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In Paris with bread on my mind…

Having arrived in Paris a couple of days ago for Europain, I had the great pleasure and honor of leading my first bakery tour yesterday on behalf of the Bread Bakers’ Guild of America. Being the appointed guide and interpreter, I couldn’t really take many pictures or any notes but I’ll share what I have.

We visited Boulangerie Julien (75 rue Saint-Honoré) and Maison Cohier  (270-272 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré). “Les boulangers américains” (the American bakers) couldn’t have asked for a warmer and more gracious welcome. We were shown and explained everything and all our questions (of which there were many) were answered. Both Jean-Noël Julien and Jean-Pierre Cohier have received awards for their baguettes: Julien for best baguette in Paris in 1995 and Cohier for best baguette Tradition in Paris in 2006. Monsieur Cohier – who supplied the Elysée Palace with baguettes for three years and catered in the process to two successive presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy – shared with us that Jacques Chirac liked his baguettes “bien cuites” (baked to a crusty brown) whereas the prevailing taste in today’s France is, sadly, for the opposite (a much blonder baguette).
Both bakers churn out an impressive amount of breads, cakes, viennoiseries, salads, sandwiches, etc. in a space that’s barely larger than the kitchen in many American homes (having no flour storage space at all, Monsieur Cohier gets his flour delivered every two or three days). As is often the case in Paris, the labs are located under the store in the cellar. Neither is air-conditioned, by choice. Monsieur Julien actually had the air-conditioning system dismantled because the workers kept getting sick. Room temperature was in the 20-22°C/68-72°F during our visit but I imagine it climbs way higher in the summer.

Both master bakers make their famous baguette tradition the same way: with no poolish or levain or any other kind of preferment. They use .6 % of yeast and go for a very short and gentle mixing (with three folds at 20 minutes’ intervals) then a long cold fermentation for 20 to 24 hours (Monsieur Cohier told us that on weekends the fermentation goes on for 48 hours and the resulting baguette has incomparable flavor). Then the baguettes get scaled and shaped (here the techniques differ: Julien uses a divider and a shaper whereas Cohier does everything by hand), they rest 45 minutes and they go into the oven.  In both cases, the ovens are electric and a different temperature is used for the sole and for the top.

Having bins of baguette dough fermenting at all times enables both bakeries to churn out loaves as needed all day long. Boulangerie Julien actually closes only two hours a day (in the late evening): the rest of the day and night it is bustling with activity. We visited on a Saturday morning and a large order of mini-viennoiseries (1500 pieces) had just gone out. They had been mixed and shaped the day before, frozen overnight (for ease of storage) and baked at dawn.
We asked Julien and Cohier whether they ever use levain: Cohier doesn’t. Julien uses a rye liquid levain in certain types of bread other than the baguettes but he doesn’t make or keep it himself. He buys it and gets it delivered. I had heard about German bakers subscribing to a levain delivery service but I didn’t know it was also done in France. Julien said that the logistics of keeping a firm levain would be mind-boggling with so many bakers working in shifts as fermentation would tend to get out of hand. The liquid levain was easier to handle.

Bluebird Grain Farms’ No-Knead Emmer Bread

Or should I say, Flat Sophia’s Emmer Bread? See, I got the recipe from a flyer on the Bluebird Grain Farms‘ table at the Ballard Farmers Market in Seattle when I bought a bag of their beautiful emmer grain. But I actually baked the bread with Sophia, my 7-year old grand-daughter who lives 3,000 miles away in New England. Sophia has been helping me bake practically since the day she was born. She mastered the switch on my SP5 mixer before she knew how to talk and she always loved scaling ingredients (getting her jammies all floury in the process). She adores raw dough (especially naturally-leavened) and slices of rustic batard with honey are her favorite snack at my house.

So of course when her first grade teacher put Flat Sophia, her avatar, in a big yellow envelope and sent her via first-class mail to stay with us for a week, I knew bread-baking would be on the agenda. But as (bad) luck would have it, I am levain-less right now. Between a quick trip back to the Northeast a couple of weeks ago to see the grand-children and the upcoming trip to Paris for Europain (followed by visits to family and friends), there is no way I can take care of my levains and since I don’t much like the aroma of the acids created when they spend a long time in the fridge, I have dehydrated them and stored them in ziploc bags for later use. Not that I look forward to the rehydrating process which I find tiresome and which requires a healthy amount of faith in the zest for life of these tiny organisms but it sure beats the alternative (which would be to bake a levain-fermented bread I don’t enjoy eating).
So no levain in sight and Flat Sophia chomping at the bit to get her hands on some dough. What to do? For those of you who are not familiar with flat kids, please take a look at the Flat Stanley books: I had never heard of Flat Stanley before getting Flat Sophia from the teacher but after a week of taking her everywhere we went, I can tell you that many many people know of his adventures and, as a result, have shared their lives with a flat kid at some point. A fishmonger at Seattle’s Pike Place Market told us he once was sent a 5-foot tall flat boy and schlepped him around for a week. An elementary school teacher we met at the register at Costco offered to adopt Flat Sophia and take her back with her to Alaska. She promised to send her back with pictures of her classroom. She was very kind and cheerful and a trip to Alaska sounded like fun but would you entrust your grandkid (however flat she might be) to a complete stranger? I didn’t think so. So we kept her with us and she had innumerable adventures (she jumped from a hot air balloon and narrowly avoided landing in a pond and once was rescued by a super watchdog from the open jaws of a giant fish) and we put together a picture book which will be sent back to Connecticut tomorrow. On the final day of her visit, the weather outside was bleak (it snowed huge flakes in the early morning and the one thing paper kids don’t handle too well is wetness), so we stayed home and we baked.


It was a lot of fun. Ok, I admit, not as much fun as baking with the real Sophia, but still! I for one will be sorry to see Flat Sophia go. I found that doing things with her and taking her sightseeing was a great way of staying connected to her namesake, dreaming up adventures that she would enjoy reading about and sharing with her teacher and her classmates. Still tomorrow she must be slipped into the big yellow envelope and mailed back…


Ingredients:
  • 420 g freshly milled emmer flour
  • 165 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 1.3 g instant yeast
  • 11 g fine sea salt
  • 360 g water
Method:
For the method, please refer to the Bluebird Grain Farms website as I mostly followed it except that:
  • I milled their emmer grain instead of using their flour
  • I didn’t sprinkle the dough with coarse sea salt before baking
  • I used rather more water than they do
  • I fermented the dough for 22 hours (first 8 hours at 74°F, overnight at 70°F and the last 4 hours at 74° F again)
  • I proofed it in a Dutch oven and when ready, put the Dutch oven in the cold oven with the lid on. I baked the bread for 45 minutes at 470°F, took it out of the Dutch oven and placed it directly on the hot baking stone. It baked for another 15-20 minutes at 450°F. It made a nice hollow sound when thumped. That’s how I knew it was done…
Taste-wise, I find it hard to describe this bread. I don’t want to use words like “nutty” or “delicious” because they have been used so often (including by me) that they are no longer very meaningful. I can only say that there is something deeply satisfying about the taste of emmer: it is certainly wholesome (you can almost taste the sunshine ripening the fields and the wind softly rippling the rows of spiky stalks). Unlike spelt (to which it is genetically related), it doesn’t taste of honey and like kamut, another ancient wheat cereal, it bakes into a mellow crumb which almost melts in the mouth. I also find that this bread tastes better the day after it’s baked:  yesterday, the flavor of the yeast (never truly my favorite) overpowered that of the grain. Today the taste of yeast has all but vanished and all is left is the grain. Definitely a good and easy bread to have in one’s repertoire. It also slices very nicely, which will come in handy for the honey sandwich I plan to send home with Flat Sophia for sustenance en route…
Bluebird Grain Farms’ No-Knead Emmer Bread is going to Susan for this week’s issue of Yeastspotting.

Morning Cuddle Bread with Oats, Plums and Hazelnuts

The anxiety of influence is most certainly a reality for some. After all, a whole book has been written on the subject (although the author probably didn’t have the art of baking in mind) but I am happy to report I don’t suffer from it. I love leisurely browsing through books and/or exploring online worlds and letting ideas wash over me, leaving behind precious little nuggets of inspiration. Sometimes – and that’s the most fun – these nuggets combine to form something completely different.
That’s how the morning cuddle bread came to be. A couple of weeks ago a British Columbia food podcast had pointed me towards an oatmeal, walnut and plum bread, which the Man pronounced to be a wonderful breakfast bread…

…and as I was contemplating what to bake for him for Valentine’s Day, I remembered another fruit and nut bread I had once bookmarked in Les 20 meilleurs ouvriers de France et médaillés d’argent se dévoilent et vous offrent leurs recettes choisies, a book put together by l’Équipe de France de boulangerie (the French Baking Team) in the early 90’s.  What I had liked most about it was its endearing shape (two entertwined pieces of dough) and its name, pain câlin du matin (literally morning cuddle bread).

Oven-roasted hazelnuts
The two recipes got reborn as one: from Chef Bruce (the British Columbia baker), I retained the idea of the plums (the Man is a huge plum fan!) and the nuts (but instead of the walnuts, I used the fragrant hazelnuts my friend Meeghen had brought me from her own orchard). I also stayed with the mix of wheat (whole-grain and all-purpose) and oatmeal (I love the tenderness of an oatmeal crumb). From the French recipe – by Gérald Biremont, “meilleur ouvrier de France” (best artisan baker in France) – I took the shape and the name. After all, what’s more appropriate on Valentine’s Day morning that a sweet little cuddle?

Interestingly both recipes call for a straight dough but I always prefer using a preferment: the bread keeps better, if nothing else, and I find it tastier too. So I reinterpreted the Canadian recipe to use both a poolish (made with only a speck or two of instant yeast) and some levain. It took its own sweet time to ferment but, hey, Valentine Day comes around only once a year. Besides the dough did all the work, leaving the cuddling to us…

Ingredients: (for 8 morning cuddle breads or 4 cuddle breads and a loaf)

For the poolish

  • 280 g all-purpose flour
  • 280 g water 
  • one tiny pinch of instant yeast (0.06 g)
For the final dough
  • 200 g mature white starter at 100% hydration
  • 320 g all-purpose flour
  • 150 g white whole wheat flour
  • 115 g old-fashioned oat flakes, coarsely ground in a food processor
  • 180 g water  (amount to be adjusted up or down depending on your flours, the humidity in the air, etc.)
  • 100 g oven-roasted hazelnuts, roughly peeled and chopped
  • 110 g dried plums, roughly chopped
  • 19 g salt
Method: (this bread is made over two days since the starter and the poolish both need to be fed the evening before and to ferment overnight)
  1. The night before, mix the poolish and feed the starter. Let both ferment overnight at room temperature (if very warm where you live, fermentation could be faster, which means you may need to adjust your schedule accordingly)
  2. On baking day, mix the flours, the starter, the poolish and the water until all the ingredients are well distributed and all flour is hydrated. Let rest for 20 minutes
  3. Add salt and mix on low speed until a soft pliable dough is formed (don’t overmix)
  4. Add the plums and hazelnuts and mix gently (I find it easier to take the dough out of the mixer at this stage and mix in the fruit and nuts by hand)
  5. Set in an oiled container and let rise until at least doubled (it took close to 6 hours at 72°F/22°C)
  6. Divide in two pieces of roughly 850 g each
  7. If you want to make only cuddle breads, then divide each of these pieces in 8 and make 8 baguette-shaped cylinders. Twist them together by pairs. If you want 4 cuddle breads and one loaf, divide and shape accordingly
  8. Proof until doubled in size (in my case, it took one hour and a half at 72°F/22°C). Pre-heat oven to 400°F/204°C
  9. When ready bake for 15 minutes (with steam the first five minutes) then check the color and if necessary turn oven down a bit. Turn the breads 180° and bake another 15 minutes. They will be ready when they have a rich color and sound hollow when thumped on the bottom.
  10. Cool on a rack!
Enjoy!

The morning cuddle bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting.

Hutzelbrot with dried cherries and cranberries

Besides the delightful taste of this bread, what I love about this Peter Reinhard recipe (from his book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor) is that it uses a mash and that the mash can be made in part with “old bread”. To me there is already something deeply satisfying about pre-soaking whole grain flour and having the enzymes start working hours and hours before you even begin to mix your dough but when you can feed them your stale bread too, wow, it’s just too good to pass up!
Reinhart uses (or suggests using, it’s hard to figure out which) a mix of dried fruit for this bread, such as citron, apricots, figs, plums, cherries, cranberries, golden raisins). Even though I had pretty much everything on hand but the citron, I decided to focus the flavors a little more and go for the sweet dried cherries my friend Kim had brought from Wisconsin (each one like a burst of summer in the mouth, thank you, Kim!), paired with slightly tarter dried cranberries from Washington State. I also decided to soak the old bread in apple juice since I had some I needed to use up and it would nicely boost the fruit taste. The bread turned out crusty and surprisingly light.
It takes two days to make which is perfectly fine with me since most of the time the ingredients toil away all by themselves….



Ingredients (slightly adapted): makes 2 batards



For the soaked bread (altus)

  • 1/2 inch-bread cubes with crust left on soaked in hot organic apple juice or water and left at room temperature for at least 4 hours and preferably overnight. Use just enough liquid to saturate and soften the bread. Reinhart advises using rye bread but he says whole wheat is fine too. Squeeze out excess liquid before adding to the mash (I didn’t weigh anything to start with, just used up all my stale bread and made a big bowl of actus. When required by the recipe, I took out the 170 g needed for the mash, weighed the rest, put it in a ziploc bag, labeled it and stored it in the freezer for next time)

For the mash

  • 300 g water
  • 64 g coarse whole wheat (I used flour from Cedar Isle Farm in Agassiz, British Columbia, which my friend Meeghen kindly brought me)
  • 64 g 75% sifted rye flour (I used flour from True Grain Bread on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, which Meeghen also brought me. Thank you, Meeghen, for giving me the opportunity to bake with these gorgeous flours!)
  • 1 g diastactic malt powder
  • 170 g altus

For the starter

  • 71 g whole wheat or rye starter
  • 213 g whole rye flour
  • 170 g water at room temperature (70°F/21°C)
For the dough
  • all of the starter (454 g)
  • all of the mash (397 g)
  • 99 g white whole wheat flour + 200 g (which I had to add because my dough was way too wet, possibly because I had pre-soaked the fruit which Reinhart doesn’t say to do)
  • 99 g whole rye flour
  • 100 g sweet dried cherries (briefly pre-soaked, then drained)
  • 70 g dried cranberries (briefly pre-soaked, then drained)
  • 14 g salt (I didn’t add to that amount even though I added more flour: I just tasted the dough and it seemed fine)
  • 7 g instant dry yeast
Method:

On Day 1

  1. Mix the mash ingredients (save for the altus) (using water heated to 165°F/74°C) making sure the flour is fully  hydrated and the end product resembles a thin pudding or gravy. Cover and keep warm (150°F/66°C) if possible for 3 hours or at least for 60 minutes. Reinhart suggests using the oven for that step (turning it repeatedly on and off if it doesn’t have such a low setting) 
  2. After 3 hours, stir in the soaked bread and refrigerate until ready to use (you can also leave it overnight at room temperature) if you are planning to use it within the next 24 hours
  3. Mix all of the starter ingredients and knead with wet hands to form a ball of dough. Let it rest 5 minutes and knead again. The dough will be tacky. Allow it to double at room temperature (which can take up to 8 hours depending on the temperature). When fully developed, knead for a few seconds, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight if necessary to coordinate timing with the mash. Remove from the refrigerator about 2 hours before mixing the final dough
On Day 2
  1. Using a metal scraper, chop the starter into 12 smaller pieces, sprinkling some extra flour over them to prevent them from sticking to each other
  2. If mixing by hand (which I did), combine starter and mash in a large bowl with the whole wheat and rye flour, cherries, cranberries, salt and yeast. Mix for about 2 minutes until all the ingredients are evenly integrated and distributed into the dough. The dough should be soft and slightly sticky. If not, add water or flour if needed (that’s where I had to add the extra 200 g of white whole wheat flour as the dough was definitely not going to take shape otherwise)
  3. When dough feels soft and only slightly sticky, form it into a ball and let it rest for 5 minutes while you oil a container
  4. Knead it briefly again for one minute and make any final adjustments to water or flour. It should be malleable and tacky but no longer sticky
  5. Form into a ball again and place in prepared container, rolling to coat with oil
  6. Cover loosely and let rise at room temperature for about one hour or until it is at least 1 1/2 times its original size
  7. Transfer to a lightly floured surface and shape into two batards. Place the batards on a sheet pan lined with semolina-dusted parchment paper. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or a cloth towel and let rise at room temperature for 45 to 60 minutes, until 1 1/2 times their original size
  8. While the batards are proofing, preheat the oven to 425°F/218°C. When ready to bake, dust them with flour and score the loaves as desired using a sharp knife or blade
  9. Place them in the oven (with steam), lower the oven temperature to 375°F/191°C and bake for 25 minutes
  10. Rotate the loaves 180 degrees and continue baking for another 20 to 35 minutes or until the loaves are well-browned and make a hollow sound when thumped on the bottom
  11. Cool on a rack and wait at leasts 12 hours before slicing open.
Enjoy!



The Hutzelbrot with dried cherries and cranberries go to Susan for this week’s issue of Yeastspotting.

Chickpea flatbread with mushrooms (Farinata ai funghi)

Farinata is basically a flatbread made of chickpea flour, water and olive oil (sometimes with the addition of onion and/or rosemary). It is a regional specialty, eaten as streetfood without a topping both in Nice, France (where they call it socca) and in Liguria (the part of Italy where Genoa is located). I have made it over and over as an appetizer since Mark Bittman published the recipe in the New York Times and he’s right, it does disappear fast…
We tried the Ligurian version in Genoa a couple of years back and ate it in the street and thoroughly enjoyed but I would never have thought of making a whole meal of it if I hadn’t happened on an Italian cookbook listing dozens and dozens of recipes using the farinata as a base for all kinds of tasty toppings, including mushrooms. That gave me an idea for a quick dinner the other night.

I wanted something really light, no sauces, no tomatoes, nothing runny, a topping that would enhance and not cover the taste of the chickpea flour (which we love). I had stuffing mushrooms on hand and half a bag of baby spinach. A few citruses were awaiting their fate in the fruit bowl and I thought they would do nicely for a marinade. I was going to juice a Meyer lemon and a tangerine and blend that with some white balsamic vinegar when I remembered the balsam calamansi vinegar my friend Kim had kindly brought me.  Calamansi is a sweet and sour citrus, very popular in the Philippines. It added an interesting and exotic layer of flavor, but if you don’t have any in your pantry, any combination of sweet and sour citruses and mellow white vinegar will work.
I mixed the farinata batter (it has to rest for a while, four hours at least says the Genoan cookbook, while the oven heats up and as long as 12 hours, says Mark Bittman) and set it to do its thing on the counter. Meanwhile I washed and sliced the mushrooms, drizzled calamansi vinegar and olive oil over them, added some finely chopped garlic (no salt at this stage or no pepper either since there is lots of pepper in the farinata itself) and set them to rest companiably next to the batter.

The farinata is normally baked in the oven in a cast-iron skillet but I tried something different this time and cooked it like a crepe on the stove top. Although it has advantages (it cooks faster and cleaning a regular crepe pan is less work than cleaning, drying and re-seasoning a cast-iron skillet) I don’t think the taste is quite as delicate as when it is oven-baked, so by all means follow the original recipe if you do have access to an oven and don’t mind turning it on.


Ingredients :

For the farinata (below are the proportions I used for 5 small flatbreads. You should use Bittman’s if you are making the larger oven-baked flatbread)

  • 150 g chickpea flour
  • 320 g water
  • 35 g olive oil
  • salt
  • freshly ground pepper (as liberal an amount as you think you can stand)

For the topping

  • 170 g small portabella mushrooms (I used the stuffing variety from Trader Joe’s)
  • 170 g baby spinach (twice that amount would have been better but I only had half a bag)
  • 3 tablespoons balsam calamansi vinegar (or one tablespoon each of lemon juice, tangerine, clementine or mandarine juice and white balsamic vinegar)
  • 2 tablespons of extra-virgin olive oil (for the marinade) + 1 tablespoon for sautéing the mushrooms
  • 2 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
  • salt to taste
  • red pepper flakes to taste (optional)

Method:

  1. For the farinata itself, please follow Mark Bittman’s recipe. When it is almost done baking:
  2. Heat up a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan, drain the mushrooms, saving the marinating liquid, and gently sauté them until done (they cook fast) taking care not to overbrown them so that they remain moist
  3. Add the baby spinach to the mushrooms and drizzle over them a scant teaspoonful of the marinade (no more as you don’t want an overload of raw garlic) and sauté them briefly until they barely start softening a little. 
  4. Add salt and red pepper flakes. Remove from heat
  5. Take the farinata out of the oven, cut it in slices like a pizza and serve hot, topping each slice with a heaping spoonful of mushroom and spinach.
Enjoy!
The chickpea flatbread with mushrooms goes to Susan for this week’s issue of Yeastspotting.