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Sonora White Whole Wheat Jelly Roll

West/Southwest meets North/Northwest, white Sonora wheat meets red kuri squash. Made with 60% Sonora white whole wheat pastry flour (bought at Grist & Toll in Los Angeles, California, from grain grown either in California or in Arizona) and 40% white whole wheat pastry flour (bought at Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill in Burlington, Washington) from grain grown in nearby Lynden, this sunny cake is a regular melting pot, all the more so as it is filled with jam made last fall from our Northwest bumper crop of red kuris.

The Sonora accounts for the pale yellow and the red kuri for the bright orange, and together, they make for a soft texture and complex taste. They may overshadow the less assertive Northwest white but then, sorry, Lynden grain, this time you were invited in a strictly supporting role as, right or wrong, I wasn’t sure the Sonora would have been up for a roll with macho kuri jam without your help. But fear not, your turn to shine will come again…

Ingredients
*   I used two different flours because I wasn’t sure that the Sonora flour would be strong enough for a jelly roll if used by itself
** I used grape-seed oil
*** Or any medium-soft jam or jelly

For those of you who are using BreadStorm (including the free version), please click on this link to import the formula.  For more on BreadStorm, you may want to read this post.



Method
For the instructions, please refer to the first five steps of this King Arthur Flour recipe (from which I adapted the list of ingredients).

If there is any red kuri jelly roll leftover, you might want to squeeze a sweet orange (such as a Cara Cara navel) over the whole thing the next day, let the crumb soak up the juice for a couple of minutes and… I’ll say no more, you’ll know bliss when you taste it.

Meet the Bakers: Louie and Clinton Prager

You know how sometimes when you walk into a bakery, you don’t really need to see the bread, from the fragrance in the air, you already know it is going to be good? Well, that’s how it is at Prager Brothers in Carlsbad, California, except that you can’t help seeing the bread anyway because several loaves are sitting right on the front counter waiting for the bakers to offer you samples…

And the bread is good indeed. Very good. All entirely naturally leavened (except for the pinch of yeast added to the baguettes) and all slowly fermented. Louie and Clint do have a retarder but they no longer use it. They reworked the production schedule so that every dough gets shaped, proofed and baked when it is ready. Sometimes all the breads are ready to go in at the same time and things get a bit hairy but then running a bakery is a long learning process…

Prager Brothers opened in May 2013 in an industrial park in the city of Carlsbad, north of San Diego. When the two brothers moved in, the place was bare. They built everything themselves, buying all the equipment (except for the oven which they got new) from a pizza place that was closing down. Everything was covered with what Clint describes as thick “pizza grease.” He spent days on end scrubbing the residue off the metal shelves. Elbow grease against pizza grease! Elbow grease won but as the two brothers soon discovered, the real work began when the bakery opened for business…



They work sixteen hours a day, sometimes more. Louie says he’s so tired when he gets home that he barely has time to make himself a grilled cheese sandwich before falling into bed, dead to the world. Nights are mercilessly short and come morning, the cycle starts all over again.

A plant biologist with a degree from the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, Louie, 27, started selling bread in April 2012. First he baked from an Alan Scott oven he built in his backyard and sold to neighbors and friends, then a nearby pizzeria gave him permission to use its oven at night, which made him eligible for a permit to sell at a farmers’ market. Soon he was approached by other farmers’ markets and started making more and more bread. He did this for about a year investing any money he made into more baskets and more racks. Louie recalls baking sixty loaves a week and bringing home sixty dollars, having given away most of his bread in the form of samples. When you plan to open a bakery in an area where handcrafted and naturally leavened bread is almost completely unheard of, educating tastebuds is indeed the best (perhaps the only) way to build a customer base…

While in school in San Luis Obispo, Louie met Richard Webb, an older local baker whom he credits with teaching him most of what he now knows about the craft. Soon he started reading all the bread books he could find. Later he also helped out in a brewery where he learned how temperature affects fermentation and generates flavor. His scientific training, and more specifically the classes on metabolism he took at Cal Poly, also helps him tremendously with the maintenance and use of natural starters: it has given him a keen understanding of the way micro-organisms work and taught him the discipline of writing everything down (although he acknowledges with a soft laugh that he often doesn’t have time to jot down the results of his experiments). Louie and Clint also get help from Jeff Yankellow, who lives in the area and drops in occasionally to share his knowledge and know-how with them. Since Jeff is one of three members of the Team USA who took home the gold at Coupe du monde de la boulangerie (the Olympics of bread baking) in Paris in 2005,  the two brothers are truly learning from a champion…

A huge batch of rye starter was softly humming to itself in the big Benier mixer when I first came in. It looked so satisfied I could almost imagine a smile on its rugged and bubbly face. It had been fed a couple of hours earlier and smelled like honey. It tasted marvelously sweet. But then, neither of the Prager starters is sour. They get fed as often as needed for the flavor to remain predominantly lactic instead of acetic. The rye for instance is fed twice a day most of the year and three times a day in the summer. It is not refrigerated.

Clinton, 26, is a professional musician; he plays the guitar and he sings. Like Louie though, he has been badly bitten by the bread bug. He has taken the Ancient Grains class at the San Francisco Baking Institute but most of what he knows about baking, he learned from Louie. He is keenly interested in eating wholesome food; making and selling bread from all organic flours and almost all organic ingredients is one way, not only to feed himself properly, but also to help other people eat better.

Louie and Clint are already training Lauren, 23…

…and they are looking to hire another baker so that they can establish two shifts. Once they do that, they’ll be able to revise their production schedule and bake more: they are considering making more rye bread for wholesale; they would also like to increase the retail side of the business by developing the front of the store. One of their friends who is a chef will help them put together a couple of lunch items, for instance soups that they could pair with a slice of bread and offer to the many office workers in their neighborhood. They are literally bursting with ideas but they cannot possibly do more than they do now until they hire help. Between the three of them (Louie, Clint and Lauren), they already cover six farmers’ markets a week, two on Wednesdays, two on Saturdays and two on Sundays. When Louie is at the market, Clint is at the bakery mixing and baking, and vice-versa.


Baguettes sell really well and so do the country loaves. The bakers have learned that, interestingly, different markets have slightly different tastes: they sell more whole-grain (100% whole wheat with seeds and walnuts, sprouted spelt) for instance at the Carlsbad and Vista farmers’ markets than at the Little Italy one, a variation that Louie thinks is correlated to the number of yoga people in the various communities. The more yoga lovers, the more requests for whole grain…

Louie starts mixing the dough for the rye. Based on the percentage of dry flour, he uses 200% rye starter. He adds pumpernickel flour, more water, quickly-soaked raw sunflower seeds, yet more water, stops the mixer, checks the consistency, checks again and again, checks constantly. The formula is taped to the wall behind the mixer but what he reads is the dough, not the printed page.

Once done, the dough is divided among oiled bins. The last batch left in the mixer gets a few handfuls of currants before being set to ferment.

A bit later, I watch the two brothers oil pans, scale and shape the rye dough, wordlessly switching workstations mid-process. I ask how it feels to be working so closely with a sibling on an everyday basis. They glance at each other : “It wasn’t easy at first and still isn’t sometimes.” Then they laugh in unison, shoulders shaking with mirth. The pros clearly beat the cons but the cons save the relationship from boredom. Not a bad setup.



Despite the high percentage of starter, the resulting bread tastes surprisingly mellow…

A customer walks in, asking for a raisin-walnut loaf. The bread is still in the oven. Louie feels bad, he’s the one who told her earlier to come back at 4 but they are running late today. He asks her to please wait a few minutes. As soon as the loaves are out, he slips one in a brown paper bag and hands it to her: “It’s on the house. But please remember to cool it on a rack when you get home.” The customer thanks him and leaves, a happy smile on her face. I pack up my camera and my notebook and start saying my goodbyes just as another customer comes in, asking for rye bread. But the rye is still proofing. Louie sells her the one half-a-loaf he has left and tells her there’ll be plenty more in the morning. Holding the wrapped bread close to her chest, she says with surprising fervor: “Please, please, don’t ever go out of business. I love your bread! I am from Germany and your rye tastes exactly like ours back home.” When she’s gone, he says: “You know, that’s what makes it all worth it. That’s why we don’t mind the long shifts and the tough schedule. Meeting people and making them happy by feeding them good bread… That’s what this is all about.” Clint chimes in: “Good food, good people and the pleasure of knowing we are working for nobody but ourselves. What else is there to ask for?”

Maintaining a rye starter and preparing for a bake

When breadsong took the lid off her container of rye starter during last month’s Baking with Natural Starters Workshop in Victoria, BC, there was a collective gasp of surprise then a few seconds of reverent silence before we all exclaimed about the extraordinary honey-like aroma. Breadsong took a long sniff and said that while she had sometimes detected beautiful fruity aromas in the heat of summer, she had never picked up on such a honey scent before. We speculated about what might have caused it: it could have been a simple mass effect (she doesn’t usually mix such a large amount of starter); it could have been the flour (she had been stayting with Diane for a couple of days and using Diane’s rye flour instead of the one she uses at home; it could have been the presence of countless wild yeast cells in Diane’s kitchen. We may never know. What I do know for sure is that I have never seen or smelled such a rye starter as hers. So of course I asked her if she could explain in details how she cares for her starter and what she does to prepare it for baking. Below is what she wrote back. Thank you, breadsong!

“When I took Jeffrey Hamelman’s rye breads class, he recommended a schedule for maintaining a rye starter at home. I try to follow a similar schedule, feeding my rye starter every other day when I am not baking.  If planning to bake, I’ll increase the feeding to daily, then twice-daily feeding, just before building a rye levain for a bake.
When well-cared for and regularly fed and refreshed, the rye starter contributes lovely aroma and flavor to the baked rye bread, so I try to keep up the feeding schedule. I can’t always maintain this schedule if time is short or if away travelling, but the rye starter seems to bounce back quickly when the feeding schedule is resumed.
The rye starter is maintained at 100% hydration, with feeding being equal parts rye starter, water, and flour (30g rye starter + 30g warm water (un-chlorinated) + 30g whole organic whole rye flour). The top of the starter is dusted with rye flour after feeding, to help make the starter’s expansion and ripening more visible. I place an elastic band around the container, at the level the starter is right after feeding, to help me see how much the starter rises while fermenting.
Temperatures in the low 80’s are recommended dough temperatures for sourdough rye breads in Jeffrey Hamelman’s book, so  thought I’d try 80F as a target temperature for fermenting the rye starter when getting closer to bake day, to try to make sure the rye starter has lots of vigor prior to building the rye levain.
I aim for a rye starter temperature of 80F after feeding. If I’m not planning to bake soon, I let the rye starter ferment at room temperature  until the rye starter has peaked or matured (has domed, doubling in height compared to its height in the container when freshly fed; has cracks on the surface ;  with lots of fermentation bubbles visible along the sides of the (clear) container it is fermenting in). After the starter has peaked, I refrigerate it to prevent the starter from over-fermenting before the next feeding (I don’t like how the starter’s consistency breaks down when it over-ferments).
When getting closer to bake day, I use the Brød and Taylor proofer to keep fermentation temperature of the rye starter at 80F – the rye starter really seems to be happy at this temperature.
As an example of the feeding schedule I use, to prepare for a Sunday bake:

  • Monday morning, feed starter and let ferment at room temperature until  it peaks, then refrigerate
  • Wednesday morning, feed starter and let ferment at room temperature until it peaks, then refrigerate
  • Friday morning, feed starter and let ferment at room temperature until it peaks, then refrigerate
  • Saturday morning, feed starter and let ferment at 80F until it peaks, then leave at room temperature
  • Saturday evening, feed starter (upping the quantities, if necessary, considering the amount of rye starter needed to build the rye levain); let ferment at 80F until it peaks, then leave at room temperature
  • Saturday night or early Sunday morning, when rye starter peaks, build rye levain for Sunday bake (fermenting at 80-83F preferably, sometimes fermenting at a cooler temperature, hoping to time it so the rye levain will be at its peak at a convenient time for mixing)
  • After building the rye levain, feed rye starter and let ferment overnight or until it peaks, then refrigerate until Monday morning.  If building a rye levain of 100% hydration or less, will dust the top with rye flour to help make the starter’s expansion and ripening more visible.”

Maintaining a white starter and preparing for a bake

If there is a secret to Diane Andiel‘s gorgeous breads, it is that her wheat starter is extraordinarily vivacious. If it were a person, it would be a soprano! It erupts into singing bubbles any time she walks by, you know that slight “crushing paper”sound a starter makes when it is happy? You have to see it (and hear it) to believe it. I asked her how she maintained it and being a woman of few words (but action galore), she wrote back what follows:

I keep the starter on a twelve- hour schedule for at least three days leading up to a bake. Morning and night it is refreshed so that it will do what I need it to do. When I am not baking for a few days, I will feed it once a day or refrigerate it for three or four days without feeding.
I keep it on my kitchen counter and do not worry about the temperature of the room. In winter at night the kitchen is very cool and in the hot summer I must be more observant because it will move much faster and may require an extra feeding.
The ratio we used in the class to build the levain was 
100 % flour
120 % water
20 % liquid starter
This levain had twelve hours to ferment before being added to the final dough.

No pampering, no frills! Tough love rules! I find that very interesting especially if you consider the extent of the tender loving care breadsong bestows on her own starters. And yet, both get wonderful results. From my own experience as a baker, I would say that starters are a bit like kids. They like a routine and they like limits. I once had a starter that I normally fed once a day. Having read somewhere that starters are happier and more energetic when fed twice a day, I put it on a morning and evening schedule and guess what? It was never the same after…
But since the starter I am now using is Diane’s (she gave me some to take home), rest assured I shall stick to the two-meals-a-day schedule: I want it a soprano too!

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Meet the Baker: Guillaume Viard

Guillaume Viard is a baker with a mission and it is not in the least surprising that his bakery, Le Pain par nature, should gleam like a beacon on Rue Cavallotti, an otherwise rather gray street in Paris’ eighteenth arrondissement.

Customer education begins in the window:


(All our ingredients are fresh and seasonal and all our products are “home-made”). 

“People need to learn to live within the Earth’s finite resources, they need to pay attention to the weather, to the climate. Once a crop is all in, that’s it for the year. In the fall, we use apples and pears in our tarts and cakes, in the winter, lemon, chocolate, caramel and apples (they keep well); in March, we work with dried fruit. Then spring arrives, bringing back first strawberries, then apricots. When someone asks for a fraisier (a fresh strawberry cake) in December, we explain why it can’t be done. Our sandwiches and other snack food follow the seasons as well. We offer thick vegetable pies in the fall when varietal diversity is at its peak. As soon as tomato season is over in France, grated raw root vegetables (carrots, beets) or céleri rémoulade (grated celeriac in a mustardy mayo dressing) replace tomato slices in our sandwiches. New customers are baffled. We explain. That’s when consumer education happens. Some will never learn, they go elsewhere. Most stay. We have lots of students, many families, old people who are the pillars of our community. Some come three or four times a day: for croissants in the morning, for a salad or a quiche at lunch, for bread at any time.” Listening to Guillaume (who, while talking to me non-stop in the bakery’s kitchen, is also hand-mixing mayonnaise and chopping and grating vegetables for salads and sandwiches), I feel a sudden longing for a life where I too might be able to stop four times a day by my neighborhood bakery…
The bakery gets its flour from Moulin Trottin, a mill whose owner largely shares Guillaume’s outlook on territoriality and the environment: the flours Guillaume buys from him are all French and all organic. He shuns such exotic grains as kamut and quinoa: “They come from too far away. Using these flours makes no sense economically-, biologically- or environmentally-speaking. So we do without. Besides wheat, the flour we use the most is petit-épeautre, also called engrain (emmer). Grown in central France (the one from Provence is too expensive) and rich in minerals, it is redolent of our terroir français.  Since it is low in gluten and absorbs a lot of water, we have developed a special formula and technique to make the best possible use of its characteristics and to showcase its unique flavor. It is quite popular with our customers.”

“We use no grand-épeautre (spelt) at all. It is too close to wheat, especially in gluten-content, to be of much nutritional interest.” Guillaume stops chopping for a minute. “Gluten intolerance is a modern ailment, a direct result of wheat selection which has consistently favored high-gluten varieties: today wheat can contain up to forty-three percent gluten. Twenty years ago, the percentage was twenty-five percent. There is naturally much less gluten in ancient wheat varieties, such as the ones that are currently being reintroduced in some parts of southern France.” His face takes on a slightly mournful expression: “I guess gluten-free baking has a future in this country, sort of.” Chopping resumes at a faster rythm.

The loudspeakers are going full blast in the shop and kitchen; Guillaume and Suat, his sale associate, are moving briskly. It is mid-morning. Their shift has started early but not as early as Luc’s, who is nevertheless still busy downstairs in the bread lab. The phone rings, the greengrocer is on the line. Guillaume, who is dexterously filling mini-tubs with the salad he just made, wedges the phone between cheek and shoulder and places an order from a list seemingly embedded whole in his memory: “Flat parsley, Reine de Reinettes and Golden apples, leaf celery, eggs, etc.” He goes on and on. The seller is a cooperative of producers and everything is organic.
I ask about dried fruit and nuts. “We buy organic French walnuts. I’d love to buy French hazelnuts as well but we just don’t produce enough. The best hazelnuts come from Italy. Unfortunately ninety percent of Italian hazelnuts are gobbled up by a huge industrial confectioner. ” He shakes his head: “And that’s how the best hazelnuts in the world end up in the worst candy in the world. ” He looks dejected for a minute but he soon brightens up: “Right now I am looking for a producer of AOC chestnut flour in Corsica but this year’s crop isn’t completely in yet. I have to wait. Meanwhile I use the Markal brand. My rule is to go as close to home as possible to buy the best I can find: almonds from Spain, hazelnuts, figs and apricots from Turkey.”

One thing is for sure: no truck ever lumbers up to Le Pain par nature to delivers frozen pastries and viennoiseries; no order is ever placed for strawberries from Spain, Africa or South America or from anywhere but France, for that matter; mangoes, pineapples, sesame seeds and pistachios never darken the door. Ninety-two percent of the fruit and vegetables used at the bakery is grown in France and organic. Milk and eggs are organic too. But, Guillaume explains, “Organic is becoming a business, and nowadays the only organic butter available in France comes from Holland. It makes no sense to use Dutch butter when we ourselves make the best possible butter for our croissants!” So he buys Montaigu, a conventional AOC butter from Charentes-Poitou.

Suat Adiyaman, Luc Poggio and Guillaume Viard

Among the breads, the best-seller is the Tradi-bio (a naturally leavened baguette with a crunchy crust, a fine crumb and a good shelf-life) closely followed by the Bioguette (a yeasted baguette with a shorter fermentation time).  Bio (short for biologique), means “organic.”





Among the special breads on offer on this particular morning, I spy the Cambrousse, a country bread…

…the Pain des champs…

… and a few glorious miches…

I also spy also viennoiseries such as the airy chausson aux pommes below (filled with homemade applesauce)…

…the friand maison (a house pâté made with ground meat -veal, beef and chicken- and fresh herbs)…

…or crumbly pains au chocolat aux amandes (twice-baked chocolate almond croissants)…

Despite using all organic ingredients (save for butter, oil and vinegar), Guillaume and Luc keep their prices reasonably competitive. The Bioguette goes for one euro (a non-organic baguette costs an average of € 0.85 in Paris,  € 0.95 in the neighborhood) and the Tradi-Bio for € 1.20 (against an average of € 1.10 for a conventional baguette tradition in Paris, € 1.15 in the neighborhood). Sandwiches and salads are a bit more pricey than elsewhere, reflecting the added cost of the ingredients but they still fly off the shelves. “People come for the taste. They may grumble about the price but they come back.” Guillaume hands a stack of covered salad containers to Suat who takes them into the shop. Noon is fast approaching, the lunch crowd will soon arrive, re-stocking is in-order.

Full trays of just baked snacks are waiting to be displayed…



Roullos made with rolled out tradibio dough smothered with organic ham and cheese
sometimes made instead with julienned veggies or shredded chicken and cheese

“Our customers understand that everything we sell is made in-house. But it took a while for that to sink in. Take the croissants! After years of eating frozen industrial croissants (the bakery’s previous owners didn’t make their own), they were a bit put out by the fact that the shape of ours varied slightly from one batch to the next. We had to explain that our croissants were hand-made by Luc, an artisan, not by a machine! Now they know and they no longer notice.”
Guillaume met Luc at La Boulangerie par Véronique Mauclerc, an organic bakery which I remember visiting it a few years ago, awed by the diversity and flavor of the offerings. (For a picture of Guillaume in front of Mauclerc’s woodfire oven, one of only three still in existence in Paris, click here). There is pride in his voice when he adds: “I trained him myself. Now he runs our bread lab.”
As for Guillaume, he started as an apprentice in a bakery in Central France (where he is from). Sadly the boss never allowed him to touch anything but a broom and a mop and he spent his days cleaning the floor. So he joined Les Compagnons du Devoir, became a baker, did the customary Tour de France, and after trying his hand at pastry, cooking, and other trades went back to bread when hired by Veronique Mauclerc. “Not only did I learn a lot from her about organic baking but she also taught me self-reliance. At one point though we found ourselves disagreeing about some fundamental choices and we parted ways. I went down South to get my driver’s license and started thinking about the bakery I was dreaming of opening one day. I worked a bit for Eric Kayser, a fellow Compagnon and my then-idol (I learned a great deal from his three textbooks). Then Luc and I decided to become partners. It took us more than two years to put the project together: a year and a half to write the business plan, six months to find financing then a year to locate the bakery we wanted.  We found our current premises (where a bakery has been continuously in operation since 1904) through word-of-mouth. There were many other interested buyers but the owners liked us from the get-go. So they sold to us. We opened on November 5, 2012 and did well right away: sales volume increased by 50 to 60% the first year compared to the sellers’ turnover of the year before (to be fair, they weren’t getting any younger and didn’t have their heart in it anymore). Most of their customers stayed with us. Le Pain par nature is a neighborhood bakery and we love it that way.”

Guillaume is very proud of the fact that he won tenth place earlier this year for his tarte aux pommes (apple tart) in a Paris-wide competition. “I was raised in rural France and we grew most of our food. All organic of course. We knew no other way. I still do everything the way we used to. For instance, I make my crème pâtissière (pastry cream) from a recipe given to me by a great-aunt. I don’t change a thing.” When he was a child, he baked cakes every Sunday, so when he joined the Compagnons, he was hoping to become a boulanger-pâtissier (bread baker/pastry chef) but admission was based on competitive exams and “I could only apply to one. I picked ‘boulanger‘ because the trades were listed in alphabetical order and it was the first to come up. I have no regrets: pastry is a very rigorous and technical craft. That’s not who I am. I work on instinct, on feeling. But I still like pastry. Although maybe I like cooking even more.”
Le Pain par nature is a different kind of business: “We chose to make it a cooperative, which means that the focus is on the business itself, not on the capital. We are required by law to keep it growing as opposed to getting the most money out of it and, again by law, we cannot be anything but salaried employees. Right now the bakery officially has two employees, Luc and myself. Suat – who is a landscape artist by trade – came on board at a later stage, when the company he worked for went out of business. He is expected to soon become a partner.”
“We all share the same ideas. Luc was born in Paris but he is keenly aware that organic is the way of the future. Our dream is actually to one day open an école de boulange (a baking school), maybe in my childhood home if we can swing it as it is fairly large and comes with a fruit and vegetable garden. We would just need to build a classroom. We would adopt a holistic approach and teach all aspects of the trade: working with organic ingredients only, we would make sure the apprentices know where everything comes from. They would grow the produce they would use. We would build a mill to help them understand flour. They need to see by themselves that wheat requires time, technique and terroir to grow, that the land has its own nature, origin and history, that life has meaning and that bread is alive. We’d seek accreditation but we couldn’t get it, we could remain a private trade school: our graduates would just have to sit for the public exam to obtain their official diplomas. Whether or not we ever open our dream school one day, we already live and work by our principles and I like to think that our bakery is twenty years ahead of our times.”
I close my notebook and Guillaume selects a well-baked Tradi-bio among those which have just come out of the oven. He hands it to me. It makes a lovely crackling sound: “Taste it later when it has cooled down a bit”. I already know that it will taste just the way it looks, as an honest to goodness baguette, ready to play second fiddle to whatever tasty food will be put on the table but whose crust and crumb make it ideal for that most cherished goûter (afternoon snack) of my childhood: bread with a bar of chocolate inside. The torch is passing to a new generation and it is a lovely feeling.