to me from Agassiz, BC, by my friend breadsong)
  • 10 g sugar
  • 3.3 g instant yeast (a scant teaspoon)
  • 140 g milk
Fruit mix 
  • 40 g dried cranberries
  • 90 g raisins
  • 5 g dried orange peel (you might want to use the grated zest of an orange instead)
  • 50 g orange juice (if using freshly grated orange zest, you will need only 25 g of orange juice)
Final dough
  • All of the above flying ferment
  • 130 g white flour (you may need more or less depending on the flour you use. The best way to proceed might be to start with 100 g and adjust as needed)
  • 55 g wholewheat flour
  • 7 g baking spice (I used Penzey’s which I can’t recommend enough as the blend of Ceylon cinnamon, mace, anise and cardamom yields an irresistibly delicate flavor). Please note that I have zero financial interest in the company and no incentive to blog about it! It just happens that there is a Penzey’s store in Seattle and I like the fact that most of their spices are available in 4-oz resealable plastic bags that can be stacked flat in the freezer. Stored that way they keep their flavor almost indefinitely
  • 5 g salt
  • 15 g sugar
  • 25 g butter (at room temperature, diced)
  • 25 g egg (about half an egg)
  • All of the above fruit mix (don’t squeeze the fruit but don’t go overboard with the liquid either. Your best bet is to use the leftover liquid for another purpose. I added it to the plum sauce that was simmering on the stove)
Method:
  1. Soak the fruit with the juice, water or brandy and allow it to hydrate for at least an hour, longer if you can, stirring from time to time (Andrew advises putting it in a plastic bag, sealing the bag, shaking it so that all the fruit get wet and if possible occasionally repeating the shaking during the soaking period)
  2. Mix the pre-ferment and allow it to ferment for about one hour in a warm place (it should rise and drop)
  3. Mix all the dry ingredients together then add the butter, the egg and the flying ferment (do not add the fruit mix at this stage)
  4. Mix until the gluten structure is well developed (I started mixing by hand but the dough was too soft and I soon transfered it to the Kitchen Aid mixer: I mixed it on 2 for two minutes, then on 4 for a couple more minutes, at which point I took it out of the bowl, put it on the floured bench and folded it a couple of times. It came together beautifully)
  5. Stretch the dough into a rectangle and carefully press the fruit into it, then roll it as you would a jellyroll, tucking in all the fruit that might escape
  6. Turn the “jellyroll” 90 degrees and roll it again
  7. Then return the dough to the bowl, cover it and let it rise until it no longer springs back when you palpate it with your finger
  8. Divide in six and shape into fairly tight rounds
  9. Put the rounds 5 cm apart on a parchment-lined half sheet pan, slide the pan into a clear plastic bag, blow once in the bag and tie it shut
  10. Set to rise in a warm place until they are almost touching
  11. When the buns are ready (the dough no longer springs back when you palpate it with your finger), decorate the top if desired (I sprayed them slightly with water then sprinkled some pearl sugar on them), bake them in pre-heated 350°F/180°C for 15 minutes (I steamed the oven first) then check their doneness. If necessary, bake another 5 minutes
  12. Cool on a rack
  13. Enjoy!

Andrew Whitley’s Spicy Buns are going to Susan for YeastSpotting.

Daily Bread: An Andrew Whitley Workshop

When Andrew Whitley was invited to speak at the Kneading Conference West 2012 in Mount Vernon, Washington, Victoria-based writer  Rhona McAdam (who had attended an Andrew’s Whole Grain Baking workshop in Scotland earlier this year) knew she had to jump at the chance to have him come to nearby Vancouver Island, BC and teach. So she put together a weeklong program of teaching and discovery for him (neither Andrew nor his wife Veronica had ever been to Canada) and I was lucky enough to be able to participate, at Diane Andiel‘s suggestion, in Daily Bread, the baking workshop which Andrew led on Saturday, September 22 at the Royal Oak Middle School in Victoria, BC.
Not only was I very excited to get to learn from Andrew, if only for a day, but Victoria holds a special sway on my heart and imagination as a city where the local food movement is alive, well and bold. I have yet to read, Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto, the book which Rhona just published (I have it on pre-order for my e-reader and should get it by mid-October) but I already knew that beyond the bright flower baskets, the colorful totems and the ceaseless ballet of roaring seaplanes over the harbor, not to mention the upscale and touristy afternoon teas at the Empress hotel,  there was a vibrant city pulling itself by its roots so to speak, with urban farmers raising chickens, energetic young gardeners biking around to pick up compostable waste and citizens growing their own fruit and vegetables on their balconies or their decks or in their backyard.

On the night I arrived in Victoria, I went straight from the Clipper terminal to a lively panel discussion on alternative ways to support a local food economy: Andrew Whitley was there, making a case for community-supported baking (CSB) and explaining that CSB can take many forms: providing capital to buy equipment or rent premises; contributing labor or offering administrative support; helping out with product distribution, etc.
Another panelist,  fisherman Guy Johnston, described the community-supported fishery (CSF) he had established. Now in its second year, the CSF had gone from 65 members the first year to 130 today: the members buy a share of the crop (prawns, octopus and salmon) ahead of the season, providing fishermen with guaranteed income from sustainable fishing. Knowing pre-season how much fish they should bring back made a huge difference (I was reminded of that fact when reading in the New York Times earlier this week that many fishermen in Spain couldn’t keep up the payments on their vessels).
Another panel participant, Angela Moran, an urban farmer, explained how she had successfully enlisted her neighbors’ help in managing her flock of chickens: everyone took turns in caring for the chickens and in exchange got a share of the eggs they produced.
Andrew Whitley – who lives and works near Edinburgh – said that food was a powerful connector to help weave social traffic and that the emerging community schemes in the Victoria area reminded him of Nourish Scotland, a movement which existed “to reconnect producers, growers, retailers, consumers and all who care for local, sustainable food in Scotland” and which aimed, among other things, to change local food economies. A key element of food security was the resilience stemming from the knowledge that these local networks could not be bought: built on human relationships, they were based on the desire to relate, which wasn’t for sale.

Teaching bread-baking can also be a way of generating interest in this form of local economy as people learn to bake, “produce more than they can eat, share the surplus with others and so take the first step into commercial and community baking”. And in fact among the people attending the workshop the following morning were grain growers, local chefs, homebakers and farmers, some of whom were already making bread for their communities.
I wish I could show you pictures of Andrew demonstrating how to make bread (especially his fascinating air-kneading technique) but he had outlawed photography and so my camera remained in my backpack. Rhona was allowed to click away for a while however and she was kind enough to share her pictures so that you can at least have an idea of the setup:

As you can see, space was limited (which meant no notebooks on tables either) but it all worked out  (note to self: great networking opportunities are to be found in tight quarters!).
Andrew had us bake four different kinds of breads:

  • A 100% wholewheat no-knead bread (straight dough) which some of us shaped in a braid
  • 33% wholewheat rolls for which he had prepared an overnight sponge
  • A plain sourdough 100% rye (from his book Bread Matters, pp. 160-166)
  • Pre-fermented 55% wholewheat spicy buns (from the same book, pp. 154-155)

Plain rye sourdough

Andrew has developed his own method for maintaining a rye levain and I will describe it in details in another post as soon as I make his sourdough rye at home (which should be very soon as the rye culture is already bubbling away).
A lively instructor, he kept a running commentary that made for instructive and entertaining baking. As you may already know (especially if you have read his book), he is a big fan of whole grains, high hydration and long fermentations. He thinks that commercially available white flour is dead flour and even though his baking repertory does include white bread, back home he uses a stoneground flour that retains more of the nutrients. Baking a loaf with a super airy crumb isn’t clearly not his top priority: as he puts it, “big holes in a crumb means white flour and no nutrition.”
Of course he had access to none of his regular flours in Victoria and I believe he was slightly puzzled by the way the unfamiliar (to him) Canadian flours handled themselves: they required more water than their British counterparts and yielded a dough that was more difficult to manage. At one point he had his assistant, Barbara, wash a piece of dough under running water until only the gluten strands remained. They were tightly packed and the whole thing looked rather like an used chewing gum. It was a striking sight (I wish I could have taken a picture!) which brought in sharp relief the true nature of gluten (which should surprise no one since its name is derived from the Latin word for glue). Andrew said that trick was a good way for the baker to evaluate the protein content of a flour when the information wasn’t readily available otherwise.


No-knead wholewheat bread

Generally speaking the breads didn’t come out as plump and golden as they could have and I believe that beyond the flours (which would have benefited from a pre-workshop test but there had been no time for that), the ovens were also rather a disappointment: the class took place in an home economics classroom equipped with homestyle stoves and steaming wasn’t an option. But it really didn’t matter. Bread matters and in that respect, Andrew’s knowledge, passion and commitment are stellar; they made for a memorable workshop. Thank you, Andrew (for teaching the class), Rhona (for organizing it), Diane (for generously helping out with the ingredients and the pre-ferments) and Barbara (for making the whole thing run smoothly)!

Related post:
Andrew Whitley’s Spicy Buns

Farming in Greater Victoria: other images