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Pavé au levain

Have you ever wished you could just bake (part of) your levain and eat it, so that you can savor its pure unadulterated flavor? Every time I feed it and breathe in its fragrance I wish I could do just that. But of course I resist the impulse (since it probably wouldn’t turn out too good as is anyway) and I just keep on enjoying the scent.
Recently however I have been feeding my liquid levain (not the one I made with Gérard) some high-extraction organic flour from Québec I received as a present and the levain started producing such aromas that the impulse to just bake it became irresistible. That’s when I remembered the pavés au levain we made last spring at SFBI in Didier Rosada‘s Whole Grains workshop. So, yes, you can have your levain and eat it too. And I cannot even begin to describe how delectable the result is. Pure heaven!
Didier said hazelnuts and/or fruit can be added to the dough. But I don’t see how it is possible to improve on the flavor.

Ingredients (for 4 smallish free-form pavés):
295 g white starter @95% hydration, fed three times with high-extraction flour (if no high-extraction flour is available, use 80 % organic all-purpose flour and 20 % organic whole wheat flour after sifting out the coarser bran particles)
736 g high-extraction flour
573 g water (I started with 442 g and added more water on the go until the dough reached medium soft consistency)
18 g salt
7 g diastatic malt powder (if no malt had been added to the flour at the mill, which was the case for this Quebec flour)

Method:

  1. Mix flour and water (at the required temperature to get a final dough temperature of 70-73ºF/21-23ºC) and let rest (autolyse) for about 45 minutes
  2. Add the levain and more water as needed, mix until very soft
  3. Add the salt (I love the way watching the dough tighten up once the salt is added and I now always add the salt towards the end of the mixing as I find it makes it easier to get the right consistency)
  4. Add water if needed after incorporating the salt
  5. Transfer dough (which will be rather slack) into an oiled bin, cover tightly and let ferment at warm room temperature for two hours with one fold after the first hour (since the room was cool, I let the dough ferment three hours with one fold after two hours)
  6. Invert the dough onto a table dusted with flour, then cut squares or other shapes free-form using a sharp dough-scraper
  7. Transfer to a baking sheet covered with flour-dusted parchment paper, dust with more flour and let rise, covered, for an hour and a half
  8. Pre-heat the oven at 450ºF/232ºC after putting into it a baking stone and a heavy-duty metal pan (for steaming)
  9. Gently slide the breads onto the hot baking stone, add one cup of water to the metal pan and quickly close the oven door
  10. Bake for 35 minutes (a bit longer if you made big loaves, a bit less if you made individual ones). Check at mid-point to see whether or not you need to rotate the loaves (Didier advises keeping the oven door ajar for the last 10 minutes of baking but I think that mostly apply to professional ovens. If there is one thing that my home oven does well, it is exhaling steam full-speed the minute it detects any. So I didn’t open the door)
  11. When done, let cool on a wire rack and prepare your taste buds for rapture!

The pavé au levain goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Rustic Batard

As we (don’t) say in French, the proof is in the pudding, so as soon as I got home, I decided to give my new levain a run for its money (for info concerning this levain, see here and here). I chose to make simple batards, using 30% organic whole grains (60% red wheat, 30% spelt and 10% rye) which I milled in my little handmill (I have since purchased an electric one for various reasons, chiefly because I couldn’t get fine enough flour with the handmill and ended up wasting a lot of the nutrients present in the grain).
The bulk of the flour was Whole Foods’ 365 all-purpose organic and I used some raw wheat germ as well (to compensate for the coarse elements I had to throw away). Dough hydration was 85%, quite high but necessary considering the proportion of whole grains.
The resulting bread is true to its name, namely rustic in appearance and redolent with the flavor and fragrance of whole grains. Its crust and crumb are very pleasing. Since I now own an electric mill and will be able to mill flour to the exact degree of fineness I choose (without having to sift), I will probably try several different different combinations and permutations of flours, grains and hydration rates in the future. But at least I found out that the levain works well and is very flavorful, not sour at all…
I keep it at 65%, which I find a good compromise between firm and liquid. It isn’t too stiff to fold by hand (since the folding needs to be very gentle, it doesn’t stress my wrists which I have to watch as I already had surgery on both) and with the daily addition of 30% freshly milled whole-grain flours, it would become too hard to control if the hydration was higher, especially since I keep it at room temperature. I use 1% sea salt at each feeding to prevent the enzymes from running amok anyway. It is still a very young levain (not even one week old) and I am curious to see how it will evolve.
Calvel recommends using salt in the levain in Le Goût du pain (The Taste of Bread) (p. 61 in the French edition. I was unable to get the English translation from my local library, so I can’t give you the page number in English. Sorry about that…).
I wanted to find out a little more about the science behind this recommendation and found the following explanation in an old professional baker’s manual (J-M. Viard : Le Compagnon boulanger – Ed. Jérôme Villette – 1984, now sadly out of print, p. 229) :
“Pourquoi ajoute-t-on toujours un peu de sel au rafraîchi ? Parallèlement aux levures sauvages, l’acidité se développe, ainsi que certains enzymes appelées protéases. Ces enzymes ont une action néfaste sur le gluten et le liquéfient, ce qui rend la pâte molle et très collante ; le sel ajouté au rafaîchi bloque l’activité des protéases”. (Why add salt to each feeding? Parallel to wild yeast, acidity develops [in the levain] as well as some enzymes, called proteases. These enzymes have a harmful effect on gluten which they tend to liquefy, making dough slack and very sticky; salt blocks protease activity) (my translation).
And now, on to the bread…

  Process

  1. Mix the flours with most of the water (at the required temperature to produce a dough at 76ºF/24ºC) in the bowl of the mixer and let rest 45 minutes to one hour (autolyse)
  2. Add the levain (cut in small pieces like fluffy little pillows) and mix on first speed
  3. Continue mixing for a few minutes, adding the salt at the end (salt hardens the dough and according to Viard’s Le Compagnon boulanger mentioned above, adding it towards the end of the mixing protects against too much tenacity in the dough. I have heard and seen other bakers add it right after the autolyse in order to slow down the fermentation. As it was my first time adding it at the end, I can only say that it worked fine. But is it a rule or just because my house is kind of cool in the winter and fermentation is slower anyway? I don’t have the answer. I guess each of us would need to try both ways several times to see what the advantages and inconveniences would be in his home environment)
  4. Adjust the hydration with the remaining water (different flours require different hydration rates), continue mixing for a minute or two and turn off the mixer. The dough should be soft
  5. Transfer to a tightly closed oiled bin and set to ferment at 80ºF/27ºC (since my house is only at 64ºF/18ºC in the winter, I used the proof box the Man built for me, using the detailed explanations generously provided by Steve B. from Bread Cetera)
  6. Give the dough a fold inside the bin after one hour
  7. Give the dough another fold inside the bin one hour later
  8. Transfer the dough to a flour-dusted work surface and give it one fold (north-south), wait 10 minutes and give it another (east-west). Repeat until dough is strong enough for shaping (it took three folds at 10 minute-intervals in my case), keeping the dough covered between folds (in my case, the first fermentation lasted a total of 3 hours and 30 minutes)
  9. Pre-shape as desired, let the dough rest 30 minutes, covered
  10. Preheat the oven at 480ºF/249ºC (my oven doesn’t heat very well. A lower temperature setting might work just fine in your oven), taking care to put it in a baking stone and, underneath, a heavy metal pan for steaming (mine contains barbecue stones which we bought solely for steaming purposes)
  11. Shape as desired (in my case, two 500g-batards and three 330g-small boules, raw, respectively 417 g and 276 g after baking) and set to proof on a couche at 80ºF/27º (or use baskets if you have the right size available. I didn’t)
  12. When the loaves are ready to be baked (the imprint of a finger bounces back quickly), dust with flour, score (trying to make the cut shallow) and bake for 35 minutes, pouring a cup of cold water in the metal pan for steaming and turning the heat down after the first 10 minutes (in my case to 460ºF/238ºC)
  13. Remove from the oven and cool on a rack before slicing open

The Rustic Batard goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Building a levain “à la Gérard”: Steps 2 & 3… and a misadventure

The day after, I came upon Gérard in early morning as he was dividing and weighing the dough. We kept company for a while, then I started browsing through his bread library and was soon engrossed in out-of-print books by Lionel Poilâne, especially Faire son Pain in which he explains how to build a levain chef (mother starter) at home.
I was surprised to read that, in the first step, Poilâne recommends leaving the future levain (50% hydration) to ferment for 48 to 72 hours at 72-75 º F/22-24 ºC, either in a tightly covered bowl or entirely wrapped in a floured towel. After that length of time, it should have grown by 1/4 and be hole-ridden. It is then mixed with flour and water and left to ferment again for 24 to 48 hours. After that, it will have grown by 1/3, have a spongy appearance and be ready to make bread.
Gérard’s method is a tad more involved, to say the least! The second step takes place 22 to 24 hours after the initial build. We took the container down (it had been sitting high on a shelf where the bakery is warmest), opened it and took a long sniff. The contents smelled wheaty and clean. Gérard brushed aside the coarsely milled grain and the disc of starter appeared. It was encrusted with a layer of dry flour and coarsely milled grain and long cracks had formed at the surface (the starter is ready for the second step when these cracks are at least one-inch long). It looked pretty lively:

Gérard folded back the crust and judged its thickness satisfactory:

I scraped most of the wet stuff off and harvested 200 g of crust. Gérard checked what I had collected and said that I could gone even dryer as the crust contains three times as many wild cells as the soft parts but that it would be okay.

Bearing in mind that the desired dough temperature was 81ºF/27ºC, I measured 280 g of water at 86ºF/30ºC and poured it over the chunks of crust.

While the crust was softening in the water, I measured out the salt and the malt and milled the blend of wheat, spelt and rye berries (see formula for exact amounts).
When the crust was soft enough (it took about 15 minutes), Gérard used an immersion blender to mix it with the water.

Then we mixed the starter with the flours and the malt, folded it over and over, added the salt and ended up with a plump ball again.

So far, so good. Everything was going as planned. The day after, I checked the young levain first thing in the morning. It had already almost tripled. We went ahead and did the fourth feeding (A3 in the formula chart). This time, we didn’t use any malt and the whole-grain flour was carefully sifted to eliminate any coarse piece of grain which would create shafts in the levain through which CO2 could escape.

Then we put it to ferment on top of the shelf again. After about one hour, it had already moved considerably. We sniffed it. It smelled delicious. Two hours later it had more than doubled its size and was nicely domed. Gérard said: “Let’s wait another hour. It should have tripled by then”. So we waited and when I got back to check it, I had a nasty shock.
It had flat-lined on us and its level was noticeable lower than an hour earlier. We opened the bucket. The levain had turned oily. No hole were visible. Completely limp, it poured out like cream. However no weird smell suggested a harmful bacteria was at work and the taste was normal.
Pandemonium ensued as Gérard went into emergency mode. Sorry, no action pictures! First of all I didn’t have the presence of mind to take any, then even if I had thought of it, I couldn’t have as he was giving orders as a captain aboard a sinking ship.
Soon I was running around milling wheat, spelt and rye berries, measuring water temperature and basically doing everything but mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the ailing levain. In a nutshell, what Gérard decided to do was to feed it only freshly milled whole grains until it started acting normal again. That meant a lot of fresh flour to mill and to sift. Malt needed to be added, etc.
After two such feedings (no specific time-frame: each time, we waited until the levain had more than doubled to feed it again), it looked decidedly better, albeit still on the gooey side.

After the next feeding, it completely recovered and was ready to go home with me.

What happened? Well, the strange thing is that the night the levain went south, Gérard noticed a difference in his dough as well. It was slightly softer than usual, although nothing that he couldn’t handle. But the coincidence was interesting. As we were discussing what happened the following morning, Gérard had an illumination.
He had had a delivery of all-purpose flour the day the levain fell ill and he had used this new flour in his dough. Since he had loved the way it handled in the first batch, he had told me to use it for the levain as well. Now he suspected the flour was the culprit. He asked me to check the code number on the bag.
The code was 353, which meant that the flour had been milled on the 353rd day of the year, i.e. on December 28. January 6 was the day of the incident with the levain and the dough. The flour was nine days old! Not old enough to be used for bread-baking if fermentation was to last longer than 4 hours.
The levain had been gorgeous until the four-hour mark, then had slumped. According to Gérard, his batch of dough had been okay because fermentation had lasted three hours. He surmised he would have been in trouble past the four-hour mark.
I would need to do some reading to grasp the science behind what happened. But I remember from my classes at SFBI that flour needs to age for about 3 weeks after milling: the oxydation that occurs during this aging period improves the stability and resistance of the proteins present in the flour. A flour that hasn’t aged properly makes an over-elastic dough which tends to grow “flat” and to stick. Flatness, stickiness and over-elasticity are certainly the right words to describe our levain after we started using the immature flour.
I still find it absolutely striking that a dough that seemed to be literally bursting at the seams and ready to dance out of its container should fall back and slump in the space of an hour. It was nothing short of a spectacular event (for a levain aficionado, I mean, as I don’t think the movie would have won me an Oscar even if I had been at the ready with my camera).
The flour we milled on the spot didn’t have time to mature either but it contained a healthy dose of protein-rich spring wheat to help with tenacity and enough wild yeast to breathe a new life into the dough. The addition of malt meant that the yeast would have enough food during the fermentation process.
I learned from this whole incident that a levain which behaves strangely isn’t sick and ready for the trash as long as it doesn’t smell or taste funny.
I also learned that things are way more interesting when they go wrong…

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Building a levain “à la Gérard” – Step 1

Gérard sees pure levain (as he likes to call his starter) as the only way for a baker to truly personalize his bread: if he conducts his fermentation skillfully, no one will ever be able to reproduce the exact same taste. (I say “he” for short but Gérard counts many women bakers among his students and greatly admires them for their energy and resolve, and he is obviously talking about bakers in general).
The fact that a pure levain, defined by Gérard as “a culture of freshly ground organic grains, organic sea salt, and pure well water, patiently tended over several days”, cannot be exactly copied is what makes baking an art and the artisan baker a true artist. Every baker can and should experiment freely to find the aromas that will constitute his signature and Gérard takes great pride and delight in explaining how.
From a technical point of view, pure levain is not harder to make than a poolish for instance (a poolish being a mixture of 50% flour and 50% water fermented with commercial yeast in an amount which is inversely proportional to the duration of the fermentation). It is even easier because it is firmer. The wetter a ferment, the greater the risk to overshoot the acid threshold. To be able to control the type of acids one is looking for, the hydration rate cannot go over 50 to 60%. [Temperature is Gérard’s bakery hovers between 77 and 79ºF/26-27ºC]
I was curious to see if I could create and maintain a levain “à la Gérard” and as I was back in Vermont to work with him on a different project, he offered to show me how to start.
Frankly I was expecting the process to be exacting but a no-brainer since I would be working with an expert. But things never turn out the way we expect them to, do they? And I actually was in for a surprise (at step 3)… So was Gérard. But more on that in another post.

Gérard uses 30% of freshly milled flour (a blend of spring and winter wheat, spelt and rye) both in his final dough and in his levain. So in order to build a levain his way, you need to have access either to a small manual mill or to an electric one. Although he has a big electric mill for large amounts of grains, he prefers to use a small hand mill for the levain as the resulting flour is not only finer but also less hot (which means that more nutrients are preserved):

Manual grinder used by Gérard to mill flour for his levain
(Can be found online at Lehman’s Hardware – ref. 30347120, about $50)

For the levain formula, please click here.

To start making a levain à la Gérard, assemble all the ingredients (all-purpose flour, grain blend, salt, malt) and utensils (plastic scraper, parchment paper for weighed ingredients, thermometer, mill, bowl, plastic dough bucket, paper tape, pen), then weigh and aerate the all-purpose flour (unbleached) so that it is later more readily suffused with water:

Weigh the salt and the malt and set them on a piece of parchment paper near the bowl where the flours will be mixed with the water.
Mill the grain blend (for proportions, again please refer to the formula). Gérard insists on the importance of waiting until the last possible minute to mill the grains, in order to preserve the maximum number of wild yeast cells present in the grain. These cells are very volatile and disappear fast.

Take the temperature of the room and of the two flours and calculate the required water temperature, the desired temperature for the starter being 80 to 81ºF/27ºC:

In this clip, Gérard says the temperature of the freshly-milled whole-grain flour is 3 degrees warmer than that of the white flour. He doesn’t seem concerned, so I assume it’s fine.
Now comes the time to mix the flours and the malt (not the salt which is added after about one minute of mixing):

The flours are combined…

…and water is added:

Mixing begins and salt is added:

Gérard explains that a tension must be created on the skin of the starter.

Gérard says that the starter is ready when it begins to shine and becomes tacky.

When the starter is bouncy and the imprint of a finger remains visible, roll it into a ball, dust it with flour, flatten it into a disk which will fit at the bottom of the chosen container. For these proportions of flour and water, the disk should have a diameter of at least 7″, so the container needs to be selected accordingly.

…then place in a plastic container on a mixture of whole grains (again wheat, spelt and rye), coarsely milled to prevent light and air from filtering through.

Cover with another layer of the same mixture (the disc of starter must be entirely buried), close the lid tightly, stick a paper tape on it and jot down the date, the time and the temperature of the starter.

Ask the baker: Gérard Rubaud

Taking advantage of my second stay at the bakery, I asked Gérard all of the questions submitted by Farine readers regarding his fermentation method and bread-baking process. For ease of reference, I am regrouping all of them (and Gérard’s answers) in this post. You’ll also find at the bottom a few questions which were actually addressed to me and not to Gérard, as well as my answers.

Q: MC says in her original post that you feed your levain every 5 hours. 24 divided by 5 = 4.8 times a day. The 5 hours feeding is not a rigid time schedule, right? It depends on the weather, the room temperature, etc…?
A: Right, the time between feedings can be longer if the temperature is lower (in my bakery. it is about 79ºF/26ºC) but don’t go below 72ºF/22ºC, or you would lose the good acids (mostly lactic) which contribute to the aromas. Basically it is whatever works: not too cold, not too hot and no hydration over 65%. Pay a lot of attention to the smallest details.
Q: It would be more like 5 or 6 hours between feedings, right?
A: The time between feedings can go up to 7 or 8 hours. If kept at 72ºF/22ºC, the levain can triple in volume within 7 hours. To know if it is ready to make bread, take a chunk of levain the size of a big walnut being careful not to handle it too much and drop it in a bowl containing one liter (minimum) or two liters of water. If the levain drops to the bottom and comes back up right away, it is ready to leaven bread. If it stays underwater or remains partly submerged, you need to give it another feeding and try again 4 to 5 hours later. [Don’t scoop out some starter with your fingers but take your whole starter out of its container, place it on a flour-dusted table and cut out a small square with your dough cutter. Be as gentle as possible, the idea being to trap whatever CO2 is inside before doing the water test]
Q: Have you ever had problems creating a starter? Has it ever happened that your starter became dormant after a couple of days of starting the culture?
A: Yes, it happens rather frequently. If the starter has moved a tiny bit after 3 to 4 hours, do another feeding to stimulate the yeast. Repeat when it moves again a little bit and do not wait more than 4 hours between feedings.
In such a situation however, the best is to feed the levain home-milled organic whole-grain flours. If you always feed your levain such flours, you will never have a problem (but you need to add malt, up to 1% of the weight of the flour).
Q: Your 50%-hydration stiff levain is ready to be fed every 5 hours. What is your room temperature? It sounds like very fast maturing stiff starter to me.
A: The stronger the levain, the faster it matures, if kept at the ideal temperature of 78-81ºF/26-27ºC.
Q: Unless you feed only a small amount of flours each time?
A: No, not a small amount. The % of starter to the flour must be about 1 to 2. In other words, for 400 g of flour, 200 g of starter. But if you are patient enough to wait more than 4 or 6 hours, you can lower the amount of starter to 25 to 30% in the summer and 45 % in the winter. If you work in an air-conditioned environment, the percentage of starter can remain the same year-round.
Q: What baker’s percentage of all-purpose flour do you use in your final dough? 70%?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you use the same percentage of all-purpose flour when you feed your starter?
A: Yes.
Q: What about the baker’s percentages of rye, whole wheat and spelt flours in both the final dough and in the starter?
A: The blend of organic whole-grain flours is 30% (to 70% all-purpose). I use organic whole grains with I mill right before the feedings (starter) or the mixing (final dough). The proportions are as follows: 30% spring wheat, 30% hard red winter wheat, 30% spelt and 10% rye. It is supremely important to use only organic berries.
Q: You only make one type of bread. MC mentions in the original post that you do not consider “pain fantaisie” a real bread. What is a “pain fantaisie”?
A: In my book, any bread made with ingredients other than flour from a grain that can be made into bread – such as wheat, rye or spelt, water and salt is a “cocktail bread” (pain fantaisie). I am not interested in cocktail breads.
Q: MC shows two drawings of your levain in her original post. The legend accompanying the first drawing says: “Levain after the first feeding”. Is there another feeding before this levain is taken to make the final dough?
A: Yes, there are three feedings. My bread is a three-levain bread.
First levain: 300 g levain chef (mother starter), 400 g water and 700 g flour (70% all-purpose and 30% freshly milled whole grains as described above) = 1400 g
Second levain: 1400 g starter + 800 g water + 1500 flour = 3.7 kg
Third levain: 3700g starter + 2800 g water (2650 g in the summer as I don’t have air-conditioning) + 5000 g flour = 11.5 kg
These 11.5 kg of levain will inoculate about 48 kg of flour. But don’t forget the salt. 1% salt (freshly ground salt from the Dead Sea) is added to each feeding in order to control the fermentation. If a levain ferments too fast, it becomes oily and deteriorates rapidly.
Q: As your starter is a 50% hydration starter and it ferments 7 hours, when you use it to make the final dough, it looks like a piece of dough, as the three little pictures show (after the above two drawings) in the original post. The three small pictures show the cut-up levain, ready to be combined into the autolysed final dough flour and water, right?
A: Yes.

A reader had questions, not for Gérard but for me, as a baker and a bread afficionada.
Q: What is the key element in Gerard’s baking process (levain, timing, …)?
A: I would say “patience and discipline”. Gérard knows how to wait. If the levain is not at maximum fermentation, he waits. If the bread is not ready, he doesn’t put it in the oven. But he is in production and his bread has to go out every morning at the same time, so I’d say he is a stickler for temperature as a means to obtain the desired result in the allotted time-frame.
Q: What didn’t you expect in his baking process (dough hydration, type of flour…)?
A: I’d say that what surprised me the most the first time I visited the bakery is Gérard’s use of freshly milled organic whole-grain flours, not only in his levain but in his final dough as well. Very few bakers do that. I think that’s why he focuses on one type of dough only. Having only one dough to think about enables him to strive for excellence every single day.
As I wrote in my initial post, Gérard had a stroke a few years back and he was paralyzed for a few months. He told me that the whole time he was lying in bed all day staring at the ceiling, what saved him was thinking about his dough. It was like playing virtual chess. In his mind, he changed a tiny detail (upped the temperature a bit, lowered the salt in one feeding, added more water, etc.), imagined the effect of such a change based on his knowledge of fermentation and bread-baking and followed this virtual dough until it came out of the oven, then studied the result.
He now says that even though he wouldn’t want to go through it again, he considers his stroke was a positive event in his life as it helped him focus on tiny details he might have overlooked with less time on his hands. He says his bread is better for it today.
He also says that bread saved his life. Without the prospect of going back to baking and trying out the recipes he had devised when immobilized, he would never have had the energy to heal.
Q: What’s the flavor of Gérard’s bread?
A: It’s obviously really hard to describe. I would say “tangy and aromatic”, like a breath of country air in a cool summer when wheat is slowly ripening in the fields. It is even possible to discern a note of mature pear or peach. It is a very delicate flavor (the word in French would be “subtile”).
Gérard’s philosophy is to use excellent ingredients to produce the best possible bread but never to forget that bread must play second fiddle to food. It has to complement it, not overpower it. I would say that’s true for the bread he makes. I have had it with different cheeses for example (especially a delicious Vermont goat cheese) and found that the association was a marriage made in heaven.

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