Farine

Crazy for Bread

The Grain Gathering 2014: Pizza Porn

I can’t decide what I like best about wood-fired pizzas: the chewiness of the crust, the layer of melted cheese cushioning each bite, the flavor-imbued toppings, the caramelized edges…

…but I know that Mark Doxtader, owner of Tastebud Farm near Portland, Oregon and master pizza baker at last week’s Grain Gathering, hit all the boxes on my list with whatever pizza came out of his traveling wood-fired oven (not that I actually tasted them all, there were so many different ones that I don’t think anybody could have, but I breathed in their fragrance and I feasted on their rugged good looks and I got a pretty good idea of what they tasted like).

A former farmer (which is probably why the toppings are so fresh, diverse and creative), Mark is rumored to be planning a restaurant. For now though, you can find him, his pizzas and his bagels at the Portland Farmers Market on Saturdays and you’d better believe that when we have an opportunity to go back to Portland, I will try and make sure we hit that market.

I took a few pictures and I was going to post only those but when I saw the luscious ones my friend Gerry Betz took, I got such a bad case of the drool that I asked for permission to use his as well. Gerry is one half of the team of bakers at Tree-Top Baking in Clinton, Washington, and a talented photographer. Consider yourself warned, you are entering browse-at-your-own-risk territory! Thank you, Gerry!











I forgot to ask Mark what percentage of whole wheat he put in his dough but I am pretty sure it was substantial as the flavor of the crust was deep and complex. I have asked for the formula and I’ll post it if/when I get it. Meanwhile, enjoy!

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The Grain Gathering 2014: Wood-Fired Artisan Bread with Richard Miscovich

Richard Miscovich is the author of From the Wood-Fired Oven: New and Traditional Techniques for Cooking and Baking with Fire, a book you definitely want to check out if you haven’t read it yet, even if you don’t have access to a WFO (as is my case). WFO owners will love to find out how to make optimal use of their oven’s heat cycle and serious home bakers (or anyone wishing to bake bread at home) will treasure the wealth of information it offers on mixing, fermenting, dividing, proofing, etc. I like it that the book is never dogmatic and that the reader feels Richard’s presence every step of the way. In the fall of 2011, I had the privilege to attend a BBGA class he taught at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island (where he is an associate professor at the College of the Culinary Arts) and I remember being awed both by his teaching and by his baking. Needless to say, when I discovered he would be doing both at the Grain Gathering, I made a beeline for his workshop (although I unfortunately had to leave smack in the middle to attend a talk on natural leavening). The linearity of Time is indeed the scourge of the human condition, isn’t it?



I love to watch professionals score their proofed loaves. It always reminds me of dancing. The movement starts before the lame (or blade) even touches the dough. As Richard explains in his book, “Ideally, the motion is continuous, with the moving blade cutting neatly through the dough and continuing on its trajectory.” Another baker I know phrased it differently but the idea is the same: “The lame has to hit the ground running!”

 

The bread was 40% whole wheat. As you can see from the images below, it turned out beautifully even though it started over-proofing a bit out in the warm air: if you let your dough over-ferment, the yeast uses up all the sugar and there will be no caramelization. So the proofing baskets had to be carried back all the way through the orchards to the retarder in the lab and brought back out again when the oven reached the right temperature. Fermentation does go more quickly with whole grain (the bread was 40% whole wheat), a wet dough (hydration was at 82-85%) and warmer temperatures.

Richard uses a garden mister to steam his oven. Someone asked how much steam to use. The answer: “You know there is enough steam when you can no longer keep your hand inside the oven to add more!” It is important to bake in a humid environment because the bread expands more, the score marks open more fully and you get a really good color with shine. If you bake at home and don’t have a wood-fired oven, Richard recommends using a cast-iron combo cooker or to bake on a hearth stone or a sheet pan with a large metal bowl inverted over your loaf for the first twenty minutes.



 


For those of us who can’t get to his classes, Richard mentioned he had a video out on Craftsy, Hand-made Sourdough – From starter to baked loaf. I haven’t seen it yet.

The Grain Gathering 2014 : In the garden of Eden

The 2014 Grain Gathering (formerly known as the Kneading Conference West) took place last week on the gorgeous grounds of Washington State University Agriculture Research Center in Mount Vernon, Washington. It was the fourth of these events and as we now live in California (I had sent in my registration long before I knew our move would be a done deal by the time mid-August came around), I truly thought, before flying up, that this one would probably be the last one for me.

After all, I do get it: eat locally and seasonally, be gentle with the landscape by favoring organic or at least environmentally friendly agricultural methods and always remember that farmers need to make a living too (after all, if there were no more farmers, there’d be nobody between us and Big Food, a thought too scary to contemplate). So I had more or less convinced myself that this year’s event would be mostly a rehash and that having attended the first four ones, I was done!

Well, I am happy to say that I was wrong and that I flew home with dreams of the fifth Gathering dancing in my head! The name of the event was changed from Kneading Conference to Grain Gathering because, as Steve Jones (wheat breeder and Director of the Center as well as of the Bread Lab) puts it: “Nobody kneads anymore.” Plus bakers are not the only ones interested in grain: farmers, millers, breeders, brewers, etc. flock to Mount Vernon as well. In fact, more than anything, the “gathering” dimension is what will keep me coming. I love the energy and dynamics of encounters with participants from all over (twenty American States, three Canadian Provinces, the United Kingdom and South Africa.) I love it that bread isn’t the only focus, that classes, lectures and workshops on milling, malting, brewing, breeding, building earth ovens, transforming a stationary bike into a grain mill, etc… are all mobbed as well.

For an idea of the scope of the Gathering, you may want to take a look at the schedule. In an ideal world (where Time wouldn’t exist or if it did, wouldn’t be linear), I would have attended all classes, lectures, tours and workshops concurrently but as it is, I had to choose. So I forewent production baking (even though the workshop was run by two bakers I greatly admire, Mel Darbyshire from Grand Central Bakery in Seattle and Scott Mangold from Breadfarm in nearby Bow-Edison), the roundtable on the farmers’ perspective, the one on milling and nutrition, the tour of the orchards and gardens, the visit to the wheat, barley and buckwheat fields, the talk on the science of bread, and many more that I won’t  even mention because I feel bad for missing them all over again, but if you check out the program, you’ll have a good idea of what I am talking about.

In the end I opted for workshops that spoke louder than others either to my imagination or to my practical side or more often than not, to both. I attended all three of Naomi Duguid and Dawn Woodward‘s instructive and stimulating demos on the use of whole grain in everyday baking and cooking. I watched Richard Miscovich score proofed loaves before loading them in a wood-fired oven (Richard is an extraordinary baker and instructor and seeing him work is both a teaching moment and an experience you are not likely to forget.) I only caught the tail-end of Jeffrey Hamelman‘s pretzel workshop but still, I arrived at the wood-fired oven in time to see him score the pretzels (or not as he said it was a matter of personal preference) and hear most of his account of the tough love teaching methods of his German baking instructor.

I listened to a very interesting presentation by two high school students who won first place in the food science category at the 2013 Washington State Science and Engineering Fair for their project on fermentation and gluten.

I attended a lecture on natural leavening which went largely over my head but gave me the great pleasure of finally meeting microbiologist Debra Wink and hooking up again with Andrew Ross, professor of crop and soil science and food science at Oregon State University. I spent time with beloved friends, connected with other bloggers, met bakers, writers and Facebook friends I had never seen in person before, I took part in the Bread Lab‘s tasting of four different wheat varieties, all grown in the Skagit Valley, and I ate my way through three days of the most seductive event food imaginable.


Peach and bacon pizza

In between, I took pictures (or, shall I say, “gathered” images) with joyful abandon (making up for last year when my left arm was in a cast.) I will post some (okay, a lot) of them in the coming days. If there are any recipes you are specifically interested in on the basis of the photos, please let me know and I’ll ask for permission to post them. As far as I know, no pizza recipe is available but from the look of the ones I saw, the only ingredient that appears absolutely necessary is a boundless imagination!

Related posts

How to make 2,000-year-old bread…


Video by the British Museum

Recipe, courtesy of the British Museum
I love the string technique…
In the video, the baker says he’s using buckwheat flour as the Romans did in those days but the list of ingredients in the posted recipe calls for equal amounts of spelt and whole wheat flour. Note that the bread is shaped right after mixing and that there is only one fermentation. Not a very long one at that, most likely because of the very large amount of starter and the use of wholegrain flours. No mention of steam to promote oven spring, probably because the bread found during the excavations looks quite flat. If you make the recipe at home, remember that the posted baking temperature (200°) is expressed in Celsius: it translates into 392°F.
The recipe lists gluten as an ingredient, which I find slightly odd. I can’t imagine the Romans being in a position to supplement weak flour with gluten flour although, according to this article (scroll down to the paragraph titled Grains in Rome), they did favor high-gluten wheat. So maybe the added gluten is today’s baker’s way to approximate the wheat variety used in the original recipe.
For more info on ancient Rome’s access to grain, you may want to read Grain Supply to the city of Rome on Wikipedia.
Too bad the British Museum doesn’t provide a crumb shot. I would have loved to see one. My guess is that the bread turned out rather dense.
What makes my head spin is the idea that a bread could stay in an oven for close to 2000 years…

Meet the Bakers: Dado and Jacqueline Colussi


Photo credit: Nate Delage (thank you, Nate!)

Despite having lived and worked in the Northeast for more than thirty years, I was caught by surprise when I disembarked from the plane in Chicago by a blustery April morning: after a few years in the temperate Seattle area, I seemed to have completely forgotten what real cold felt like. When I mentioned it to Jacqueline – who had come by train to meet me at Midway Airport – she laughed: “Cold? This isn’t cold. To me this feels like spring already.” Really? She was wearing a woolen coat and hat and a thick scarf was wrapped several times around her neck. I guess all is relative, including weather. I fished my own hat, scarf and gloves out of my backpack (Jacqueline had kindly forewarned me to come prepared) and proceeded to follow her to her and Dado’s cozy home. Dado was baking pitas for lunch. It smelled delicious. I took out my camera and my notebook and we got to work, feasting as we talked. Such was the start of a glorious few days spent in this extraordinary couple’s company…

As you may already know if you have been following this blog, Dado and Jacqueline Colussi are the creators and developers of BreadStorm, the bread formulation software which delivers bakers from spending much time on calculations (for more on why I am a huge fan of the program, please refer to my original BreadStorm post). We bakers are a astonishingly diverse crowd: some of us seem to have fallen into a mixing bowl before we even took their first steps, others become professional bakers after a career in business, academia, music, healthcare, the law, education, journalism, etc., others yet become passionate bread-bakers but keep their full-time other jobs. Jacqueline and Dado don’t exactly fit into any of these categories: yes, they are passionate home bakers and yes, they have full-time jobs that, technically speaking, do not involve baking. Yet they make a living thinking about bread, more often than not twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, and they bake as often and as much as they can.


Despite the fact that writing code doesn’t come naturally to most people, Dado and Jacqueline clearly love doing the hard stuff. They also exhibit an obvious delight in working with ingredients and observing changes in their doughs. The pitas are a case in point. Watching them pop up in the oven, Dado says he feels like a five-year old all over again. “No computer screen can match that. We create bread so that we can get off the computer and spend time in the physical world. Our goal in creating BreadStorm was to reduce to a minimum the baker’s need to use the computer so that he/she can go back to the dough as fast as possible and watch the pitas popping.”

Dado was born to a Finnish mom and an Italian dad. He grew up in Finland but spent lots of time in Italy and the food in his home was a rich blend of two cultures. Dado recounts: “The seed of my interest in bread-baking was planted back in year 2000 in Italy. At a family friend’s home, eating home-made pizza baked in an old wood-fired oven made a permanent impression on me. Then in 2004, when I was in graduate school in Germany, the sourdough made by a local baker knocked my socks off, I can still taste it today. A few years later at a friend’s forest cottage in Finland, without really knowing what we were doing, Jacqueline and I had a chance to try to bake bread in a wood-fired oven together. It was a massive oven, built in the center of the cottage, to provide warmth throughout, and it had a hearth. The pizza we made came out well, but the bread was a doorstop. A total failure.” In other words, a challenge…

Jacqueline and Dado had both been living in Stockholm for two years when they met. Cooking was a shared passion from the very beginning. Baking soon followed. But after several “doorstops,” they realized that they had no understanding of what was going on and that guessing and improvising would only take them so far. They needed to get to the point where they could make informed decisions. They turned to books: Jacqueline felt especially inspired by Emily Buehler’s Bread Science while Dado first discovered “bakers’ math” in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. A curtain lifted: there was a system there and not only the wizardry of a prodigy baker.

Jacqueline and Dado come from different professional background but there is a palpable synergy between the two of them. Dado holds a master’s degree in computer science, with a minor in math. He’s been creating software professionally for the past seventeen years. One of his favorite past projects involved writing weather forecast broadcasting software for a television studio. He says: “I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make software easy for people to use. Many programmers work on systems which never talk to humans, but only to other programs, and that’s what I did at the beginning. Then I became much more interested in humans actually using the computer.” Around that time he met Jacqueline who had made it her profession to try and understand human/computer interaction. Talk about serendipity…

Jacqueline’s background is mathematics, visual arts and dance. “Pure math was my major in college. After college I was looking for a way to blend my interests in math and visual arts. I was actively trying to find my way, when I met a vision scientist through one of my undergrad math professors. ‘Vision scientist’ — that was a path I didn’t know existed, and it intrigued me. After volunteering in a vision lab for some months, I decided to go for a Ph.D. in vision. And in the years I spent working on my Ph.D., I began to find my own intellectual places: designing experiments to collect data about how we humans process what we see, whether leisurely gazing at the scene in front of us, or reacting in high-risk situations (such as the air traffic controller guiding airplanes to prepare for landing safely at a busy airport); developing mathematical models to describe this behavior; and then exploring how we can apply this knowledge to build more intuitive, easy-to-use computer interfaces for tasks in our daily lives.”
Like Dado, Jacqueline was exposed early to adventurous cross-cultural taste experiences : “I grew up in New Jersey baking bread for the family with my maternal grandma whose parents were from Croatia. But what with grad school and a postdoc job, all of which involved a lot of traveling for research purposes, I remained without regular access to a full kitchen for ten years. Looking back, I am not sure how I put up with that. I always hoped to get back to bread-baking…”

To offer a tool to bread-bakers is a joint effort propelled by Dado’s and Jacqueline’s urge to give back. “When I was in ninth grade,” says Dado, “a neighbor of ours started a programming club. I joined it. It was very casual. We met every weekend. In retrospect that neighbor transformed my life. He helped him discover a passion for mastering the computer.” As Jacqueline puts it, “were it not for other bakers in other parts of the world using BreadStorm and becoming part of the story, our job wouldn’t be nearly as compelling. We work in the context of a community.”

BreadStorm’s main idea is to let the human do what he or she does well, which is taking sensory input (temperature, consistency, texture, aromas, feel, look, response) and basing action on that, and to delegate to the computer what no human does with ease, which is computation. “Our brains have developed to respond to sensory stimuli in a way that no computer can (yet). So let’s use our brains for what they are good at and our computers for what they are good at.”
The Colussis have been baking their own bread since the summer of 2008. “Dado and I have developed our own respective styles of amateur bread baking, which are complementary to one another, perhaps even symbiotic.” Dado has come to love the rhythm of sourdough baking over the years: he makes two loaves of Chicago sourdough every week.

In addition he regularly experiments with other breads, for fun and to expand his repertoire: pitas, panettone, laminated doughs, rieska (a Finnish potato flatbread), etc. During my stay, he experimented making his signature Chicago Sourdough with two different flours (all-purpose and bread) and baked lovely and tasty Karelian pies (with a mostly rye crust and either a rice or a mashed potato filling).

Jacqueline’s bread-baking is for the most part driven by her interest in formula development: “I come at a bread in an analytical way, question myself about the role of each ingredient and its percentage, and then develop-bake-develop-bake-develop-etc, sometimes a dozen times or more, until a formula becomes stable (some would say “well balanced”) in my hands. I like to bake breads that challenge me to hone my formula-development skills. In this vein, I like to work with soakers and enriched doughs.” She bakes bagels once a week.

For my benefit, she went all out and also made beautiful egg breads…

…farro fruit and nut pull-apart rolls…

…and a walnut bread.

To say I was extraordinarily lucky to be spending time with Dado and Jacqueline is to put it mildly. Not only they are terrific hosts but they are lots of fun. We took long walks, went to the Art Institute…

 

…attended a meeting of the Chicago Amateur Bread Bakers, a group they founded in January 2011,  rode the elevated train…


(The tracks and buildings were not really tilting. I was just having fun with double exposures).

…had breakfast at La Fournette…

…roamed the streets…


But mostly we talked, I watched them cook and bake and we ate. They gave me tasks to perform with BreadStorm, both on my laptop and on the iPad, and documented my thought processes and actions. The experience was an eye-opener both for them and for me: I could see they were intrigued (maybe dismayed but if so, they hid it well!) by the way my brain worked and I was awed both by their methodical and rigorous approach and by the way their minds seemed to complement one another. ““Hey, Dado, I’d like to borrow your brain for a second!” Jacqueline makes a point, Dado listens attentively, thinks for a while and off they go, debating the best way to resolve an issue or answer a question. In a way, Dado is the chief engineer and she is the CEO. “There are levels of abstraction: down deep it is highly geeky. At the top there is a human being with his or her desires, aspirations, limitations, etc. Dado is firmly on the low level. I am more on top. We meet in the middle.”

Dado and Jacqueline generously allowed me to publish the formulas for all the breads they made during my stay with them. For ease of reference each of them is posted in a separate post:

Dado’s Chicago Sourdough (all-purpose and bread flour versions)
Dado’s Pita
Dado’s Dough for Karelian Pies
Jacqueline’s Egg Bread
Jacqueline’s Bagels
Jacqueline’s NYC Deli-Style Farro, Fruit and Nut Pull-Apart Rolls
Jacqueline’s Walnut Flax Seed Boule

What with the move and other obstacles life has thrown my way, I haven’t had much time to bake lately but when I do, I’ll be sure to go down the list and recreate these breads for our own enjoyment. I had such a good time eating them the first time around. Thank you, Dado and Jacqueline! And if the breads don’t come out of my oven as lovely and tasty as yours, I will definitely keep your observation in mind: “A failure is an opportunity to learn. A wonderful aspect of bread-baking is that there is always more to learn and that is true for all of us. There are so many unanswered questions and so many questions yet to be asked.”