Farine

Crazy for Bread

The Bashful Bûche…

…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

…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)

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…

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Gérard Rubaud on working the levain

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).
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Revisiting Gérard Rubaud

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…

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