Farine

Crazy for Bread

Search Results for: how to make bread

Daily Bread: An Andrew Whitley Workshop

When Andrew Whitley was invited to speak at the Kneading Conference West 2012 in Mount Vernon, Washington, Victoria-based writer  Rhona McAdam (who had attended an Andrew’s Whole Grain Baking workshop in Scotland earlier this year) knew she had to jump at the chance to have him come to nearby Vancouver Island, BC and teach. So she put together a weeklong program of teaching and discovery for him (neither Andrew nor his wife Veronica had ever been to Canada) and I was lucky enough to be able to participate, at Diane Andiel‘s suggestion, in Daily Bread, the baking workshop which Andrew led on Saturday, September 22 at the Royal Oak Middle School in Victoria, BC.
Not only was I very excited to get to learn from Andrew, if only for a day, but Victoria holds a special sway on my heart and imagination as a city where the local food movement is alive, well and bold. I have yet to read, Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto, the book which Rhona just published (I have it on pre-order for my e-reader and should get it by mid-October) but I already knew that beyond the bright flower baskets, the colorful totems and the ceaseless ballet of roaring seaplanes over the harbor, not to mention the upscale and touristy afternoon teas at the Empress hotel,  there was a vibrant city pulling itself by its roots so to speak, with urban farmers raising chickens, energetic young gardeners biking around to pick up compostable waste and citizens growing their own fruit and vegetables on their balconies or their decks or in their backyard.

On the night I arrived in Victoria, I went straight from the Clipper terminal to a lively panel discussion on alternative ways to support a local food economy: Andrew Whitley was there, making a case for community-supported baking (CSB) and explaining that CSB can take many forms: providing capital to buy equipment or rent premises; contributing labor or offering administrative support; helping out with product distribution, etc.
Another panelist,  fisherman Guy Johnston, described the community-supported fishery (CSF) he had established. Now in its second year, the CSF had gone from 65 members the first year to 130 today: the members buy a share of the crop (prawns, octopus and salmon) ahead of the season, providing fishermen with guaranteed income from sustainable fishing. Knowing pre-season how much fish they should bring back made a huge difference (I was reminded of that fact when reading in the New York Times earlier this week that many fishermen in Spain couldn’t keep up the payments on their vessels).
Another panel participant, Angela Moran, an urban farmer, explained how she had successfully enlisted her neighbors’ help in managing her flock of chickens: everyone took turns in caring for the chickens and in exchange got a share of the eggs they produced.
Andrew Whitley – who lives and works near Edinburgh – said that food was a powerful connector to help weave social traffic and that the emerging community schemes in the Victoria area reminded him of Nourish Scotland, a movement which existed “to reconnect producers, growers, retailers, consumers and all who care for local, sustainable food in Scotland” and which aimed, among other things, to change local food economies. A key element of food security was the resilience stemming from the knowledge that these local networks could not be bought: built on human relationships, they were based on the desire to relate, which wasn’t for sale.

Teaching bread-baking can also be a way of generating interest in this form of local economy as people learn to bake, “produce more than they can eat, share the surplus with others and so take the first step into commercial and community baking”. And in fact among the people attending the workshop the following morning were grain growers, local chefs, homebakers and farmers, some of whom were already making bread for their communities.
I wish I could show you pictures of Andrew demonstrating how to make bread (especially his fascinating air-kneading technique) but he had outlawed photography and so my camera remained in my backpack. Rhona was allowed to click away for a while however and she was kind enough to share her pictures so that you can at least have an idea of the setup:

As you can see, space was limited (which meant no notebooks on tables either) but it all worked out  (note to self: great networking opportunities are to be found in tight quarters!).
Andrew had us bake four different kinds of breads:

  • A 100% wholewheat no-knead bread (straight dough) which some of us shaped in a braid
  • 33% wholewheat rolls for which he had prepared an overnight sponge
  • A plain sourdough 100% rye (from his book Bread Matters, pp. 160-166)
  • Pre-fermented 55% wholewheat spicy buns (from the same book, pp. 154-155)

Plain rye sourdough

Andrew has developed his own method for maintaining a rye levain and I will describe it in details in another post as soon as I make his sourdough rye at home (which should be very soon as the rye culture is already bubbling away).
A lively instructor, he kept a running commentary that made for instructive and entertaining baking. As you may already know (especially if you have read his book), he is a big fan of whole grains, high hydration and long fermentations. He thinks that commercially available white flour is dead flour and even though his baking repertory does include white bread, back home he uses a stoneground flour that retains more of the nutrients. Baking a loaf with a super airy crumb isn’t clearly not his top priority: as he puts it, “big holes in a crumb means white flour and no nutrition.”
Of course he had access to none of his regular flours in Victoria and I believe he was slightly puzzled by the way the unfamiliar (to him) Canadian flours handled themselves: they required more water than their British counterparts and yielded a dough that was more difficult to manage. At one point he had his assistant, Barbara, wash a piece of dough under running water until only the gluten strands remained. They were tightly packed and the whole thing looked rather like an used chewing gum. It was a striking sight (I wish I could have taken a picture!) which brought in sharp relief the true nature of gluten (which should surprise no one since its name is derived from the Latin word for glue). Andrew said that trick was a good way for the baker to evaluate the protein content of a flour when the information wasn’t readily available otherwise.


No-knead wholewheat bread

Generally speaking the breads didn’t come out as plump and golden as they could have and I believe that beyond the flours (which would have benefited from a pre-workshop test but there had been no time for that), the ovens were also rather a disappointment: the class took place in an home economics classroom equipped with homestyle stoves and steaming wasn’t an option. But it really didn’t matter. Bread matters and in that respect, Andrew’s knowledge, passion and commitment are stellar; they made for a memorable workshop. Thank you, Andrew (for teaching the class), Rhona (for organizing it), Diane (for generously helping out with the ingredients and the pre-ferments) and Barbara (for making the whole thing run smoothly)!

Related post:
Andrew Whitley’s Spicy Buns

Farming in Greater Victoria: other images

Bake Your Own Bread

Just got word that Farine is featured as Bread Blog of October by the three bloggers who started the Bake Your Own Bread campaign (the above image is their logo): Connie of My Discovery of Bread, Heather of Girlichef and Michelle of Delectable Musings.
I am very grateful for the honor and hope that BYOB members find on Farine enough recipes they want to try. I cannot agree more with the message: stop buying industrial bread (those squishy loaves we have all encountered) and make your own or go buy bread from your local artisan bakery! Artisan bread is good and it is wholesome. (Your community baker or you don’t put in ingredients with unpronounceable names). 
By doing so, you will help perpetuate a skill that has helped keep mankind alive for countless centuries… Welcome to Farine, BYOB members!

Andrew Whitley: Bread Matters

What you’ll find below is a summary of the keynote address delivered at the Kneading Conference West 2012 by Andrew Whitley, author of Bread matters: the state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own. It is based on the notes I took as he was speaking. Any error or inconsistency is my own as I couldn’t write quite as fast as he talked (although I tried hard!)

Baker Andrew Whitley started his professional life as a broadcaster in the BBC Russian Service. He attributes his choice of a new profession to the deep influence of four writers on his world wiew: Leo Tolstoy, who challenged people born into privilege to work out for themselves what constituted a good life, extolled the dignity of labor and urged a reconciliation of the work of the brain and that of the hands; Anton Chekhov, who had little time for people paralyzed by hereditary guilt; John Ruskin, for whom artisan work was a creative response to the availability of raw materials grown in nature, not torn apart by excessive processes; and Rachel Carson, whose impeccable science and elegiac evocation of nature in Silent Spring led him to finally change his life for ever.
Coming as he did from a privileged background, Andrew was nevertheless a firm believer in the dignity of labor; he knew he wanted to actually do something about the problems identified by Carson; he also felt that working with whole grains (as opposed to the reconstituted flours sold in England under the label “wholemeal” which are often white flour with the bran added back in) was a search for vitality and connectedness that said something about the integrity of one’s personal and professional life. So he started growing wheat on an allotment in the middle of London. While the occupation was morally satisfying, he quickly realized that it wouldn’t allow him to pay the mortgage and when he heard of a watermill being restored in Northern England, he jumped at the chance of buying its flour and becoming a baker.
First he needed to figure out how to make bread. The learning curve was steep, especially because the local wheat was wildly unpredictable. Also, nobody was familiar with the kind of bread he was striving to make. As he put it: “I went to a part of the country with almost no population to make a product nobody asked for with a grain that didn’t have the right properties.” Against all odds, it worked and for this, he credits his early customers who were both encouraging and steadfastly supportive.
Bread matters to us as individuals because it is part of our nourishment. In certain developing countries, it is the main staple and people are still enormously dependent on it. In Great-Britain, the bread culture can be characterized by irreverence or indifference. There is no consideration for the nutritional quality and digestibility of wheat grown for human consumption. Poor choices have been made in terms of plant breeding since World War II,  the goal being always to maximize yield through chemical and mechanical means. But the way we make bread as a society has huge consequences for the soil, agronomical methods and choice of seeds as well as for the distribution and consumption of the product and its disposal (in the United Kingdom, up to 30% of bread is thrown away untouched, still in its unopened plastic bag). 
Agronomy has an interesting effect on the quality of grain: nitrogen is applied to the wheat after flowering (late nitrogen method) to boost the protein content. But what is the quality of this protein? Tests have shown that organic wheat with a protein level of 11% has the same baking properties as non-organic wheat checking in at 13% protein and that wheat treated with late nitrogen contained twice as much gliadin (for more info on the link between gliadin and coeliac disease, click here). In another experiment, scientists compared the nutritional quality of wheat coming harvested at the same time and from the same fields but milled differently: half was stoneground, the other half roller-milled. The stoneground flour contained many more nutrients than the roller-milled one.
Due to the combined effect of new wheat-growing technologies, milling methods which take much more out of the grain than traditional ones and the acceleration of the baking process itself, the industrial construct of water, flour, salt and additives that is now eaten by most people in the UK may be called a loaf but it should never be dignified by the name of bread. Although choices appear deceptively wide at the supermarket, the fact remains that, beyond superficial differences, all British loaves are actually very much the same.
When a baker allows flour to ferment for a significant amount of time especially in the presence of sourdough, changes happen in bread that seem to make it more nutritional. It is hard to research digestibility scientifically but anecdotes are reliable stories about how people feel when they eat something. The Real Bread Campaign – which Andrew Whitley helped launch –  was born of the desire to make bread better for ourselves, our families, our communities and our environment. It calls for honest labeling of all ingredients and processes. The bread industry accuses the campaign of seeking to drag it down. But isn’t its coming clean as to what it does and uses a reasonable thing to ask? The industry refuses to list the enzymes it uses routinely, for instance. Why?
A fervent believer in the need to re-localize the food chain, Andrew seeks to be an agent of revitalization of the local supply chain for grain and flour. Most of the grain grown in Scotland – where he now lives and works – goes to the commodity market where it is subject to investors and speculators. Andrew himself owns five acres of land on which he grows several varietals with the goal of evaluating their baking properties. He is involved with a project run by Martin Wolfe of the Organic Research Centre to produce multiple varieties of seeds and combine them in order to help them resist pests and other adverse conditions. He hopes that one day he’ll be able to bake from wheat entirely grown in Scotland.
He seeks to encourage community-supported baking through a system of donations or through novel forms of community funding, for instance ‘loaf loans” under the terms of which 7.5% of the interest due is paid in bread vouchers; or “bread basket” systems under which one customer buys one basket of ten loaves, gets one free and sells the other nine to colleague and friends, making it possible for the bread to reach people who would otherwise never think of walking into an actual bakery.
The cultural context needs to evolve: dietary changes will come from a combination of changes in regulations and actions at the individual level. Minimum nutritional standards should be set for minerals and vitamins in flour. No additives should be allowed. The pressure should go all the way from the consumer to the breeder. Last time the UK tried to raise the standards for bread was during World War II when it instituted the “national loaf”. Today’s bread, based on the values of simplicity and common ownership, could be rebranded and promoted as the “common loaf”.
In fermenting dough, many transformations come together to yield a flavorful and healthful bread. At the time of the French Revolution, “le pain se lève” (the bread is rising) was both a password and a call to arms among the insurgents who prepared to storm the Bastille. Today British consumers still have a long way to go to free themselves from large corporate interests that do not have their best interest at heart. As Andrew sees it, the move towards real bread is light-years ahead in the United States. Events such as the Kneading Conference are an essentiel ingredient in the fermenting process. The bread is definitely rising!


A field of heirloom wheat at WWU Mt Vernon Research and Extension Center
with orchards in the background and the snowy peak of Mt Baker in the distance
(the Center is the seat of the Kneading Conference West)

Related posts:
Kneading Conference West 2012
Naomi Duguid: Bread Over Time

Naomi Duguid: Bread Over Time

Meeting Naomi Duguid in person at the Kneading Conference West 2012 was a moving moment: she has been an iconic presence in my life since I bought Flatbread and Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas when it first came out many many years ago: here was a woman who dared. She dared to travel to the most remote corners of the world and observe cooks and bakers at work, collecting recipes. She did what most of us tied to a regular day job could only dream of and dream I did, a true armchair traveler, savoring each of her books as they came out.
Well, it turned out that she was just as moved to meet us, her readers and bread fellows. When she reached the podium to deliver the keynote address, there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them and whispered in the mike: “Don’t mind me, emotion always comes first! It’ll be over in a minute” and it was. But however quickly brought under control, her emotion added a deep resonance to what she had to tell us.
We have established that we all care about bread, she said. Now how do we translate that into action? Well, a time-proven way of looking forward is to look back.
We are standing on the shoulders of hunters, gatherers, growers, people who have looked for ways to transform grain into food that would sustain themselves and their communities. Solving the problem meant survival. Eventually they may have thought of using a rock (or a mortar and pestle) to make flour, so that they could make bread. They brewed beer, they rolled couscous, they made leavened or unleavened flatbreads. Perhaps they built an oven.
All of these people were deeply involved in and committed to the local production of grain.
Today as well finding ways to use grain to sustain life in our communities may make the difference between surviving or not. But how do you give “bread” (loosely defined) its value again? When you have no respect for the process, you have no respect for the product. How do we get back the sense of the special that we lost in the commodification of grain?
As soon as you scale up production to a large scale, you dumb down the product. Predictability becomes the goal and the unpredictability of nature the problem to solve. Commercial bakers want their flour to be consistent, so we produce the lowest extraction flour where nothing alive remains. We lose flavors and varietals. We don’t know the taste of the grain grown across the road.
Let’s reverse the trend. Let’s go back to our homes and bakeries and add at least two products that contain whole grains to our repertoires and at least one item largely made with another grain than wheat. A world of flavors is waiting…
In Tibet, whole grain hulless barley is roasted, then ground into tsampa, a very fine flour. This flour is then mixed with hot tea. With butter and salt added, it becomes a kind of instant bread. The story of tsampa is a tribute to human creativity, ingenuity and survival instinct in an unyielding environment.

Let’s bring back respect in our relationship to grain: respect for the farmer, the miller, the baker; respect for our customers (be they our families or the people who actually buy our breads). Let’s move forward with that relationship by incorporating whole grains into our baking and using other grains than wheat whenever we have a chance. 
***
The above is a synopsis of Naomi’s address based on the notes I took as she was speaking. If any of you readers were there listening to her and think I forgot something important, please let me know (mc.farine@gmail.com) and I’ll add it in.
Meanwhile I would like to share a story: when I was in elementary school in Paris, I had no access to a library. My school had no books to lend that I can remember. If our arrondissement had a public library (and I am pretty sure it did), we were never taken there. At my grandparents’ house (where we spent most weekends), I had all of my father’s and uncle’s childhood books at my disposal and read and re-read them avidly but they were mostly boy books. At home I had girl books which were given to me for my birthdays or at Christmas. Those too, I read and re-read avidly. Among those, Daughter of the Mountains by Louise Rankin, a book about a young Tibetan girl which I obviously read in French (I had no English at all then). I remember my brothers teasing me mercilessly about the title (Momo, Fille des Montagnes) which, I admit, sounded a bit silly, even to my ten-year old ears.
But mostly I remember loving the book with a passion and reading it dozens of times over from cover to cover. To this day, I can taste the tsampa that Momo carried in a little pouch around her neck and survived on during her long and arduous search for her stolen puppy: it was so vividly described that I literally yearned for it.
As Naomi was talking, I had the feeling that some lose threads in the tapestry of life were weaving themselves together for me. I may never follow in Naomi’s actual footsteps to far reaches of the world but I can certainly answer her call and spurred on by the taste and smell of the tsampa I remember eating vicariously in a beloved childhood book, open my baking to new flavors. I owe it to the little Parisian girl who grew up dreaming of life in the high mountains of Tibet…

Chad Robertson’s Danish Rye Bread

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

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

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

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

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