Farine

Meet the Baker: James McNamara

Bakeries are my favorite food stores and bakers my favorite artisans in the culinary world. I am sure wine and cheese makers are just as passionate and dedicated but since I haven’t (yet) started making my own wine or cheese, I tend to seek them out less, so I can’t really tell. What I know for having met with several bakers over the past few months, in and out of school, is that bakers breathe and dream bread, and that, I find very endearing.
They think about it all the time, how to make it good, how to make it better, how to ensure timely delivery of a consistent product to a client base that has come to rely on it. James McNamara, head baker at Wave Hill Breads in Wilton, CT, is no exception. He describes lying awake at night trying to recall where he read something that could apply to a problem he might be encountering, then getting up and going straight to the book or books, taking mental notes and plotting out the best way to implement the solution.
A baker I met last year in Switzerland, told me: “Bakers are basically insomniacs”. I think that’s true or, at least, that being an insomniac is an asset for the baker as, given the relentless pace, there is no opportunity at the production stage to comb through notes or to just sit back and muse.
Wave Hill Breads makes several kinds of breads, all from the same dough – a creamy and aromatic 3-grain poolish-based beauty (spelt and rye grains are milled daily and added to the wheat flour).

Making multiple batches of the same dough over and over offers a baker an unique opportunity to hone his or her skills, to learn to “read” the dough and stay attuned to its slightest variations. On busy nights, there might be up to 12 batches, 75 minutes apart, at Wave Hill Breads. Each one tells a different story and that makes the task endlessly new. For instance, because of minute changes in temperature or flour characteristics, McNamara is constantly monitoring the dough hydration, adding water or taking some away.

The poolish (which is mixed during the day while the mixing and baking are done at night) is allowed to ferment for 6 hours before being added to the flour and water in the mixer with the tiniest pinch of yeast. After a shaggy dough is formed…

…it rests in the mixer for a while (autolyse), then salt is added and once all the ingredients are incorporated, the mixing starts. It is kept to a minimum (one minute on second speed), then the dough rests for 15 minutes. Another short spin and another resting period. Another spin, then the dough rests in the mixer until it is time for another batch.

It is then transferred to a wooden trough…

…where it ferments some more in a temperature-controlled environment. When it is ready…

…it is taken to the bench…

…and the shapers’ work begins.

Kathleen and Beverly at the bench

Bâtards proofing

Tonight Sharon, the other baker, is in charge and she’s the one manning the ovens…

…loading, unloading, rotating, constantly assessing the doneness of the loaves.

Not done yet

Baked to perfection

McNamara came to Wave Hill Breads in the summer of 2008. As quite a few other bakers I have had the privilege of meeting (including Sharon, who was an accountant in another life), he didn’t set out to be a baker. He was on the premed track in college and graduated with a degree in English. But he went on to attend the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont and became the assistant pastry chef at La Panetière in Rye.
As luck would have it though, a relative gave him a starter from King Arthur Flour as a present as well as the book Bread Alone by Daniel Leader. It is no exageration to say that this serendipitous event changed his life.
He started experimenting with sourdough and baking from the book and soon realized that bread was his true calling (“Bread dough is ALIVE, so much more interesting than butter and chocolate, don’t you think?”). He set to training as an apprentice baker by volunteering to work on all his days off at Daniel Leader’s Bread Alone in Boiceville, NY. Such was the pull of the bread made over there that he doggedly put up with the 1-hr and 45 minutes commute each way from his home in Katonah.
After a year of this hectic life, he moved to Boston, a city which features several good bakeries and was soon hired at another remarkable bakery, Clear Flour Bread in Brookline, MA. Clear Flour was very different from Bread Alone where a baker learned to do everything from the mixing to the shaping and the baking. It was a very organized 24-hour operation where the bakers worked in dedicated shifts (some mixing, some punching and folding, some shaping, etc.) In terms of sourdough baking and punching and folding, it was a teaching bakery, bent on educating its bakers. McNamara was encouraged to take classes, which is how he came to train with Didier Rosada at the National Baking Center in Minneapolis. A Master Baker from France, Rosada has trained the American teams which competed for the Coupe du monde de la boulangerie (Bread World Cup) and he is widely recognized as one of the leading bakers in the United States.

Duly trained, McNamara went on from Clear Flour to open his own bakery in Easton, MA. His wife – who is a pastry chef – made the cakes and pies and he made the bread. But he is a perfectionist and called upon to produce by himself daily a wide variety of breads with many different doughs, he found it difficult to focus consistently on high quality. He and his wife also soon tired of swimming across the current of the anticarb wave that the Atkins diet had created. He cast about for a while, working for a friend in Ohio (but that friend already had a bread baker, so he found himself making croissants and pastries, which wasn’t what he was looking for). Coming back East, he worked briefly at Le Château before getting a job at SoNo bakery and finally joining Wave Hill Breads.
When he first came to Wave Hill, McNamara was given a formula and asked to work within well-defined parameters to produce the bread the customers had come to know and love. After a few months of going with the flow, he decided he had to introduce a few changes to make the product even better. With the owners in cautious agreement, he moved the bench to the other room, away from the oven, changed the mixing, cutting it from improved to short-mix, added a tiny bit of yeast, incorporated punches and folds, upped the hydration to the high sixties (it had been in the lower to mid-sixties) and introduced temperature control.
Since there is no leeway on time (the bread has to be ready by 4:30-5:00 AM when the baggers arrive), he had to increase the yeast and to cool the dough down to maintain quality. Even after doubling the yeast, the amount used at Wave Hill Breads is still the lowest he ever worked with. The challenge is to set the right balance daily between the temperature, the length of the fermentation and the percentage of yeast.

The bâtard I took home for tasting

As he needs to keep in mind what the owners, Margaret Sapir and Mitch Rapoport, understandably desire (which is to continue making their signature bread, thereby keeping their customers happy), McNamara has to compromise. If it were up to him, he would double the amount of poolish, increase the mixing time and prolong the fermentation (introducing more poolish would counterbalance the more intensive mix). But, as it is, he is proud of the product which he deems consistently very good, and satisfied with the direction the bread has taken at the bakery under his stewardship.

As Rosada puts it, “to grow and excel, bakers must not only learn ‘what’ to do, but understand the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of what they’re doing.” Minding the how’s and why’s is McNamara’s calling as a baker and it does translate into a near-perfect product. When I visited last fall, the bread was already great. Now it is extremely good, with a beautiful crumb and a tasty and crunchy crust. My only reservation would be the amount of salt, which is a bit high to my taste. My guesstimate would put it in the 2.3-2.5 % range (and I am more used to 2%, or even 1.5% as now required by law in Europe) but, obviously, I can be wrong. Even if I am not, I don’t doubt that there are reasons for that, if only that it is what the customers want.

Since joining Wave Hill, McNamara has assembled a whole new team of full-time bakers and part-time helpers and learned how to put the pieces together to get the work done. He is very proud of that accomplishment and has discovered he loves the managerial aspects of his profession. But when retirement age approaches (since he is only 39, we are talking a rather distant future), there is a little mountain bakery in his dreams where he and his wife could live and work, gazing at the scenery between batches of golden loaves and visions of wedding cakes. Meanwhile, he cannot picture himself doing anything but what he is doing right now and that’s certainly excellent news for all of us who live and eat in Connecticut and nearby New York!
For a list of the stores and farmers’ market where the bread can be found, please click here.

Crêtes-de-Coq (Oven-Baked Meat Patties)

Pour lire ce billet en français, cliquer ici

Odile, my paternal grandmother, called these patties crêtes-de-coq (literally, rooster crests), probably because of their fan shape. I’ve trawled for that name in Google and only came up with recipes using actual rooster crests. So maybe she made up the name or maybe she got it from the aunt who raised her and taught her to cook.

Odile was born and grew up in the Tarn in southwestern France, a region with a rich culinary tradition (but then what part of France doesn’t have a rich culinary tradition?)…

…and she had a magic touch in the kitchen, probably the only place where she was truly happy. Away from it, she was dour and embittered, emotionally crippled by the series of hard punches life had thrown at her. She was a tough grandma, unyielding and distant. Hard to love. But in the kitchen, she smiled. She would call out to us when we arrived on our weekly Sunday visit, lift up pot lids, open the ovens for a minute giving us a glimpse of the baking apple croustade, a peek at the roasting home-raised chicken, offer a spoonful of her hare civet, a forkful of the terrine she was slicing. As a child the kitchen was the only place where I felt safe with her (elsewhere her tongue was sharp and her bite ferocious). Now I realize that cooking was probably the only way she could express love and that she took great pleasure and comfort in watching us eat what she made.
Her crêtes-de-coq were sublime: she rolled out a butter dough, cut out rounds with an inverted glass (actually she let us take care of that part and we loved it), put on each a spoonful of whatever meat had been leftover from other meals, chopped up with onions, herbs and maybe a little garlic, folded them over, crimped the edges with a fork and deep-fried them to fragrant crispiness. We could never get enough of them.
She never used a cookbook (didn’t even own one) and regrettably never wrote anything down, leaving us with nothing but memories of her feasts. I have made my grandma’s crêtes-de-coq for my kids as they were growing up when I still owned a deep-fryer and didn’t think twice about the amount of fat and butter in a recipe. Now that the Man has to watch his cholesterol, though, I had to look for another way and his birthday dinner offered an excellent opportunity to try my hand at a lighter version. He loved them and, as my grandma before me, I took great pleasure in seeing him devour them.
These little patties make an excellent tapa, especially if served piping hot with crisp French cornichons (sour pickles) but I would settle for some with a mixed green salad any night of the week and call it dinner.
I am not posting exact weights for the filling as I pretty much used whatever leftover meat I could find in the freezer (I had chicken thighs and sweet fennel sausage), added some parsley and basil from the garden, some onion and garlic, chopped up everything and wrapped it in bread dough.
Anything can be used that won’t leak and make the patty soggy, including chopped up greens (Swiss chard with crumbled feta and fresh mint for instance) and mushrooms (but I would cook those first to make them yield their water) with leeks, etc.
For the dough, I hand-mixed:

500 g of flour
250 g of water
11 g of olive oil
10 g of salt
and 4 g of instant dry yeast until smooth and pliable.

I let it rest 90 minutes before rolling it out thin with a rolling pin.

Then I cut out circles with an inverted glass and went to work.

Once the crêtes were ready, I painted them with eggwash (i.e. an egg beaten with some milk), pricked them with a fork and baked them for 25 minutes in a 425F/218C pre-heated oven.

I had dough and filling left over but when I reassembled the pieces of dough and tried to roll them out again, they were not so compliant anymore. So I gave them to my 4-year old granddaugher who promptly put them to good use…

…and I made pan-fried “sausages” of the remaining filling. They will be scrumptious cold with a salad or in a sandwich.

As for my granddaughter, she opened up the crêtes-de-coq, extracted the filling and threw out the crusty wrappers: “I like meatballs without bread”, she said, handing me the empty shells. I smiled at her. She was creating her own memories…

I hadn’t thrown away the leftover dough after my granddaughter was through playing with it but stored it in the fridge overnight thinking she might be happy to play with it again in the morning. However this morning I found it had relaxed again and fermented some more and it now smells so delicious that I am just going to incorporate it as a pre-ferment into my next batch of bread. Never waste anything if it can be helped. This too I learned from my grandmother.

These crêtes-de-coq go to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting. This week’s Yeastspotting will be hosted by Iamafoodblog.

Pan Bigio

I borrowed this recipe from Carol Field’s The Italian Baker and I mostly followed it , except that I didn’t make the biga out of yeast and that I used more whole wheat than she does.
When I am home, I keep my starter on the kitchen counter and refresh it daily, which means that I have either to use it or throw some away. Since I don’t like to throw any away if I can avoid it, I decided to make a sourdough biga and I actually loved how it smelled and tasted. I fail to see in what way it differs from a regular stiff starter but since it goes into an Italian bread, I’ll still call it biga.
What I find amazing is that, with the addition of more water, the dough understands it is supposed to act Italian and that the end result and the taste are completely different from those of a French bread.
Carol Fields says in her introduction to the recipe that this bread is the classic bread of the Italian peasant.
We had it with dinner last night (a huge salad of mixed greens with creamy Gorgonzola) and it was excellent.

Ingredients (for 2 large or 3 smaller round loaves):
For the biga

361 g unbleached all-purpose flour
255 g mature liquid starter (100% hydration)
159 g water

For the final dough

400 g unbleached all-purpose flour
350 g white whole wheat flour
560 g water
18 g salt
3 g instant yeast

Method: This bread is made over two days since the biga needs time to ferment. As the dough is very wet, it is best to use a stand mixer.

The day before: Mix all the ingredients until a sticky dough is formed. Remove to a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise overnight or up to 24 hours at cool room temperature. Refrigerate after that if not using immediately for up to 72 hours (the recipe will not make use of all of the biga, so you can plan to incorporate the leftover into another dough if desired or to freeze it for a later use)
On the day of the baking: place the biga and 80% of the water in the bowl of the mixer equipped with the paddle attachment and mix until the biga is well broken up
Mix the yeast with the flours and add to the mixture together with the salt. Switch to the dough hook and mix at medium speed until dough reaches low/medium consistency (when you pinch off a piece of it with wet hands and stretch it, you should see a thin membrane – or “gluten window” – with opaque spots, which means the dough is ready)
With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the rest of the water (it might take a while as you truly need to add just a trickle at a time)
Finish kneading the dough by hand on a well-floured surface, sprinkling the top with more flour
Place in a lightly oiled large bowl or bucket, cover tightly and let rise until tripled and full of air bubbles, about 3 hours. Do not punch down
Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and shape into 2 big round flats or 3 smaller ones, making sure to pull tight on the surface of the dough with cupped hands to make it taut
Place the loaves, rough side up on well-floured parchment paper sheets set on baking sheets (it is very important that the parchment paper be extra well-floured as the dough is extremely sticky and might not detach itself easily later on)
Place the baking sheets in large clear plastic bags, tightly sealed and let proof about 1 hour
Thirty minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 450 F/232 C after placing inside a baking stone and a shallow metal pan
Dimple the top (rough) side of the loaves all over with your fingertips and let rest for 10 to 15 minutes
Just before baking, sprinkle the baking stone with cornmeal
Gently invert the loaves over it
Bake for 45 (small loaves) to 55 minutes (larger ones)
Let cool on racks.

The Pan Bigio goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Blueberry Bread with Spelt Starter

Even though (or because?) it is a three-party marriage (“un mariage à trois” as we say in French, usually with a snicker), the alliance between spelt, apple and blueberries really rocks!
The flavors complement each other with none of them trying to steal the show. Definitely a felicitous union although it could be be sweeter. That is, I could have put in a sweetener. I didn’t because I usually prefer not to, but this time, just a hint of agave nectar or honey would have been welcome.
You know how they talk about the boys of summer? Well, this is a bread of summer. It brings back memories of fragrant hayrides and long hours among the bushes, picking to one’s heart’s content.

I love blueberries, their shape, their color and the way they seem to blush under the thinnest coating of mauve talcum powder. I actually read somewhere that this very thin powder is their sunscreen. They secrete it to protect themselves from rays that would otherwise turn them into raisins. I wish we were genetically programmed to do the same. Although maybe that’s what a suntan is…

But too much suntan does turn you into a raisin after a while… So we don’t have it as easy as blueberries and that’s a fact.

Anyway, I was trying to come up with a blueberry bread that could be eaten on its own, a bit like a quickbread, and still be a “real” bread, the macho type with a nice crust and a chewy crumb. And save for the fact that it could have been a wee bit sweeter, this bread delivers. As is, it is actually excellent with Swiss cheese or white Cheddar cheese and obviously delicious with blueberry jam!
I would have used all spelt (a combination of white spelt and whole spelt flours but I ran out of white spelt, so I replaced some of it with unbleached all-purpose flour). Spelt flakes and/or spelt bran could be added for texture if desired. I had given my usual white starter (100% hydration) two feedings of spelt and it looked quite happy and rearing to go. So off we went…

Ingredients (for 1 small loaf and 1 big one):

288 g white spelt flour
171 g whole spelt flour
112 g unbleached all-purpose flour
285 g water
115 g spelt starter
86 g unsweetened applesauce
229 g fresh blueberries
28 g almond oil (or other neutral oil)
13 g salt
2.8 g instant yeast

Method:

Mix the instant yeast in the flour
Put the flours, the starter, the oil, the applesauce and about 80% of the water in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix on low speed until incorporated. Add the reserved water as needed
Let rest, covered, for 20 to 30 minutes (autolyse)
Add the salt and mix at medium speed until the dough reaches a low/medium level of gluten development (when you pinch a piece of it off with wet hands and stretch it, you should see a thin membrane – or “gluten window” – with opaque spots and that means the dough is ready)
Place the dough on a flour-dusted worktable and gently incorporate the blueberries, taking care not to squash them too much
Spray with oil a large bowl or bucket, put the dough in it and cover tightly
Let ferment for 1 1/2 hour or so (if the dough is very slack, you may want to give it a fold after the first 30 minutes)
Spray the worktable with oil and gently put the dough on it, taking care not to deflate it or squash the blueberries more than necessary
Divide the dough in 1 small loaf and 1 big one (or 3 small ones)
Pre-shape the pieces in balls and let them rest, covered, for about 20 minutes
Shape tightly in the desired shape (I made one small boule and one big oval bread as I don’t have 3 small baskets) and place in well-floured baskets or bannetons
Set to proof for about 45 minutes inside a clear plastic bag, well sealed
At least 30 minutes before baking time, preheat the oven to 450 F/232 C, after placing a baking stone and a shallow metal pan inside
When the loaves are ready, turn them out of their baskets onto a semolina-dusted sheet of parchment paper placed on a half-sheet pan or baker’s peel and score them in a cross pattern
Pour one cup of water into the shallow metal pan, taking care to protect your face and hands
Slide the loaves onto the baking stone, spray the oven walls heavily with water and close the door
Bake for 35 minutes (turning them half-way during baking so that they color evenly)
Then remove the parchment paper from under the loaves and flip them over gently to ensure a crisp bottom (that’s because the blueberries tend to leak during baking and make the bottom of the loaf soggy in places)
Bake another 5 minutes
Remove from the oven and set on a rack to cool. Enjoy!

This Blueberry Bread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Kamut Miche

Yearning after the gorgeous breads that Safa Hemzé made at SFBI this winter using specialty flour starters, I decided to make a spelt miche. When I started rummaging in my flour chest however, I discovered we were all out of spelt but that we had a cache of whole kamut flour I had completely forgotten about. So I switched grains.
Kamut is actually a brand. The common name of the cereal is khorasan. But good luck with finding khorasan in the stores!
As the story goes, it was found in an Egyptian tomb by an American who shipped a few grains home to his father. The father sowed the grains and trademarked the name. Originally from Mesopotamia, kamut as we know it is organically grown in the United States. It is richer in protein and some minerals, especially selenium, than wheat but poorer in gluten. It is sometimes tolerated by people who can’t have wheat, not however by people who have coeliac disease (according to Wikipedia).
I took a portion of my white starter (100% hydration), fed it twice with kamut and decided it was ready although it looked definitely less perky than when fed with wheat. But ready it was because even though I chose a long fermentation over the addition of instant yeast, it gave me a very satisfactory oven spring.
Oven spring isn’t all there is to like about this bread, however. Safa is right, when you switch flours in the preferments, you do get amazing flavors. This bread has a complex and delicate taste. It is delicious just eaten on its own, especially because the crumb turned out silky and, while not wet, still not dry either, just what you want in a piece of bread when you don’t necessarily intend to put butter or anything else on top. If I was given one word only to describe this crumb, I would say that it is voluptuous…
The dough mixed easily but wouldn’t accept all of the 65% of water I had planned for it. It just wouldn’t. So I didn’t insist. I let it reach the desired consistency (low-medium gluten development), then ever so gently I added in most of the remaining water. I did it very slowly, so as not to drown the gluten and it was fun to see it gasp and sink and then swim back to the surface and ask for more. At one point though it clearly had enough and that was it…

I find doughs have a mind of their own and – most of the time – it’s fun to look for it and discover it and then work with it.
I had just read Joe Ortiz’s chapter on stencils in The Village Baker and I decided to try his technique of piercing the surface of the dough in 8 or 10 differents points before stenciling, so that you don’t need to score and still the bread won’t implode. The bread definitely didn’t implode, so it worked, but I don’t care very much for the look of these holes. They make it seem as if I’d tried to make Swiss cheese, not bread. I didn’t use an icepick as Ortiz recommends but a thin wooden skewer, the kind that’s used for chicken satay. But an ice pick probably makes even larger holes, so I don’t think that was the problem…
I also discovered that although it’s fun to write with flour, a miche doesn’t give a baker a lot of writing space. Kamut is fine, so would wheat and spelt be and rye would be even better, but forget about buckwheat or amaranth! So if miche-writing is your calling, be sure to pick your grain carefully…

Ingredients:

476 g unbleached all-purpose flour
127 g white whole wheat flour
127 g kamut starter
32 g whole grain kamut flour
412 g water (I had 19 g left at the end of the mixing)
14 g salt
13 g olive oil

Method:

Put the flours, the starter, the oil and 80% of the water in the bowl of the mixer
Mix at low speed until incorporated
Cover the bowl with a towel and let rest 20 to 30 minutes (autolyse)
Add the salt and mix until the dough reaches low-medium consistency (when you wet your hands and pinch a piece of it, as you stretch and turn, you should start seeing a translucid membrane with some opaque spots)
Start adding the remaining water very slowly until the dough can’t take anymore
Set the dough to ferment in a large covered lightly oiled bowl or dough bucket
Give the dough a fold 30 minutes later, repeat after 30 minutes if the dough is still too slack
Let the dough finish rising (it should have almost doubled. In my relatively cool kitchen 0 68F/20C, it took 7 hours altogether)
Pre-shape the dough in a ball and let it rest 20 minutes, covered
Shape it into a tight ball and let it proof for about 40 minutes on a flour-dusted parchment paper sheet set on a baking sheet
Preheat the oven to 470 F/243 C with a baking stone in the middle and an empty shallow metal pan on a different oven shelf
Pierce the loaf to a depth of about 1 inch (4 cm) in 8 or 10 different spots and stencil it if desired (one can also just dust the miche with flour and score it)
Pour a cup of water in the prepared metal pan inside the oven (taking care to protect your hands and face) and slide the miche onto the baking stone
Spray the oven walls with water and quickly close the oven door
Lower the oven temperature to 450 F/232 C and bake for 30 to 40 minutes. The inside temperature of the loaf should be over 205 F/96 C.

The Kamut Miche goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

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