Farine

Crazy for Bread

Search Results for: how to make bread

Meet the Apprentice: Justin Rosengarten

Justin Rosengarten, 24, who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in visual arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, came to bread the same way as many other bakers I have had the pleasure of meeting since I started this blog: out of sheer passion.
He isn’t absolutely convinced yet that bread is his ultimate calling (he has given some thought to being a furniture designer, a children’s book designer or a pianist) and as he puts it, “I’ll continue to dance until I find” but he has a pretty good idea that it might be it.
Even before meeting Gérard and deciding to apply to the apprenticeship program, he started on his own to learn what he could about bread: “Frankly I thought there was nothing to it”.
He built an oven at one of his friends’ house in Vermont: “I wanted to have this oven on my résumé.”  But he needed more exposure to bakery work.
His Vermont friend called Erik Andrus, the local baker, and asked him whether he might be open to have Justin come and watch him make bread. Erik, who owns Good Companion Bakery near Vergennes in Northern Vermont, invited Justin to come over and actually hired him to sell bread at the farmer’s market.
On his free time, Justin decided to go visit other bakeries in Northern Vermont. He googled Vermont bakers, found Gérard Rubaud through this blog and the rest is history. When I met Justin, he was on the fourth day of his apprenticeship with Gérard. 
Having since left the program for personal reasons, he no longer works at Gérard’s. I wish him the best of luck. I am hoping he’ll appear again on this blog, this time in the Meet the Baker series…

Gérard Rubaud and the Three-Speed Levain


Gérard’s regular levain, fermented on second speed, initially (left) and six hours later (right)
What baker hasn’t wished his or her levain would ferment a little faster so that mixing can start? Gérard who runs a one-man show on a very tight schedule has devised a method that gives him more control on how fast or how slowly his levain will develop.
He doesn’t advocate using this method all the time as he isn’t sure of what actually happens within the levain when it ferments faster: does it develop undesirable acids or aromas? He hasn’t been able to tell just from tasting the resulting bread. Still he finds it a handy tool to have as it makes for more flexibility.
As for me, when we did the experience described below, since we didn’t bake with any of these three pieces of levain, I can’t vouch for the taste but I can tell you one thing: the levain fermented on third speed had aromas which were heady enough to make a grown woman swoon. Plus it ended up so round and fluffy I wished I could have used it that night as a pillow. Forget about cloud nine! I’ll take cloud three anytime…

Three-speed levain demo



Pictures taken before the start of the experiment
#3 may look a bit bigger than #2 to start with but it is an optical effect. 
All three levains weigh exactly the same.
  • Shortly before 8:00 AM, Gérard feeds his regular levain and scales off three 1,650 g pieces which he calls #1, #2 and #3 respectively. Please note that he keeps his levain at 57% hydration and always salts it
  • He rounds the three pieces gently
  • At 8:20 AM, he places #1 in a plastic box, loosely covered, and puts the box on its side (to make later comparisons easier) (this is first speed)
  • He places #2 next to #1 and loosely covers it with a sheet of clear plastic (this is second speed)
  • He places #3 next to #2 on a clear sheet of plastic which he loosely wraps around it (this is third speed). 
  • When wrapping the levain for third speed, it is important to leave it room to expand as its volume will triple
  • The three levains are then left to ferment side-by-side at room temperature (about 78°F) for about six hours
  • At 2:20 PM, Gérard uncovers the three levains simultaneously
  • Significant differences in sizes can be observed between them, ranging from #1 (the smallest) to #3 (the largest)


  • #3 has obviously reached a more advanced stage of fermentation (Gérard’s theory is that wild yeast cell counts shoot up when the levain is completely sheltered from ambient air)
  • #3’s fluffiness makes it much easier to incorporate into an autolysed dough: there is no risk that some pieces of it might remain firm and unincorporated
  • For the sake of the side-by-side photo comparisons, Gérard has made all three levains into boules today but when he actually uses the third speed in a production setting, he shapes the levain into a long sausage before wrapping it. The fermentation is even faster that way.
Gérard says he uses second speed routinely and third speed only when he really needs to rescue his production schedule. 

Other Gérard Rubaud stories may be found on this page.

Gérard Rubaud: The Never-Ending Quest

Time has come for a return visit to the bakery on the hill and to the maestro whose life’s work is to charm wild yeasts out of plain bags of flour and grains and choreograph them into intricate ballets of flavors and aromas.

Save for the colors of the season, the landscape hasn’t changed: the pond still stares at the sky, the girl still dances on her bluff and the trees are as watchful as ever.

The dogs romp in the meadow, there is enough wood near the house to feed the oven for months on end… No, not much has changed indeed since my last visit to this corner of northern Vermont.

But the baker himself, ah, the baker remains a moving target. What he is seeking in his endless quest no one can really tell, maybe not even himself.
In the three years I have known Gérard (only three years and yet I feel as if I had known him all my life), he has changed almost everything in his formula, changed his levain, changed his methods, changed his timeline. The bread is indeed better than it ever was but that’s incidental. He will never get where he’s going but that’s fine. If he did, all light would fade away from life.
In this seemingly changeless environment, what keeps the baker going is change. Not change for change’s sake, mind you! Change because nothing actually ever stays the same: temperature and humidity go up and down, protein and enzymes differ from one bag of flour to the next, customers call and ask for big holes in the crumb, others request a denser crumb (“I don’t want to wear a bib when I eat my toast and marmalade”), others yet follow variations in the taste of the levain as sports fans follow a favorite team (“What did you do to your bread? I love it, keep it that way!” or “I liked last week’s better”), they ask for more whole grains, for less whole grains. They are a vocal bunch and bread to them is definitely not the squishy stuff that comes in a plastic bag on the supermarket shelf. Their bread carries Gérard’s signature and they like it that way. They queue up at the stores. Peter, the man in charge of the deliveries, says people wait in the parking lot for his van. They follow him into the store and wait while a price label is affixed to the bag, then they make their move.



The breads on the left haven’t been bagged yet as they are still too warm. They will be before they get to the store.

Gérard could sell much more bread that he currently does, except that he can’t because it would be physically impossible for him to bake much more than 150 loaves a day five days a week. He learned that lesson from the stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed and permanently disabled six years ago (he used to bake seven days a week). But as he sees it, the most important part of a baker’s job is making good bread every day for local customers (his “friends and neighbors” as he calls them). Never mind expanding…
Fame knocks at his door now and then but he sends it on its way. Gérard’s bread was recently featured in Saveur magazine’s round-up of the best breads in America and when I saw a picture of one of his loaves in the print version of the article (the online version is a crumb shot and I have no clue whether or not it is indeed his), I gasped and picked up the phone: “Gérard, what happened? The bread looks awful!” He chuckled: “Yes, they requested that bread be sent to them for a photoshoot but it arrived too late. The shots were done. So they asked my permission to use just any bread picture and I said, fine. I don’t care, I am not selling bread across America. My neighbors are whom I bake for and they know my bread”…



The crumb on Gérard’s bread on the day I arrived (a very hot and humid day)

What you’ll find below is a snapshot of Gérard’s current process and the thinking behind it. Consider it as a moment frozen in time. It will have changed again by the time I go back.

Flours
  • Gérard currently uses 12% freshly milled whole-grain flours in his everyday bread (as opposed to close to about 30% when I first met him). He says his customers have asked for a less rustic crumb
  • This whole grain consists entirely of spelt right now but he will switch to half-spelt and half- hard red winter wheat when the harvest is in and he can get Warthog wheat again from Vermont farmer Jack Lazor as the flavor of that wheat is simply extraordinary*
Levain
  • Gérard originally creates his levain from 50% wheat and 50% rye. After the very first feeding, he only uses all-purpose flour (AP)
  • He switched to an all-white levain because he wanted more elasticity. He had had some issues with his previous levain tearing and decided to give priority to texture over taste (not that the taste is any less complex and marvelous, just different)
  • He keeps it at 57% hydration
  • The smallest amount Gérard ever mixes (his old Hobart doesn’t take less) is: 700 g AP flour, 400 g water, 300 g levain and 6 g salt. That is the first build, always
  • Feeding a levain again as soon as it doubles helps create anywhere from 15 to 30% more wild yeast cells. In Gérard’s experience, the first time, the levain doubles in four hours, the second time 20 to 30 minutes faster and the third time, 40 minutes to one hour faster than the first time. That’s when the levain is at its peak
  • With such a levain, it is possible to make croissant dough with very little butter using whole grains
  • Currently the levain‘s schedule is as follows: first feed at 8:30 PM, second feed at 5:00 AM, third feed at 3:40 PM (for a 9:30 PM autolyse and a 10:15 PM mixing)
  • A baker who normally feeds his or her levain a percentage of whole grains must put it on an all-white diet before storing it in the fridge or it might ferment too much and develop unwanted acids
Autolyse
  • Uses all of the water in formula
  • Duration: 30 minutes at least and up to 6 hours if desired/necessary
  • Takes place at room temperature which, in Gérard’s case, is usually in the high 70’s
  • It takes a while to calculate dough hydration taking the texture of the levain into account. A levain that is too flexible will result in a dough that will need one or two folds to be strong enough
  • A six-hour autolyse only reduces later fermentation time by about 40 minutes but makes the dough silkier. An added benefit is that the dough can be mixed right away when the baker arrives at the bakery. Of course in a professional setting, it usually only works for the first batch as the mixer is needed for other doughs
  • Flour and water should be mixed for less than 3 minutes (first speed). Don’t mix until the dough becomes homogenous: you want unaggregated lumps that will not hamper gluten formation. The resulting crumb will be softer
  • Gluten will develop by itself over time. The baker’s role is to make sure that a maximum of water hydrates the amount of flour in the formula. Once the flour is hydrated, the mixing must stop immediately
Levain Incorporation
  • If the levain is flexible enough, it should incorporate in no time
Adding salt
  • Once the levain is fully incorporated and dough turns shiny (it takes less than 3 minutes), add the salt
Total Mixing Time: 9 minutes maximum
  • Mixing is always done in first speed (Gérard has disabled the second speed on his mixer to make sure it wouldn’t be used)
  • 3 minutes maximum for the autolyse
  • 3 minutes maximum to incorporate the levain
  • 3 minutes maximum to incorporate the salt
  • Ideally these times should be further reduced if possible
Bulk Fermentation
  • Once the levain and the salt are incorporated, the dough is transferred to the wooden fermentation box where it remains for a minimum of 4.5 hours (room temp: about 78°F)
Folding
  • Generally speaking Gérard only does one fold and it happens post-bulk fermentation after transferring the dough to his worktable (and if possible without overlapping the folds)
  • The exception is when the baker has over hydrated the dough thinking the flour was very high in protein when in fact the protein level was inferior or the quality of the protein poor. The resulting dough is runny and folding is a way of strengthening it

Dividing and Pre-Shaping

  • Gérard starts dividing the first batch at 3:30 AM
  • He scales at 800 g
  • He pre-shapes the divided dough and lets fermentation start again by allowing the dough to rest for at least 30 minutes and up to one hour (if room temperature is cool)
  • Gérard likes to keep the dough in its pre-shaped form for at least 45 minutes: he finds it easier to work with afterwards and gets better results
  • If room temperature is around 78 to 80°F, the ideal is to allow the pre-shaped dough to rest for one hour
  • This lengthy rest enables the baker to give the dough any shape he or she wants afterwards. It works better if the dough hasn’t been pre-shaped as a boule however: in boule form, fermentation would go too fast
  • A lengthy pre-shaped rest enables the baker to decrease proofing time

 
Shaping

  • After a 40-minute rest, Gérard gives the dough its final shape
  • The shaped dough is transferred to flour-dusted couches
Proofing
  • Proofing is the third stage in the fermentation process (levain + bulk + proofing)
  • A good way of knowing when proofing is done is to apply two fingers on the dough (with very little pressure). If the imprint of the fingers doesn’t bounce back and remains on the dough, proofing is done. If the imprint disappears right away, proofing isn’t over
  • Total fermentation time depends on the liveliness of the levain and the amount used in the formula: the less levain in the dough, the longer the total fermentation time. For a dough containing 25 to 30% levain, proofing lasts about two hours (the longer the dough rests in its pre-shaped form, the shorter the proofing)
  • Gérard no longer retard the proofing loaves (as he started doing last time I was there). He says he prefers to stay away from newfangled methods of making bread as the traditional way has always worked for him. Switching trays of bread from a warm room to a cold room and back to warm is also too physically demanding to make it worthwhile: Gérard currently has no help in the middle of the night. Peter only comes in in the morning to carry the trays of bread to the oven and back and to take care of bagging and delivering

Baking
  • The first batch of bread goes into the oven at 8:00-8:30 AM
  • Oven temperature is between 485 and 525°F
  • Gérard “power washes” the sole of the oven with water before he starts loading (in the winter when air is very dry he also adds steam). But his oven has no venting system and the thirty-six breads he bakes together lose 10 to 12% of their weight when baking, thus providing enough humidity
  • Gérard scores his bread holding his lame at a 30° angle. His cuts are very shallow and he never lifts the skin of the dough. What he’s shooting for is a very thin crust with hardly a grigne (grigne is French for an ear in the crust)
  • For an 800 g bread (raw dough), baking time is 35 minutes.
* Jack Lazor just harvested his Warthog wheat. He says that he brought in eighteen tons and that there will be plenty for Gérard.

WheatStalk 2012


(image courtesy of BBGA)
Just back from a bread-baking whirlwind in Chicago and still under the spell, with visions of perfect loaves dancing in my head…
If you have been reading Farine for a while, you may remember previous posts about classes or events organized or co-sponsored by the Bread Bakers’ Guild of America (BBGA).  I try to attend as many of these gatherings as I possibly can: they are always interesting, informative and fun and they provide great opportunities to meet other bakers. With WheatStalk which took place last week at Kendall College in Chicago, the Guild (a non-profit organization whose core mission is education) has outdone itself, bringing together two hundred participants (professional bakers, home bakers, millers, farmers, scientists, industry suppliers, etc.), for three full days of  baking and learning.

There have been two other WheatStalk-like events in the Guild’s history: Camp Bread 2005 and Camp Bread 2007 (both of which took place in California) and those who attended (I have met quite a few since I joined BBGA in 2008) still talk about them with awe in their voice and stars in their eyes.
By all accounts, WheatStalk 2012 was pretty much in the Camp Bread tradition except that it was held in the Midwest so that even more people could attend (some participants even came from Canada and Central America). La fine fleur (literally the finest flour, more aptly translated as the cream of the crop) of America’s baking instructors was there to offer a wide array of hands-on classes (building a commercial brick oven, functional breads, easy rye breads, gluten-free breads, ancient grains the modern way, etc.), lectures (starting your own bakery, finding whole grain solutions for formula development, the science underlying bread baking, etc.) and demos (laminating with whole grains, bread showpieces and decorations, Team USA breads, etc.).
The level of energy, enthusiasm and good will was extraordinary. Master bakers attended classes alongside home bakers. Instructors switched sides, teaching one day, apprenticing the next, attesting a simple truth: “Dough makes us humble”. We can tweak it, coax it, cajole it, browbeat it, pamper it. In the end, it has a mind of its own although it definitely listens to some more readily than to others. So yes, indeed, knowledge matters and practice, practice, practice…


Jeffrey Yankellow and Mike Zakowski presenting Team USA’s breads
(photo courtesy of breadsong)

Participants had been requested to apply for their classes months ahead of time (giving their order of preference) and the organizers (who did a fantastic job of marshaling resources for the event) worked very hard to satisfy most requests. But even if all of one’s wishes were granted, there were so many equally desirable labs, demos and lectures that everybody had to make hard choices. I had selected two lectures (Day 1) and two all-day labs (Day 2 and 3), which means that, inevitably, I missed out on seventeen other all-day labs, ten other demos and four other lectures, almost all of which I would have loved to attend. So much too learn, so little time!
WheatStalk started on Wednesday night June 27th with a baker’s math review, taught by Jeff Yankellow, the current Chair of the Board of Directors for the Guild. The class was mostly intended for home bakers, especially those who like me are resolutely number-challenged (now I know that it wasn’t a smart idea to spend most of my math classes in high school practicing writing with my left hand. It is a pretty cool skill and useful all right but except for making it easy to switch hands when scoring, I can’t say it has helped me very much in my baking). I should have listened to my mom – who had been a math teacher… (Dr. Freud, where were you when I needed you?) when she said I would be sorry one day…

Jeff explained that baker’s percentage is a tool:

  • Combined with a fundamental knowledge of bread baking, it enables the baker to make any bread he or she wishes without having to go look for a formula in a book
  • Since it is a common language among bakers and in the industry, it makes it possible to look at a formula and know right away what it is about
  • It provides an easy way to scale a batch of dough up or down
  • It makes it much easier to identify and troubleshoot problems. 
  • Those who have trouble envisioning a dough with a 100% flour ratio can just replace the word percentage by the word “part” and it all becomes clearer.

The following day, Thursday June 28th, was the hottest day of the week in Chicago: outside temperature reached 101° F/38°C. My thoughts often wandered to the backyard where the wood fire oven was being put together (and where it was so hot that plastic cups left in the sun actually melted) and to the labs where the ovens were doing a good job of roasting everything and everyone in sight. As luck would have it, it was lecture day for me so I got to spend it in the relatively cool sixth-floor auditorium.
In the morning, Amy Scherber from Amy’s Bread in New York City and Leslie Mackie from Macrina Bakery & Café in Seattle held forth on the subject of starting a bakery. Albeit living and working on either side of the country, they have a lot in common and while they made a few different choices over the years, their stories were fundamentally similar. They clearly get along famously too!

After a short presentation of their bakeries, they listed the twenty steps to follow to open a bakery or café on a small budget (they also made it clear that depending on the location, the “small budget” may in fact be quite large nowadays for an artisan baker looking to make it on his or her own).
The first step (“Dream a dream”) is the most enjoyable (and presents the added benefit of costing nothing). All the others are more arduous and demanding (tip: if you have deep pockets, hire someone to do the ground work for you).
The audience – among whom more than one self-described “baker trapped in the body of an accountant” (or a lawyer) – listened in rapt concentration and pored attentively over the printout of the forecast business model. In the end, once all the technical details and numbers were taken care of, the bakers’ advice boiled down to this: if you want to open a bakery, you need a lot of endurance, energy and stamina, both physically and mentally. So if you are serious about it, prepare yourself: eat healthy foods and get exercise!

The afternoon lecture was devoted to food photography. It was taught by Eric Futran, a food and culinary photographer who started his career as a photojournalist and is currently the staff photographer for Kendall College. His delivery was fast, efficient and very entertaining. The class consisted in:

  • A two-hour presentation of the main trends in food photography and a close “reading”/deconstruction of various food shots borrowed either from books by well-known photographers or from Eric’s own portfolio
  • A two-hour photoshoot of whatever we liked (he had brought some fruit, bread and vegetables as well as various backgrounds and a series of tripods). 

Sorry for the greenish screen.
I exposed on the slides because the room had been darkened and that’s how it came out! 

Since the eye spontaneously moves from top to bottom and from left to right, you want to help it travel across the shot at a diagonal:

  • Tangents are really pleasing and angles are everything
  • Never center anything!
  • Light should come from behind (to create texture) 
  • But it must be reflected by a fill card or a piece of foil so that one can see through the shadow it creates towards the camera.

On the technical side, Eric recommended:

  • Shooting food on a tripod  (to reduce camera shake)
  • Or using a high ISO setting (useful tip in the field when no tripod is available)
  • Setting the white balance (the color temperature) to shade or cloudy when shooting bread (if the camera allows it). 

I didn’t use a tripod for the two shots below but I bumped up the ISO. (At home I would definitely have used a tripod). Both were shot using the light coming in through the window. In the first picture, I left the white balance on automatic and forgot to use a fill card. For the second one, I set the white balance  to shade and I did use the fill card. Notice how much more light there is in the foreground in the second shot and how much more golden and inviting the bread looks. In the end though, color temperature is a matter of taste and style. I usually set the white balance on daylight when shooting at home but I will definitely experiment with the other settings.


The very same night, at the beer and cheese tasting the Guild had organized at a nearby brewpub, I started practicing what I had learned that day (even without a tripod or fill card). I set the white balance on automatic (an easy way out when there is a mix of natural and artificial light and you don’t really know what color temperature to pick). Notice how the focus is on the beer and cheese and the bread is just a prop. Well, they always say a picture is worth a thousand words. What would you say was first and foremost on my mind when I took this one? Hint: it was deliciously refreshing!

Friday was my first all-day lab: four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon with a one-hour break for lunch if the bread allowed. I had chosen to attend the gluten-free baking lab, partly because I had zero experience in the matter and wanted to learn and partly because it was taught by Michel Suas, the President of the San Francisco Baking Institute (SFBI) and I knew SFBI had done extensive research on the subject over the past few years.

The class was brilliant: Michel started by having us mix and bake tiny batches of thirteen different gluten-free flours and one of all-purpose flour (which was the control). All of the flours were pre-soaked with the same amount of water, so that we would have an idea of the various absorption rates. Then they were mixed with cornstarch, xanthan gum, salt and yeast (adding more water if/as needed to obtain the same medium-soft consistency) and set to proof.


Next came the baking and the tasting.

The truth of the matter is that they all tasted pretty awful (or, at best, bland) but that was to be expected since we hadn’t really made a bread, just pieces of dough. The flour that absorbed the most water was the oat and the one which absorbed the least the light millet. Some of these little “breads” were so sticky it was impossible to slice them and we had to tear them apart. All this taught us a great deal, much more than I have space here to write about (I hope to do it in a later post after I get my hands on some of the needed ingredients, not an easy task since I am spending most of the summer at our little camp on the river where baking supplies are mostly limited to all-purpose and whole wheat). 
In a nutshell, sorghum seems to be the way to go since it offers the closest texture to regular bread flour (plus it is cheap and has great nutritional value. Just remember never to sprout sorghum grains as they would turn poisonous). Teff is really good also (tasty and very nutritious but, alas, very expensive) and koda is the best rice flour to work with (the others tend to be gooey).
We proceeded to make seven gluten- (and sometimes egg-)free products: four breads, orange biscotti, a lemon poundcake and blueberry muffins. Of all of the breads, the poolish “baguette” below was the one with the best crumb structure.


“Baguette” made with a sorghum, koda rice and brown rice poolish
My second all-day lab, on Saturday, was Ancient Grains the Modern Way. The instructor was Frank Sally (with whom I had taken Artisan I and II at SFBI a few years ago). It was excellent and I will write about it in more details at a later time. Today I’ll just share a few pointers:


Dough made with kamut levain
  • Don’t go too wet on spelt as it gets soupy
  • For a same dough consistency, white kamut requires way more water than white spelt
  • You may want to add gluten to spelt as it doesn’t have much of a push
  • Sorghum doesn’t hold water very well: don’t use sorghum flour dry (see tip below)
  • The best way to incorporate sorghum, barley, teff or millet flours into any dough is to soak the flour: using 100% flour and 100% water, pour water at 120°F/49°C (neither cold nor hot) over the flour and make a paste, let cool and use. It helps set the protein and the starch and makes the flour more stable
  • Make this soaker the morning of the mix (don’t hold it overnight)
  • Sprouting ancient wheats like kamut, spelt, emmer or einkorn and baking them with levain is a good idea: it makes the bread more digestible, it unlocks the mineral contents of the grain and it has a sweet flavor.
We made seven breads on that day (kamut levain, kamut with wheat germ, sprouted spelt, spelt levain,   sorghum with kamut and pumpkin seeds, teff with sunflower seeds, millet with toasted pecans) and by the time the afternoon was over, I was ready to drop! But we did really well and most of these breads were  breads I would be interested in making at home (which means that some of them might appear on Farine sooner or later). The teff ciabatta was especially gorgeous.


Now WheatStalk is over but the fever and the fervor have not abated. I have been in touch with other participants and judging from their one-track conversation, their brain is still in full fermenting mode! I know mine is. I have so much to process and so much to try. I did bring back a few formulas but more importantly I came back with tools, tools which will help me grow as a baker and be more confident and avoid mistakes that I would have made otherwise. For this I am grateful to the Guild and to each and everyone of the staff and volunteers who made WheatStalk possible as well as to Kendall College, its faculty and students for hosting the event. Thank you all! 

Meet the Baker: Diane Andiel

I am titling the post “Meet the Baker” because that’s the name of the series and Diane Andiel is definitely a baker and an accomplished one at that. But I could just as well title the post “Meet the Farmer”, “Meet the Cheesemaker”, “Meet the Goat Raiser” or “Meet the Community Development Programmer” (her full-time job) because Diane is all that and does all that with a passion and dedication that would leave most of us panting from exhaustion.
I met Diane last year at a BBGA’s baking class in Seattle and was instantly fascinated by what she told me: she lives on a farm outside Victoria on Vancouver Island, makes yogurt and cheese from the milk of her one cow and several goats and bakes bread year-round on Friday nights to sell at the nearby farmstand on Saturdays. She also grows many of the vegetables they eat at the farm (by “they” I mean her partner Ed who holds a full-time job as well and the occasional “wwoofer” who helps with the chores in exchange for room and board). She raises hens and sells their eggs. She also raises chickens for eating. What she cannot raise or grow, she likes to trade or swap for with another farmer or artisan so that she always knows where their food comes from. One eats very well at Diane’s table (she is an excellent cook) as we found out when she kindly invited us to come and visit.
In the spring and summer (her busiest seasons), Diane bakes twenty-five loaves a week. Not a lot by professional standards but no mean feat when you work 9 to 5 outside the home five days a week and your only oven is the one in your kitchen stove. She makes a batch of sourdough white (the Norwich sourdough seen in the above picture) and a batch of 40% sour rye every week. In the summer she adds a multigrain.

She keeps two starters, a wheat and a rye. The wheat lives on the counter in the kitchen and gets fed every day, morning and night. The rye spends part of the week in the refrigerator and gets taken out for refreshment the day before the baking. For the Norwich and the multigrain, she builds the starter on Thursday night…



…scales the other ingredients and does the mixing on Friday morning (including a 20-minute autolyse), shapes on Friday night and bakes early on Saturday morning. For the rye, the starter gets a build on Friday night and the mixing takes place on Saturday morning early. Follow a 90-minute bulk fermentation, the shaping and a 60-minute proofing.

Diane with Mark and Sharon Sinclair at the Back Home Bakery 
(photo courtesy of Mark Sinclair, originally posted here)
Diane says her baking made huge strides forward in 2009 after her one-week internship at Mark Sinclair’s Back Home Bakery in Kalispell, Montana. Not only did she come back with a treasure trove of recipes but she learned how to manage a production schedule (staggering fermentation and proofing according to oven availability) and also discovered that there was more than one way to bake a loaf of bread. For instance she now does all her baking using the convection function of her oven. Sure, she has been taught like most of us that you should bake in a classic oven, if possible on a pre-heated baking stone, but if she did, she could only bake two loaves at a time and her Saturday morning production would be halved: she can’t afford to do that. More than anything else, she is a pragmatist: if it works on convection, then that’s the way to go. And work it does! Her breads get a terrific oven spring and bakes to a beautiful crisp crust. Now that’s a technique she learned from Mark and one I will certainly experiment with at home because if I can make it work for me, I could actually bake more.
Diane’s bread bookshelf is pretty short: besides Mark’s recipes (she uses his sour rye formula every week) and a couple of classics, The Fresh Loaf (where she got the formula for the Norwich sourdough) is her favorite font of new ideas. Martin Burnett, her baking instructor at Vancouver Island University, is also a source of inspiration. One of his recommendations is permanently engraved in her brain: “If you must err, err on the side of wetness, not dryness”. Definitely a good motto to live by for a baker!
Watching Diane at work, I was amazed to see -again because the opposite has been hammered in my brain by various books and instructors- that she never checks the temperature of anything (except her oven). She says: “What’s the point? It is what it is. I have no control over it”. She relies on her experience to judge when a dough is ready to be shaped or baked.  As a baker, she considers herself lucky to be working in an old farmhouse (it was built in 1898) where the kitchen is always warm but where the other rooms are nice and cool, sometimes even cold. In the winter it is pretty easy: Fermentation and proofing both take place at a cool temperature in the dining room (which seldom gets used) and go on for twelve hours each. There is no need to get up in the middle of the night to bake. In summers, things get a bit hairier and she does get up very early!
Diane has been baking seriously for six years and selling her bread for five. She comes from a long tradition of baking women. Her maternal grandmother -who was German- always baked bread, mostly rye, and never let bread go to waste. Whatever wasn’t eaten got ground up and incorporated in the next batch of dough (I really love that idea). Her paternal grandmother hailed from Czechoslovakia and was also into baking, but mostly cakes and sweet pastries. I have seen Diane whip up a spongecake for guests she was expecting in the afternoon and, believe me, a fairy with a magic wand couldn’t have done it more effortlessly (at least that the way it looked like!). She says she uses less fat and sugar than her grandma did. Her cake certainly felt as light as the tip of an angel’s wing. And even though she does not make cakes for sale, she does bake and sell sweet breads and pastries (stollen, hot cross buns, poppy seed brioches, etc.) for specific holidays.

Photos courtesy of Diane Andiel
But her baking genes do not tell the whole story. In a facebook exchange, Mark Sinclair (from the Back Home Bakery ) described Diane as a “jack of all trades” and the description definitely fits. Diane is one of the most multifaceted person I know: she seems to be leading many full lives simultaneously.
As a community activity planner, she plays an essential role in helping develop affordable and accessible programs for all citizens of the district: she meets with community associations to determine the kind of support they need and the best way to provide it; she puts them in touch with the right people; she spearheads projects such as garden-plots for seniors who love to garden but find it too physically demanding to do it on their own or community kitchens for at-risk people who have stopped cooking for themselves. When these activities involve the growing and/or the cooking and the sharing of food, so much the better. Diane is convinced that food is part of who we are and that eating together is a good way of building not only families but also communities. Inspiring others to cook is one of her great joys. Her oldest son bakes his own bread with a starter he made himself from scratch and that makes her happy although she says she would like it even better if he asked her for advice from time to time!
As a goat raiser, she attends meetings and shows (she was the president of Vancouver Island Goat Association for years) and even traveled once as far at Nashville for a goat conference where she got to meet like-minded people from all over Canada.

As a farmer, she grows her own vegetables and greens (with her partner Ed, she even assembled her own greenhouse, a task which she definitely doesn’t recommend as a relationship booster!), raises chickens and hens as well as a Jersey cow and several goats. She is not in the least sentimental about her animals: they are not raised as pets and while she acknowledges the strength of her connection to them, she doesn’t romanticize it or shed tears when they are sold for meat. But they have the best possible existence on the farm: she patiently bottle-feeds the baby goats when the mothers prove incompetent (which apparently happens more often that you’d think) and puts sweaters on them when the nights are cold; her cow has the run of the meadow and so do the goats; Zeva, the Sarplaninac livestock guardian dog, gets walked every day, rain or shine,  even though she roams the grounds freely day and night, and everybody eats very well (including the chickens who get not only grain but all the table scraps and, ever hopeful, flock to the fence the minute anybody appears in the kitchen doorway).




As a baker, she is constantly seeking to hone her skills. I asked Diane what she did for fun and relaxation and she said: “I take baking classes!” Of course she is an advocate for lifelong learning in everything she does and when you are into cheese-making and animal husbandry, every day brings its own discoveries. As she sees it, part of her job as a farmer is precisely to convey what she learns to the public and to convince it that buying food from a farm is a better choice. But bread, ah, bread is in a class of its own: “Eating a slice of freshly baked bread is an experience like no other” and you can’t express it with words.  So she bakes and with her baking, she certainly does her best to make the experience possible for those who are lucky enough to live in her neighborhood.