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Baking with natural starters: a bread workshop in Victoria, BC

I may not be a wiz at math but I know a winning formula when I see one! Take two experienced and passionate bakers, mix in two eager helpers, sprinkle with six enthusiastic baking students. Add two very active homegrown natural starters (one white, one rye), four completely different doughs, a copious dose of elbow oil (the students mixed everything by hand), a dash of late fall weather and a lovely Victoria farmhouse. Let the whole thing ferment, dusted with bread love and lore, and what you get is a fantastic introduction to baking with natural starters.


breadsong with the 80%-rye bread and Diane with the Norwich Sourdough

The workshop was the brainchild of two of my baker friends, Diane Andiel and breadsong. Diane is a full-time community programmer for the district of Saanich in Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia; she is also a farmer (she raises cows, goats and chickens) and a baker. She knows all the slow-foodies there are to know on the island and they all know her. Many of them buy her bread every weekend. A British Columbian as well (albeit a mainlander), breadsong is a marathon baker and born instructor who loves nothing more than sharing both what she makes and what she knows. She is also a full-time certified general accountant and a member of the team of volunteers which standardizes formulas for the Bread Bakers Guild of America.
Taken separately neither of them might have been bold enough to take on teaching a bread class but put the two of them together and all bets are off. Emails pingponged for weeks across the skies of British Columbia, from misty shores to mellow valleys, from pregnant fields to pounding surf. Formulas fluttered back and forth; some were forcefully driven to the ground; others blew slowly away, never to be seen again; four made the final cut: Diane’s version of the Norwich Sourdough, Jeffrey Hamelman‘s 80% rye (a honey-walnut-spice variation), his whole wheat multigrain and Ken Forkish‘s 75% whole wheat.
On the actual eve of the workshop, as dusk darkened the windows, four women could be seen sitting around the kitchen table: Diane and breadsong, Melanie (a baker from Northeastern Washington who had come to help) and myself, the designated blogger. A giant platter of homemade cookies was brought in from the cold; mucho munching ensued, fueled by steaming tea and riotous retelling of bread (mis)adventures. Then we all got down to business: breadsong made final adjustments to the class handouts; Diane mixed a batch of Norwich sourdough, then shaped the one that had fermented all day and set it to proof. Melanie and I started scaling the ingredients for the doughs which were to be mixed in the morning.

A variety of grains was set to soak…

…spices were roasted and ground for the rye bread…

…and the various levains got fed.

Then, save for the silent squish of slowly rising dough, the house hushed for the night.

Things picked up fast in the wee hours of the morning: doughs needed to be mixed and set to ferment for the students to later shape, proof and score, proofed loaves had to be baked and everything step and ingredient checked and re-checked and checked again.


At 9 the students filed in. Although they were all there for the same reason (to learn how to make naturally leavened bread), their motivations varied: some had mastered yeasted breads and wanted to “graduate” to levain; others had never baked bread but loved the idea of making everything from scratch; one had just gotten a stone-mill grinder and wanted to switch to whole grains; another had a gluten-sensitive wife and was hoping that naturally leavened breads would be easier for her to digest, etc. But one thing was clear: they were all determined to make the most of the workshop.
By way of an introduction, Diane explained that the class was an experiment as neither she nor breadsong had ever taught bread making before. She stressed that since sourdough baking couldn’t possibly be a one-day project, the students would see all the steps of the process but not necessarily in chronological order. Two doughs were ready to shape and the students would start with that; then they would mix four doughs from scratch. The most urgent task was to shape the Norwich sourdough which had bulk-fermented (a technical term for what the students might already know as the first rise) overnight.


Shaping


Two things to remember when shaping:

  • Keep your hands dry and floured
  • Don’t use too much flour on the bench (the table or countertop) or you will compromise the crumb (since the gluten in the added flour isn’t given a chance to develop)



Desired dough Temperature

Mixing




Dough development

Fermentation & temperature

By the time the various morning tasks were done and over with, everybody was both famished and excited. Lunch was vegetable soup and Norwich bread, followed by tea and cookies made with homemade butter. Talk about keeping the troops happy!


Norwich bread

Two student-shaped loaves

breadsong’s rye bread

Each and everyone of the students took home two containers of starter (one wheat, one rye), some rye flour, two fully baked loaves (one Norwich and one 80% rye) and two doughs to finish fermenting, then shape, proof and bake at home (the 75% whole wheat and the whole wheat multigrain), all wondrous presents for a bread lover and would-be sourdough baker. But as exciting as all these goodies were, the most precious thing the students left with was surely this advice from Diane and breadsong. Reflecting on their experience, they said that what had helped them the most over the years was:

  • Properly maintaining and caring for their sourdough starter (wheat, rye)
  • Using a scale (weighing ingredients) and a thermometer (to monitor dough temperature)
  • Allowing flour time to fully hydrate (as an aid to mixing)
  • Calculating water temperature prior to mixing
  • Controlling fermentation: maintaining appropriate temperatures when fermenting the starter and the dough 
(a Brød and Taylor proofer is a useful tool); 
  • Properly developing the dough when mixing
  • Watching the dough, not the clock, to determine whether it has fermented (risen) enough
  • Baking with steam.
I couldn’t agree more.

The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day


As indicated in my last post, I haven’t had a chance to bake much from Jeffrey Hertzberg’s and Zoë François’ new book, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day, since I bought it last week but I like what I have seen so far.  The two recipes I tried yielded very good bread.
The knot and the two batards shown above were made from one batch of European Peasant Bread: they had a nice flavor (the dough calls for a bit of dark rye flour and a bit of whole wheat flour and the long slow fermentation does add a welcome complexity). As for the loaf below, it was baked this morning from what was left of the Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Bread dough and I already know it will be excellent.

Plus I like the whole idea of mixing dough at my leisure, then letting it cold-ferment for a long while (sometimes up to two weeks) to finally bake from the fridge whenever we need fresh bread. I am sure it helps to have a bit of baking experience, especially when it comes to shaping and such. However experience is what one get by actually doing, observing, experimenting, taking notes, etc. If you don’t like the way a bread turns out, change something (hydration, room temperature, rising time) next time around and see what happens! For instance, I already know I will make my next batch of peasant bread a little bit wetter to try and get a slightly more open crumb.

I bookmarked several breads from the book, including the Wisconsin beer-cheese bread, the sauerkraut rye, the Moroccan anise-and-barley flatbread, to name just a few, and I am looking forward to giving them a try. Kudos to Jeff and Zoë for providing bread-lovers with a “real bread” alternative to industrial bread, especially in areas where artisan bakeries are few and far between, and for empowering all of us home bakers who are looking to make a variety of good breads with minimal fuss!

No-Knead Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Bread

Remember Emmanuel Hadjiandreou’s lovely chocolate currant bread in How to Make Bread? Maybe because of the cold snap that hit most of the country, including our state, and maybe because there are few things more comforting than the aroma and taste of chocolate when the outside world freezes up, I had a sudden craving for that bread when we came back from our Thanksgiving family visits. However I knew there was no way I could make it until I got my levain (starter) going again and since said levain had been quartered in the fridge for a couple of weeks, I also knew it was going to require some tender loving care over the course of a few days before it got back to its usual ebullient and efficient self…
Meanwhile, what could I do? Mix a poolish, let it ferment overnight and use that instead of levain? Sure, and I would have done just that if, on the plane ride home, I hadn’t read the Kindle version of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François’ appealing new book, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and bookmarked a double chocolate bread which seemed rather similar to Hadjiandreou’s (minus the currants) but required neither levain nor poolish. It did require a long cold fermentation though. Impatience and curiosity had a go at each other within my head for a few seconds and curiosity won. I decided to give the Artisan-in-Five recipe a try.
The result is spectacularly tasty, even if a bit less complex than the levain version. The crumb is both soft and ever so slightly crunchy and the dark chocolate flavor is to die for. I attribute the almost imperceptible crunch to the sugar I used: with the drop in temperature, the hummingbirds had been feeding like crazy and most of our regular sugar had gone into making nectar for them. I didn’t feel like driving to the store just for sugar, so I settled for evaporated cane juice sugar which we had in stock. It doesn’t seem to melt in quite the same way but I actually love the crunch.
Despite the fact that I only used half the amount of sugar indicated in the original recipe, the bread eats like chocolate cake (with less fat) and is so easy to make that even a beginner should have good results.
One thing to keep in mind if you decide to try your hand at it though: do not treat time indications as gospel truths. I am sure that all the recipes in the book have been thoroughly tested and re-tested but they haven’t been tested in my kitchen in the winter, using the flour available to me. If I had followed the recipe to a tee, I doubt I would be as satisfied as I am with the result. So instead of going by the book, trust your eyes and hands. To give you an example, the dough sat on the counter for close to twenty-four hours after mixing before it had risen enough to be put in the fridge (instead of the two hours indicated in the recipe) and, on Baking Day, the shaped loaves proofed for two hours (instead of forty minutes) before they were ready to bake. Depending on where you live and a myriad of other factors, you may have a different experience. If you have the patience to jot down flour brand, dates, times and temperatures and if you make the recipe over and over (which you may well do if you get hooked), you will learn more about the interplay of these factors. In the words of Adam Gopnik (in Bread and Women, a piece he wrote recently for The New Yorker and which, sadly, isn’t available online in its full-text version), “Bread dough isn’t like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over.” In my experience, the more a baker knows about the way dough thinks, the easier it becomes for her to humor it and get good results.
Jeff and Zoë kindly gave me permission to blog the recipe providing I used my own words. Please note that I adapted both the ingredients (using less sugar and a different salt) and the method. For the original recipe, I refer you to the book and, for more info regarding the “Artisan in Five” method, to the Breadin5 website and corresponding YouTube videos, including this one.



Ingredients: (for three 300g-loaves)

(The formulas were created using BreadStorm)

By weights

By percentages

Method:

(The dough is made a few days ahead of the actual baking day)

  1. On Day 1, I mixed the liquid ingredients in a large bowl (using water at 100°F), then added yeast and sugar
  2. I added in the remaining dry ingredients (flour, salt and cocoa) and mixed well, using a dough whisk.  Even though the whisk helped a lot, at the end I had to use my hands and since my wrist is not strong enough yet to hold the bowl firmly for long, the cocoa powder wasn’t perfectly blended in, which really doesn’t matter. A case can actually be made for the white swirls, don’t you think? Next time, I might just stop blending in the cocoa a bit sooner…
  3. I covered the bowl loosely (the dough needs some oxygen at this stage) and let rest at room temperature (which was 65°F on that day). According to the book, the dough will rise and collapse within about two hours but I suppose it depends on the season and how warm your house is. In my case, after two hours it was going nowhere fast. In fact, it took almost 24 hours to rise
  4. Once it had more than doubled and looked like it could do no more, I put it in the fridge, tightly covered this time
  5. The authors suggest using the dough within a five-day period: accordingly I used two-thirds of  it on Day 3 and will use the rest by Day 5. Following their instructions, I dusted the surface of the dough with flour. Then I scooped out 600 g of dough which I divided in two. I loosely shaped two boules which I let rest at room temperature on a floured countertop, covered with a plastic sheet
  6. After thirty minutes I shaped one piece of dough as a bâtard and the other one as a boule and I sent them to rise on a board covered with flour-dusted parchment paper. I placed the board inside a large sealed plastic bag, put a space heater in the little laundry room (which doubles as my bakery) so that the room temp rose to about 73°F and I waited. The loaves took over two hours to proof (rise). (You know they are ready to bake when they jiggle as you gently shake the board.) At a lower room temperature, the process might have been even longer
  7. Meanwhile I had preheated the oven (equipped with a baking stone) at 350°F. Before sliding the loaves onto the baking stone, I brushed them with a bit of melted butter and sprinkled them with pearl sugar
  8. I baked the loaves for 50 minutes (a good way to know when they are baked through is to take them out, hold them upside down and knock on the bottom with your knuckles. If they give a hollow sound, they are done. If not, bake a while longer)
  9. I let them cool overnight on a rack before slicing one of them open.

For those of you who are using BreadStorm (including the free version), please click on this link to import the formula so that you can scale it up or down as desired.

BreadStorm: a quick update on the free version

When I first wrote about BreadStorm (see my post here), the free version only allowed the user to scale formulas downloaded from the BreadStorm formula page or received as a .bun file (BreadStorm format) from another baker. With the new free version, you can experiment creating a formula. That should make it easier to decide whether or not the software is right for you.
To find out more, you might want to check BreadStorm’s FAQ page.

Kneading Conference West 2013: Creating signature breads

Martin Philip, our instructor for this workshop, is a baker and the bakery operations manager at King Arthur Bakery in Norwich, VT. According to his bio on King Arthur’s website, in previous lives, he was a professional opera singer and worked in investment banking. I never met him in these past avatars. I only know him as an accomplished baker (the flavor and crunchiness of the straight dough baguettes he handmixed for us the following day while our other dough was fermenting put to rest once and for all any preconceived idea I might have had on baking without a pre-ferment). Martin is also an excellent instructor. A firm believer in the Socratic method, he favors collaboration and the meeting of minds over didactic teaching and magisterial pronouncements, yet he keeps a firm hand on the discussion and never lets it go out of focus. It surely works for me!
The goal of the workshop was to design a bread as a group. Martin explained that before we could even start, we had to make a few choices. What kind of a bread did we want? What ingredients were we thinking of using? What did our production schedule look like? The combinations were almost infinite as Martin demonstrated from the deck of cards he uses as prompts. A baker may want/need to:

  • Showcase seasonal flavors
  • Use grains that are available locally
  • Diversify his or her offerings
  • Satisfy a customer request (for a specific taste or nutritional benefit)
  • Challenge himself/herself by using a new technique or a different type of flour
Based on the flour(s) to be used, the baker needs to make decisions regarding:
  • Type of pre-ferment (if using)
  • Hydration
  • Type of leavening
  • Mixing
  • Bulk fermentation
  • Shaping and scoring
  • Final proof time
  • Bake temperature and duration
FLOUR
  • If using a weak (low protein) wheat flour, the baker might choose to pre-ferment all of it (i.e. to hydrate all of the weak flour with some of the water in the formula, adding a bit of  yeast and salt, and to let it ferment anywhere from three to twelve hours) in order to make the dough stronger
  • If using a strong (high protein) wheat flour, an autolyse is the way to go as it helps boost extensibility. It is highly recommended for baguette dough
  • If a niche flour (buckwheat, einkorn, legume, quinoa, grapeseed, sprouted wheat or spelt, durum, sorghum, kamut, mesquite) is to be used, thought needs to be given to ways to get the desired crumb structure
WATER
  • Hydration is pretty much dictated by the type of flour(s) to be used
LEAVENING
  • The baker might choose to use either commercial yeast or a starter or maybe both. It all comes down to the kind of flavor s/he is looking for. Baguettes, for instance, have a very different flavor profile when made with liquid levain as opposed to commercial yeast.
  • If using a levain, build schedule needs to be a consideration
  • Liquid levain and poolish are usually made with white flour but some whole flour can be used as well. A pre-ferment containing whole grain will be more active: it might therefore require the addition of a bit of salt. A white poolish or levain is more predictible.
AUTOLYSE
  • An autolyse is an optional step in which all the flour and most of the water in a formula are incorporated in the absence of either yeast of salt until the flour is thoroughly hydrated. This somewhat shaggy dough is allowed to rest for a mininum of twenty minutes before the baker proceeds with the mix proper. The goal is to jumpstart both gluten development and enzymatic activity
  • Commercial yeast is never added to the autolyse but when a formula calls for poolish and/or liquid levain, the poolish and levain are added to the flour and water in the autolyse (flour wouldn’t hydrate properly otherwise since they contain a large part of the total water in the formula)
  • Doing an autolyse is highly recommended if the dough is to be hand-mixed
  • But even if using a mixer, an autolyse is an excellent way of developing the gluten without overprocessing the dough and risking loss of flavor
MIXING
  • What type of mix is best for the bread the baker has in mind? Short? Improved? Intensive?
  • Generally speaking, today many artisan bakers choose to mix the dough very gently and to rely on folds to develop the strength of the dough during fermentation
BULK FERMENTATION
Decisions need to be made regarding:
  • Time: if the dough is machine-mixed, total fermentation time might need to be reduced
  • Number of folds (usually based on an evaluation of the dough consistency)

After this short recap of the considerations a baker needs to keep in mind when designing a bread, Martin invited all of us (I would say we were about fifty, half professional bakers, half home bakers) to pitch in with ideas and suggestions. The only non-negotiable condition was that a pre-ferment had to be used. Also, it soon transpired that beautiful dried figs had been purchased for the purpose of this workshop and the idea of a fig bread was quickly adopted by consensus. 

The back and forth was most informative. For ease of reference, Martin’s comments are presented in bold and in a different color. Please keep in mind that all percentages are given in relation to the amount of flour, always expressed as 100% (for more on bakers’ math, please refer to the post entitled BreadStorm)
  • Participant: Could we make a 100% whole wheat bread?
    Martin Philip:  Since we are going to use figs (a heavy ingredient) it would be preferable to use a fair amount of white flour in order to optimize crumb structure. Going 50% white 50% whole wheat would be a good compromise

  • Participant: What proportion of figs should we use?
    Martin Philip:  Since the figs we just bought are moist and don’t need to be soaked, we could go anywhere between 25 and 35%. Back home it might be worthwhile to try and make one bucket of dough with 20% figs and another with 30% and then decide which one works best. If opting for another dried fruit, keep in mind that raisins, currants, pears and apples all pull water from the dough unless quick-soaked in boiling water before incorporation

  • Participant: Could we leaven the bread entirely with liquid levain?
    Martin Philip:  Sure! Back at home or at the bakery you can, but because of time constraints during the Kneading Conference (due to limited oven space), we will need to add a bit of yeast. Another reason to add yeast is that figs have a high sugar content. Sugar being hygroscopic, it tends to slow down fermentation by pulling water away from the yeast
    Tip: if you are making one single dough with different breads in mind, take out the portion you need to make the fig bread and add a bit of yeast to that, keeping the rest of the dough yeast-free for other purposes

  • Participant: How liquid is the levain we are going to use?
    Martin Philip:  We will be  using a levain hydrated at 100% but at the King Arthur Bakery, the liquid levain is kept at 125%-hydration

  • Participant: Could we use a firm levain?
    Martin Philip:  The bright acidity of a firm levain might be a bit assertive for a fruit bread but it might be interesting to mix and match liquid and firm levains or to use a liquid levain and a biga. All elements need to be balanced. Is the levain acidity kept in check by the sweetness of the figs? Experimenting is the way to go

  • Participant: Could we add in a bit of rye levain?
    Martin Philip:  We certainly could but if the levain is going to sit all night before we mix the bread tomorrow morning, it might be best to stick to wheat (rye develops faster and may cause the levain to peak before we are ready for it). Another consideration to bear in mind that a sour rye would add acidity

  • Participant: How much levain should we use?
    Martin Philip:   The percentage of total flour used in the pre-ferment affects both the functionality of the dough and the flavor of the bread. It is one of the most notable feature in any formula. A high proportion of levain tends to make the bread denser. The ideal in this case would be to use about 18% levain although at the Kneading Conference we will have to use 30% because of time constraints

  • Participant: Could we make miches?
    Martin Philip:  Better go for a smaller shape in order to maximize caramelization. A tear-drop shape that would emulate the contour of a fig would be visually pleasant for this bread

  • Participant: What hydration should we go for?
    Martin Philip:  No need to reinvent the wheel. The best way to determine hydration when creating a new formula is to look at existing formulas for similar types of breads and see what percentage of water they use. A good starting point for this particular bread would probably be 74-75%. In any case, the baker needs to monitor dough consistency throughout the mixing, keeping a container of water close at hand

  • Participant: Could we use a soaker?
    Martin Philip:  A soaker would be a great addition. If you opt for soaking grains such as wheat, barley or rye chops for an extended period of time at room temperature, bear in mind that you need to use a bit of salt or the soaker will be off by the time you are ready to mix. For best flavor, toast the grain, then let it cool, crack it in your mill, add water and soak overnight. In this formula, we are going to use wheat because that’s what we have available but back home you may want to try other grains and see which one works best for you 

  • Participant: How much water should we use in the soaker?
    Martin Philip:  A good ballpark figure for hydrating cracked grain is 120% (meaning a baker needs to use 120 units of water for 100 units of grain). The water  used to hydrate the soaker comes out of the total dough water. Same thing for the water used in the levain

  • Participant: If using a spice such as anise seed, what percentage should we go for?
    Martin Philip:  One percent is usually the way to go. Remember to always toast aromatics  before incorporating them in a dough. Use a heavy metal object to bust up the anise seeds a bit after roasting

  • Participant: How much salt should we use? Two percent?
    Martin Philip:  Because of the high percentage of figs and cracked wheat, 2% salt might be a bit low
The (almost) three-hour brainstorming ended too soon for my taste. I could have gone on listening forever! Martin explained that the next step would be for him to work out the formula on his computer based on what had been discussed and to feed the levain. He would mix the dough the following morning, so that dividing, shaping and baking could start in early afternoon.
See Fig-Anise 50% Whole-Wheat Bread for the completed formula and more photos.