Farine

Blood of the Dragon: Healthy New Year Orange Cake

2012-01-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

My brothers and I grew up eating a marvelous orange cake which I sadly probably won't make again even though I have the recipe and it couldn't be easier to make or more delicious: 150 g butter + 150 g flour + 150 g sugar + 2 whole eggs + 1 orange (juice and zest) + 1/2 packet of baking powder. Mix everything (except juice). Bake. When cake is done, drench with juice. Revel!
Over the years, I have made it over and over and it always met with the same unmitigated success. I even made it once ages ago for friends who were coming for tea one snowy Sunday afternoon and I burned my wrist when taking it out of the oven and it fell to the floor face down! There was no time to bake another one, so I took a spatula and rescued as much as I could of the part that wasn't in contact with the floor. Of course it was all broken but I pressed it into a charlotte mold and since it was still warm, it took the shape of the mold very nicely. When it had cooled enough, I unmolded it and drizzled warmed up apricot preserves over it. It was beautiful and even better than the original. My guests asked for the recipe which I provided - skipping the floor part - and all was well.
I had forgotten all about it until our youngest son's fourth grade teacher enrolled her whole class in a New York State writing program and the kids were asked to write about specific incidents in their childhood. So he wrote about the cake being scraped off the floor minutes before our guests arrived and his writing was so good and so funny that his piece was chosen to be read aloud in assembly! I was mortified but that wasn't the worst of it.
The worst came what he wrote about a very bumpy flight from Athens to Paris when he was 5 years old. He explained that he had been seating next to me and that the whole plane had been jolted when we were hit by lightning (true), that we had made an unplanned landing in Lyon to check for damages (they were minor) and that we continued to Paris under the cloud cover and that everybody got sick (true again); that we landed in Paris so fast that we were on the ground barely one minute or two before we took off again at warp speed and everyone was deadly pale and afraid and the flight attendants were running down the aisle with a strained look on their faces (still true) and that I turned towards him and shook his hand and said: "A..., it was nice meeting you" (the hand shaking and stiff upper lip discourse all figments of his imagination, needless to say). That too was read in assembly!!! I was never happier to see a kid graduate to middle school so that I become anonymous again...

Well, to come back to the cake, I can't make it anymore for health reasons but that doesn't mean we don't yearn for it every winter when huge baskets of oranges arrive at the grocery store... Last week it was blood oranges.

Blood oranges! When I was growing up in France, blood oranges were very sour. They truly had a bite, so much so that I actually didn't care very much for them. They came from Spain and I don't think they had as much sun as the ones we get here which come from California and are sweet and fragrant.
Blood oranges (don't you love the name?) are rich in vitamin C, of course, but also in anthocyanin which is a powerful antioxydant. That gave me an idea. In honor of the Chinese New Year, I would bake a health-friendly orange cake (after all striving to keep my loved ones healthy throughout the year is certainly a priority) and call it Blood of the Dragon (as you can see, my youngest son doesn't have a monopoly on imagination!).

Now I won't lie and tell you the result is as airy and lovely as the original all-butter orange cake. You wouldn't believe me anyway. The texture reminds me more of a pudding than a cake proper but it is very tasty and refreshing. Orange and ginger combine to give it a nice kick (next time I might even add a bit of fresh ginger) and, in the health department, you can't beat the ingredients: nutrient-rich white whole wheat, natural starter (which makes it easier for the body to assimilate the nutrients present in the grain), ginger (a powerful antioxydant in its own right), fresh oranges, cultured buttermilk, olive oil, etc... So here is to a wondrous and healthy New Year!

Ingredients (for a 9-inch cake pan):

For the starter

180 g mature levain (starter)
180 g white whole wheat pastry flour
180 g cultured buttermilk
25 g ginger syrup

For the batter

80 g extra-virgin olive oil
juice and zest of 2 blood oranges
100 g unsweetened applesauce
50 g bits of crystallized ginger
pinch of salt
note: the oranges I used were very sweet and with the crystallized ginger and the bit of syrup in the starter, I didn't need more sugar. You should taste the batter prior to baking (one of the advantages of baking without eggs is that you can actually have a taste) and determine whether or not sugar should be added

For the finished cake

blood oranges
confectioner's sugar

Method:

Starter is prepared at least 4 hours before baking: mix all ingredients with wooden spoon, cover tightly and let rise at warm room temparature
When the starter has doubled, add other ingredients, mix with wooden spoon and pour in oil-sprayed pan. Bake for 40 minutes in pre-heated 350°F/177°C oven
When done (a cake tester comes out clean), turn off the oven and leave the cake inside for another 5 to 10 minutes with oven door ajar. Cool on a rack
Dust with confectioner's sugar
Serve with freshly sliced blood oranges. Alternatively drench with blood orange juice before serving.

Blood of the Dragon Orange Cake is going to Susan's for this week's issue of Yeastspotting...

Beet Quiche

2012-01-21T08:58:00.000-08:00

If you live in the United States and you have been following the news, then you already know that Seattle got snowed in and iced over this week, all in one fell swoop with no breather in between. Our world turned one solid color (or at least a continuum of white, black and grey) and it was all I could do not to check my camera over and over to make sure I hadn't inadvertently changed the settings...

At first it was new and lovely and we marveled at the transformations it brought to the landscape : odd shapes suddenly appearing where there were just bushes before; cats' pawprints quilting together otherwise untrodden lawns; stately evergreens slumping against the windless sky. But I soon found I wanted color back and I wanted it soon and since the forecast didn't look encouraging, it had to be in our plates. No way we could hazard down the hill to the grocery store however, so making do with what we already had was a must. I looked in the crisper drawer: the beets we had bought last week at Ballard Farmers' Market woke up and winked at me. I looked in the pantry: flour, poppy seeds and olive oil? Check! I looked in the refrigerator again. Eggs? Check! Cream? None! Milk? Check! Cheese? Fresh goat cheese only. Perfect! Beets and goat cheese are a match made in heaven... I decided to make a quiche.

First I steamed the beets. I considered roasting them but I wanted them to keep their firm cheeks and vibrant colors. There is a wonderful dignity to just-steamed-enough vegetables, don't you think? Serene emissaries of the vegetal world, they carry the unadulterated tastes of the soil, the wind, the sun and the rain, combined and summed up in unique flavors. A gift too precious to be roasted away on a day when they have been cast as the stars of the show (don't get me wrong, I love roasted beets as much as the next person, only not for this particular quiche...)

While the beets were steaming (thoroughly scrubbed but uncut and unpeeled), I mixed the dough for the crust (adapting a French recipe by Laurence Salomon which can be found here), rolled it out and baked it blind. Then I let beets and crust find their cool.

I had steamed three different kinds of beets (dark red, yellow and pink) and all were the same dull brown when they were done. But under their drab coats, their flesh was as exuberant as ever. The crust got a coat of mustard paint and a powdering of ground hazelnuts. Then the sliced beets amiably arranged themselves in nestled circles.

If there had been a way of making a quiche without a filling, I would have done it (just so the beets would continue to shine). But there wasn't. Or rather if there was, I couldn't find it. So I poured the egg, milk and cheese mixture over the beet petals and hoped the oven would do its magic.

Which it did. Pretty much.

Ingredients: (for an 11-inch tart pan)
For the crust (crust recipe adapted from Laurence Salomon)

150 g white whole wheat pastry flour (all-purpose flour can be used instead and will likely require less water)
10 g poppy seeds
50 g old-fashioned oat flakes
33 g extra-virgin olive oil
4 pinches of salt
50 to 70 g of ice water (depending on the flour, you may need to use more or less, so go easy on the pouring)

For the filling

Assorted beets (I forgot to weigh them but you won't go wrong if you buy and steam four or five big ones. Leftover beets are delicious in soups or salads), scrubbed but unpeeled with roots and top stems (not leaves) uncut
150 g fresh goat cheese, crumbled
50 g ground hazelnuts (optional)
52 g whole milk
3 eggs
French Dijon mustard (you don't have to use fancy - I used Trader Joe's - but you need to make sure it contains no sugar as its role is to counterbalance the sweetness of the beets)
Hot pepper sauce to taste but preferably sparingly (I used Sriracha)
Salt and pepper to taste
Nutmeg to taste, freshly grated

Method:

Steam the beets and let them cool down. Then peel and slice them
Assemble the crust: pour flour, poppy seeds, oat flakes, salt and olive oil in the food processor with metal blade attached, pulse for 10 seconds (until oat flakes turn into coarse flour) and with the motor running, slowly pour in the water (just enough for the dough to form into a ball). Stop the moment it does. Wrap the dough in plastic and let it rest for 30 minutes (I put it in the refrigerator but I am not sure it was actually necessary as it may have made it harder to roll out)
After 30 minutes, roll out the dough and place it in 11-inch ungreased tart pan. Place a piece of foil in the pan and fill it with pie weights (you don't need to prick the dough). Bake in preheated 350°F/177°C oven for 15 minutes, remove the foil and pie weights and bake for another 5 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on a rack
While beets and crust are cooling, whip the goat cheese with the milk and the eggs, adding salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste
When crust is cool, paint bottom with Dijon mustard and sprinkle ground hazelnuts on top if desired (the hazelnuts are optional: they soak up some of the liquid, preventing the dough from getting soggy and they add a layer of taste which I like very much but it mostly came through when we ate the quiche cold the day after. Their presence was barely perceptible when the quiche was warm and freshly baked)
Arrange the sliced beets in the crust and pour filling over them. Grate nutmeg over the quiche and bake in pre-heated 350°F/177°C oven for 30 minutes. Check doneness (the filling must be set) and if necessary, bake another 5 minutes until gently golden all over.
Let cool somewhat before unmolding.
Eat hot, warm or cold.

The beet quiche keeps beautifully in the fridge and tastes even better the day after. It also makes a comforting lunch to take to work if you can make it through the snow...

Breadfarm's Winthrop Whole Wheat Bread

2012-01-16T13:24:00.000-08:00

Winthrop Whole Wheat Bread (as made and sold at the bakery)

Related post: Meet the Baker: Scott Mangold

Loosely based on a Peter Reinhart recipe, the Winthrop loaf is a fairly simple bread to make at home. You just need to plan ahead since it requires two preferments: a 24-hour soaker (which spends 12 hours in the refrigerator and 12 hours on the counter) and a whole wheat starter. Breadfarm's owner Scott Mangold uses wheat from two different parts of Washington State: white whole wheat flour from Bluebird Grain Farms in Winthrop and coarse whole wheat flour from Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill in nearby Burlington. Having neither of those, I used what I had on hand, which was white whole wheat flour from Fairhaven and hard red winter wheat berries from the coop, which I ground coarsely with my own little mill.

It is also a rather forgiving recipe if you make sure to bring both preferments to room temperature before incorporating them. I miscalculated my schedule for the day and had to slow down the starter in the fridge. It came back to life beautifully. Scott says that as an alternative to making the soaker one day ahead of time, you can also make it only 12 hours before mixing and then skip the waiting in the fridge part by just having it rest at room temperature (about 73°F/23°C).
Breadfarm maintains a whole wheat starter at 100% hydration but any wheat starter can be used provided its hydration is appropriately adjusted. I used my regular white liquid levain (100% hydration) and simply fed it twice with coarsely milled wheat flour before using in the recipe. The important part is to make sure to feed the starter about 8 hours prior to mixing (although, as I said, I had to slow mine down and it still worked). It must achieve full ripeness. If fed coarsely milled flour, the starter holds longer between feedings and the resulting bread is more chewy.

Fairhaven coarsely milled wheat flour

Ingredients (for 3 small loaves):

(Scott uses his mixer at the bakery but at home I did the mixing by hand)

For the soaker

320 g white whole wheat flour
248 g water
14.5 g salt (all the salt for the formula goes into the soaker to inhibit protease activity)

For the starter

65.5 g ripe whole wheat starter (100% hydration)
262 g coarse whole wheat flour
262 g water

For the final dough

.85 g instant yeast (about 1/4 of a teaspoon) (used in a production situation to ensure that the bread rises on schedule but optional at home)
23 g water
590 g starter (all the starter)
582 g soaker (all the soaker)
227 g white whole wheat flour

Method:

In the video below, you see Scott mixing, folding, scaling and shaping. Only two folds are shown but Scott actually did three. Also the bakers working and chatting in the background are Caryn, Gregory and Nathan. Matt was in charge of the oven that day and he did the baking as Scott had to go home take care of his kids.

Proof the yeast in the warm water for 5 minutes (even if it's instant as it makes it more active and you need to use less)
Combine all ingredients and mix until you get a good windowpane test (see video) but the dough is still loose and shaggy. Target dough temperature should be 78 to 80°F (26-27°C)
Fold three times at 25 minutes interval
Divide and shape as batards 25 minutes after the last fold (no pre-shaping)
Bake about 20 minutes after shaping in 450°F/232°C oven for 35 to 45 minutes with steam in the first few minutes.

Winthrop 100% Whole Wheat (the Farine version)

I had fun making the Winthrop loaf and I love its flavor. Scott says it has a small but devoted following among the whole grains crowd and I can understand why. It's definitely a keeper!

The Winthrop 100% Whole Wheat Bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Meet the Baker: Scott Mangold

2012-01-16T13:23:00.000-08:00

I wrote a while ago that if I ever got a new life and was reborn as a baker, I would like to start my career at Noah Elber's Orchard Hills Breadworks in New Hampshire. Well, that's still true of course. Only now I feel I have both sides of the country covered. In case the Northwest is where I happen to breathe a new life, then I'd like to go work at Scott Mangold's Breadfarm in Washington State.
Not only do both Noah and Scott make excellent bread (would I consider spending the afterlife working for them otherwise?) but there is something about the ambiance in their bakeries, the cheerfulness and dedication of their teams and their own overall easygoing-ness (is there such a word?) as bosses that make me think I would learn well from either of them and have fun in the process.

Scott's bakery is located in beautiful and fertile Skagit Valley in Edison, a village so tiny that if you blink as you reach it, you could pass it and never notice. With Vancouver two hours to the north, Seattle one hour to the south, the Cascade mountains to the east and Puget Sound close by to the west, Edison could be forgiven for thinking of itself as the center of the universe.

But instead of bragging, it has adopted a whimsical last frontier kind of attitude that has you sit up and notice and, yes, make a U-turn and park if you have already driven through...

The bakery sits next to the saloon in an old building that has hosted successively over the years a butcher shop (some of the village old-timers still remember accessing the meat locker in the back), a candlery and an upholsterery shop. When Scott and his wife Renee opened up in July 2003, there was no culture of bread in the area. None. Scott traveled with samples and brochures in his van and explained what they were hoping to do to whomever would listen and have a taste. The samples were a hit: the bread was well-received. Besides the brisk business they do in the shop, they now sell to nine grocery stores as well as to about fifteen restaurants including on the San Juan islands where mail and bread delivery go hand in hand.

Born in nearby Mt Vernon, Scott himself grew up as a fast food kid. His first job (as a high school student) was to wash dishes in a little restaurant in Wallingford. That's when he discovered flavor. Three months later his newfound passion for food got him promoted to assistant chef. In those years, naturally leavened bread wasn't on his radar: his chief interest lay in pastries and rolls. After college where he was a chemistry major -to this day he says science helps him a lot in his baking- he saved his money and signed up for a six-week intensive class in baking and pastry at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley. With that training under his belt, he started looking for a job. A year later, he landed at Grand Central Bakery in Portland, Oregon, and that's when the love story started. As Scott remembers it, "I was enthralled from Day 1".
Nineteen months later, Grand Central transferred him to all-organic Black Bear Bakery as head baker. Talk about trial by fire! But he got a lot of support and it was a fantastic learning experience. Fast forward another year and Grand Central found itself in need of a head baker at its Seattle location. It offered him the job. Scott drove up and spent a week there. Realizing that accepting the offer would the perfect way to round up his training in preparation for going on his own, he laid his cards on the table: he told the owners that his goal was to open his own place and that he would only remain in Seattle until he had the money to do so. But he wouldn't leave before first training his replacement. It was a deal Grand Central could live with. Scott remained in Seattle four years. Then Breadfarm happened.

I visited shortly before Christmas. The air inside the bakery was redolent with the scent of spices (mostly ginger) and baking levain, a fragrance that does more for me than luxury perfume. I fell under the spell and found myself deploring -once more- that technology hadn't progressed enough to make it possible for my camera to capture aromas as well as images.

Like miller Kevin Christenson, his almost neighbor and also his main purveyor of whole-grain flours, Scott wants to be part of a sustainable grain-growing, milling and baking local economy. One of his goals is to be a voice for the bakers by explaining why certain grains work better for them than others (each has its unique aroma and baking characteristics), by stressing the importance of consistency (one of the challenges of local grains is the way flour varies from one delivery to the next due to factors sometimes as simple and basic as changes in the weather) and by pushing for more storage down the road (more storage would allow for blending which would improve consistency). For a baker, consistency trumps local: at this point, Scott has no choice but to get his unbleached white flour from outside the state.
As you can imagine, I had an uphill battle with myself trying to decide which of Breadfarm loaves to feature on Farine. In the end, since I am still new to the area and basically learning its tastes and flavors, discovering the terroir if you will, I decided to go for the Winthrop Whole Wheat bread, made with two kinds of wheat, both grown in Washington. I had tasted it before and liked its nutty aroma. I also liked the fact that even though it was 100% whole wheat, it didn't stick its wholesomeness in your face with a holier-than-thou kind of attitude: it was light, handsome and very pleasant. In other words, a winner.

Winthrop 100% Whole Wheat (Breadfarm)

Related post: Winthrop 100% Whole Wheat Bread

Blackberry Buckwheat Blossoms

2012-01-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

When I met Fairhaven miller Kevin Christenson, he told me that buckwheat flour was his favorite and that he always added it to whatever he baked, mostly scones. I asked whether he might be willing to share a recipe but he demured. He said he was no baker, he just picked whatever scone recipe was on hand when he made breakfast for his family and replaced part of the all-purpose flour with buckwheat. So I started looking for a scone recipe I could use but most of the ones I found involved butter and since we are just recovering from the holidays, I thought, no butter, no, thank you, not this time.

That's when I remembered Plum Gorgeous: Recipes and Memories from the Orchard, a lovely book by Romney Steele which I couldn't resist buying last fall. Browsing through it, I found a recipe for butterless blackberry polenta muffins. Now my freezer is chokeful of blackberries I picked over the summer in the lanes around our house. I have already made blackberry jelly and blackberry frozen yogurt but I still have lots and lots. So why not bake muffins that would remind us of long walks in the hills along fragrant hedges?
Except for the cornmeal which I bought in bulk at the natural food store nearby without checking where it came from (or if I did check, I forgot), I used all organic Fairhaven Mills flours. The original recipe calls for all-purpose flour and polenta or stone-ground cornmeal. I used the cornmeal as indicated but kept only one third of the all-purpose flour substituting white whole wheat and buckwheat for the rest. I also decreased the amount of sugar (we like sweet baked goods to be just on the cusp of enough sugar. The original recipe uses over a third more than I do. If you have more of a sweet tooth, by all means dial it back in.)
I don't know of any other wild berry that packs as much aroma and taste as Washington's plump blackberrry (the two varieties that grow in our neighborhood each have their own distinctive flavor). Since the berries go into the batter still frozen, they poach gently during the baking, becoming so marvelously juicy that they burst in the mouth with every bite. As for the buckwheat and the cornmeal, they are perennial favorites. I have already made these muffins twice and we can't get enough of them. So here is to you, Kevin Christenson! Thank you for these beautiful flours. Next time I pop over, I'll bring you a batch...

Ingredients: (adapted from Plum Gorgeous)

80 g all-purpose flour
80 g white whole wheat flour
90 g buckwheat flour
90 g stone-ground cornmeal (or fine polenta)
70 g sugar
15 g baking powder
zest of one orange
2 eggs
160 g whole milk
52 g extra-light olive oil (safflower or other vegetable oil can be used as well)
130 g frozen blackberries (+ 12 for topping) (do not thaw before folding into the batter)
1 pinch of salt

Method:

Preheat the oven to 350°F/177°C
Line 12-muffin pan with paper baking cups
Combine flours, polenta and baking powder in a bowl. Mix well. Add sugar and orange zest
Lightly whisk together eggs, milk and oil in separate bowl, then stir in the flour mixture
Fold in the berries
Scoop the batter into the prepared muffin cups. Top with a blackberry if desired
Bake until golden, about 20 minutes.

The Blackberry Buckwheat Blossoms are going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Related post: Meet the Miller: Kevin Christenson

Deb's Apple Sharlotka

2012-01-08T18:20:00.001-08:00

I was mournfully contemplating a bowful of apples and pears dating back to the waning days of the old year and trying to guesstimate whether or not they were in good enough shape to survive another day without my doing something awfully boring to them when the thought occurred to me that I might as well multitask while I was thinking. So I let my fingers walk to the nearest keyboard and wander to the Web and lo and behold, they took me almost directly to Smitten Kitchen where the most appealing cake was frantically beckoning.

It looked much too gorgeous to be anything but unhealthful and there was no way I was going to let myself be tempted, not when the new year was just one week old but as I continued scrolling desultorily, I saw apples appear, so green they couldn't possibly be sinful and these apples got peeled and sliced and chopped and I read the list of ingredients and I got hit as if by lightning by the absence of the word "butter" (which I try to avoid in my baking) and I knew this cake had come to me for a reason.

Thank you, Deb! I love you, your blog and your Russian mother-in-law. I imagine my own late MIL, who was born in Russia in 1911 and didn't leave the country until 1917, ate her fair share of sharlotka in her early childhood but I don't recall her mentioning it.

My version is less Russian than Deb's: I used only 150 g of sugar and replaced half of the all-purpose flour with Fairhaven Mills' white whole wheat flour. I also used half pears and half apples. Everything else stayed the same. It is a festive and beautiful cake and I am delighted to have this recipe. I intend to play with it a bit and since I am always on the lookout for more uses for leftover levain, maybe next time, I'll skip the flour and replace one or two of the eggs by ripe starter. Why not?

For tonight though we'll savor it as it is, still warm, the slight acidity of the apples and pears marvelously showcased by the sweet vanilla-scented dough. My mind will travel to faraway Russia and cozy datchas tucked away in birchtree groves and I'll be happy, knowing for a fact that procrastination is the way to go!

Meet the Miller: Kevin Christenson

2012-01-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

Except for a natural food store which had probably known better days, there was no source of organic flours of any kind in or near the little town where we used to live in the Northeast. I bought 50-lb bags of wheat, spelt and rye whenever we visited more baker-friendly places and relied on my little mill to supply me with whole-grain flour on demand. If kept at cool temperature, grains will last forever, so I never ran short of the essentials but access to more “exotic” grains such as barley, buckwheat, millet, etc. was another matter. I had no choice but to turn to the natural food store where freshness was sometimes an issue, even in the bulk section where everything looked a bit sorry for itself. So imagine my delight when I heard about Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill, an actual mill located in the Skagit Valley, about one hour away from where we now live now in the Northwest, a mill milling organic whole grains and run by a miller who is a real person, not a corporate entity.

I had liked the various Fairhaven flours which I had tried (our local grocery store carries them bagged and the nearby PCC Market has some of them in bulk) and I thought I'd like to take a closer look. So I contacted Kevin Christenson, the miller, and told him I would love to come and meet him if he was up to a visit by a serious home baker and bread blogger.

We drove up by a beautiful December morning. In the valley, the fields were a patchwork of green and brown (having lived for so long in states where the landscape tends to be monochromatic from early December to the end of March, I marvel at how much color the winter landscape still offers here in the winter). Mount Baker was visible in the distance, snowy and majestic.

The mill is located inland in a new-looking industrial zone but Puget Sound is only a few miles away as we discovered when, after our visit, we drove north along the coast to Bellingham, a quaint little college town with an awesome bookstore and good eateries.

Puget Sound and the San Juan islands

Kevin Christenson was born and raised in Minnesota and has lived and worked in Manhattan for seven years but he is the only miller for miles around (the other organic mill in Washington State, Blue Bird Grain Farms, is located way to the east). As such, he has established strong ties with the local farmers and bakers and if working in close collaboration with those who till the land and feed you, your family and your community doesn’t make you a local, what does?

The mill's front entrance

The mill's backyard

Becoming locals was exactly what he and his wife Matsuko had in mind when they decided to move to coastal Washington State to raise their two boys. They had visited the area several times and fallen in love with it. Now they needed to find jobs that would make them bona fide actors on the local scene, jobs that their kids could understand and relate to. It took a while. They bought a house with a garden and lived on what they grew (Kevin had been a home gardener all his life and still grows most of their food) and they relied on their savings for the rest. When he found the mill up for sale on Craigslist (of all places!) in 2007, he had already spent two years researching a business he could try his hand at but everything he found was of the run-of-the-mill (no pun intended!) variety, jobs he could have done just as well in New York or in Minneapolis. Not what he was looking for. The mill was another story.

Then located in the 5,000 foot basement of an old building in Bellingham, it had started in the mid-70's as a cooperative to provide whole-grain organic flour to the local bakers and homemakers when nobody else was doing it and it had been bought in the 80’s by one of the coop members. The owner was now ready to retire and eager to sell.

From the start, Christenson's idea was to encourage local farmers to grow more grain. With the support of Stephen Jones, director of the Mount Vernon Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center (where the first Kneading Conference West took place last September), contacts were established and fair price agreements worked out. Today the mill buys 60% of its grain from Washington State (compared to 20% when the Christensons bought it). The wheat (which used to come mostly from Montana) now comes from Washington farms which Christenson has visited many times: spring red wheat and buckwheat from Walla Walla; barley, soft white wheat and hard red wheat from nearby Lynden. Millet still comes from Montana as do spelt (although Christenson is trying to get some from Eastern Washington), rye, oats and some light barley; brown rice comes from California (none is to be had locally); corn from New Mexico (the 2011 crop didn't yield enough in Washington). The mill stopped milling soy in 2010 because the source could no longer guarantee it would be free of GMOs.

Thanks to the move to the 7,200 square feet new facility in the fall of 2010, the mill could conceivably double its output of 80 to 100,000 lb a month. But the kids are still young and family life remains top priority, especially with both parents employed at the mill although Matsuko works there only part-time.

Trevor filling buckwheat flour bags

Altogether the mill employs two full-time and two part-time workers. Kevin never went to milling school (if such a thing exists in the United States) nor is he a baker. He had to learn literally every aspect of the job as he went along (the previous owner stayed on for two months to help with the transition) and, as he sees it, he is still learning every day. He likes machinery and has always enjoyed fixing whatever broke down. That's a big plus. He has a business degree. That helps too. Finally he enjoys engaging with people and he is an indefatigable listener: he has frequent contacts with farmers and bakers; he consults with Stephen Jones; he participates in as many grain-related programs and field trips as he can.

His is strictly a whole-grain operation. The organic all-purpose flour sold under the Fairhaven brand actually comes from Central Milling in Utah. Fairhaven isn't simply not equiped to produce such flour. Christenson is currently working with Snohomish County farmers who are seeking a grant to finance the installation of an organic white flour mill. It would cost over $1.5 million. Fairhaven still uses its original stone mill but only to make coarse meal (which some local bakers order every week). All the other flours are hammermilled.

I bought bags of grain and some flour and on our way out, we saw old posters on the walls of the office. They belonged to the previous owner who was of the back-to-the-earth hippie-ish persuasion. Although Christenson kept the posters, he is more attuned to our times. Intent on making sure his community remains relevant in the global economy, he is keen on doing what he can to foster a sustainable way of life in the Skagit Valley. Listening to him I kept thinking: "This is what it actually means to act locally and think globally. That's it. In action. With no rhetoric, embellishments or flourishings. Simple as can be."

Related post: Blackberry Buckwheat Blossoms

Almond-Orange Honey Cakes

2011-12-30T14:17:00.000-08:00

In my family, nothing whispers "I love you" more tenderly on the breakfast table than a plump little honey cake fragrant with anise and ginger, so when I stumbled upon an orange-almond paste "pain d'épice" (literally spice bread) on Alter Gusto, a French blog with a myriad of attractive recipes, I decided to make it for New Year's Day.

There is something inherently happy about spices, don't you think? They are as old as time itself (nothing faddish about them); because of their medicinal value, most of them are considered beneficial; and finally they are wickedly delicious (the expression "to spice up your life" says it all). In other words, they offer the perfect paradigm for a New Year's resolution by making it easier to eat well.

Pain d'épice in France is traditionally made with rye. Carole (Alter Gusto's owner) used chestnut flour (which she had in abundance) because she couldn't find any rye flour. I had wholegrain rye flour and that's what I used (I have yet to find a good chestnut flour in the US). Also traditionally pain d'épice is made without fat or eggs and this one is no exception. Which is a huge plus in my book.

Pain d'épice is customarily sweetened with honey and here a word of caution seems appropriate. According to this article in Food Safety News, some of the honey sold in the US isn't honey at all and many of the big chain stores we'd think we could trust actually peddle junk under the honey label.

Ingredients: (the recipe was slightly modified to take into account the greater absorption capacity of the American flours compared to the French ones. I also added salt).

160 g whole grain rye flour
80 g unbleached all-purpose flour
70 g almond paste (make sure almonds are listed as the first ingredient on the label)
10 g baking powder
40 g powdered milk (I had none and used whole milk instead to supplement the orange juice)
2 untreated oranges
160 g honey
4.5 g of ground ginger (2 teaspoons)
1.2 g ground cardamom (1/2 teaspoon)
3 cloves
.6 g grated nutmeg (1/4 teaspoon)
1 pinch of salt
a handful of roughly chopped almonds (optional)

Method:

Wash and dry the oranges. Grate the zest of one of them and set it aside
Squeeze the juice out of both oranges. Add enough milk (or water if using powdered milk) to obtain 50 g of liquid
In a saucepan, heat the honey, the blend of juice and milk (or water), and all the spices. Mix until honey is well incorporated and the liquid hot. Remove from heat. Let stand for 30 minutes then drain out the spices
Pre-heat the oven to 350°F
In a food processor or a blender, mix flours, almond paste and orange zest until powdered. Transfer to a bowl. Add powdered milk (if using) and baking powder. Blend well
Drain the orange juice infusion. Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients until just well combined. Do not overwork
Divide into mini-molds or pour into a bread pan
Garnish with chopped or sliced almonds if desired
Bake for about 30 minutes (a bit longer if using a single large pan)
Cool on a rack.

Happy New Year everyone!

Printable recipe

Salmon Koulibiac

2011-12-27T08:53:00.022-08:00

Funny how memory works! You make a dish which has been a family favorite for many many years and suddenly all of those who ever shared it with you show up in your mind and heart as if they were ready for a chat and a hug.

The recipe was given to me by my friend Cricri who lives in a village near Paris in a tiny yellow house with blue shutters. Her small kitchen opens onto a walled old garden where the scent of her baking mixes with the fragrance of the nodding lilac. My friend Nicole, who also lives near Paris, likes it so much that the year she turned 50, I made sure our yearly trip to France coincided with her birthday celebration and I baked two of them for her party: I still remember the assembly line she created on her dining room table (her kitchen was way too small) and the arriving guests milling around us, glasses of sangria in hand. My friend Do (who lives in a 17th century house in Versailles and whose father was Russian-born) bakes a mean koulibiac too but she uses fresh salmon fillet and I always liked the smoked salmon version better. Sorry, Do !

My mother-in-law (who hailed from Denmark but whose mother was Russian and who grew up in St-Petersbug) loved it because it brought her back to her early years in czarist Russia: the swishing noise of the sleds in the street below, the jingling of the bells, her niania (nanny) with her towering bonnet and her grandpa sitting at the head of the table, a large white napkin tucked under his flowing beard. Magic tales of yesteryear to one who had been brought up on Russian novels!

Before Cricri baked this recipe with me, my own most memorable experiences with koulibiac were with the ones my parents ordered for very special occasions from the Italian caterer on Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris, near our home. It was shaped like a log, not like a fish and the hard-boiled eggs were always left whole and lined up in a single file in the middle of the spinach filling, so that each slice of the koulibiac featured a beautiful yellow sun against a dark green background. Lovely! Personnally, however, I still think the fish shape is more spectacular but if you decide to stick to more traditional koulibiac shapes, just google the term and dozens will appear.

I don't make the dish very often (usually only once a year for New Year's Eve) because the process is rather time-consuming. Even when all the ingredients are ready, it usually takes me two and a half hours to assemble it. But it is creative and fun and I get to visit in my mind with all the people I ever baked it with or for and that's a big plus.

I wasn't planning to blog the recipe so I wasn't set up to take any pictures. But almost half-way through, I though, why not? Maybe some of you would enjoy making it as much as I do and starting a new family holiday tradition. So here we are. The pictures are from my phone and they are not very good. Also since I thought of taking pictures kind of late in the game, I don't have any from the beginning of the process. Still I think they give a good idea of the assembly process, don't they? Happy New Year!

Ingredients (for 8 people):

735 g puff pastry (3 frozen puff pastry sheets)
340 g smoked salmon, sliced
8 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
1 big bunch of parsley, chopped
4 shallots, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
250 g cooked rice (I use brown basmati rice)
750 g leafy greens, steamed and squeezed dry (I use a mix of spinach and Swiss chard leaves)
Egg yolks (for egg wash)
For the sauce:
450 g sour cream (you want the regular one, not a low fat or no-fat one containing thickening agents)
2 lemons (if they are juicy, you actually only need one and a half)

Method:

30 minutes before starting, take the dough out of the freezer
Flatten the dough (patching one whole sheet and a half-one together) using a rolling pin and cut out the shape of a fish (remembering to leave a 2-cm border all around). This will form the bottom crust
Using the bottom sheet as a template, cut out the other sheet and a half, leaving a wider border (at least 4 cm) to provide for the filling. This will form the top crust. Do not throw away the leftover scraps of dough as you will need them for the fins, the eyes and any other decoration you might wish to use
Incorporate the chopped eggs in the rice
Incorporate the minced shallot and garlic in the chopped parsley
Place the bottom fish crust on a semolina-dusted parchment-lined half-sheet baking pan (I forgot to do that one year and had to transfer the assembled koulibiac from the countertop where I had rolled out the dough to the baking sheet without the assistance of any paper or liner. Not a mistake I am likely to make twice!)
Keeping 2-cm away from the edge on the bottom sheet, start building the different layers spreading half of the rice and egg mixture first, then the greens, then the salmon, then the shallot-garlic-parsley mixture, then the remaining rice, making sure the fish is entirely covered save for the border
Salt and pepper to taste (be careful with the salt since the salmon might be rather salty)
Make sure the edges are clear of rice, egg or parsley and paint them all around with egg wash
Carefully position the top sheet of dough over the bottom and press all around the edges so that the top and the bottom fish are firmly stuck together
Add fins, eyes (when there are little girls around, I like to make it a she-fish with long eyelashes, mouth, etc.)
Paint all over with eggwash, draw scales and tail as desired and crimp the edges all around
Bake in preheated 350°F/177°C oven for about an hour, checking frequently to make sure it is baking evenly. You may need to tent foil over it at some point to prevent overbrowning.
While it is baking, squeeze the lemons and, using a fork, incorporate the juice into the sour cream until the cream liquefies a bit
When the koulibiac is ready, bring to the table to slice so that your guests can decide whether they want a piece of the tail, or the eye, or a fin. My oldest grandchildren - who were always adventurous and appreciative eaters - liked to be able to choose.
Serve hot with the sauce on the side. (Over the years I have found that the best way to pair the sauce with the fish is for each guest to gently lift the crust on his or her slice of koulibiac, pour a generous tablespoonful of sauce over the steaming filling and fold the crust back over the whole thing.) Blissful!

Printable recipe

The Salmon Koulibiac is going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Swedish Thin Bread

2011-12-23T16:54:00.027-08:00

I have had a (huge) soft spot in my heart for Scandinavia ever since my beloved late mother-in-law Sigrid -who hailed from Charlottenlund near Copenhagen- introduced me years and years ago to the magic both of white summer nights and of Nordic Christmases. Juleaften (Christmas Eve) was her favorite holiday. She didn't bake or cook but she filled our house with lights and love and I will cherish these memories for as long as there'll be Christmas. So when Eva and Valter, our Swedish friends, invited us to a pre-Christmas bake party, my imagination (never idle) brought me back to these winters of long ago when I used to dream of snowy lakes and red cottages with glimmering windows and my heart immediately skipped a beat.

The thin breads are not part of the Danish tradition (at least not as I know it through Sigrid) but the elves (julenissen) very much are and the minute I stepped inside the Swedish bake house and saw these little creatures on the wall, I knew I was in the right place. Turns out, the elves were not only on the wall. They were rolling out dough, talking, laughing, snacking, tending the oven, counting seconds (it takes exactly 11 seconds to bake a thin bread in a wood-fire oven) and sipping glögg (mulled wine).

We joined right in and a few hours later, with floury aprons and much good cheer, we all emerged from the baking house with armfuls of flatbreads. These will be enjoyed with smoked salmon, lox or crab paste, cheese, jams or just plain butter all through the holiday weekend and even later since the habit is nowadays to freeze whatever isn't eaten immediately.

In the old days, families and friends met a few times a year to bake this bread, not only at Christmas time. So when the owner's family moved from northern Sweden to the Northwest, they had a brick oven built in a little house in the backyward and it became a tradition for the neighborhood Swedish immigrants (there were quite a few in the old days) to meet there and bake. The tradition has survived the generations and today the bake house is still very much in use.

The thin breads can only be made one at a time in a woodfire oven. They are never flipped, just rotated to ensure an even bake. The dough is typically mixed at home and brought to the bake house at the appointed time (families book oven time long in advance).

It is then scaled, rolled out (with lots of extra flour as it is pretty sticky), flattened into round pancake-shaped loaves, thinned out with specially grooved rolling pins, brushed to remove any flour which might still be clinging to the dough and then deftly lobbed onto the oven sole in front of the flaming wood. They are folded immediately while they are still hot. (I hung a few on my pasta drying rack to dry out completely when we got home as condensation had accumulated in the Ziploc bags. As soon as they were perfectly dry, I packaged them again).

What follows is Eva's recipe. Thank you ever so much, Eva! I used a blend of light rye and white whole wheat flour but I'd be tempted to add oat, barley or buckwheat flour next time or maybe use dark (whole) rye, just to vary the taste as the Swedes apparently like to do.

Ingredients (for 30 large thin breads):

2.5 liters of milk
19 g instant dry yeast (28 g active dry)
5 g baking powder
56 g butter
130 g sugar (I might skip the sugar next time and that may sound like heresy to a Swede! I'll have to ask Eva)
210 g syrup (I used maple but you can use any pancake syrup or a mix of molasses and syrup)
13.5 g salt (I will use 2% of the flour weight next time as we like our breads a tad more salty)
1815 g unbleached all-purpose flour
913 g light rye flour (or a mix of rye and whole wheat flours)
11 g ground fennel seeds (Eva leaves some fennel seeds whole or barely crushed)
11 g anise seeds

Method:

Mix all dry ingredients with hand or a wooden spoon
Warm milk, butter and syrup to 120-130°F/49-54°C
Mix everything together in a large shallow bowl
Let it rise, covered, until needed (I gave it one fold as it looked really batter-ish)
Divide into 30 pieces and proceed with the shaping and baking as per video above.

Printable recipe

Happy Holidays!

The Swedish Thin Bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Seven Stars Bakery's Pumpkin Seed Bread

2011-12-20T19:41:00.028-08:00

Sometimes I dream we are back in Providence, RI, and we go and have lunch at one of Seven Stars Bakery's three locations... In the two days we were there in November (I was attending a BBGA class with Richard Miscovich at Johnson's & Wales beautiful campus), we managed to hit all three. I can't say I have a favorite. We liked them all. All three feature the same seductive breads, pastries and cookies (everything is made in a nearby central location that Jim Williams, the owner, was kind enough to take us visit) and in all three, the atmosphere was relaxed and appealing: friends of all ages chatting over coffee or tea, dads reading books to toddlers before heading home from grocery shopping, students crouched over laptop screens or texting without a pause in their conversations, tourists - like us- rejoicing in the variety and quality of the offerings.

Everybody - friends, dads, students, tourists - had a tempting treat on the table in front of them and we had a (very) hard time limiting ourselves to what the two of us could reasonably sample. And that's coming from a woman who really doesn't like sweet things but who can resist Seven Stars' chocolate almond croissant? Not me... Although, true to form, I enjoyed the vegetarian sandwich even more.

In the evening, Jim and Lynn Williams were the gracious hosts for BBGA's Guildhall Gathering, which gave us the opportunity to taste even more breads and that's how I "discovered" and fell in love with their Pumpkin Seed Bread.

Seven Stars Bakery's Pumpkin Bread as sold at the bakery

I asked Jim if he wouldn't mind sharing the formula and, generous to a tee as are most bakers I know, he said he'd send it to me. So here we go... But before we proceed, you may want to take a closer look at the bakery's website, and more specifically at its baking process page which you'll find a most informative description of the work going on in a serious artisan bakery.

Back to the pumpkin bread. I had meant to bake it for Thanksgiving but we got back shortly before the holiday and it took an inordinate amount of time for me to rekindle my levain's enthusiasm for baking. Then we hit a cold spell and it was just freezing in the house (at least it felt like it) and when I did get to the bread, canned pumpkin had disappeared from the stores. Apparently it is a seasonal product in Washington State. Once Thanksgiving is over, it is as if it never existed. That's new to me as one of the rare things I could be sure to find year-round where I come from in the Northeast is canned pumpkin. But never mind that, we did manage to find a can after hitting a number of grocery stores and I just now baked the bread for our Christmas brunch (hence the wreath shape).

I love the flavor (nutty with a faint sweet note to which the tang of the rye levain offers a delicate counterpoint), the texture (mellow and chewy/crunchy at the same time) and the golden color. It takes its own sweet time to rise but you can make it over two days: I mixed the dough in the morning of the first day around 10, gave it three folds and let it rise slowly for about 4 hours. Then I put it in the garage (where the temperature was about 44°F/7°C) and I let it rest until morning. In the morning (around 8:00 AM), I set it to warm up at 77°F/25°C. It took a while: when I shaped the dough around 1:00 PM, its internal temperature was 66°F/19°C. But by then the room was really warm and the shaped loaves proofed happily in the baskets. I might have gotten a more open crumb if I had waited a little more but I had to go out, so by 2:00 PM, they went into the oven. Jim does it a bit differently: his final dough get a 2-hour bulk fermentation, then it proofs for 4 hours and gets baked. He warned me that at home, the process would be somewhat longer and he was right.

All in all, I am happy with the result. The crumb isn't as holey as Seven Stars' but the taste is right, the texture very appealing and I love the color. Thank you for sharing, Jim! Of course I can only encourage those of you who live in New England or have a chance to go visit to check out the bakery and have a taste for yourself. Maybe you'll even meet my friend Lumi who is now a baking instructor at Johnson &Wales and a huge fan of Seven Stars!

Ingredients (for one wreath and one oval loaf):

700 g unbleached all-purpose flour
106 g whole wheat (I used Fairhaven's white whole wheat berries which I milled for the recipe)
42 g cornmeal
665 g water (I used 645 g but then it depends on how thirsty your flour is), at required temperature to ultimately get a dough temperature of about 76°F/24°C
170 g canned pumpkin
102 g sesame seeds, toasted
170 g pumpkin seeds, toasted (I actually used 50 g pumpkin and 120 g sunflower seeds as it was all I had)
85 g mature wheat levain (at 65% hydration) (mine was my regular levain which calls for 33% whole-grains including wheat, spelt and rye)
51 g mature rye levain (at 100% hydration)
20 g salt

Method: (I mixed the dough by hand)

Mix the two levains and set aside, covered, at warm room temperature
Mix the flours and the polenta and most of the water until well incorporated. Cover and let autolyse for about 30 minutes, at warm room temperature
Incorporate the levains, then the pumpkin (at same warm room temperature), then add the salt
Add the rest of the water as necessary (I was left with about 20g of the original water amount)
Mix in the seeds until well distributed in the dough
Dough temperature was 75° when set to proof at warm room temperature in an oil-sprayed covered container.
Give it three folds 30 minutes apart and let it rise afterwards for about 4 hours (the length of time necessary to almost double).
Set it in the fridge (or in a cold spot like a garage) until the next morning
The day after, set it to warm up at room temperature and shape it in two loaves (scaled at 1000g)
Bake in prey-heated 470°F/243°C oven (with steam the first few minutes) for 10 minutes, then another 10 minutes (without opening the door) at 450°F/232°C, then turn the loaves around and bake another 15 minutes (for a total baking time of 35 minutes).
Turn the oven off and let the loaves rest inside with oven door ajar for another 5 minutes
Set to cool on a rack.
When completely cool, slice a loaf open, top a piece with some extra-sharp Cheddar cheese, set a glass of hard cider at your elbow, close your eyes, take a bite and find yourself magically transported to a crisp fall day in Providence, RI. Enjoy!

Printable recipe

Seven Stars Bakery's Pumpkin Seed Bread will be going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

The Bashful Bûche...

2011-12-19T11:57:00.023-08:00

...also known as the bûche of Christmas present and maybe future! See, when I was growing up, the bûche de Noël (yule log) was a big event in our family. My Mom made it from scratch year after year. We kids saw it as the pinnacle of the Christmas dinner and awaited it eagerly. For the filling and the frosting, she made "crème au beurre" (butter ganache) which she flavored with strong coffee. She always decorated her bûche the same way, with a plastic Santa hoisting a bulging backpack of presents, a little sled pulled by two reindeers as well as a few elves and a couple of mushrooms, including a gigantic red one with white polka-dots. Pretty tacky stuff but magical to a child!

I inherited the decorations when my Mom stopped making Christmas and used them on our own bûche when our kids were little. But then slowly but surely after decades of loyal and cheerful yearly service, the red faded, the big mushroom cap assumed an awkard angle that no amount of tweaking seemed to fix for long and the reindeers lost their footing. I regret to say that they all had to be retired... At about the same time I stopped making the dessert and my Mom's bûche suddenly morphed into the bûche of Christmas past.

This year, despite the lack of plastic Santas, elves and reindeer, I decided to pick up the tradition where I left it years ago but with a self-imposed twist: no butter and as little egg as possible. Why? Well, I am not a card-carrying member of the nutrition brigade but the fact is that the Man has to watch his cholesterol levels and since his ruling principle is that whatever I make or buy is good for him or I wouldn't make or buy it, I find myself looking for alternatives which I would never consider left to my own devices.

See, I am lucky enough to have inherited my Dad's cholesterol gene. He was the living embodiment of the French paradox, never having met a saucisson (dry cured sausage) or a pâté he didn't like and until his last day, he never let water touch his lips except when brushing his teeth. As for me, I remember going to a new doctor for a check-up back in New York a few years ago. She glanced at my lab levels and did a double-take, then got up from behind her desk and walked to her bookshelves, coming back with a huge medical volume. She thumbed through it for a minute, then her brow cleared: "You are okay, it seems. It's just that I have never seen such a low level of cholesterol in a living person!"

Well, my Mom wasn't so lucky and neither is the Man who pretty much likes everything that's garanteed to stick to his arteries. His take on his health reminds me of a conversation I once had with one of our grand-daughters. We were traveling in the car in a driving rain when she glimpsed beckoning golden arches. She said wistfully: "I love chicken nuggets. It's my favorite food!". Crestfallen, I observed that it was okay to have them once in a while but that they were not really good for one's body. She replied sharply: "Maybe they are not good for your body, but my body loves them!". She had just turned 3.

So even though I think that, barring compelling health reasons, it is okay to eat whatever one likes from time to time, when I resolved to bring the bûche back to our Christmasses, I looked for one that would go where others fear to tread and entirely eschew butter. The one I found on the Eating Well website fit the bill. It used lots of egg whites and only two yolks and the cake itself looked superlight. I decided to go for it.

One roly poly, a meringue mushroom patch and mountains of frothy frosting later, I do declare a winner in the bashful bûche pageant: the cake is light and the taste delicate. I love the combined flavors of roasted hazelnut, chocolate and coffee and best of all, the whole thing is as airy as a cloud, which is a pretty nifty trick for a log.

I followed the recipe to a tee but for this clever log to become the bûche of Christmas future, I would change a few things:

I would set aside one-and-a-half to two cups of frosting for the filling. The recipe calls for one cup but I had barely enough to cover the cake. Despite my painting the cake with a blend of coffee and hazelnut liqueur before filling it, it turned out drier than it should have;
I would make the filling more chocolaty. I used Valrhona cocoa which should have be strong enough but it wasn't. I would melt some good dark chocolate, let it cool and gently fold it into the frosting, creating some kind of superlight chocolate mousse;
Finally I would make the coffee-flavored frosting darker and slightly more assertive by using more concentrated coffee.

Once that's done, I think even my Mom would agree that the Bashful Bûche is a keeper. Now all I need is a new plastic Santa, a few elves and a pack of reindeer. I think I have the mushroom situation under control.

Nice and Naughty: Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums

2011-12-10T14:33:00.040-08:00

...or will it be naughty and nice? Your call!

For the brioche recipe, look no further than Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. If you don't own it and your local library can't get it for you, you could go browse the book on the amazon.com website, look inside and search for brioche. If you are lucky enough (I was the first time I tried), it will let you browse pages 151-152 where you'll find the olive oil brioche recipe. Alternatively if you speak Spanish or don't mind using Google Translate, you can check out Madrid Tiene Miega, the blog where I got the idea of making this dessert bread to accompany the wickedest, meanest, craziest plums I have ever had the pleasure of serving.

Tartine's olive oil brioche has a delicate and complex taste. I was a bit hesitant to use our regular extra-virgin olive oil as I thought it might be a bit too fruity but Chad says to use a strong-flavored oil, so I went for it and found that it played a wonderfully supportive role to the poolish and the levain. You don't actually taste it (at least I couldn't) but you definitely taste more than slowly fermented grain. A truly intriguing combination. The original recipe calls for orange-blossom water, which may not be easy to find if you don't have access to a Mid-Eastern market. If that's the case, steeping a few crushed cardamom pods or whole saffron threads in the warm milk for a few minutes is a good substitute. Both go well with the taste of the brioche provided you err on the side of caution with the amount of spice and you make sure to strain the milk before using it in the dough. Skipping the extra flavor is also an option.

I had no luck finding orange-blossom water, so I used green cardamom pods (3 g total which I crushed in a mortar with a pestle). I halved the original amounts given in the book for all the ingredients (which I now regret as it would have been just as easy to make the whole batch and freeze half), especially as the dough is a pain to work with. It is super wet and looks like pancake batter for the longest time. I must tell you as well that I ended up adding about 120 g of flour to make it finally come together. I also switched the mixer to high speed - instead of medium - for the final couple of minutes. That may explain why I got a tighter crumb than I had been shooting for.

Halved, the recipe yielded one big brioche and about 20 small ones (scaled at 50 g raw). In half-a-dozen of those (the ones which were to accompany another dessert), I hid two or three of the exquisite chocolate-covered cherries my friend Kim, a talented baker if I ever saw one, had sent me from Wisconsin (thank you, Kimmy!). I love the tangy taste of cherries both with cardamom and with saffron although I don't know how well it would fare with orange-blossom water. The crumb looks a bit dry on the picture below and it was: since I had forgotten to take a crumb shot, I had to photograph the last surviving brioche. It was 5 days old...

I just gave you nice. Ready for naughty? Read on!

Back in France when I was growing up, dried plums were these dark oblong unidentified objects which were so hard that you had to soak and simmer them before you could eat them. Once cooked, they tasted watery and you had to watch out for the pit or you'd crack your teeth. I never liked them then but they were supposedly good for us, so in the winter they appeared regularly as a dessert on our dinner table. Some years later, we had fleshier ones which we pitted, stuffed with almond paste and rolled in crystallized sugar. They were a special Christmas treat and definitely a step up!

But now, oh now, I have stumbled upon a completely different beast, one that will probably remain forever my ultimate winter after-dinner treat: dried plums slow-soaked in vodka... It definitely takes a while for them to bloom into their magnificent taste and texture, so even though it might be tempting to make them for the holidays this year, if I were you, I would just make them now and then wait until the end of January to enjoy them. They will be an excellent antidote to the winter doldrums and, provided you are not tailgating it and having to drive home but watching the game on your couch with nowhere else to go, you might even make them the star of your Super Bowl party if there are no teenagers around (although as long as you tell them it's prunes, they probably won't go near the stuff anyway).

The fruit sold in some parts of the country as California prunes and in others as California dried plums (isn't it interesting that some states are more prune-tolerant than others?) has almost nothing in common with what I knew as a child. It is fleshy to the point of quasi-roundness and it has been pitted. It is quite tasty on its own if you actually like dried plums, which I do.

Now every summer, back when I lived in France as a grown-up, I used to make "framboises à l'eau-de-vie" (raspberries in brandy, literally acqua vitae) with a special spirit they sell over there just for macerating fruit. Since raspberries were delicious and plentiful this summer in the Pacific Northwest, I decided to preserve some in brandy for the winter. I couldn't find a suitable brandy at the local liquor store however, so I used vodka (100-proof). It does pack a wallop. A less potent version would do just as well, I suspect.

The vodka-marinated raspberries retained their plump shape and even some of their color and they looked pretty but the taste wasn't what I was looking for. Of course the reason could be that I really don't like vodka, never did and probably never will and they tasted like vodka flavored with children's cough syrup (probably because I misguidedly decided to flavor the vodka with a few hyssop leaves). In any case, not a success...

I was contemplating the berries and wondering what to do with the leftover vodka (I had bought a large bottle) when I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Since I always keep dried plums in the house, why not try and see if they would work? After the raspberry fiasco, I had little hope. Still, ever the optimist, I took a small jar (one which had contained jam or jelly in another life) and packed it tight with the fruit, then filled it with vodka (not the raspberry-infused vodka but fresh vodka) to the brim, screwed the lid back, put it away and forgot about it for six weeks.

When we opened the jar, the vodka was gone! It had mostly been soaked up by the fruit and whatever was left had turned into a syrupy boozy liqueur which tasted fantastic. I have since made two big jars of the plums, one which I am keeping at low temperature (in the garage actually) and the other one at room temp, just to see if it makes a difference (I'll let you know if you are interested but I won't find out for another four weeks). I have also added some vodka to the new jars at the two-week mark as I found the plums had been at the sauce again and the top ones were no longer covered. But one thing you need to know is that each time you add vodka you are thinning out the liquor which means you will have to wait longer until you can fully savor the plums. In other words you have to choose between having more or having sooner. As I said, it's your call...

The Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums will be going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Gérard Rubaud: the movie (October 2011)

2011-11-27T14:35:00.012-08:00

I came home from my visit with Gérard Rubaud last month with a whole series of video clips which I had planned for my personal use. Since they were not meant for posting on the blog, I didn't pay any attention to the audio part: I didn't suggest to Gérard that he stick to baking topics or lower the volume on the radio; I also didn't ask him to speak English.

But when I reviewed the clips, I found myself awed by what they reveal of his quasi mythical reverence for his dough as well as moved by the timelessness of his craft. There is something deeply soothing to watch this man at work in his quiet bakery on top of a Vermont hill. The world may be in turmoil all around but whatever happens, it still needs to be fed. That's the baker's job and nothing distracts him from it.

So I removed the audio track and replaced it with music (which is fitting in a way because Gérard loves to listen to music as he works). It is a bit strange to see him speak without hearing what he's saying and of course you can't hear me answering either. It's a trade-off, I know, and next time I'll do it differently. But at least you can see what I saw and that's better than nothing...

Ask the baker: Gérard Rubaud Building a levain à la Gérard - step 1 Building a levain à la Gérard: steps 2, 3... and a misadventure

Gérard Rubaud on working the levain

Meet the Baker: Gérard Rubaud

Revisiting Gérard

Rustic Batard Shaping a batard/baguette: Gérard's method

Gérard Rubaud on working the levain

2011-11-26T19:00:00.004-08:00

For someone who has no means of going online and checking out what's happening in today's web of bakers, Gérard Rubaud has formed a rather accurate idea of the way many of us go about our baking. Although he welcomes the renewed interest for boulange au levain (baking naturally-leavened breads) which the Web in general and blogs in particular contribute to feed throughout the world, he also warns against bee-like behaviors which detract from the big picture: going from one blog or one website to the next and picking up fragments of techniques or advice which do not coalesce into a harmonious whole. In his opinion, it is close to impossible to make really good bread that way. The starting point should always be the taste and texture one is looking for. Once that has been decided, then the baker marshals the tools he/she knows to be necessary to obtain that result.

Of these tools, the most important is the levain. Properly fermented, a good levain will get you half-way towards your goal. Three main variables will determine its performance: its degree of hydration, the number of wild yeast cells it contains and its temperature. The baker must seek the perfect equilibrium point between temperatures and fermentation times. In today's brouhaha about bread, it is easy to forget the two go hand in hand. A one-hour fermentation at + or - 5 degrees F can yield hugely different results: five degrees cooler and you need to wait two more hours for your levain to double. Five degrees warmer and the fermentation runs ahead of you. In the absence of specific fermentation time/temperature indications, a good reference point should be the doubling of the levain at 80°F/27°C. When that has happened, you know you are good to go.

Gérard cannot insist enough on the fact that the baker needs to have his/her thermometer in hand at all times. He himself makes bread five days a week, 51 weeks a year, which means he does three levain builds five times a week. On his two days off (which are not consecutive), he keeps his levain in the fridge and feeds it only once a day. A home baker could keep his or her levain in the fridge for five consecutive days (feeding it once a day and putting it back in the fridge as soon as it has fermented enough to reach the top of its container), take it out on Day 6, give it three or four feedings and bake with it on Day 7. It is fundamental that the levain be brought back to warm room temperature (at least 75°F/24°C and as close to 80°F/27°C as possible) prior to incorporating it into the autolyse (by autolyse Gérard means the shaggy dough resulting from the incorporation of final dough water into final dough flour in the absence of salt). A colder levain is harder to incorporate; the baker has to mix longer, thereby running the risk of tearing the gluten network and over-oxidizing the dough. Gérard advises keeping the autolyse at 80°F. The warmer the dough, the more malleable it will be. That means always controlling the temperature of the water you add to the flour.

A good quality levain will boost the elasticity of a well-hydrated dough provided its consistency and temperature are similar to those of the dough : if your autolyse is hydrated at 55% and your levain at 65%, you need to boost the hydration of the autolyse. Matching the hydration of the autolyse to the hydration of the levain isn't a routine proposition however: each time Gérard gets a new flour delivery (and we are talking the same brand and quality of all-purpose flour he has been using for years), he needs to run a test to see how much water the flour will absorb. The variations in protein content (which governs absorbency) from one monthly batch to the next had become so distracting that Gérard recently switched his flour delivery schedule from one-month to three-months intervals. These discrepancies between batches of the same flour mean that the quantity of water given in a recipe should always be treated as an indication. The baker has to use his or her judgment to determine how much to add or take away. Another good rule of thumb is to adjust the hydration of the levain to the type of dough you want to get: it is hard to make a very wet dough with a very stiff levain for instance.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that accomplished bakers such as Jeffrey Hamelman and Gérard Rubaud are both somewhat dismissive of the current obsession with huge holes in the crumb: Jeffrey joked during his recent class on Baking with Locally Grown Grains that some bakers seem to consider the number of alveoli in their crumb on a par with their sperm count as an indicator of their masculinity. As for Gérard, he sees what he calls "les bulles" (the bubbles) as important (they do contribute to the taste of the bread) but not fundamental: at the end of the day, "on ne les mange pas" (you don't get to eat them).

However if an airy crumb is what you want, your levain can help you achieve that goal too: feeding it as soon as it doubles triggers a huge proliferation of wild yeast cells and a proportionate acceleration of the fermentation process. One way to make baguettes au levain with a very open crumb is to feed the levain three times at 6 hour-intervals prior to mixing the dough.

Gérard's experimentation over the past few months have led him to modify his formulas, both for the levain and for the final dough. He has reduced the proportions of freshly milled whole grains in his bread, using none in the third (last) build of his levain and only 13% (instead of one third) in his final dough. He said that by doing so, he has lost a few rustic aromas but he has improved the texture of his bread tremendously. Also he has found that new, very delicate aromas were being created during fermentation. His dough has gained in elasticity and resilience and can now readily absorb more water, which helps get a more open crumb.

As related in my post Revisiting Gérard Rubaud, Gérard is now retarding his shaped batards for 10 hours and more. The long proofing changes the texture of the dough by making it more elastic and more malleable, which makes it possible to up the hydration even more. There is no doubt in my mind that Gérard's formula will keep evolving as he lives and works by one simple motto: "Tout peut toujours s'améliorer" (there is always room for improvement).

Ask the baker: Gérard Rubaud Building a levain à la Gérard - step 1 Building a levain à la Gérard: steps 2, 3... and a misadventure

Gérard Rubaud: the movie (October 2011)

Meet the Baker: Gérard Rubaud

Revisiting Gérard

Rustic Batard Shaping a batard/baguette: Gérard's method

Revisiting Gérard Rubaud

2011-11-23T06:00:00.012-08:00

Visiting Gérard Rubaud is like taking a huge leap sideways over the Atlantic to the French Alps and once there, a few steps back in time. Maybe not to the 18th century, although judging from old engravings, his bakery looks a lot like the ones found there before the Revolution of 1789: of course those didn't have electrical light or hot water on demand or a mixer (even a 40-year old one) or an electronic scale or a floury radio blasting Radio Canada 24/7. But you certainly feel you traveled back as far as the fifties at least...

As for himself, he owns neither a television ("When would I have time to read or to listen to music if I did?") nor a computer (same answer). He doesn't own a camera, digital or otherwise ("I don't think I ever took a picture in my life") and of course no smartphone (or even a simple cell phone). But he does have a regular telephone and it rings very often. Gérard may be short on modern life accoutrements but he is long on true friends and many of them often call or drop by.

In the two years since my first visit in 2009, we have become friends too. We speak on the phone, I visit, we have been on field trips together. I have learned a lot about boulange au levain (naturally leavened bread-baking) and he has discovered a few things about blogs, computers and the Internet. Not that he cares that much, to tell you the truth, except as a new and convenient way to disseminate and perpetuate age-old baking skills. Bread-baking is his lifeline, his raison d'être (literally: reason for being).

When a stroke confined him to a wheelchair a few years ago, he would have let himself go were it not for the tweaking he was constantly giving his dough in his head: he wanted to walk and work again to see if the actual results would match the dreamed-up ones.

When asked how come he doesn't grow tired of baking the same bread 51 weeks a year, year in and year out, his eyes grow round with surprise: "But it's never the same, that's the challenge. First of all, every time I get a new flour delivery, I have to adjust the formula. Plus I am constantly experimenting, adding or subtracting grains, lowering or increasing temperatures, varying fermentation times, etc. It is actually a lot more fun to stick to one dough and see what you can do with it and make it the best you possibly can than to divide your attention between several different ones."

He probably doesn't approve of the fact that I am frivolous enough not to be satisfied with a firm levain, so that I keep a liquid one as well and enjoy making "pains fantaisie" (breads that contain ingredients other than cereal grains, flour, salt and water) but he has come to tolerate my difference and not to look (too) skeptical anymore when I tell him how delicious these other breads can taste. I was actually going to bring him some this time so that he could try them for himself but because of the hand injury I sustained a few weeks before our trip, I had to forego baking for a while. That experience will have to wait.

You have probably guessed by now that Gérard has his own (very specific) ideas about the "right" way to bake: he applies the methods he was taught as a teenage apprentice. He is also a fervent admirer of Raymond Calvel whose book Le Goût du pain (The Taste of Bread), he seems to know by heart. So I expected him to balk at my suggestion that he experiment with retarding his dough overnight at a cool temperature and naturally I wasn't disappointed.

"Retarding has been invented by bakers who wanted to sleep longer nights. It has nothing to do with improving the dough." (Gérard has trained himself to sleep very short nights, complemented during the day by numerous 12-minute naps: beyond 12 minutes, he gets groggy and can't function properly. So he sets the timer, lies down on the bench in the bakery, lifts his arms above his head -an old trick which works wonders for him- and seconds later, he is asleep. He wakes up with the timer, fully refreshed and in good spirits, all set to go back to work.)

I had an uphill battle to fight to convince him to try retarding. But I was spending a few days at the bakery, he had time off - no production deadlines - and I gave it my best shot. In the end he gave in, provided we didn't go for too low a temperature. "Below 68°F, you start getting undesirable acids. It'd be best to let the shaped breads proof overnight at 70 to 74° F." We settled on 68° (which happened to be the temperature of the bakery that evening).

He mixed the dough. I photographed the process. How I wish my camera could have captured aromas... Those coming from the mixing bowl were simply heavenly.

The breads were set to proof at 8:40 PM. He said he would check on them in early morning. I promised to come and join him the minute I woke up. When I entered the bakery the next day around 6:00 AM, Gérard met me at the door. His face looked grim. "What's wrong?" I asked innocently. "Come and see! I checked on the breads at 4:00 AM and they were already completely overproofed. I knew it wouldn't work. I kept them for you to see before I throw them in the trash". Well, I could see them all right. They had reached over the edges of the couche to kiss each other's brows and made for a huge mess indeed. And of course I wasn't surprised either: after all, I had never heard of retarding for hours at room temperature when room temperature is close to 70°...

However, being a morning person, I can be annoyingly cheerful when the day is young. So I told Gérard how two summers ago, when we had friends visiting from France at our little house on the river, I had made a batch of his rustic batards and set them to proof, only to forget all about them and go boating for six hours. When we came back, they had looked even worse than today's misfits. Still I had baked them and they had turned out a bit flattish but excellent with a wide open crumb.

Gérard didn't seem impressed. He started tucking at the kissing loaves (which parted reluctantly) and chucking them in the trash one by one. I protested so vehemently that he finally relented and spared two, one of which he disgustedly folded over itself like a limp parcel. Those two, he baked, still grumbling: "We won't get any rise; all the sugar has been eaten up; they won't brown; I should have added malt to the dough, etc."

Meanwhile the bakery was filling with its usual aromas and Gérard's brow gradually cleared (Has anyone ever studied the mood-enhancing benefits of bread baking?) to finally settle in an expression of amazed delight when the two loaves came out of the oven: they had magnificently risen to the occasion and shone golden in the morning light. By now Gérard was eager to slice them open and had started casting regretful looks towards the trash can where the discarded dough was gasping its last breath like a carp out of water...

The rest, my friends, history and by that, I mean a phenomenon of historical proportions in Gérard's life as a baker: when he cut open the loaves, he was greeted by a burst of lovely aromas and he saw a crumb which he deemed to be more open than anything he had ever achieved before. We each had a first slice, then a second one slathered with Vermont butter: the flavors were magnificent. Rustic and intricate. Marvelous...

Gérard said: "Well, you were right and I was wrong. I learned something today. Thank you!". His face was a bright as the rising sun. His mind was running a mile a minute. I could see he was already thinking up various ways of adapting his baking to this new discovery. Meanwhile he kept slicing and savoring, a blissful expression on his face. The man may be a tough nut to crack but I like it that his ego isn't what gets in the way. Bread is. And it wins. All the time.

Updated news, three weeks later:

I just talked to Gérard on the phone: today is his day off and he is hard at work refining his timeline. Laughingly he tells me he is now retarding his bread for 10 hours at 70-72° F. To avoid overproofing, he has halved the percentage of levain in the dough down to 20% from the 40% he normally uses in the winter. Which means he still gets the acids he is looking and none of the undesirable ones. Wow!

He says his bread has never looked or tasted better. He gets a fabulous crumb, full of oval-shaped holes (interestingly and inexplicably half the holes are vertical, half horizontal). His only complaint is that the crumb is a bit moist on the first day and reaches its peak the day after. To solve that problem, he is planning to bake his bread a bit longer at a lower temperature.

You have got to love that about the man: he may be reluctant to enter the game but once he catches the ball, he does run with it so fast and so far that it's hard to catch up. I bet that next time we talk, his production schedule will cover three full days (he says he's leaning that way and I bet he's serious too). I forgot to ask if he's now among the bakers who sleep full nights...

Meet the Baker Gérard Rubaud

Ask the Baker Gérard Rubaud

Building a levain à la Gérard - step 1

Building a levain à la Gérard - step 2, 3..

Gérard Rubaud: the movie (October 2011)

Gérard Rubaud on working the levain

Shaping a batard/baguette: Gérard's method

Whole Wheat Cookies for a Washington Autumn

2011-11-21T08:07:00.009-08:00

A walk in the nearby woods and My Italian Smörgåsbord's post about baking Holiday Tea Cookies with a small child were the inspiration for the crunchy treats my youngest grandson and I made on Saturday with local flour (my only variation was to replace all of the all-purpose flour with white whole wheat flour and since the flour was whole grain and therefore thirstier than regular flour, I had to wet my hands once or twice to make the dough come together). Thank you, Barbara, for the recipe which calls for two of my favorite baking ingredients, olive oil and honey!

And for those of you who might wonder, no, we didn't meet any bear along the trail but we could have, right?

Related post: Baking With Locally Grown Grains

Camembert in a Sourdough Jacket

2011-11-20T12:10:00.032-08:00

My niece Flo whose beautiful and passionate blog, Makanai, is a treasure trove for gourmets and gourmands of all ilks as well as a mine of information on food intolerances and ways of coping with them - in French, I know, but there is always Google Translator) recently called attention on her Facebook page to a most appealing and ingenious appetizer, Camembert rôti en croûte de pain (literally Camembert baked in a bread crust), posted by Cindy of Food for Thoughts.

Baked Bries or Camemberts are nothing new. But a French cheese baked inside a miche au levain (a sourdough boule), now, that's something I had yet to see. As luck would have it, we had just bought a pair of French Camemberts at Costco.

I had no boules in my freezer and no immediate prospect of baking one since my levain was still in reactivation mode after our long absence. However our local Trader Joe's came to the rescue once more: I found there a boule of just the right size, made exclusively of flour, water and salt. Perfect!

I followed the original recipe to a t (except that I didn't use sugar and that, having no garlic powder on hand, I just rubbed the inside of the hollowed-out miche with a fresh clove). I am not kidding myself that our baked Camembert was as flavorful as Cindy's. It did come from France but it wasn't made from raw unpasteurized milk, so it was certainly a good bit tamer than the one she was able to find in London. But it was still good enough that nobody seemed to mind (the bread was crisp on the outside and the cheese deliciously velvety and smokey-spicy). At least I imagine that's the reason why it vanished so fast. Thank you, Cindy, for this great idea! Just in time for holiday entertaining too...

Make sure the cheese fits inside the hollowed-out boule

but don't bake it with the wrapper still on!

Ingredients:

1 Camembert from France (preferably made from raw unpasteurized milk if available in the country where you live)
1 small sourdough boule (not San Francisco sourdough though as the sourness might overpower the cheese)
1 1/2 teaspoon chili powder (I used chipotle chili)
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder (see above for possible substitution)
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
1 tablespoon salted butter

Note: the original recipe also calls for 1/2 teaspoon of sugar but I didn't use any.

Don't you love the fragrance of garlic on fresh crumb?

To maximize it, split the clove in two

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 356°F/180° C (using convection if available)
Cut off the top of the boule and set aside
Hollow out the center of the boule and of the lid (making sure the Camembert easily fits into both)
In a small bowl, mix chili, garlic powder (if using. If not using, rub the inside of the bread and of the lid with raw clove of garlic) and mustard powder
Lightly butter the inside of the boule and of the lid
Generously sprinkle the inside of the boule and of the lid with spice mixture
Pre-cut the boule all around to make it easier to pull out croûtons later on (see picture)
Scrape the Camembert all around, not forgetting the sides and bottom
Place inside the hollowed boule, scatter rest of spice mixture over it
Place the lid over the cheese making sure it fits the bottom snugly
Bake in pre-heated oven for 30 minutes
Let cool a few minutes before serving (serve the top alongside so that guests can rip chunks of it to dip in the melted cheese when the sides of the boule are all eaten up).

Printable recipe

All dressed up and ready for the oven

The Camembert in a Sourdough Jacket goes to Stefanie whose marvelous blog, Hefe und mehr, is hosting this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Jeffrey Hamelman's Whole Wheat Scones

2011-11-18T17:09:00.032-08:00

Related post: Baking with Locally Grown Grains

Having experienced first-hand during his apprenticeship in Ireland how light and flaky scones could be (nothing like the sturdy and mealy-greasy items that often pass for scones on this side of the pond), Jeffrey Hamelman resolved to recreate the recipe for his bakery in Vermont and while his version isn't likely to meet with the approval of the cholesterol police, it is still packed with wholesome nutrients since it relies exclusively on whole wheat flour. In case you are partial to scones, as I am, you are likely to be wowed if you try it at home.

If you are concerned about the amount of fat the recipe contains (Hamelman even advises using full-fat buttermilk if available), you can try taking out some of the butter, replacing some of the cream by more buttermilk, using a bit of sour cream, or mixing yogurt and buttermilk. I haven't tried any of these skinnier suggestions but I will once the fourteen scones still waiting for us in the freezer are gone. The number of scones the recipe yields depends upon the size of the scoop used to shape them. In class we used a scantily filled 2.5 inch scoop and we got 16 scones. At home I used our regular 2-inch ice-cream scoop and I got 22 smaller ones.

Jeffrey uses Vermont white whole wheat pastry flour. I used Fairhaven white whole wheat pastry flour which is sold in bulk at my local natural food store. Other sources can surely be found in other parts of the country. It will be interesting to see if they yield the same results.

Scones can be scooped out and frozen raw close to each other on a sheet pan (covered with plastic) then bagged once frozen. There is an almost imperceptible flavor loss but the convenience makes up for it. They should be taken out and put on a sheet pan (spaced properly this time) in the refrigerator overnight for baking first thing in the morning (although I know some bakers bake them directly from the freezer, presumably adjusting the baking time accordingly). Don't egg wash and/or top with sugar the scones you are planning to freeze (the dough would absorb it all).

Now for the funny part: I do not relish sweets and although I loved the scones we made during the class, they were a bit too sweet for my taste (I actually like savory scones best). But it was my first time trying my hand at the recipe at home and, contrary to my rebellious nature, I decided to follow it scrupulously.

In the best culinary school tradition, I did what we French call the "mise en place", that is to say, I scaled all the ingredients and got them all lined up in little bowls on the workbench. I mixed the flour and the baking soda, I incorporated the butter as indicated. I poured in the liquids with the egg and mixed until just combined. I scooped out all the scones: 8 nicely spaced on one half-sheet pan, 14 closely packed on the other. I egg-washed and pearl-sugared the ones I intended to bake right away. I reached for a plastic bag to cover the sheet-pan destined to the freezer and that's when I did a double-take: a hot pink bowl was sitting forlornly on the counter. It was full. Of sugar. I hadn't added a gram of sugar to my dough. Freud was right: the subconscious rules! My scones were going to be savory indeed.

Nothing to do at this point but go forward. So I went ahead with the baking. My scones didn't spread as much as the ones we made in class and I had to leave them in 5 minutes longer. I don't know if that had to do with the lack of sugar or with the different absorption capacity of the Washington flour or with my oven... No way to know. What I do know is that my first bite into a cooled down scone was very tentative... I had completely skewed the formula. Would it still work?

Ladies and gentlemen, the answer is a resounding yes. So my advice to you is to do as you please with the sugar amount. The pearl sugar and the currants provide enough of a sweet hint to make the scones attractive to sugar lovers (who can always lather them with jam or honey later on) without displeasing those of us who have less of a sweet tooth. Leaving the sugar out or reducing it could potentially be a sure way to make everyone happy in the family. Think of the smiles around the table on Thanksgiving morning!

Before baking

Ingredients (for 22 small scones):

545 g white whole wheat flour
136 g sugar (optional as it turned out. Can also be reduced instead of just taken out)
33 g baking powder
3 g salt
136 g butter, unsalted, diced, pliable
109 g currants, tossed in a little extra flour
60 g egg (1 large one)
204 g cultured buttermilk (full-fat if available. I made mine at home using full-fat local Guernsey cow milk)
289 g heavy cream
egg and milk for egg wash
Pearl sugar for decoration (optional) (I bought mine at Ikea)

Method:

Pre-heat oven at 375°F/190°C
Dice cold butter and leave at room temperature until pliable/soft. Toss currants in a little extra flour
In a separate bowl, whisk the egg and add the buttermilk and heavy cream
In the bowl of a stand mixer, blend the dry ingredients to combine
Add the diced, pliable butter to the mixing bowl and, using the first speed, paddle into the dry ingredients until pea-size
Add the currants, then the wet ingredients all at once to the mixing bowl. Still using the first speed only, blend until just combined.
Portion with scoop of desired size onto parchment paper-lined baking sheet.
Egg wash tops of scones and sprinkle with pearl sugar (if using)
Bake (with no steam) for about 13 minutes or until tops are barely springy (I baked mine for a total of 18 minutes).

Printable recipe

Jeffrey Hamelman's whole wheat scones are going to Stefanie (whose marvelous blog Hefe and mehr will be hosting this week's issue of Yeastspotting.)

Baking with Locally Grown Grains

2011-11-09T05:30:00.059-08:00

"Baking with Locally Grown Grains", such was the title of the class I recently attended at the King Arthur Baking Education Center in Norwich, VT. Sponsored by the Bread Bakers Guild of America (BBGA), it was taught by Jeffrey Hamelman (whose Bread: A Baker's Bok of Techniques and Recipes figures prominently on the shelves of most serious bakers I know). Attendees were mostly professional bakers but there were also a few home bakers like me, so I didn't feel like the odd woman out. All of us were brought there by the common resolve to keep farms up and running where we live and work by spending our money in our community. As Hamelman aptly put it: "If you buy grain from the neighboring farmer, there is a good chance he'll become a customer at your bakery".

Many of us were also motivated by the desire to savor our terroir which, in this context, can roughly be defined as the taste of the place where we live. The flour used in the class came from grain grown in Vermont to which most of the participants wouldn't have access once back home but grains purchased from small farmers elsewhere in the country share enough similar characteristics that we can take the knowledge back to our bakeries and adjust our baking techniques accordingly to obtain the best possible results (at least that was my hope when I registered for the class and happily I left with the information I had been looking for).

Local grain can be used for more than making bread. Intent on making the point, Hamelman started the class by preparing a vegetable pie for which the mock puff pastry dough had been made with equal parts of Vermont white whole wheat pastry flour and white flour (from Gleason Grains).

On the second day, we made scones from local white whole wheat pastry flour. Based on a recipe Hamelman brought back from Ireland many years ago, they were simply the flakiest and lightest I have ever had and it was hard to believe they didn't contain a gram of all-purpose flour. I'll try and make them when I get home using Fairhaven white whole wheat pastry flour (Fairhaven Mill being the only source for organic grains and flours that I have discovered so far in my neighborhood). I'll post the recipe then. So stay tuned if you like pillowy scones!

Update November 20, 2011: the recipe can now be found here.

Hamelman reminded us that, in colonial times, Vermont was the breadbasket of America and that wheat, rye and barley grew in the Champlain Valley. But as nutrients were not put back in the soil, it took only 20 years for the land to be overfarmed. With the construction of the Erie canal, more agricultural land eventually opened to the West. Wheat growing became concentrated in the Midwest and in the Canadian prairies. At the same time, the invention of roller mills and the expansion of the railroads made it economically possible to bring the grain back East. One by one the small grist mills which had dotted the Vermont landscape (there had been one every three miles on every little river) became idle and disappeared. The Western farmers were not breeding for flavor but for yield per acre and for the ability to withstand hailstorms (which explains the preference for short stalks). Short stalk wheat was the main thrust of research and development in the wheat business for over 100 years and still is today.

But some local farmers are pushing back: Jack Lazor (from Butterworks Farm) is a case in point. (If you are curious to learn more about him and his wife, you may want to read this detailed article about them in Vermont's Local Banquet.)

I visited the farm a couple of years ago with a friend who is a baker and a long-time customer of the Lazors' and I was struck by their energy, dedication and inventiveness.

Anne Lazor offered us bottles of her kefir and it was so good that, ever since, the very first thing on my list whenever I get to Vermont is to find a coop and buy some. We bought bags of spelt and hard red winter wheat.

I brought my purchases home (back then, I still lived in the Northeast) and as soon as I started baking from it, I was hooked. There was simply no comparison, taste-wise, between the flours I could buy at the grocery stores and the flour I milled from Lazor's grains. The explanation is to be found in the varieties Lazor chooses to grow, which are typically more flavorful (and richer in nutrients) than the ones grown on an industrial scale.

For more information on the renewal of grain growing in Vermont, you may want to listen to this Vermont Public Radio talk.

But nothing is ever simple, is it? Buying grain or flour directly from a farm is tempting but it can have its pitfalls. In Vermont, many of today's old farmers were once fervent adepts of the back-to-the-land movement and they are still at it. Their philosophy is: "It's organic and we grew it. So it's good." Their milling is empirical and they don't sift, so that the flour isn't necessarily tailored to the needs of the artisan baker. However when they realize they can attract more customers by sifting a bit and also use the resulting bran for other purposes, they are more likely to adjust to the new demand.

The Northern Grain Growers Association was created with the help of the extension staff at the University of Vermont to foster a dialogue between the growers and beyond that, between the growers and the bakers. Hamelman was the first baker to join. Today Vermont farmers have a better understanding of the impact of their choice of grain varieties and milling techniques on the baking product and bakers are learning about farming life. On a much smaller scale, when seeking to buy grain from a local farmer who doubles as a miller, it is a good idea to tell him or her the baking characteristics you are looking for.

Don't hesitate to ask about grain health either. Lots of crops are susceptible to fusarium. Cereal grains are no exception. If infected, they get fusarium head blight which gives them a very distinct pinkish cast. They can neither be used as seeds nor turned into flour. Therefore Hamelman advises any baker buying directly from a farm to have a conversation with the farmer about testing for DON (deoxynivalenol). DON can develop in the field in most growing conditions in the United States. Any grain with a level of DON above one part per million (1 ppm) is considered unfit for human production. For more information about crop diseases, you may want to check your local library for a copy of Field Crop Diseases Handbook by Robert Nyvall.

If the farmer is also the miller, ask about the milling stones. Are they vertical or horizontal? Horizontal stones might be preferable to vertical ones (I forgot why but if you are interested, I can find out). Are the stones properly dressed? American hard red winter wheat tends to wear them out faster than other grains and very few artisans now have the required skills to maintain the stones.

But even flour skillfully milled from healthy grain can produce a poor loaf of bread. Weather conditions are a factor. If the weather is dry close to the harvest, then the crop will have a higher protein content. While some moisture is ideal to get things going, wet summers can lower the amount of protein in the grain.

All kind of enzymes can be found in cereal grains. Amylase is one of these enzymes. Its role is to convert starch into sugar. As bakers, we need ample amylase potential in our flour. If the flour lacks amylase, very little starch is converted into sugar, fermentation is very sluggish and the resulting bread will be poor. If it contains too much, the fermentation gallops along, too much sugar is produced, the dough is too wet and the crumb gummy.

There can be an excess of amylase when the weather is too wet (it can happen in the field before the harvest, so that the resulting crop is spoiled or contains so much amylase that no miller will take it). Labs use the falling number method to calculate the level of amylase.

There is an inverse relationship between the falling number and the quantity of amylase in the flour. Millers won’t buy a grain with a falling number of 200. The bull’s eye is 250. It is much more useful to know the falling number than the level of protein. When you buy your grain or your flour directly from the farmer, you have no clue what the amylase level is. If you buy from an organic mill, you can ask the miller. If using one of these 5-lb bags sold at the supermarket, you don't need to worry about it because the test will have been done at the mill and any amylase issue fixed through the blending of grains of different origins and the use of barley malt.

The falling number is usually quite high in whole wheat flour but this flour contains so many fermentable nutrients that it isn't a problem whereas a low falling number would be. Another thing to remember is that rye is even more susceptible to wetness and excess of amylase than wheat. If you need to know the exact characteristics of the grain or flour you are buying from a local source, you can always send a sample for testing to CII Laboratory Services in Kansas.

I mentioned taste before. Beyond the desire to save food miles and to help farmers survive in our community, pleasing our taste buds is often the main reason we turn to local flours (for which we usually pay a premium). For some of us though, access can be problematic. Jack Lazor mentions during the above-mentioned radio talk that he feels very fortunate to be living and farming in Vermont. He had recently been to North Dakota and there, in the land of wheat, there was almost nothing local to be had...

If you are lucky enough to have access to a local source of tasty grains and flours and eager to start baking, what should you watch for?

One of the main principles when using local grains is that you need to process things fast. With Vermont flours, Hamelman likes to go for a one-hour-long first fermentation with three folds and he pre-ferments up to 35% of the total flour in the formula to compensate for the shorter bulk fermentation;
Use a firm starter (to better control the fermentation process);
Do not retard overnight;
Don't try to go for a supermacho 85% hydration dough. Local grains are often low in protein and won't be able to absorb as much water as the store-bought flours you might be used to;
When scoring, don't make a zillion cuts (it would flatten the bread);
Local grains may have to go in the oven a bit underproofed;
You may want to start them in a hotter than usual oven (470° to 480°F/243° to 249°C) and to lower the temperature progressively (receding oven technique);
Steam the oven copiously, load the bread, steam again. Five minutes later (no more), open the vents (or, if you are a home baker, remove the steam-generating device from the oven).

If your local grain lacks protein:

Do an autolyse;
Watch your pre-shaping;
Pay attention to the shaping;
Reduce the fermentation time;
Bake in a hotter oven.

Several of the bakers attending the class are already baking some of their breads with local flours but logistics frequently intervenes to prevent them from using more. There is no infrastructure for grain delivery in Vermont (taking advantage of his booming yogurt business, Jack Lazor couples his grain deliveries with his dairy deliveries and can thus supply King Arthur's bakery and other bakers but other farmers do not have that option).

White flour represents 99% of the flour eaten in the United States. But white flour mills are hard to come by. A regional one would cost about $10 million. Even if the money were to be found, how would the grain get to the mill? The railroads have gone the way of the grist mills...

I obviously don't know what the future holds for artisan bakers or for farmers. But I do know that I love the back-to local-food movement: when I was a child, my grandparents grew most of our fruit and vegetables and raised chicken, ducks and rabbits and I didn't even know it was a huge privilege to be fed that way. I took it totally for granted and complained when we overdosed on asparagus, strawberries or salsify. I never imagined our way of living and eating would one day follow the grist mills and the railroads and almost disappear... Any thing I can do at my modest level to make it come back, I will!

Whole Wheat & Hazelnut Breadsticks

2011-10-12T15:25:00.008-07:00

My hand is still (a bit) sore and my levains are still asleep, so I am not back in baking mode yet but I have been meaning to share my hazelnut version of Martha Rose Shulman's whole wheat and walnut breadstick recipe for a while. Now is as good a time as any, especially since it is hazelnut season and maybe you are lucky enough to have hazelnut trees in your garden.

I have tried it with levain instead of yeast (not as crisp) or with rye and spelt replacing some of the whole wheat (too assertive). I have also made it with walnuts as originally intended but as long as we have hazelnuts on hand, I always came back to this one which is our favorite.

I like to make it before traveling as the sticks' elongated shape makes them ideal for the side pockets of our backpacks and with some cheese (even plain cheese sticks) and an apple or a handful of dried apricots, they make a wholesome snack on the go.

They are very good both with regular whole wheat and with white whole wheat.

Ingredients (for 24 breadsticks):

425 g whole wheat flour (white or regular) (I use freshly milled)
200 g unbleached all-purpose flour
52 g finely ground hazelnuts (or hazelnut meal) (if using whole hazelnuts, roast them for 10 minutes in a 350°F/177°C oven, let them cool down a bit, then rub them in a kitchen towel to remove as much of the skins as possible before grinding)
50 g hazelnut oil (a mild olive oil can be used instead)
13 g sea salt
3 g instant dry yeast
314 g lukewarm water
5 g honey or maple syrup (optional)

Method:

Please refer to the original recipe as I have followed it to the letter with excellent results.

These Whole Wheat & Hazelnut Breadsticks are going to Susan's Wild Yeast for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Blender Bread

2011-10-02T15:31:00.018-07:00

I never thought I would make bread in a blender. Yet that's exactly what I did yesterday and I can explain why in two words: extensor tenosynovitis (ET). Unless you are a physician or have had ET yourself, chances are you don't know what I am talking about. Until day before yesterday I didn't either and believe me, I wish I never learned. It is diabolically painful (and this, from someone who is known for having an abnormally high threshold for pain).

ET is a repetitive stress injury and I got it from watching Grey's Anatomy on my handheld device. Which is why I should sue both ABC and the manufacturers of the device. Although maybe not ABC if they let me pick my doctor from the show...

See, what happened was that I was trying to get ready for Season 8 (which just started) by watching all seven previous seasons (which I had never seen before). That's 148 episodes and by episode 140, I guess my left hand grew tired of holding the thing up so that I could better see MerDer drill holes in people's skulls. It gave up without prior notice, leaving me unable to tie my shoe laces, cut veggies, feed my levains (which had to be forcibly dehydrated, poor babies), mix bread and, worse, hold my youngest (one-month old) granddaughter in my arms.

However since:

I own one of the powerful blenders you can see demonstrated at big warehouse stores
I got a grain attachment for it (for these seeds or beans which might damage my regular mill)
This grain attachment came with a booklet of recipes
Two of these recipes looked interesting: one for sourdough bread, one for hearty multi-grain yeasted bread
I had levain galore (as usual)

I decided to combine these recipes by just replacing the yeast by liquid starter.

The blender was going to do the work, so I didn't have to worry about anything, right? Well, almost true. But let me tell you, I still found it exhausting to make bread that way. Too many ingredients. Weighing 5 g of this and 7 g of that countless times to get just one loaf in a 8.5 x 4.5 pan! Call me lazy but I don't think it's worth it.

The original multi-grain loaf recipe makes no mention of salt (did they just forget it or is it deliberate?) and eschewes bulk fermentation. The dough goes straight from the blender to the oiled pan. It is supposed to rise in 30 minutes, go into a 350°F oven for 30 to 35 minutes and voilà, bread done.

Well, it didn't quite happen that way. The blender did a good job of milling the minute quantities of millet, buckwheat, flax seeds, wheat, spelt, rye, barley, sunflower seeds, etc. It did mix the dough reasonably well (but I had never had a dough come out at 87°F before and that, even though I used really cold water). I added salt (which is listed as optional in the sourdough recipe). I did upend the blender over the pan to let the dough drop gently into it. But I waited almost 5 hours for it to rise enough to go into the oven (and it had been in a warm place all that time). In all fairness I must say the recipe for the sourdough bread indicates that it might take anywhere between 30 minutes and 8 hours, depending upon the temperature of the room.

The result is as can be seen above. Not pretty but better than just edible. Will I make it again? No. Will we eat it? Yes. At least I will. It actually tastes very healthful. I am hoping it's good for extensor tenosynovitis.

Local Loaf (Hazelnut Cider Barley Bread)

2011-09-26T10:30:00.027-07:00

Do you sometimes wish you could eat the landscape? I do. Like babies, I need to taste the world to apprehend it. If that means I am stuck at a pretty archaic stage of personality development, well, so be it! I will readily grant you that I am the oral type. My grandfather probably had a lot to do with it: he had had two sons, one of whom, my uncle, had tragically died of tuberculosis at age 19. My father gave him three grandsons and one granddaughter. My grandfather had never had a little girl in his life before. He fell hard for me.

To be closer to us (we lived in Paris), he and my grandmother moved from Southwestern France (where they were born and had lived all their lives) to Normandy. We went and visited them every weekend, all year-round and in all kinds of weather. Which means that they saw a great deal of us and often while my brothers were playing war games in the wonderfully half-tamed garden, he took me walking. He had made a little wooden basket for me and when we were not looking for eggs in the chicken coop, we wandered the nearby woods and meadows. But we never walked just for exercise or leisure.

Our neighbor, the farmer, had given us access to the land across the road where he pastured his cows and there was a wood at the end of the bramble-hedged lane that went up the hill: I learned to gather baby dandelions (so utterly delicious in a salad that I still yearn for them almost six decades later) and button-mushrooms in the fields, chanterelles and boleti in the forest, blackberries, wild apples, hazelnuts and walnuts on the way back. I can still recall the puckering taste of sloes and the black stain the walnuts left on my hands. And then of course, there were the fruit and vegetables my grandfather grew, the chickens and the rabbits that he raised and the ducks we bought from the farmer, not to mention the milk we went to get every evening in metal milk pans.

The only thing I didn't really care for was the bread which we bought from a baker who made his rounds in an old van. On the baker's days off, my grandfather (who by then was already over 80) rode his Solex (a motorized bicycle) three miles away to another village to get it. It wasn't good either (I guess I was born and raised at the time bread in France took a precipitous turn for the worse).

Well, these days are long gone but for the past couple of months, they were somehow brought back as I wandered the lanes around our new home enjoying the sun (yes, summer can be gorgeous in the Northwest) and picking blackberries. The blackberries were nothing like the ones I remembered from my childhood though. For a start they were generally sweeter (maybe because August had been so sunny) but also, of course, this being America, they were twice the size. But I filled buckets after buckets. I also ate a lot of them.

Walking, eating and picking and fighting my way out of countless thorny grips, I was listening to a French recorded book on my iPod. That book is one of my favorites. I have read it (in print) over and over to the point that I can often guess what is coming at any given moment. It was written in the early years of the 20th century and the action (such as it is) takes place mostly in and around Paris. The writing is gorgeously descriptive and listening to its music along these brambly lanes in the Pacific Northwest had the strange effect of knitting together the past and the present for me. The cadences of the language and the fragrance of the blackberries slowly wove themselves into a new whole and that's when I knew with absolute certainty that moving here had been the right call.

Just as I can recall with uncanny precision the exact taste of my childhood, I started to yearn for the taste of the landscape around our new home. We joined a CSA where, wonderfully, part and parcel of the weekly share is the freedom to go to the fields and pick the greens, herbs and flowers we want (out came the little wooden basket which I had cherished but not used all these years). We visit farmers' markets around our home and recently, as you know if you read my previous post, I went to the Kneading Conference West 2011 where I met local bakers, farmers and millers. I bought local organic all-purpose flour from Fairhaven Mill. Having attended Leslie Mackie and Andrew Ross' inspiring presentation on baking with barley, I also purchased local organic barley flour.

I was at the farmers' market the other day when the sight of gorgeous hazelnuts gave me the idea of baking the flavors of the surrounding landscape into what I love best, bread. I purchased some hazelnuts as well as a quart of honeycrisp unpasteurized cider and I went home. I had previously bought delicately flavored blackberry honey from a local beekeeper who sells through the CSA but I decided against caramelizing the hazelnuts with it. I didn't want a sweet bread. I wanted a clean-tasting loaf where the soul of the levain would soar to the accompanying music of the roasted hazelnuts and the tang of the cider. I wanted a bread, not a dessert. And that's what I got.

The fermented taste is mysterious and almost inebriating in its complexity. The flavors of the barley and the cider do not really shine through but they definitely contribute to the whole as by themselves, wheat and hazelnuts would never have yielded such aromas.

I imagine there are endless variations on the theme of the local loaf and I might look for others as the seasons change. I'd love to know which ones you would come up with to define your own landscape if you felt so inclined and didn't mind sharing.

Meanwhile I am sitting by the fire staring at the rain which has finally come and thinking of the many ways in which my corner of the Pacific Northwest reminds me of Normandy. As for the blackberry honey, it is incomparably delicious on a slice of the landscape...

Ingredients (for 2 loaves):

585 g all-purpose flour
60 g barley flour
387 g water
97 g unpasteurized honeycrisp cider (*see note below)
194 g liquid levain (at 100% hydration)
100 g hazelnuts (roasted for 10 minutes, rubbed together to remove skins and roughly chopped)
13 g sea salt
* Note: what this farmer calls cider is basically apple juice. It has no alcoholic contents whatsoever. What I did though was to keep it unopened in the refrigerator for a week before using it. By then it had reached the stage where, with the boost of the levain fermentation during the slow rising of the dough, it started fermenting in earnest. At least that's how I explain the slightly boozy taste of this bread. Maybe a scientist would see it differently...

Method:

Mix flours and water until combined and let rest for 45 minutes (autolyse)
Add levain and salt and mix until medium soft consistency is achieved
Add cider and mix until absorbed (I had to put the dough into the mixer at that stage and mix on high for a couple of minutes until the dough came off the sides of the bowl)
Add the hazelnuts and mix on slow for a few minutes until combined
Set the dough to ferment for as long as it takes for it to stop springing back quickly when poked with a finger
Divide the dough in two, pre-shape as boules, shape and score as desired (I did one boule, one batard)
Pre-heat oven to 470°F/243°C
When loaves are fully proofed (the dough no longer springs back quickly when poked), bake at 470°F/243°C with steam for 10 minutes, lower temperature to 450°F/232°C, bake another 10 minutes, turn the loaves around if necessary and bake another 12 to 15 minutes or until their internal temperature reaches about 210°F/99°C
Cool on a rack.

Printable recipe

The Local Loaf is going to Susan's Wild Yeast for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Kneading Conference West 2011

2011-09-18T08:35:00.029-07:00

I am lucky enough to have spent the last three days immersed in local flavors and bread talk at the Kneading Conference West, held at the Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center of Washington State University in Mt Vernon, Washington. The Conference was an extraordinary opportunity to encounter world-known researchers and bakers and to meet with bread people of all kinds:

Bloggers/accomplished home bakers such as Meeghen from Breadsong (who posted about the Conference here) or Teresa from Northwest Sourdough (whose post on the Conference you can read here);
Master bakers such as George DePasquale from The Essential Baking Company in Seattle, Jeffrey Hamelman from the King Arthur Flour Company (whose book Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes is a bible for bakers), Leslie Mackie from Macrina Bakery in Seattle, Scott Mangold from the BreadFarm in nearby Bow/Edison, to name only a few;
Scientist/bakers working on developing demand for local grains, such as Andrew Ross from Oregon State University, and many others.

There were also several hands-on workshops: the basics of artisan bread, sourdough bread at home, pizza baking in a wood-fired oven, malting, earth-oven construction, baking with fresh-milled grains, baking with barley, preferments, etc., as well as presentations and panel discussions.

Located in the Skagit Valley and set against the misty blue background of the Cascade mountains, the Center is surrounded by fields, gardens, meadows and orchards. The Conference took place partly in the main building and partly under the big white tents which dotted the meadow. The food was local, healthful and delicious. We had an opportunity to taste magnificent cheeses, hard ciders and beers, not to mention breads and pastries which were so good they defy description.

And we were kept busy from morning to night. Steve Jones, Director of the Research and Extension Center, showed maps illustrating the centralization of wheat growing in the Midwest over the past 100 years for reasons that had to do with economies of scale and big business, not the quality of the soil. He said that the renewed focus on local has as much to do with flavor and terroir as with helping farmers make a living wage in our communities. He showcased Ebey's Prairie on nearby Whidbey Island, a farm which produced 119 bushels an acre on its land 100 years ago (a world record) to be compared with the current Midwestern yield of 45 bushels an acre. He explained that the main challenge today for the local farmer was the lack of infrastructure: combines, mills, silos (he showed us a picture of the local silo, now a café) and money for research: for instance the Perennial Grain Project is no longer funded at the federal level.

George DePasquale (The Essential Baking Company) remembered visiting the ruins of Pompeii near Naples on a trip to reconnect with his family roots in Southern Italy: looking at the ancient bakery, he felt he was standing in a river of history and tradition and suddenly understood that his responsibility as a baker was to keep this river moving forward.

Jeffrey Hamelman (King Arthur Flour Company) had everybody laughing when he recounted his beginnings as a bumbling baker in Massachusetts but held the audience's rapt attention when he read an excerpt from The Nature and Art of Workmanship by David Pye: the author distinguishes between the workmanship of certainty and the workmanship of risk. For Hamelman, bakers (and farmers) are very involved in the workmanship of risk. The concept is central to how they organize their life since they can't possibly make identical products time after time. Yet they perform fundamental work for society by providing its nutritional foundation. They are public servants (although not in the same sense as the ones in Washington).

Quoting Pablo Neruda's Nobel lecture, Hamelman concluded: "I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind's products: bread, truth, wine, dreams."

Like the original Kneading Conference held every summer in Maine, the Kneading Conference West constituted one more step towards changing the conditions in which we live, work and dream. And that, my friends, was its whole purpose.

Larry's Buckwheat Batons

2011-09-09T12:37:00.063-07:00

Related post: Meet the Baker: Larry Lowary

A few years ago, as I was visiting my Mom in Paris in her retirement home not far from the Eiffel Tower, I decided to take advantage of the fact she had to leave for her physical therapy session to go and check out the nearest Eric Kayser bakery. I had read a lot about Kayser and his bread on the Internet but hadn't actually seen any of his bakeries. I knew he had one in the 15th arrondissement.

I set out at a brisk pace and 15 minutes later arrived 79 rue du Commerce. The store was sleek and elegant (for an idea of what it looks like, click on "Where are we?" on Maison Kayser's website, then on "Paris"). The salespersons were a bit harried since it was around lunch time and it didn't look like they would be available to chat, so I took a quick look at the breads (which were all gorgeous) and asked for a "baguette Paline" (which I knew to be a buckwheat bread).

(I don't know why Kayser named this bread Paline but, in case you are wondering, he certainly didn't do it after the former governor of Alaska. His buckwheat bread came into being way before Ms. Palin found her way into mainstream American - not to mention French - consciousness.)

I paid and two minutes later I was back on the sidewalk with, under my arm, a dark brown baguette sticking out of a paper bag. Being pretty hungry I broke off a piece and bit into it. Instant disappointment... The crust was not crunchy enough, the crumb greyish and too tight. I love buckwheat, having been raised on the buckwheat "galettes" (i.e. savory crêpes) with which my paternal grandmother - who was from the Southwest of France - always accompanied her divine rabbit or hare stews but the Paline triggered no Proustian memory. It tasted dull. I was crushed. So much for buckwheat bread if even a master baker couldn't produce a tastier loaf...

Now I had read good things about Kayser's Paline, so my disappointment may have stemmed from the combined facts that I had high expectations and that I tried it on a bad day. I will check it again next time I go to France (which sadly is less often now that my Mom passed away) and report back .

Anyway, fast forward to the first time I saw Tree-Top Baking's spread at the Bayview's Farmers' Market on Whidbey Island, Washington. There, among scores of baguettes, rye loaves, levain miches, challahs, etc. I caught sight of luscious batards sporting a burnished look. Getting closer, I read the labels: Buckwheat Batons!

I bought one and was charmed. The crust crackled. The crumb was on the dark side but open and the taste delicate: earthy but not overly so, showcasing the flavor of the buckwheat but also the complex aromas of the levain. I was hooked! That baton was everything I had hoped a Paline would be. Whidbey residents clearly share my enthusiasm. Larry bakes these loaves every week and they always sell out.

Of course I asked for the recipe and that's how I learned it was actually based on a Kayser formula as demonstrated to Larry by Boris Villatte, a hugely talented young French baker he had met at SFBI. Villatte had worked for Kayser for many years and helped open several Maison Kayser bakeries around the world.

Kayser has published several of his recipes, including in his book 100% pain: La saga du pain enveloppée de 60 recettes croustillantes (summarily translated, the title means: "100% bread. The saga of bread, wrapped in 60 crusty recipes".) I don't own it and have no access to it but the author of La Table de Mamou, a French blog, says she has successfully baked several recipes from 100% pain, including baguette Paline. I checked Kayser's recipe as posted on her blog and noticed that it differed considerably from Boris': among other things, it called for much more buckwheat. Interestingly while Mamou writes that she liked the taste, she also says that the crumb was too tight and that the next time she would use less buckwheat. In his book Local Breads, Daniel Leader gives another recipe for the Paline and he too uses less buckwheat (although he calls for buckwheat levain). The recipe below is the one which Boris has shared with Larry.

You will note that it flies in the face of everything we have been taught about gently mixing the dough and promoting good fermentation by maintaining it at warmish room temperature. Here the dough gets literally whipped around in the mixer at the highest possible speed until it comes together and then it is shocked into the fridge until ready to bring to room temperature, divide and shape.

The first time I made the batons, it was a total failure. I thought it was because I had used all-purpose flour while Larry uses bread flour (which contains more gluten). But that wasn't the reason: I have made it several times since with all-purpose flour and consistently gotten excellent results.

No, the sad truth is that this dough is a masochist. The first time I hadn't dared yield to my inner sadist and beat it enough. So it just sat there and did absolutely nothing. I had to throw it away. I went back to Whidbey and Larry showed me how to punish it into action (see first part of the video below). Now I get it right every time.

Once you get the whipping part, this dough is easy to make and very flexible. It adapts readily to your schedule (how often can you say that with bread?). You can autolyse all day or all night in the fridge and mix in early morning. Or you can have a 45 minute autolyse and go right on to mixing. You can mix the dough and refrigerate it for as little as a couple of hours and then bring it back to room temp before dividing, or you can leave it in the fridge all day or overnight. I have done all of this with equal success. As Larry says, you don't necessarily get exactly the same bread but it's always good.

Ingredients (for 4 batons)

940 g unbleached all-purpose flour
60 g buckwheat flour (I milled buckwheat groats for this but store-bought buckwheat flour works fine)
800 g water
25 g salt
2 g instant yeast
120 g mature levain (hydration: 100%)

Method (requires a stand mixer):

TIP: Didier Rosada says in Breadlines vol. 19 no.2 that if using a vertical mixer or a mixer without a bowl-reverse option, to avoid having flour stuck in the bottom of the bowl without being incorporated into the dough it is a good idea to add half of the water first, then all of the flour, then the rest of the water as needed to achieve the desired dough consistency. I tried it and it worked to perfection. No more scraping the sides of the bowl for me!

Mix water and flours until combined (see tip above). Refrigerate 45 minutes to one hour (Larry says he has successfully autolysed the dough anywhere from 5 to 9 hours)
Take the dough out of the refrigerator, add levain, salt and yeast , starting slowly but moving quickly to high speed (using first the paddle, then the hook) until the dough comes together away from the sides of the bowl (see above video). When ready, the dough must be tacky but not sticky. Desired dough temperature is 75-77°F/24-25°C
Transfer the dough to an oiled container and put it back in the refrigerator for 9 to 12 hours
Take it out and bring it to room temperature (Larry puts it in the proofbox for 2 to 3 hours)
Divide at around 500 g, pre-shape as a cylinder, shape as a baguette taking care to leave a lip of dough along the loaf (see above video)
Flatten this lip using the flat of your hand, then flap it over the bread
Proof the loaves, flap down, on a heavily floured couche for 45 minutes to one hour
While the bread is proofing, pre-heat the oven to 470°F/243°C after placing in it a baking stone (on middle shelf) and a metal oven dish (on the lowest shelf)
Bake for 10 minutes at 470° F/243° C (with steam) , then lower the oven temperature to 450°F/232° C and bake another 20 minutes
Cool on a rack.

Printable recipe

Larry's Buckwheat Batons go to Susan from Wild Yeast for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Related post: Meet the Baker: Larry Lowary

Meet the Baker: Larry Lowary

2011-08-29T11:58:00.045-07:00

As his partner Gerry Betz likes to remind him (rather teasingly and usually in the middle of the busiest pre-market nights when sleep is in short supply), Larry Lowary is a man who is living his dream.

A journalist by trade (he is a graduate of the prestigious Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri), he came rather late to baking despite the fact that his grandfather was a baker. Growing up in Chicago, he spent a big part of his childhood in and around bakeries and even though he loved journalism to the point of once acquiring and running his own newspaper (The Big Timber Pioneer) in the town of Big Timber, Montana, ultimately when his passion for reporting started to subside and he began looking for a profession that would bring him back to the basics and allow him to actually make a product that people would come and buy, he saw himself at work in his own bakery baking bread.

Today the dream has come true. So much so that life is a bit hectic during the baking months of the year. But that's in part because Larry brings to his new profession the same curiosity that drove him to the old one: he is constantly on the lookout for new tastes, new techniques, new recipes, new master bakers.

Endearingly, like many bakers I have met and despite years of experience, Larry doesn't think he knows best: every day brings opportunities for learning, whereas from books (he has all the books I covet and more), from baking classes and fellow students (as I could see first hand when I met him at a San Francisco Baking Institute weeklong workshop) or from tasting trips (what he and Gerry call "tasty travels"). The result is that he is never bored (except by repetitive tasks that no longer offer a challenge) and, more importantly, neither are his customers who flock to the Saturday Bayview Farmers' Market where he and Gerry have been selling their baked goods from May to October since 2007. Larry bakes the bread and Gerry makes the cakes (he's a pastry chef).

Now how did Larry get from Big Timber, Montana to Whidbey Island, Washington? Well, by the time he decided to become a baker, he was working in Oakland, California. He took his training at the Dunwoody Industrial Institute in Minneapolis, then a trading school for bakers underwritten by General Mills, today Dunwoody College of Technology. As luck would have it, Gerry, a native Californian, had trained at the same school, albeit years before. A baking convention coincided with a class reunion. They met. After a stint working together for a German baker in San Francisco, they hit the road in the best American tradition and explored their options. The trip took them from California to the Southwest then back north to the Midwest and finally to Seattle where they settled and worked for several years as bakery managers in an upscale family-operated grocery store. At one point, they bought what they thought would be a weekend house on Whidbey Island and started spending their free time there.

But the lure of island life proved irresistible. After some extensive and much necessary remodeling, they moved in. They had a building built on the property. A couple of years later, an oven was put in and they started to bake for the market. The rest is history.

Now I said Larry was living his dream. But did I mention that he does so in a place that many bakers can only dream of? For those of you who live a world away or are just unfamiliar with the Puget Sound area, let me take you on a short trip: coming from Seattle, the shortest way to get to Whidbey is on a ferry.

Leaving on the ferry from Mukilteo Sailing towards Whidbey Island

A short crossing and a maze of tree-lined country roads later...

...you are at Tree-Top Baking.

First go in and visit the bakery , then check out its website. Like me, you'll probably be amazed at the impressive array of baked goods Larry and Gerry manage to produce each week in such a small space.

Last time I was there they were recuperating from a market day where they had sold most of the 728 items they had brought with them, including more than 200 loaves of bread: Bayview baguettes, seeded baguettes, herb pain rustique, challah, white chocolate orange viennois, five-seed multigrain, Genzano bread, flaxseed rye, cracked wheat sourdough, buckwheat baton, barbecue buns, etc. (see complete list).

As we all know, baking is hard work involving long hours, short nights and back-breaking chores. Artisan bakers are usually not in it for the money. Larry and Gerry are no exceptions. In-between market days and during the winter months, they take in orders for various private customers, coffee-shops and restaurants. They deliver each week a large number of muffins, scones and cookies and other pastries as well as the occasional festive cupcake, not to mention wedding cakes. Sometimes they get tired. They'd like to be able to go away more, to have a more normal life but as Gerry put it, if we stop doing it, then these families and businesses would have no choice but to opt for buying, freezing and reheating warehouse baking products. They see their work as contributing to the quality of life on the island. I couldn't agree more. I like bakers with a social conscience...

Now I have tasted many of Larry's breads and fell in love with more than one, including his sprouted wheat or spelt breads which are to die for. But the one I would like to showcase this time is his intriguing Buckwheat Baton.

Making croissants and other delightful viennoiseries

2011-08-14T06:16:00.004-07:00

I want to make it clear that I am not the author of this video. I found it on YouTube through a posting on the Bread Bakers Guild of America forum (a fantastic resource by the way) and as I greatly enjoyed watching it (even though I don't think laminated dough is in my future), I thought you might too.

Made in Quebec: from wheat to bread

2011-08-11T12:07:00.058-07:00

Fragment of a mural on the outerwall of Première Moisson

in the Mont-Royal area of Montreal

Just came back from a few days in Montreal with lots of good memories (including of a mad dash through rain-peltered streets to the sheltered terrace of a café on Place Jacques-Cartier where we sat next to a cheerful bilingual beer-guzzling street entertainer in a black kilt and dreadlocks), half-a-shelf worth of used books (as if I needed the extra weight for the flight home next week but where to get novels by Michel Tremblay or Félix Leclerc in the Pacific Northwest?) and a bagful of bread - well, just four loaves really - as well as two "chocolatines aux amandes" (almond chocolate croissants) which were to die for.

Chocolatine aux amandes

The chocolatines (which we first sampled when visiting Première Moisson Bakery at Atwater market) were so good that I knew I had to go back and buy some bread, especially because I was curious about the bakery anyway. I had first heard of it in August 2010 when I went to the Montérégie area of Quebec, west of Montreal, to meet with Robert Beauchemin, owner of La Meunerie Milanaise.

Photo © La Milanaise, used with R. Beauchemin's permission

Beauchemin, who with his wife Lily Vallières has been producing organic cereal grain on his farm since the late 70's, had a mill built on his property in 1982 because no mills were available to him which would stone-grind his grain and he felt stone-milling was a trade which was slowly disappearing. He was determined to reverse the trend. He soon discovered that there was much more to milling than knowing how to keep the stones sharp and that the milling process itself had a tremendous impact on the finished product. With the help and support of Agriculture Canada, he was able to hire research staff at the end of the 90's to analyze this process. Initially scheduled to last two months, the study actually lasted two years as the team discovered more and more layers of complexity, once all of the physical characteristics of a given variety of wheat were taken into account. (For more on the history of La Milanaise, check out this page of its website).

Beauchemin also told me that La Milanaise only mills organic grain and that he had joined hands in 2007 with the owners of Première Moisson Bakery (literal translation: First Harvest) to found another mill, Les Moulins de Soulanges with the goal to develop specialty flours tailor-made to the needs of Quebec artisan bakers. These flours wouldn't be organic but they would be made without any chemical additions or manipulations.

He recounted how, as late as in 1999, La Milanaise was still buying 85% of its wheat from the Canadian West as it was widely believed that no quality wheat could be grown in Quebec. A variety of wheat was considered good for baking purposes when its flour readily absorbed water and produced a bread with hardly any crust and a finely honey-combed crumb, in other words the perfect sandwich bread. The wide plains of Western Canada produced 100% spring wheat which yielded the ideal flour for such bread.

But towards the end of the 90's, the move towards artisanal bread was starting to take hold in Quebec. Scores of bakers were arriving from France and having a excruciatingly hard time producing French breads with the strong flours (14% protein) which were the only ones then available to them. A demand thus emerged for a type of wheat that was of no interest to the Western farmers. Time had come to revisit the principles of wheat production in Quebec. Beauchemin who is a mechanical engineer and holds a Master's Degree in mathematics, was convinced that science was the answer: the influence of genetics and climate needed to be thoroughly analyzed and tested. With strong government support, he hired two full-time agronomists whose job it was (and still is) to establish a concordance between what could be observed at the mill and at the bakery and what was going on in the fields.

Thanks to these efforts and others and to forward-looking government subventions, Quebec is now producing more and more winter wheat whose aromas are much more complex than those of spring wheat: "After a few years of researches, we have now identified certain varieties of wheat grown in Québec that have interesting potential for speciality flours and bakery. Moreover, we observed that some characteristics of wheat grown in Québec make them even more interesting than other varieties grown in the Canadian West." (quotation from La Milanaise website)

Les Moulins de Soulanges is currently working with six to eight varieties of wheat, some selected for their strength, some for the flexibility they bring to the dough and others for the characteristics of the bread they yield - color, aroma, crust texture (a full-time baker is also on staff). All the flours it produces result from a blend of grains in varying proportions according to the desired results. All agricultural machinery used by the farmers who work with Les Moulins is equipped with a chip that constantly analyzes data during sowing, hoeing, fertilizing and harvesting. That chip makes it possibly to determine the quality of the protein in each part of each field so that overfertilizing is never an issue. Every element is measured and controlled at every stage. The origin of each grain delivery can be pinpointed not only to the individual farm but almost to the individual furrow. Blends are made on the basis of the percentage of gluten (which is not necessarily the same as the percentage of protein) and the aptitude of the flour to produce the desired dough characteristics.

What's more, by managing changes in wheat characteristics, it is now possible to develop a wide range of aromas from floral to coffee. The baker can choose the ones that will become his or signature once he/she applies to the flour his or her knowledge of the fermentation process by varying acidity and temperatures levels. He/she can pick different blends for different breads. I don't know about you but I find the concept of picking aromas à la carte totally mind-blowing. Like a dream come true...

Quebec doesn't yet produce enough organic wheat to satisfy demand. But with the support of the Canadian government, it has implemented a successful sustainable agriculture program which makes it possible for a big artisan bakery such as Première Moisson to use exclusively wheat grown in Quebec without the use of pesticides.

A rustic setting for Les Moulins

Knowing all this and having the good fortune of spending three days in Montreal earlier this week, I was curious to see Première Moisson. A family store, it was founded in 1992 and now has multiple locations in the Montreal and Quebec City areas. I only saw three of them, the above-mentioned bakery at Atwater market, the one at the Jean-Talon Market and the one in the Mont-Royal area of Montreal (where I photographed the mural). But in all of them the displayed motto was the same: "L'art du vrai !", translated by Première Moisson as "Truly authentic!"

First off, the wheat-colored stores are bright, airy and spacious. Then there is bread (or pictures of bread) literally everywhere (I am only focusing on bread but the bakery offers much more including various pastries and a "charcuterie" section supervised by an artisan master charcutier from France who uses meat from animals raised in Quebec under a "clean label"). The pictures I took in the store are not very good. But they'll give you an idea of the atmosphere of the place and the kind of bread to be found there.

The breads we took home were actually quite tasty, except for the olive sourdough loaf which was rather bland, way blander as a matter of fact than an olive bread has the right to be in spite of the description in the in-store brochure which promised: "for a fleeting moment, you'll be transported to the Italian countryside!". The olives had no flavor and I couldn't taste the olive oil. Oh, well! Maybe it was a bad day for olives. The crumb was beautiful though... The organic sprouted grains and the sourdough walnut were both very good.

Olive Sourdough

Organic Sprouted Grains

Walnut Sourdough

But the raisin, honey and hazelnut sourdough was spectacular, with perfectly roasted hazelnuts and a complex honey flavor.

Première Moisson's raisin, honey & hazelnut sourdough bread

So will I go back to try and sample some more next time we go to Montreal? Sure. There is a lot more to explore at the bakery and I am looking forward to new discoveries. But then I may also want to talk to Josée Fiset who founded Première Moisson with her mother and her two brothers close to 20 years ago. She came out in 2006 with a book, Bread, which I couldn't resist buying to learn more about the bakery's bread philosophy (well, I actually bought the French version, Pain, but the contents are probably identical). In any case as I was reading through the introduction, I was shocked to discover that Fiset believed (and had confirmed by a baker colleague in France) that the possibility of making good artisan bread at home was an utopia as could only be made at home breads which required no steam, no levain and no kneading skills!

I personally know several professional bakers who would firmly disagree with her, including Anis Bouabsa who was recognized as Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Artisan Baker in France) in 2004 and whose baguette won the label of best baguette in Paris in 2008. Anis actually told me when I saw him at Europain in 2008 that he was very impressed by the work of home bakers and he certainly wasn't above passionately discussing levain techniques with me. I can only think that Fiset is too busy running the bakery to keep up with the serious home baker movement. Hopefully the few links I am planning to send her will help convince her that things have changed!

Sourdough Corn and Spelt Rolls

2011-07-26T04:23:00.027-07:00

I love corn and I love spelt and thanks to my wonderful island neighbor, Kristi (who schlepped bagfuls of grains up to the little house on the big river where we have been spending the summer for the last 25 years), I have spelt galore to mill. So when I read Dan Lepard's original recipe in the Guardian, I knew these rolls would appear on our table.

They offered the added benefit of baking rather quickly which is an important consideration when the temperature is hovering around 90° F/32° C. But given the surplus of levain (both firm and liquid) which I need to deal with everyday, I decided not to use yeast as he does and to go for liquid levain instead.

Also Lepard calls for strong flour which designates high-protein flour in the UK. I didn't have any on hand as I always use all-purpose. Since corn has no gluten and spelt much less than wheat, I decided to add a little bit of gluten flour.

Finally I used maple syrup instead of honey because the honey we have here has spent winter on the island and is still a bit crystallized, so it would have been harder to mix in).

The rolls came out a little moist (even though their internal temperature was 210° F/99° C, so they were fully cooked) and wonderfully flavorful. They were a snap to make with nothing else than a bowl and my bare hands and I will definitely make them again. The kids loved them!

Ingredients:

75 g cornmeal or polenta

200 g boiling water

225 g cold water (I adjusted the original water amount to make up for the water in the levain)

20 g maple syrup

150 g levain (liquid starter at 100% hydration rate)

300 g whole spelt flour (I milled the grains right before starting on the dough)

125 g all-purpose flour

20 g gluten flour

11 g salt

Oil and flour, as needed

Method:

Please refer to the original recipe.

The sourdough corn and spelt rolls go to Susan's goes to Susan's Wild Yeast Blog for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Sourdough granola bars

2011-06-30T17:01:00.015-07:00

...or should I say "Granola Bars à la Susan"? Because it is on Susan's blog, Wild Yeast, that I got the awesome, fantastic, super clever idea of using leftover 100% hydration levain to make granola bars! It simply had never occurred to me before. Here is Susan's original post.

Like her and like most bakers I know, I just hate pouring starter down the drain (or in the compost bin). It smells yummy, it's all set to get to work rising amber waves of crusty bread, so why, oh! why must I throw it out?

But of course I understand that if I kept feeding it the amounts of flour and water it needs to continue to thrive, I would soon have enough levain to fill a swimming pool and then where would I be? So yes, I do throw some out more often than not but when I happen upon a great way to do otherwise, I just jump on it, and yesterday morning when I read Susan's post (it dates back to the end of May but I was traveling then and it had escaped my attention), I quickly took stock of what I had on hand and went to work.

Since I didn't have all of the ingredients that Susan used, I substituted a few things: almond butter instead of peanut butter, maple syrup instead of honey, dried blueberries instead of golden raisins, dried apricot instead of dried cranberries and almonds instead of walnuts. I put in ginger as suggested in one of the comments to her post but, mindful of the calories, I used a bit less less pumpkin seeds and I halved the amount of sweetener. However, keeping in mind that my family has more of a sweet tooth than I do, I put some brown sugar on top to even things out a bit. Also, since Susan found her bars a bit too thin, I used more levain than she did and I baked mine in a biscotti pan.

Ingredients

285 g 100% hydration levain (sourdough starter)

100 g smooth unsalted almond butter

100 g rolled oats

75 g dried blueberries

75 g dried apricots, chopped

50 g maple syrup

50 g pumpkin seeds

50 g almonds, coarsely chopped

50 g pecans, coarsely chopped

15 g candied ginger, finely chopped (this could easily be doubled as the taste of ginger was rather faint)

6 g salt

brown sugar to taste (as a topping)

Method

I followed Susan's instructions except that I toasted the pumpkin seeds, pecans and almonds at 350° F in the oven prior to chopping them and that I baked the mixture for 30 minutes instead of 20 since it was thicker.

Back home...for now!

2011-06-15T15:53:00.023-07:00

Back home after a long visit overseas and itching to finally get back to baking after a 6-month hiatus, I took out the levain nuggets I had made in the fall to jumpstart the rebirth of my starter. (To make these nuggets, I cut up my 60% hydration starter in small pieces, let them air dry until completely dessicated and then store them in an airtight container). The whole process is normally a no-brainer: I cover two or three nuggets with water, let them sit for a while, add flour, mix and let rest, feed again, etc., until the thing come back to life. It usually takes between 36 and 48 hours.

Well, this time, it didn't go as planned. The first batch of nuggets (luckily I had made three) had become infested with tiny black insects. All the bugs were dead (I guess levain bacteria are not what these beasties are supposed to snack on) but the nuggets were history.

As to the second batch, it didn't even have a chance to show its mettle. Since the house was pretty cold (I know, everybody is sweltering across America but I assure you, in the Northwest, we have natural air-conditioning and my house is nowhere close to overheating). So anyway it was barely 60°F in the kitchen and since I am now the proud owner of a warming drawer (something I had never seen or used before), I figured I would set the warmer at the lowest temperature and put the levain inside. I guess I should have read the manual before I entrusted my baby to this thing as it does get awfully hot, much more than I thought! To make a long story short when I checked on the levain an hour later, it was resting placidly where I had left it and when I opened the lid, it exhaled a doughy sigh that bore no trace of the wild aromas I am so crazy about!

Out came the last surviving nuggets. Needless to say, I was extremely careful with them. I treated them to a steady diet of high-extraction wheat flour and freshly milled rye and after 24 hours of what I assume was deep reflection on their part, they finally came back to life. When they woke up, they showed such vigor that within 48 hours, I was able able to bake, which was good since we have family coming to visit next week and I needed to replenish the freezer...

While all this was going on I was so frustrated that I decided to go back to an old workhorse, Jim Lahey's no-knead bread of New York Times and Internet fame, and give it another try, except that this time I used the same proportion of whole grain (a mixture of wheat, spelt and rye) as in my staple dough (the one I use for the rustic batard). This dough has a depth-of-flavor which we have grown addicted to and I wanted to see for myself how much was due to the freshly milled grains and how much to the levain.

Well, now I know. The yeast-based miche (made with a dough that had fermented 24 hours after the initial mix) turned out just fine but the aromas were muted, barely perceptible. Nothing like the fragrant music we have grown accustomed to. I am not bashing yeasted dough: I love tasty baguettes and other prefermented breads way too much for that. I am just saying that this 24-hour bread came in very handy (it made great breakfast toasts) but that it wasn't the same, which means that I will happily remain on levain duty for the foreseeable future.

Buckwheat Crackers

2011-05-16T09:27:00.016-07:00

Finally (almost) back! We have been without a home to really call our own for the past six months. We spent most of that time at our youngest son's house. We are immensely grateful to him and his wife for putting up with us while renovation work was going on in our new house. It made it possible to close the door and leave the mess behind at the end of each day, which was a great comfort as the amount of things that needed to be done was overwhelming at times, especially when the Man started painting against the clock so that the furniture could go against the walls and unpacking could begin. He said he never imagined retirement could be so exhausting.
To make a long story short, it's not over yet but the house is slowly turning into a home, so much so that we finally moved in last week and I was able to start baking again. For lack of time I didn't get to experiment with any new formula (that will come later when we come back from visiting the Man's parents in Belgium) but I was able to make a couple of batches of our staple bread, the Rustic Batard, and it was just heavenly to breathe in again the fragrance of baking bread.
I also made some whole grain crackers and before flying out to Europe (and putting Farine on hold again for a few weeks), I thought I would report on these as they are wholesome and quite easy to make. I used my new Kitchen Aid (my very first ever) and its pasta attachment to roll out the dough (what fun to create these long ribbons) but it can be done by hand with a rolling pin. Martha Rose Shulman recently wrote an article on whole grain cracker recipes for the New York Times. I tried the olive oil ones (some with grated Parmiggiano, some with za'atar, some with nigella seeds and some with sumac). They were quite good (although they could have used more salt) but our favorites were the Buckwheat Crackers. Lacking sesame seeds, I used chia seeds which I had on hand.

To Farine's readers who are familiar with the "galettes au sarrasin" (savory buckwheat crepes) made in Brittany and found in crêperies (crêpe restaurants) throughout France, I will tell this: if you try these crackers, you are in for a lovely Proustian moment...
I used buckwheat flour (bought in bulk already milled) and hard red winter wheat (which I milled just before mixing the dough). I didn't use any all-purpose flour. The crackers came out crunchy but tender.

My daddy is a baker!

2011-03-13T06:04:00.006-07:00

A miniclip promoting the baking profession produced by Supamonks Studio in Arcueil, France. A bit misleading (no baker I know uses a rolling pin to shape a boule) but fun and very French (see the whiskered guy dipping his hand in his morning "café au lait" for lack of a "tartine")...

How to properly score a baguette...

2011-03-04T11:10:00.002-08:00

...by Ciril Hitz. Many thanks to Ciril for making this useful video available to all of us!

The Wonders of Brioche: Leslie Mackie's Kugelhopf

2011-02-10T16:37:00.090-08:00

The Wonders of Brioche is the title of the BBGA-sponsored class I recently took at Macrina Bakery in Seattle, Washington. It was taught by Leslie Mackie, founder of the bakery and author of the popular Macrina Bakery & Café Cookbook.

Before I took the class, I thought of a brioche as a soft and buttery little bread with a funny hat like the ones I grew up seeing in every Parisian bakery and that pretty much summed up all I knew or wished to know on the subject. Butter and sugar are two ingredients I try to avoid in my baking, mostly for health reasons, so I never gave brioche much thought.

But the class flyer described brioche as "one of the most versatile doughs", one which could be used to make roasted vegetables savory bread pudding, sandwich bialys and kugelhopfs, to name a few possibilities, and that new take on an age-old dough piqued my interest. Plus I had wanted to meet Leslie and discover Macrina ever since Bon Appétit ranked it among the 10 best bakeries in the US. More importantly still, I couldn't pass up a BBGA baking event in my own backyard (we are in the process of moving to the Seattle area). So I took the class.

I didn't regret it. Not only is Leslie a skilled and gracious instructor but I met passionate bread people from all over: Debbie who recently opened a bakery in North Carolina with her two daughters; Tom, a retired computer consultant who moved to the West Coast of Mexico after 30 years in New York and plans to open a little bakery there; Nieva who would like to retire one day to her native Philippines and open her own bakery in her hometown; Bob, a serious homebaker who built himself a wood-fire oven on his patio on nearby Bainbridge Island; Diane, a community developer who lives on a farm near Victoria, B.C., raises goats, makes her own cheese and bakes up a storm every week; Marina, an inspired young head baker from Minnesota who is looking to expand her product line; Julie, who lives in Southern Washington and with whom I took a weekend tart baking class at SFBI last year, among many others.

We made two doughs, one sweet and one savory or rather, Leslie demoed the mixing of the savory dough and we mixed the other one. I was surprised to see her add sugar to the savory dough (which we were going to use to make bialys and bread pudding). When I asked her about it, she said it just wouldn't be brioche without it, so while she reduced the amount of sugar, she still put some in.

I then asked about possibly reducing the amount of butter or substituting some wholegrain flour for a percentage of the white flour and got the same answer. It just wouldn't be brioche. See? There is no Santa Claus after all... But Leslie encouraged me to go ahead and try anyway and see if what I like what I get. Maybe I would find the trade-off worthwhile. So sooner or later I will indeed give it a shot.

Leslie's baking style reflects her lifelong interest in flavor-building, a devotion she attributes partly to her mom whose idea of spring break was to take her daughters to San Francisco (the family lived in Portland, Oregon) on whirlwind gourmet-eating expeditions.

After graduating from the California Culinary Academy, Leslie lived in Los Angeles at the time when Nancy Silverton was experimenting with bread. As she puts it, "it lit a fire." She went to baking school in France at Aurillac, toured artisan bakeries in Italy where she ate her way through more than a hundred loaves, soaking up traditional flavors and techniques, and by the time she was done, the fire had taken hold of her for good. She came back resolved to open her own bakery one day. She trained for a month in Seattle with Tomas Solis at Grand Central Bakery where she was then hired as a head baker and where she worked for four years before finally realizing her dream. Everything else she knows, she says she learned through trial and error and through her association with BBGA.

A firm believer in the value of the intuitive process, she loves to experiment and now that she has brought in partners into the business she started 17 years ago, she can spend most of her days thinking up new recipes or experimenting with innovative takes on older ones.

Her bialys for instance look and taste like no other bialys I had ever seen or eaten. They are airy and soft and make a terrific sandwich (although I could do without the slightly sweet taste): watching Leslie build a fried egg sandwich on an onion-poppyseed bialy is a treat in itself. No wonder her customers descend upon these breakfast sandwiches like locusts upon a field of tender shoots: she orchestrates the flavors like a maestra.

But of all the things we made during the class, the kugelhopf was my favorite. Now I am not an expert on kugelhopf and I am sure excellent ones are to be found elsewhere. But to be frank, on a scale of 1 to 10, I am usually sorely tempted to give a score of 3 or 4 to the ones offered for sale in French bakeries, particularly in the Alsace where they lurk in every shopwindow. They are all too often dry with a sandy crumb. Before I took the class, the only attraction they held for me was the beautiful molds they are traditionally baked in.

However Leslie doesn't bake her kugelhopf in a traditional mold. She uses a Bundt pan. Also, she doesn't just put the dough in the pan. She first laminates it with extra butter, then she rolls it up in a tube, somehow attaches the two ends together to form a ring and transfers the whole thing to the pan where it is allowed to rise seam-side up in a voluptuous pillowy circle.

Her kugelhopfs are light and delicious. They taste like no other kugelhopf I have ever had but hey, that's the whole point... They are fantastic. Because of their high butter/high sugar content, they won't become a staple in our house but I suspect they'll appear on our holiday tables from now on. They are just too good to pass up...

Leslie doesn't use baker percentages and she doesn't do grams (her book uses cups and tablespoons, probably because it mostly targets homebakers). At the bakery she works with pounds and fractions of pounds. But she took pity on us and gave us the formula for her brioche dough.

Macrina Sweet Brioche Dough

(please note that this dough is best mixed in a mixer)

All-purpose flour, unbleached 100 %

Milk, at room temperature 51.85 %

Eggs 22.22 %

Sugar 13.85 %

Butter, at room temperature 22.22 %

Salt 1.41 %

Instant Yeast 0.67 %

Vanilla Extract 2.59 %

Total 214.81 %

Method

Mix milk and yeast and let rest a few minutes
Pour flour, salt, vanilla and eggs in mixer
Mix 4 to 5 minutes on 1st speed, adding butter in small pieces while the mixer is running and after flour and milk have been incorporated
Switch to 3rd speed and mix for 5 minutes, gently shaking in the sugar
Continue mixing another 5 minutes on 3rd speed (desired dough temperature after mixing: 78°F/26°C)
Transfer to covered oiled container and set aside for 2 hours (fermentation)

Ingredients (for 3 kugelhopfs)

Filling

500 g brown sugar
170 g chopped walnuts
10 g cinnamon
10 g cocoa powder
140 g unsalted butter, melted
10 g vanilla

Dough

1.88 kg sweet brioche dough
330 g unsalted butter

Method

Mix all ingredients together, set aside
Flatten/degass the dough
Spread the softened butter over 2/3 of the dough
Do a triple fold and roll out the dough
Let is rest for 30 minutes, covered with plastic in a walk-in cooler or in the refrigerator
Roll out the dough to 1/2 inch-thick, spread filling over the dough
Roll up like a cinnamon roll. Divide into 3 equal pieces
Place in buttered bundt pan baking molds, seam-side up
Let proof at room temperature for 1 hour, then put in the walk-in or in the refrigerator overnight
The day after, bring out to room temperature for 2-3 hours or until nicely proofed.
Preheat oven at 300°F/150°C for one hour
Let cool. Invert and brush with butter
Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Be sinful and enjoy!

Macrina's Kugelhopf goes to goes to Susan's goes to Susan's Wild Yeast Blog for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Have you seen this ad video clip for Tartine Bread Book?

2011-01-07T04:58:00.003-08:00

It is beautifully filmed and the love of bread shines through! So even though it is an ad (and, in case you are wondering, no, I am not being paid a penny for posting the video!), I have decided to put it on Farine so that you can have a look if you haven't already.

The original version is to be found here and if you really like it, I would advise to go watch it on Tartine's website as the image will be bigger.

Meet the Baker: Noah Elbers

2011-01-05T07:50:00.002-08:00

Related post: Noah Elbers' Maple-Oatmeal Bread As we were driving home after a visit to Noah's bakery in New Hampshire, I was thinking that if I could have another life and start all over again and be a professional baker, then I would want to start my career at Orchard Hill Breadworks. Not only is it located deep in the woods of New Hampshire which are gorgeous year-round and especially in the fall when we were there (sorry I can't show you more pictures than the ones I took from the car as it rained all the time we were there)...

...but I have never seen such a jolly team of bakers as Noah and his employees. Kurt, one of the full-time workers, was away on a trip but I met the two other permanent members of the team...

...Dave Cody (who used to work with kids with behavorial problems)...

...and Brendan Smith (who started as a home baker when he was working in a consulting firm specializing in renewable energy)...

...as well as Ben Ewing who was replacing Kurt on a temporary basis and who, by trade, is a forester. All three love biking (as does Noah) and I have the feeling that they have no problem finding something to talk about as they work. Dave and Brendan live a mile away on the same road as the bakery. They bike to work most of the time. Every house along the road has a wood stove and they say the air smells delicious as they ride by. They clearly love it here and Noah enjoys the interaction with his employees. A small detail (which I found it endearing): Noah's family has a flock of 50 laying hens and whenever these hens lay, his bakers get free eggs. Now that has nothing to do with baking but it certainly fosters a feeling of belonging...

I am always amazed at and delighted with the diversity of the paths which lead to bread. Noah himself started baking as a teenager when a next-door neighbor built a wood-fire clay oven and recruited him to help make bread. He loved the essential nature of the elements involved, fire and earth, especially in the winter. He enjoyed seeing the dough rise in baskets. He also loved the bread which was excellent. But he didn't see baking as a career. By the time he graduated high school he had pretty much ruled out college and decided to stay home and help his Dad run his farm (he has an apple orchard). The baking neighbor no longer lived next door. They had remained friends however and one day he convinced Noah that he needed to build his own outdoor oven, so that he could bake breads on weekends. The rest is history (or rather a story told here on the bakery's website).

Dave, Brendan and Ben - soon joined by Noah - were shaping the 6-grain bread when I showed up in early morning. As can be seen from the video below, the bakery is a regular beehive:

Noah says he has no illusion about being a master baker. Bread isn't a religion for him and he doesn't live through bread. He likes the idea of leaving space within himself for other interests and hasn't devoted attention to developing a signature bread nearly as much as to trying to make a living for himself, his wife and his two kids. He describes himself as the type of baker who has given a lot of thought to the bread-baking process, tried his best to learn and observe as he went along (he never went for formal training and at the beginning mostly learned from books such as The Bread Builders by Alan Scott as well as from skilled friends) and ends many a shift with a puzzled look on his face. He finds that the complexities of baking are at times well explained by science and at other times simply unexplainable. But he goes with what works for him and obviously cares deeply about the quality of his products.

Most of Noah's breads are naturally leavened except for a couple of sweet breads which benefit from an addition of poolish. He maintains a liquid levain (at 90% hydration) which is fed every 12 hours with a mix of 90% all-purpose flour and 10% freshly cracked rye (he finds that rye adds complexity and takes away some of the more acidic flavors). He uses an old refurbished mixer which is gentle on the dough.

The piece of equipment Noah takes the most delight in is however his oven. Having baked for years, first in an outdoor clay oven (despite the rustic appeal, he certainly doesn't wax nostalgic about the days he had to carry trays of proofed loaves outside in all kinds of weather) then in an Alan Scott brick oven (it could only hold 30 to 40 loaves at a time, and no more than 500 loaves in a day's bake which would take 14 hours to complete), he clearly enjoys his gorgeous Llopis revolving brick oven: it allows him to bake more than 900 loaves in little more than 8 hours.

There are three bake cycles per week (from preferment mixing to bread delivery), each one producing on average 1,000 lbs of dough (total dough production will reach 155,000 lbs this year). Noah is committed to making weekly not only a 100% whole-wheat loaf but also another whole-grain one which changes regularly (rye, Russian rye, whole-spelt with rice, oats and millet, currant rye, etc.) At each bake he also makes a country campagne with 40% whole grain. Although he himself enjoys whole-grain breads, he acknowledges readily that they represent a very small percentage of the total production.

Now for those among you who are passionate bakers and love to delve into the specifics, here is a bit of technical information:

Noah doesn't preshape, ever. He has done a lot of side by side comparison and failed to establish that it made a difference
All his doughs are pretty well hydrated but not superwet (at least 70% for most white doughs and closer to 85% for the whole-wheat), so that they relax quickly
Although most of the white flour he uses (hard red winter wheat) comes from Quebec's La Milanaise, Noah mixes all his preferments with Kansas Heartland Mill flour which, in his experience, seems to have a better tolerance for long fermentation. He regularly uses a blend of 70% Milanaise and 30% Heartland.
For the whole wheat, he uses exclusively La Milanaise flour
He fires up the oven while mixing the bread (which means that the oven isn't fired every day). When baking, by the time the oven floor is completely loaded with bread, the first loaves are finished and fresh loaves are immediately put in their place. The oven is never less than 80% full.
The ceiling of the oven is much higher than in most deck ovens. Due to the high volume of very humid air (coming from the baking loaves), there is no need to add steam
Noah uses poolish (together with levain) to give the dough an extra boost whenever it contains a lot of sweetener or milk

Noah also makes specialty breads: one of the most popular is cracked pepper & parmesan but I never made it up to the bakery on a day when this bread is on. So I can't say how it tastes. But the first time I visited the bakery, Noah had just made maple-oat bread. I bought a couple of loaves and brought them back home. It was love at first bite!

The bread is so good that I decided on the spot that I had to interview Noah for Farine and beg him for the formula. He kindly acceded to both requests and I now have the great pleasure of introducing a marvelous specialty bread: Noah Elbers' Maple-Oatmeal Bread.

Noah Elber's Maple-Oatmeal Bread

2011-01-05T07:48:00.007-08:00

Noah Elbers's Maple-Oatmeal Bread (as sold at the bakery)

Related post: Meet the Baker: Noah Elbers

Since discovering Noah Elbers's Maple-Oatmeal Bread (and before I learned how to make it myself), I have bought maple-oatmeal breads from other bakeries, including in Vermont. I have yet to find one that can compare. I even remember being so put off by one of these other loaves that I cut it into small pieces, took it to the lake and fed it to the ducks (who, having no basis for comparison, seemed to like it way more than we did). It is hard to describe the flavor of Noah's maple-oatmeal bread other than to say that it is barely sweet, supremely delicate and very, very addictive.

Noah Elbers's maple-oatmeal bread (as sold at the bakery)

I watched the making of this bread from the mixing of the dough through the shaping but since it was going to be baked much later (after retarding) and we needed to drive back home, I didn't see the baking.

Here is Noah's formula in baker's percentages:

60% all-purpose flour

20% whole-wheat flour (+ 10% each in starter and in poolish) = 100%

20% cooked steel-cut oatmeal

44% water

2.2% salt

16% pure maple syrup

20% liquid starter

20% poolish (made with a pinch of instant yeast)

All liquids together = 75%

Pointers:

Starter and poolish: 12-hour fermentation at 75°F/24°C
Oatmeal: Scale equal weight of oats and water. Boil the water, pour it over the oats, stir, cover and bake in the oven at a temperature of about 410°F/210°C for 40 minutes. The oats absorb all the water and by the time they are mixed with the maple syrup, they form an "oat chunk" rather than oatmeal. The water used to cook the oats is not included in the total water percentage
Autolyse: 20 to 30 minutes
Desired dough temperature: 77 to 78°F/25 to 26°C
Bulk fermentation: 2.5 hours with 5 folds after 50 minutes and 5 folds again after 40 minutes
No pre-shaping
Scaling: at 24 ounces/680 g
Shaping: as a boule or as an oval
Proofing: 45 minutes on the floor (at least 1 hour at home where the temperature is probably lower) then 14 to 15 hours in the retarder with the cover on
Baking: at 400-415°F/204-213°C for 35-40 minutes with lots of steam at the beginning

The first time I made the bread, I miscalculated the amounts (not surprisingly, since I truly am mathematically challenged) and used way too much water. I tried to rescue the dough but to no avail. It spread so much on the parchment paper that I thought I had totally messed up and would for sure get another treat for the ducks. What I got instead was a weird looking but delicious maple-oatmeal ciabatta which we found particularly enjoyable at breakfast. Before we tasted it, I was so mad at having messed up that I didn't take any pictures but I should have: the bread was rather too dark for a ciabatta and a bit flatter too but the crumb was perfect, delectable and open. I think I will actually make it again...

The second time was at my kids' house in the Northwest. Having no access to baskets of any kind, I shaped the dough as a boule and proofed it directly on a couche. It rose beautifully in the oven and even though it again turned out darker than I would have liked (the oven was way too hot), the taste was almost spot on.

However since I didn't want to end up with a ciabatta again and since I had no proofing baskets, I had reduced the amount of water to make sure the dough wouldn't be too slack. The end result is that I got a tighter crumb than the one I was shooting for.

(By the way, I am sorry for the poor quality of these two pictures. It was very dark out and raining and nowhere in the house could I get enough of the natural light I would have liked to work with.)

Ingredients:

447 g all-purpose unbleached flour
151 g whole-wheat flour
151 g steel-cut oatmeal, cooked as described above
328 g water
151 g liquid starter
151 g poolish
121 g pure maple syrup
16 g salt

Method:

Note 1: The starter has to be fed and the poolish mixed the night before

Note 2: Poolish recipe: 100g flour + 1 pinch of instant yeast + 100g water. Mix well and leave to ferment overnight, preferably at warmish room temperature (above 70°F/21°C if possible)

Note 3: Noah retards this bread for 14 to 15 hours. I didn't do it (there was no room in the refrigerator) and even though the bread still turned out quite tasty, next time I will retard it and see if the flavor becomes even more complex (it should). Also, since I had no access to a mixer, I mixed the dough by hand.

I mixed all the ingredients except the salt in a big bowl and let the dough rest for 30minutes, covered
I mixed everything again to medium soft consistency, covered the bowl (dough temperature by then was 75°F/24°C ) and applied the 5-folds regimen recommended by Noah (see pointers above). Total bulk fermentation time was three hours at room temperature (72°F/22°C)
I skipped pre-shaping, shaped the whole dough as one single boule and let it proof for two hours covered, on cornmeal-dusted parchment paper (I had no semolina), again at room temperature
I pre-heated the oven at 475°F/246°C half-an-hour prior to baking time, after placing an old metal pan at the bottom and a half-sheet on the middle rack (my kids have no baking stone in their oven)
I slid the boule with the parchment paper underneath on the half-sheet, quickly poured one cup of water in the metal pan and closed the door
I immediately lowered the oven temperature to 450°F/232°C and let the bread bake for 25 minutes without opening the door
I then rotated the bread, lowered the oven temperature to 420°F/216°C and continued the baking for another 20 minutes.

As indicated above and obvious from the picture, I started with an oven which was way too hot and I didn't lower the temperature enough afterwards. Oh, well, that's how we learn, isn't it? Noah bakes this bread at 415-425°F/213-218°C and, according to him, even at that lower temperature it colors quickly, much like it would in a hotter oven, maybe because of all the steam coming off the baking loaves or the materials his oven is made of or the heat or a combination of all these factors. Basically the home baker will have to find the temperature that works the best in his/her oven for this bread. But even if it comes out a bit too dark for your taste at first, I bet you will love it!

Noah Elber's Maple-Oatmeal Bread goes to Susan's Wild Yeast Blog for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

2010-12-25T05:20:00.008-08:00

Happy Holidays to All!

Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

2010-12-12T05:18:00.006-08:00

Pear-Chestnut Confit

2010-12-12T05:17:00.002-08:00

Related story: Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

Chestnuts are abundant in the Ardèche where they are used in a variety of dishes, some sweet and some savory, and even in bread. To make this confit, Solange uses chestnuts from her own chestnut-trees.

She also uses pears from her orchard (she only grows Williams pears). The ones she uses in this particular dish are the last of the season and she has saved them for the demo. 2010 hasn't been a great year for pears: last year the pear-trees yielded a huge crop of very big pears but this year, they struggled to produce fewer and much smaller fruit. Still the pears seem marvelously fragrant and juicy to me.

For this recipe, the pears are first peeled...

... then cooked in syrup until they become translucent.

As for the chestnuts, they are cut horizontally in a circle, then boiled briefly to slightly loosen their two layers of skin. Once peeled, they are cooked in boiling water before being added to the pears. Preserved chestnuts in syrup can also be used, whether home-made or store-bought.

Solange uses a special knife to cut through the chestnuts but as demonstrated in the video below, a regular paring knife can also be used.Previously, when she was processing her chestnuts for commercial purposes, she had them peeled in the village by an artisan who uses a less labor-intensive technique: he places the chestnuts inside a rotating cylinder perforated with many small holes and uses a flame-thrower. The flames lick the outside of the cylinder, burning away most of the skins. The chestnuts are next dipped in water then placed on a rolling mat where the remaining skins are removed by hand. The perfect ones can be used whenever a recipe calls for whole chestnuts whereas the other ones are puréed and used in other recipes.

Solange says that it is best to let fresh chestnuts dry out a little as they are easier to peel if they have shrunk a little. Store-bought ones are usually somewhat dry already, so this step can be skipped. Since the skins are easier to remove when the chestnuts are hot, it is almost guaranteed to be a challenging exercise and caution is de rigueur. If one isn't really partial to burned fingers, it is best to use chestnuts preserved in syrup as a less hazardous alternative.

Ingredients:

1 liter of water

400 g crystallized sugar

10 pears

10 big fat chestnuts (or their equivalent in broken pieces)

1 vanilla bean (from Tahiti if available)

Method:

Peel and cook the chestnuts as described above. Solange cautions that the chestnuts need to be peeled while still hot as their skin starts to stick again when they cool down.
Heat water in a medium-size wide and shallow pot (to facilitate evaporation) and add the sugar
Slice open the vanilla bean and scrape the tiny grains into the syrup, then add the two halves of the vanilla bean to the pan
While the syrup is boiling, peel and core the pears and cut them in quarters
Plunge them delicately into the boiling syrup and let them simmer. Refrain from handling them as they cook. To avoid breaking them, do not flip them over
When the pears are translucent, gently add the chestnuts with some of their cooking water and let the syrup thicken again
Pour into jars when done. The confit will keep for a couple of weeks in the fridge. To extend its shelf life, it is imperative to sterilize the jars, a precaution that Solange takes systematically. She places all her jars in a big pot, covers them with cold water, then bring the water to a boil and lets the whole thing boil at 176°F/89°C for 15 minutes. None of her jars has ever spoiled.

Unfortunately my version of iMovie doesn't allow me to add subtitles or I would have done so. But I can at least tell you what Solange is saying in this video clip (and please excuse my use of the French word "translucide" for "translucent" in the spoken dialogue. After two weeks of complete French immersion, I clearly had a hard time switching my aging neurones to English!).

When adding the pears to the syrup, make sure they are completely immersed and let them simmer
When preparing the chestnuts for peeling, cut through both skins all around. It is a bit hard to do but but when cut that way, both skins loosen simultaneously in boiling water.
Using a chestnut knife makes cutting the chestnuts in a circle a bit easier but a regular paring knife can be used as well
It doesn't matter if the cut penetrates the flesh of the chestnut
After peeling, the chestnuts need to be cooked before they can be added to the pears
Add some of the chestnut cooking water to the syrup in the pear pan, so that it can thicken again without caramelizing
It doesn't matter if the chestnuts crumble when added to the pears. In fact if using preserved chestnuts you probably want to break them a bit at this point.

The last two months...

2010-12-07T07:23:00.013-08:00

...have been pretty hectic and haven't offered me much time to bake, let alone blog about it. A week before Halloween, we embarked on a close-to-4-week-long post-retirement jaunt which took us from Amsterdam to Paris via a circuitous route (we hit Geneva, Cannes, Marseille and the Ardèche on the way) and allowed us to visit with family and friends as we never could when we were both working. We started with my in-laws and worked our way down and back up, meeting new friends, discovering along the way cousins whom we didn't even know we had a few months back and tightening up lifelong ties with former neighbors as well as with childhood schoolmates. What a unique and joyful experience! When we finally flew back a week before Thanksgiving, we didn't go home but straight to the Pacific Northwest where we'll be relocating early next year and where we spent the last three weeks trying to put together a budget and a timeline for renovating the house we just bought. We are staying with one of our sons and his family and even though my friends at Tree-Top Baking kindly brought me some of their levain and my daughter-in-law couldn't be more gracious about sharing her kitchen and her oven, the truth of the matter is that it isn't really possible to make artisan bread regularly when you are out and about all the time. All this goes to explain why this blog has been mute since early October. I'll do my best to catch up but more upheavals are in the works: while we are flying back East tomorrow, we'll be hitting the road next week (weather-permitting) to go and spend the holidays in the Midwest with yet another one of our kids and his family. So bread-baking opportunities will alas remain few and far-between for the foreseeable future. In October though, before we left the US, I met with a most interesting and talented young baker whom I'll be blogging about as soon as I can put the story together and in France, I spent 24 hours with a jam-maker extraordinaire who, using the pear and chestnuts from her farm, showed me how to make a delicate "confit' that would be a delicious addition to any holiday table, especially in the company of a buttery brioche. So please stay tuned!

Tartine's Basic Country Bread (baked two ways)

2010-10-20T14:27:00.039-07:00

Baking started in a cold oven

Baking started in a hot oven

We'll be moving to the Pacific Northwest next year, probably sometime in the spring. Considering how costly such a move is bound to be, we have started divesting ourselves of whatever we can bear to part with. Almost first to go, I am sorry to say, have been stacks and stacks of books, some of which had traveled with us from Europe thirty years ago. But it would probably cost more to ship them that to buy them again (although some of them are no longer in print and cannot be replaced)...

Our local library was accepting book donations last Sunday and you should have seen the elderly volunteer's eyes light up when we pulled over with our carload. He hurried away to get a cart and couldn't stack the boxes on it fast enough. I guess he didn't want to give us a chance to change our minds. I felt a twinge of sadness abandoning these old companions but the Man said: "It's okay. There'll be new books..." and I felt some degree of comfort in that thought. Plus I like the idea of our books being adopted by book lovers.

I know there are new books in our future and I do look forward to discovering them. Most of them will probably be stored on our Kindles however as we won't have as much shelf space in our new home and many will actually be old since the Web offers a huge selection of books that have passed out of copyright, books I might never have access to otherwise and that I enjoy tremendously.

But have you tried reading a cookbook on a Kindle, or rather cooking from one? I have and I found it challenging to say the least. So just as I drew the line at giving away any of my cookbooks (I did last time we moved and ended buying some of them again), I still find myself buying bread-books when they catch my attention with their siren-song, which is what happened with Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread. Once I had it in my hands, Chad's conversational tone and the pull of Eric Wolfinger's photographs were too much for me and I bought it even though it will now have to be schlepped cross-country! I just couldn't resist the urge to read it (our library doesn't carry it yet).

Chad advises the home baker to bake Tartine's basic country bread in a dutch oven combo such as this one in order to gain "the two main characteristics of a professional brick oven: a sealed moist chamber and strong radiant heat".

Now I have been baking round loaves in my dutch oven for years and truly love the way the bread comes out. But I was intrigued by the fact that Chad recommends pre-heating both the oven and the dutch oven so that the dough can be turned out into a hot pot. I have had excellent results with cold bakes (setting the dough in a cold dutch oven and putting said dutch oven in a cold oven). I find it much less dangerous to my health to handle a cold cast iron pot than to grapple with a hot one (I confess I am pretty clumsy and I have the scars to prove it).

So I decided to experiment. I made a batch of Chad's basic country dough and I baked one loaf cold and the other one hot. The results are a little bit skewed by the fact that I forgot to put the second loaf in the fridge while the first one was cooking, so that it ended up proofing about one hour longer. The kitchen was cool (65 ° F) however, so it may not have made much of a difference but still, the experiment would have been more meaningful if I could have baked both loaves at the same time in two different ovens, one pre-heated with a dutch oven inside and one stone-cold. Alas, I have but one oven...

As it is, I did get different results: cold-baking gave a higher loaf (3.25 inches vs. 3 inches with hot-baking) and a slightly more open crumb. Of course when you mix enough dough for two loaves, unless you have access to two ovens and two dutch ovens, you will always be in a situation where you'll have to do at least one hot bake. ;-) But why not bake the first one cold? In my experience the dough loves this very slow rise in temperature in a highly humid environment (because of the water present in the dough, there is a lot of steam inside the dutch oven).

Ingredients (for 2 loaves)

700 g + 50 g water @ 80°F/27°C
200 g mature levain (100% hydration) (fed with 50% all-purpose unbleached flour and 50% La Milanaise's sifted flour which is high-extraction and contains some bran. Regular whole-wheat can be substituted maybe with a pinch of dark rye for flavor)
900 g all-purpose unbleached flour
100 g whole-wheat flour (I used freshly milled)
22 g salt (Chad uses 20 g but I adjusted for the flour in the levain)

Method

Note that you can choose to make this dough over two days as a matter of convenience or to get a different flavor if you set the loaves to rise in the fridge overnight or for up to 12 hours.

The dough is hand-mixed in a large bowl but mixing time is kept to a minimum. I won't go into great details as the process is pretty straight-forward but here is what I did.

As recommended by Chad, I started by mixing the levain with 700 g of water (reserving the extra 50 g), then I added the flours and mixed until all the flour was thoroughly hydrated
I let the mixture rest for 40 minutes (autolyse)
Then I added the salt and the reserved water and I did as many folds as necessary (still in the bowl) until the dough was cohesive and reasonably smooth
I transfered it to a lidded plastic container and set it to ferment at 80°F/27°C, using the proofing box the Man put together for me a couple of years ago on the model of this one
I gave it three folds (inside the container) at roughly one-hour intervals and stopped the fermentation after 4 hours
I divided the dough in half, pre-shaped each half in a round, let them relax 10 minutes and shaped them as boules which I set to proof in baskets
Proofing (in a large clear plastic bag) lasted 2 hours and fifty minutes (at room temp but under the kitchen lamp which does provide some heat)
I dusted the top of one loaf with semolina flour and covered it with a sheet of parchment paper. I quickly inverted the basket over the paper and using the sheet of paper as a sling, transferred the boule to my cold dutch oven
I dusted the loaf with flour and scored it in an x pattern, set the lid on the dutch oven and put the whole thing in the cold oven
I set the oven temperature to 470°F/243°C and pressed the start button
I let the loaf bake covered for 45 minutes, then I took it out of the dutch oven (using heavy oven mitts) and, removing the parchment paper, set it directly on the heated baking stone (this stone is a permanent fixture in my oven) and let it bake another 20 minutes at 455°F/235°C, then I took it out of the oven and set it to cool on a rack where it promptly started making wonderful crackling music
Following Chad's instructions, I then pre-heated the oven to 500°F/260°C after putting the by-now barely warm dutch oven inside with the lid on
I then transferred the second loaf to a piece of parchment paper after dusting the top (which quickly became the bottom) with semolina flour and with some trepidation (and heavy oven mitts) removed the now boiling-hot dutch oven from the oven. Again using the paper as a sling I set the loaf inside the pot, dusted it with flour, scored it in a square pattern, closed the lid and set the whole contraption back in the oven
I immediately reduced the oven temperature to 450°F/232°C and let the loaf bake, covered, for 20 minutes. I then removed the lid and let it finish baking in the open dutch oven for 25 minutes. I set it to cool next to the other loaf and it too started to make music pretty soon.

Note that immeditately after, both loaves were registering an internal temperature of 215°F/102°C which indicated that they were fully baked.

Baking started in a cold oven

Baking started in a hot oven

We haven't sliced open the second loaf (which is intended for our daughter's family) but I doubt there will be much of a difference between the two, taste-wise. I do like the taste and texture of Tartine's basic country bread but bread is like love (and as the old French saying goes, love is like Spanish inns: in the old days at least you only found in them what you brought to them. My apologies to Farine's Spanish readers. I have no clue as to whether or not French inns were truly any better than Spanish ones in those days and I certainly don't mean to be insulting. What I do mean to say is that the better the ingredients, the better the bread.

I love the taste of the levain when it isn't entirely white and failing access to La Milanaise's sifted flour you may want to use a bit of rye to give your starter a more interesting flavor. Likewise, for whole wheat flour, I use red hard winter wheat I bought last summer in Vermont from Jack Lazor at Butterworks Farms and I mill it just before mixing. I love its fragrance and its taste. Not everybody has the time or the desire to mill grain before baking but what is true of the grain is true of the flours: some are more flavorful than others. It is a good idea to shop around and try different ones to determine which one brings out the best flavors in your bread. I know for a fact that my bread became much better when I started looking for tastier alternatives to supermarket flours (I still use big brand flours for all-purpose though). So hats off to Chad and his basic country loaf: it does showcase the flavor of the grain and it is pretty easy to make (provided one exercises caution when handling the hot dutch oven). But do start the first loaf in a cold oven. It saves energy and it yields excellent results.

Tartine's basic country bread goes to Susan from Wild Yeast for this week's Yeastspotting.

Team USA Wins First Place at the 2010 Louis Lesaffre Cup

2010-09-30T15:31:00.005-07:00

For more info, check out my baker friends Gerry and Larry's blog, Tree-Top Baking. They were in Vegas and can tell you more than I could about this victory. Hurray for Team USA!