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Search Results for: chad robertson

Chad Robertson’s Tartine Book № 3: a book event

Last Friday, Chad Robertson came to Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, ninety minutes or so north of Seattle, to talk about his latest book, Tartine Book No. 3. I had been eagerly looking forward to this talk by the owner of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, California, and maybe the most famous baker in America today. Yet, because Chad is a shining star in the home bakers’ firmament (and home bakers formed a large part of the audience), I also vaguely expected to meet a celebrity bent on promoting both himself and his book. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The evening turned out not to be about Chad or even his book. It was about grain, bakers, millers and farmers and all that goes into the making of a loaf of bread. Chad himself came across as endearingly unassuming. There is something meditative and quietly centered about him and I was reminded of “the solitary baking trance” he alluded to in the introduction to his first bread book when describing his quest for “a certain loaf with an old soul.” The old soul is very possibly Chad’s himself.

 

Chad hadn’t come alone. He had brought with him Stephen Jones, Director of Western Washington State University Mount Vernon Research and Extension Center and Jonathan McDowell, resident baker at WSU’s Bread Lab. The panel was moderated by film producer JD McLelland, whose documentary The Grain Divide is due for release this summer.

 


From left to right: Stephen Jones, Jonathan McDowell and Chad Robertson

Chad recalled that at the time he was learning his trade, most bakers focused exclusively on fermentation, not grain variety, to achieve flavor. However the master bakers he apprenticed with, both in the United States and in France, were already working with wholegrain flours and using a range of grains and seeds in their quest for taste. When he struck out on his own, his first goal was to achieve the bread he could see and savor in his mind: dark with a blistered crust and an open crumb. Thousands of loaves later, he had streamlined the technique into a single basic recipe relying mostly -but not only- on white flour to achieve the perfect balance of flavor and acidity. This recipe could be adjusted to produce a broad variety of breads. Tartine Bread, published in 2010, aimed to give home bakers the tools they needed to make such bread at home.
But whole grains had remained very much on Chad’s mind and he was eager to see if, using as a springboard what he had learned over the years, he could now take his baking in another direction.  He traveled to Northern Europe where he was utterly surprised by the vitality of the food scene and by the close interaction between bakers and farmers. The farmers were bringing back heirloom varieties of wheat and rye, crossing them with new ones, selecting on flavor and baking properties. Invited to bake, he discovered that his techniques worked really well with these grains. He observed the same phenomenon in Germany and in other parts of Europe and came back home discouraged at the thought that the extraordinary variety of grains Danish bakers had at their disposal was unavailable in his own country. Little did he imagine when he decided to come up and visit the Bread Lab two months ago that he would find his Copenhagen in Mt Vernon, Washington.

Steve Jones pointed out that growing wheat in Washington was about both flavor and a sense of place. At the Bread Lab, there is no commodity wheat, no plastic-wrapped bread. The grain comes from local farmers. It has a face. In 2013, bread milled from grain grown north of Lynden, Washington, was served at two White House events. A sound grain economy is part of the process of making nutritious and flavorful bread available to a larger public: the farmer needs to make a living as do the miller and the baker. The role of the Extension Center is to help make this economy viable as well as to look at flavor. Chefs all care about nutrition but they care even more about taste.
JD McLelland remarked that when he set out to make his documentary two years ago, he intended to focus on the grain movement afoot in Arizona and to produce a thirty-minutes video. Then he started looking at what was happening in other states (the Carolinas, California, Vermont, Utah, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, etc.), traveled to the United Kingdom and Denmark, among other countries, and ended up with a much broader understanding of the current search for real and viable solutions to the “grain divide” (separating industrial and heirloom grains). Grain is a very important part of our economy as well as of our diet. The burgeoning grain movement seeks to promote education as a way of reducing the learning curve for farmers sowing the “new” varieties. It also aims to boost taste and nutrition. The people at the Bread Lab are pioneers. They are the only ones doing merging science and art by doing research on seeds and calling on bakers, millers and farmers to collaborate on solutions.
Chad plans to come back to the Bread Lab as often as he can, possibly every few weeks, not only to help facilitate research on texture and flavor but also because he finds the Bread Lab to be a huge source of inspiration in his own work: in the past few days, for instance, he saw Jonathan McDowell, the resident baker, sift some bran out of freshly milled whole wheat flour, soak it to soften it, then incorporate it in the dough during the mixing process. It worked beautifully: the resulting crumb was more open. In the same way, the Bread Lab has started applying beer-brewing techniques to bread-making, notably by malting the grain. Food for thought as Chad is working to take his baking to yet another level. Also the Bread Lab has access to eight different kinds of mills, which makes it easier to figure out how milling affects nutrition, baking properties, etc. In other words, Chad himself can only learn from being closely involved.

A period of questions and answers followed. Someone asked Chad what he meant by “high-hydration bread.” He replied that any dough using 80 to 90 (or more) units of water for 100 units of flour (for instance, 800 to 900 grams of water for 1,000 g of flour) was considered high-hydration. A high hydration facilitates a more active fermentation and when baked, a more thorough gelatinization of the starches, which makes the bread more digestible (according to his mentor Richard Bourdon who liked to say you wouldn’t cook a cup of rice in half-a-cup of water). A wet dough is also easier to hand-mix.
Another home baker asked about the shelf-life of flour. Chad explained that freshly milled flour ferments faster. That’s what he uses at home. At the bakery, the flour is two- to three-week old. But he is hoping to start incorporating a small percentage of freshly milled flour into his breads. Someone like Dave Miller (whom Chad worked for a long time ago) mills and mixes immediately. Working with fresh flours is well worth it.
Jonathan McDowell chimed in that with whole wheat flour, you do have to watch out for rancidity (off-smell and loss of flavor). Bakers come to the Bread Lab from all over the country to do testing. King Arthur bakers had found that freshly milled flour had best flavor but second best performance. One-month old flour performs the best but with skilled hands, you can do better with fresh milled as well. One-to-two-week old flour does not yield satisfactory results. One thing to keep in mind is that the fresher the flour the more nutrients it contains. Refrigeration and freezing help prolong shelf-life (as long as the flour is in an airtight container). White flour is conditioned for a long shelf life.


Chad Robertson’s cracked barley porridge bread

Samples were past around of Chad’s barley porridge bread (baking with porridge makes it possible to use grains that have little or no gluten and still make bread) and of wholegrain breads made with wheat (Renan and Edison varieties) grown in Washington. All were extraordinarily tasty. The barley bread was almost moist.
Chad said he and his team were already at work on their next book. Book-writing has become an essential creative tool. It motivates bakers and chefs to find new ways to do things and to seek new flavors. The bakery and Bar Tartine, the restaurant, play off each other. The restaurant has its own small bread oven where the chefs have a totally different inspiration from the bakers at the bakery. The synergy and the writing hugely propel creativity. Tartine Book No 3 was two-and-a-half years in the making: it was meant as a continuation of Tartine Breads. The next book will pick up where the last one let off. Good bakeries in the San Francisco area produce ten thousand loaves a day. Tartine Bakery makes two hundred and fifty. Chad’s interest doesn’t lie in volume: it lies in finding other ways to make tasty and nutritious bread available to more people, even if they have to bake it themselves. Judging by the long line of book owners queueing up for his signature, the message is coming across…

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April 1, 2014 · Filed Under: Books, Events · 16 Comments

Chad Robertson’s Danish Rye Bread

I see my quest for Danish rye bread as a Proustian endeavor (if Proust could conjure a bygone world from a morsel of madeleine dunked into lime-flower tea, why couldn’t I bring back to life a beloved chunk of the past with a slice of bread?) but as such, of course, it might be doomed: Proust himself knew from experience that long-ago days cannot be summoned at will and that involuntary memory alone has the power to revive them.
Still, he wrote this which I hold to be true:  “When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” 
I would so love to access forgotten memories of the summers spent in Denmark in the 60’s and early 70’s with my mother-in-law Sigrid and her stepmom, Bebbe, back when we still lived in France. Our kids were barely out of babyhood (our youngest wasn’t even born yet) and we split our time between a tiny wooden cabin at the beach, lost among heather and pines, and Bebbe’s apartment in an old and quiet neighborhood near Copenhagen.
I don’t have many photos of these days (we were on a tight budget and film developing was expensive) and the few I have are mainly of people. So most of the images are in my head: the silvery wings of an old windmill against a deep blue sky, fields of wheat undulating in the sea breeze, a feisty dachshund jumping up and stealing our two-year’s old’s round lollipop as we walked home from the grocery store, a tiny courtyard full of flowers and an even tinier kitchen with a white-painted half-door through which Bebbe could be seen frying endless platters of frikadelle (meatballs), pickling gherkins (syltede asier) which we loved to eat with almost everything, making rabarber grød (a buttermilk-based cold rhubarb soup) and generally doing her best to keep us well fed and happy.
I can still see the apartment with the high-back dark red velvet Victorian couch, the finches waiting for crumbs on the leafy balcony, Bebbe herself in her old-fashioned silk dress and lace collar, the evening tea we drank in tall china cups and the endless rounds of rummy we played at night once the kids were in bed.
Bebbe lived to be 103 and kept her wits to the end. She credited the iced shot of aquavit she had with lunch every day for her general good health. That, and her daily pint of room-temperature dark ale as well as the rye bread that accompanied every meal.
I was never one for hard liquor and I didn’t appreciate beer back then. So I don’t have any taste or smell memories associated either with the aquavit or with the ale but Bebbe’s house is where I discovered rye bread. Of course I had had some in France, mostly on festive occasions when oysters appeared on the table. But that French pain de seigle had in no way prepared me for the chewy, grainy and fragrant dark marvel that formed the base of the open shrimp sandwich (smørrebrød) Bebbe had prepared for my very first lunch in Denmark. It was love at first taste.
Whether at the beach or in the city, she had a favorite bakery where she always bought her bread. I knew nothing about bread then and certainly didn’t have the slightlest inkling that one day I would be into making my own, or I would have taken pictures, interviewed the bakers, asked to see their surdejg (sourdough), jotted down recipes and bought rye berries to bring back to France. But I could identify artisan rye bread with my eyes closed just from the smell of the slowly fermented grain. Supermarket bread (which we tried once when we ran out and the bakery was closed) didn’t even come close.

I haven’t been back to Denmark in ages and of course everything would be different anyway if I visited again. So making a rugbrød that would, à la Proust, revive the taste and smell of these Danish summers and maybe recall the voices of the two women who lovingly wove these memories together for us seems like the only way back…

While I have yet to find a rye bread that quite does the trick, Chad Robertson’s Danish rye bread comes close. We had friends from France staying with us when I made open sandwiches with it. Both are well traveled and have been to Scandinavia and immediately after taking a bite, they exclaimed: “Danish rye bread!”. So the taste is definitely there. Sort of. Although the bread isn’t nearly as fragrant as the one I recall. It may be because Chad uses a wheat levain. I am pretty sure the rye bread we had in those long ago summers was made with a rye levain. I’ll try making it again and see.

Still, with a bit of smoked wild Alaskan salmon, a dollop of crème fraîche from British Columbia (brought to me the other day by my friend breadsong  and easily the best I have ever had on this continent) and a spray of fresh dill, Chad’s Dansk rugbrød makes a lovely smørrebrød. It doesn’t awaken old memories but it makes me smile as I imagine Bebbe giving it a try and pronouncing it americansk but good before methodically downing her aquavit.

On the technical side, I was a bit worried that the rye berries wouldn’t be soft enough to incorporate in the dough if simply soaked overnight, so I soaked them for 24 hours before draining and rinsing them. Since I had an unexpected scheduling conflict and couldn’t mix and bake as planned, I put them in the fridge for another 24 hours. When I looked at them, they had started to sprout. Knowing I wouldn’t have time to bake for another couple of days, I put them in the freezer. I took them out the night before I mixed the dough. I made sure all the ingredients were at room temperature when I started, even the buttermilk and the beer.
My 9 x 5.5 ” bread pans were a bit too small for the amount of dough the recipe yielded. The breads clearly wanted to rise higher and couldn’t. Next time I should probably make two and a half loaves. Although maybe I should first see if I get the same rise out of an all-rye starter…
Chad Robertson’s Danish Rye Bread is going to Susan for this week’s issue of Yeastspotting.

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September 5, 2012 · Filed Under: BreadCrumbs · 24 Comments

Nordic Whole-Grain Rye (a New York Times recipe): Takes One and Two

Take 2: crumb shot

Nordic Whole-Grain Rye Bread – Take Two

A few days ago the New York Times published an interesting article on rye by food writer Julia Moskin (Rye, a Grain With Ancient Roots, Is Rising Again.) Having been a huge fan of rye bread ever since I first set foot in Denmark ages ago (see Hanne Risgaard’s Real Rye Bread and Chad Robertson’s Danish Rye Bread) I decided to try my hand at the first of the two recipes posted with  the article, Nordic Whole-Grain Rye Bread. Long story short: I ended up making it twice because the first try was a flop.

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January 22, 2017 · Filed Under: Breads, Breads made with starter · 21 Comments

L’Atelier du Pain (Bread Workshop) at the San Francisco Baking Institute

Atelier du pain - stencilThis past weekend, the San Francisco Baking Institute (SFBI) marked its twentieth anniversary by launching its first ever L’Atelier du pain (bread workshop) serie. The event featured renowned bakers Steve Sullivan of The Acme Bread Company, Dave Miller of Miller’s Bakehouse and Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery as well as two talented in-house bakers and instructors, Miyuki Togi and Mac McConnell. While it was streamed live across the world to anyone who had bought a ticket, a lucky few (thirty in all) had been randomly selected to attend it in person.

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September 12, 2016 · Filed Under: Bread Events, Events · 3 Comments

BreadCrumbs

For ease of reference I am listing on this page tiny pieces of information that would get lost on the blog otherwise. I am looking for a more technology-savvy way to present them. If you know of any WordPress plugin that might work, please let me know and I’ll take a look. Thanks!

Flour

  • Bread flour: what to look for 
  • Enzymatic activity
  • Protein content
  • Ash content
  • Dave Miller on milling

Levain (natural starter)

  • Where do the aromas come from? What are the health benefits? 
  • A quick recap

Commercial yeast

(contents to be added)

 Mixing

  • Friction factor and autolyse
  • How to calculate the friction factor for your mixer

Fermentation

  • Your guide to preferments (by Didier Rosada)
  • Of Bread and Herons: a rye bread story
  • Mass effect
  • Musings
  • Pondering preferments
  • More on preferments
  • How to obtain the desired dough temperature (DDT)

Bread Science

  • Ever wondered how come bread dries out?
  • No-Knead Bread

Bakers’ Talk

  • Chad Robertson’s Tartine Book No 3: a book event
  • Peter Reinhart on bread

Bread Terminology

  • BreadSpeak

Bread Fun

  • How to make 2,000 year-old bread
  • Bread in a box
  • A slot machine for baguettes: only in France!
  • Doesn’t this take the cake?
  • Bread sculpture (SFBI, 2009)
  • Baguettes win in Colebrook, New Hampshire

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Hello!

MC-Profile- 2013 - DSC_0934

My name is MC: formerly a translator,  now a serious home baker and a blogger. If you like real bread and love to meet other bakers, you are in the right place. Come on in...

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