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Crazy for Bread

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Meet the Baker: Cliff Leir

I first met Cliff Leir, owner of Fol Épi Bakery (“fol épi” is French for “wild wheatstalk”) in Victoria, British Columbia, at the Kneading Conference West 2011 where he gave a talk on building your own bakery complete with a separate mill room and a wood-fired brick oven. Despite his relatively young age (he was then 33), he had already been baking in Victoria for 14 years. He had been at his new location for eighteen months or so.


Fol Épi is located at Dockside Green, a new development in a previously industrial part of Victoria harbor

Cliff explained that he built silos behind his bakery so that he could buy his grain directly from farmers, a setup which benefits both himself and the farmers: he gets a tastier (if sometimes less predictible) product than by purchasing from a distributor and the farmers get a better deal. The only wheat he uses in his bread is organic Red Fife, a heritage grain he buys in Saskatchewan (he gets his pastry flour from Ontario). Since he only had room for a pair of silos, he bakes with two grains exclusively: wheat and rye. He mills his flours himself.

Cliff described how he built his oven with the help of friends and how he learned to dress his milling stones (through Web searches and by attending milling workshops). He explained that he hydrates the wheat before milling (but never the rye) and he talked about developing a tactile feel for the dough (a true self-taught man, he never went to baking school). He shared the plans he had designed for the oven, the mill and bakery. He detailed his initial investment and his current operating costs. Basically he laid it all out for the aspiring baker/entrepreneur, making building and running your own bakery sound both like a huge amount of work and an exhilarating endeavor. I have no doubt both are accurate descriptions.


Cliff Leir’s Rye Bread
However since I was not planning on opening (and much less building) my own bakery (at least not in this current life), I would have filed away all this information in my brain under the label “Interesting story” and moved on to the next topic if, at the end of his lecture,  he hadn’t brought out samples of his breads. I tasted all of them. All were good but one literally bowled me over. It was a 50% whole wheat with a beautiful crust and crumb. I had never seen a bread with such a high percentage of whole grain and yet such an open structure: it was “long en bouche” as French wine lovers like to say when the taste of a wine remains in your mouth long after you have swallowed. It evoked the rustic fragrance of plump wheat berries ripened in a relentless summer sun with a faint note of roasted hazelnuts and caramelized butter. The lecture ended, the audience dispersed, I went home but I couldn’t get that bread out of my mind.


Cliff Leir’s 50% whole wheat bread

So when I found out I was going to Victoria, I emailed Cliff and asked if he would be willing to talk to me about this 50% whole wheat bread and maybe share his formula. He wrote back to say that he would be happy to do so but that it might be hard to find a moment as his workdays were always a bit frantic. Indeed the first time I went to the bakery, back in early April, he was in a rush. He showed me around (that was quick as the bakery is tiny) and we agreed to meet again in May since I was coming back to town to visit Diane Andiel.


Red Fife’s white flour milled at Fol Épi

Red Fife whole grain flour milled at Fol Épi (see the gorgeous bran flakes!)

The second time, Cliff was just as rushed (he had to feed the starters and finish some chores before getting his younger son from school) but he kindly took the time to sit with me and go over his formula. He also gave me two kilos each of his freshly milled Red Fife all-purpose and whole wheat flours (he mills 100 kg of flour a day, most of which white) so that I could try baking the bread at home. I didn’t ask to visit the bakery again (which is why I don’t have more pictures to post) as I could see work was proceeding at a frantic pace in the background: pizzas were going in and out of the oven like clockwork and baskets of fresh loaves were constantly beeing rolled to the front.

He told me how he built his first brick oven in his driveway at age 19, how he learned his trade by trial and error, how he started selling bread to his neighbors, then at a farmer’s market, how he opened his first bakery (Wildfire Bakery on Quadra Street) with a partner and learned about Red Fife wheat through a Slow Food Canada initiative, how he and his partner parted ways and he spent a few years building his present bakery. For a vivid description of Cliff’s journey as a baker from the moment he “discovered” Red Fife, you may want to read Mixing Up Change, the three-part article he wrote for the Baker’s Journal: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) as he tells it much better than I ever could. If, like me, you are interested in the heritage grain movement, you may also enjoy reading this article on the Red Fife community by Saskatchewan writer Penny McKinley. It is a measure of Cliff’s modesty as an artisan that when I complimented him on his 50% whole wheat bread – definitely the best I have ever sampled in its category – he attributed its taste and beautiful crumb to the flavor and excellent baking properties of the Red Fife…

According to Terra Madre – 1200 World Food Communities, a Slow Food Editore publication dated October 2004, “Today, Red Fife has survived due to the work of only a handful of organic heritage wheat and seed farmers scattered across Canada who have been faithfully growing the wheat to keep it from extinction. Artisan bread made from Red Fife wheat has a yellow crumb with an intense scent of herbs and vegetables colored with a light acidity. The nose has notes of anise and fennel, and in the mouth the bread is unexpectedly rich with a slightly herby and spicy flavor.”
Wow, I wish I had thought of all these flavors when I described tasting Cliff’s 50% whole Red Fife bread for the first time but really I would have been making it up: I detect neither fennel nor anise although the intense scent of herbs and vegetables may be what I read as the fragrance of wheat berries ripening in the fierce Western Canadian sun. As to spiciness, I don’t know, I have tasted many wheats that were way spicier than this one.
I detect no acidity either in Cliff’s 50% whole wheat bread and that’s because, Cliff’s modesty nothwithstanding,  grain only tells part of the story. Controlled fermentation tells the rest. All of his breads are made with naturally leavened starters and the 50% whole wheat results from a process in which a small amount of levain ferments the dough very slowly at a cool temperature over a long period of time. 
Fol Épi uses organic gray sea salt and filtered water (no chlorine).  As explained above, the wheat is freshly milled and the flour is allowed to rest for at least six days (and no more than two or three weeks) before being used for baking.
I was so happy to be going home with some of this wheat I clutched it to my chest like the treasure that it was. We sailed through customs (the customs officer completely lost interest when I told him that we had visited bakers and were only bringing back flours and breads) and once home, I split the bags and sent one kilo of each flour to my friend Gérard Rubaud in Vermont so that he could try the Red Fife  for himself. I baked two big loaves with the remaining flours.

Related post: 50% Whole Red Fife Wheat Bread (baked at home)

Troubleshooting dough hydration: A trick “à la Gérard”

Update: If you are planning to make the Levain de campagne Bread from How to make bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou (the bread I am talking about below), please note that there is indeed a typo in the recipe and that the amount of water should be more or less 300 g and not 150 g. This was confirmed to me today by the author himself.

Spring break brought us a passel of kids and grandkids and made for an extremely lively ten days in our household. Anyone who has had the good fortune of living in close quarters with five-and-a half-year old twins and their even younger first cousins will probably agree that the experience isn’t exactly conducive to meditation, reading and gourmet cooking.
By popular (and youthful) request, macaroni and cheese have been seen in my kitchen this week with unprecedented frequency while greens were the object of much suspicion and arduous negotiation. Asparagus and broccoli prevailed. Spinach was voted down. Frozen peas passed muster. Usually beloved, avocado was categorically rejected. Fruit was regarded with a marked lack of enthusiasm in its original form except for bananas, apples and mangos (save for one kid who expressed total revulsion at the sight of sliced mango in his fruit salad) but was widely appreciated in disguise (notably in the shape of the blackberry frozen yogurt I made from the berries we picked last summer).
A large part of the family went back home today. A second installment (grown-ups only) is expected tomorrow. In-between I found myself in the mood for a baking Sunday.
Since I am still exploring Hadjiandreou’s book, I decided to make the miche Emmanuel Hadjiandreou calls his “Levain de campagne” Bread (shown on the cover) for which he won a Great Taste Award.
The recipe calls for 150 g of mature white starter (at 100% hydration) and 150 g of water (as indicated above, the water amount is incorrect as printed in the book. It should be 300 g)  as well as for 250 g of all-purpose flour (he actually recommends strong/bread flour but then he bakes in the UK where flours are different from ours), 150 g of whole wheat flour and 50 g of dark rye flour. So far so good. 
Cruising along  after weighing everything, I was feeling quite happy (the fragrance of the levain will do that to you!)  when I hit a snag. Hadjiandreou says to “mix until [the dough] comes together. The mixture will be a bit soft, but don’t despair and don’t be tempted to add more flour”. I certainly wasn’t! Far from being alarmingly soft, my dough was as stiff as could be. I wet my hands, I added a few spoonfuls of water, then a few more. It still didn’t look good. I set the dough to rest for ten minutes prior to the first stretch and fold, hoping that it would have relaxed, but no such luck. I tried adding more water but it made matters worse: the dough showed signs of breaking apart.
That’s when I remembered a trick Gérard Rubaud showed me last fall. He said it is never too late to add water to a dough and he proved his point by hydrating a dough that had just finished fermenting and successfully making a whole batch of baguettes with it. 

This above video was done for demonstration purposes only: the dough was already fine as it was. But Gérard does use this trick to troubleshoot production situations:  he says that each time he gets a new delivery of all-purpose flour, he has to recalculate the percentage of water and sometimes he’s off in his calculations for the first batch and doesn’t know it until after the autolyse is over. If he has used too much water, it is simple enough to add more flour but if he hasn’t used enough, it is much trickier. In his experience, it is way easier to add water (up to 2% of the flour weight) at the end of the first fermentation than at the end of the autolyse.
The dough that was slowly taking shape in my bowl had none of the silkiness and pillowiness (is there such a word?) of Gérard’s. It was still rather stiff and forbidding and didn’t look like it would take kindly to a bath “à la Gérard”. Still it could clearly use some water, so I gave it a shower instead (using a spray bottle) and that’s clearly what it was waiting for.
After each stretch and fold episode (and there were a total of six at ten minute-intervals), I sprayed it thoroughly with warm water and covered it again with an inverted bowl. It absorbed the water while resting and became progressively more flexible. It was still a very different dough from Gérard’s but then Gérard’s contained mostly white flour while this one contained close to 80% whole grains.
I am sure the crumb won’t sport big holes (Hadjiandreou’s doesn’t) but will it be dense or not? In other words, should I have sprayed more? Or less? That’s what I am hoping to learn from the experience… Don’t you love the everlasting challenges of breadbaking?
I wrote to Emmanuel Hadjiandreou to make sure the recipe is correct. The dough seemed way too dry, even accounting for the differences in flour, climate, etc., for the prescribed amounts of flour and water to yield the soft dough pictured (and described) in the book. I will let you know what I hear back, if anything.

Meet the Baker: John Tredgold

At first glance, John Tredgold, who prefers to be called JT, may seem an unlikely candidate for an artisan profile on this blog since he is Director of Bakery Operations at Semifreddi’s, a large Bay Area bakery which is justifiably proud of its “handcrafted bread & pastries” but makes no claim whatsoever to artisan baking.

The truth is however that JT leads a double life and that, in his other life, he is one of nine artisan bakers selected in 2009 to train for the North American Louis Lesaffre Cup competition which will take place in Las Vegas this coming September.
Together these nine bakers form the Bread Bakers Guild Team USA 2010. Each of them specializes in one of three categories: Baguette & Specialty Breads, Viennoiserie and Artistic Design. JT is a member of the Baguette & Specialty Breads sub-team.
If the US wins the Lesaffre Cup, then it also wins the right to compete in the Coupe du monde de la boulangerie (Bread World Cup), an event that it is to the world of baking what the Olympics are to the world of sport. There is no guarantee that the present members of Team USA 2010 will be chosen to represent the US in Paris. However they might be.
So JT has a fighting chance to follow in the tracks of the legendary US artisan bakers who, in 1996, won first place in the baguette and specialty breads competition, upsetting the French, and took the gold both in 1999 and in 2005!
Now, how do you get from a semi-industrial bakery in Alameda, California, to a spot on Team USA? Well, it is a long story, one which begins in the United Kingdom in the 80’s when JT, then aged 14 and a British citizen, started working in a bakery. Bread was pretty awful in the UK at the time however: “bland” was probably the kindest adjective that could be used to describe it. There were no real possibilities for apprenticeship.
So, in his late teens, JT decided to try his luck on the other side of the Atlantic. He first found work decorating Baskin-Robbins cakes at a New England mall. Although he did enjoy the job, he quickly moved on. After a few return trips to England, 1993 found him on the West Coast where a Help Wanted ad in a local paper pointed him towards Semifreddi’s, a much smaller operation then than today. JT was hired as a shaper, a job for which his British work experience had prepared him well .
JT shaped breads for one year. But he wanted to work the deck and rack ovens. He wanted to supervise a crew. So he kept pushing and learning and climbing up the ladder and eventually, in 2000, he was offered the job of Director of Bakery Operations when it became available.
Semifreddi’s was then struggling with expansion and quality. Some things were not being done exactly right on the production floor but it was difficult for JT to pinpoint which ones. So he registered for the Artisan I workshop at SFBI and after taking the class and talking things over with Michel Suas and other instructors, he was able to convince Semifreddi’s owners to invest some time and money and implement a few changes.

Today the company makes 35 different products and a dozen pastries daily. Every day, there are problems to solve: training issues, lack of focus, lack of understanding. JT’s job is to make sure production happens. Although production baking has very little to do with new formulas, he never loses track of his artisan training and always tries to push knowledge in the production line, striving to show that if a slightly different approach were to be implemented, then the product would improve. All the managers are required to attend one training session at SFBI every year (paid for by the company), so the knowledge base is much stronger today among the bakery operators.
By 2002, JT was managing the bakery but sorely missed having his hands in the dough. He was among the spectators who saw Japan win the gold at the Bread World Cup while the US came silver. More than anything, he wanted to be part of the team. So, the following year, he went back to SFBI where Didier Rosada – the US Team coach – was an instructor and asked him if he would watch him make three breads and tell him whether or not he had a chance. Didier watched. JT wasn’t ready.
Back in Paris in 2005 to attend the competition again, he witnessed the stunning US victory and came back more determined than ever to make it to the World Cup but life intervened and he wasn’t in Paris in 2008, not as a team member nor even as a spectator, to see the United States lose to France, Taiwan and Italy by a fraction of a point, securing a 4th spot but no medal.
With more experience and training under his belt, JT decided in 2009 that he was ready and he registered for the Draft for Team USA 2010. The audition process for the team took the shape of regional workshops during which Team USA alumni judged the candidates’ skill, adaptability and teamwork. For JT and other candidates in the Western US, the workshop took place at the California Culinary Academy in downtown San Francisco, California.
Each candidate was required to bring six formulas in Excel format with baker’s percents, one of which he or she would be requested to bake from. They were allowed to bring their own levain. Each audition workshop was three-day long.
On the first day (a half-day), the candidates were split into groups and asked to prepare preferments for the day after. JT was asked to make a 100% whole wheat basic loaf, a basic baguette (with poolish) and a basic rye bread (with medium rye flour). The candidates were told they could change the formulas if they liked. They had 30 minutes to prepare before starting.
On the second day, the teams were asked to mix, shape and bake. JT says: “It was pretty stressful, not only because of the pressure but because you didn’t know your partner. A lot of important decisions had to be made as to the mixing (in JT’s opinion, more than flour and temperature, it is when you choose to stop mixing that influences the bread), the amount of water to use, the length of the fermentation (JT favors a long one, adjusting the temperatures accordingly afterwards) and the baking , and you didn’t know whether you could trust your partner’s instincts. Also all the mixers were Hobarts, there was no retarder and you had to make do with a lone electric deck oven which didn’t function properly (a few of the decks had no steam). It became clear that the judges were looking for how you would behave, accept responsibility and errors, etc. Could you handle things when they start to go wrong?”
At the end of the second day, each candidate was told which of his or her own formulas he or she would have to bake the following day. In JT’s case, the judges picked the 85×3, an aromatic country wheat bread made with 0.85% ash flour and three different preferments. Another candidate made a beer bread, another yet an olive bread. Some had submitted formulas with strongly flavored ingredients and JT remembers wondering if the flavors would be overpowering, preventing the judges from distinguishing the grain’s aromas. Each formula had to be baked in three different shapes.

JT mixed his dough and once mixing was over, he felt a little more relaxed, knowing that he was on the right course and that the bread would say what he wanted it to say, despite the challenges with the oven. When it was time to bake, he was in full production managing mode, staggering and organizing oven times so that each candidate could start his or her bread in a properly steamed oven, switching to a no-steam deck as soon as maximum oven rise was reached.

(photo kindly provided by BBGA)

At the end of the day, the instructors evaluated the products and provided a critique. They based their final decision on the technique, work habits, attitude and creativity of each candidate but also of course on the quality and taste of the final product.

The draft workshop which JT attended took place in May but he didn’t learn until October that he had made the team (the results of all regional workshops had to be in before the judges could make a decision).

Now that JT is on Team USA 2010, he needs to practice, practice, practice. As it is not always easy for the candidates to find time to train during the workday, training sessions are organized, which all candidates are required to attend.
The first one, Baguette Practice, took place on the last weekend of February in San Francisco. Already back East by then, I sent JT an email to find out how it went. His reply left me gasping for air: “It was sink or swim. I had never done anything like this before. Mike & Roger were calm and relaxed, I felt good. Planning & timing became key components immediately. No time to waste , no time to spare, everything fluid & precise, 200Kg batches of dough are more forgiving than 5kg. My first dough was too wet, make a decision, move on. Second dough better, elastic, good temp. Next step. Never panic & never give up. 8 ½ hours later, the first practice was done…” Wow! Did he stop to breathe when he wrote that, not to mention during the whole practice session?
JT told me that bread was constantly on his mind: “Everything is mental, you know. I practice in my head a lot. I think about what I did, where I placed my hands. Did it make a difference? Did I do this or that because every one else was doing it or because the dough needed it? It is essential to learn how to read the bread and the dough. So, in my head, I run a virtual practice session all the time.”

In many ways, JT’s passion for bread reminds me of Gérard. For both, the only bread that matters is the one leavened with levain. Both are at the same time totally committed and totally zen in their relationship with the dough. Both believe that less is more, that the dough must be handled as little as possible. Both are bakers, first and foremost. Eveything else in their lives gravitates around that.

As JT believes that his 85×3 (click on the link to see the formula) helped win him a spot on Team USA 2010, he decided to bake it for Farine readers and have me taste it. At first bite, I loved the crust and crumb textures but I wasn’t sure I could taste all the aromas. But then I let it rest overnight and boy, had it improved! At 8:00 AM the following day, it was delicious. At 11:00, it was truly fantastic, in the same league as Gérard‘s bâtard or Vatinet‘s baguette. Same thing happened when I tried the formula at home: it was excellent the first day and it kept getting even better as the hours passed.

I wonder if this has to do with the fact that the crumb seems a bit moist when one first slice through a loaf. The flavors become more apparent when it dries up a bit. JT turns off the oven after 30 minutes and leaves the bread another 15 minutes in the oven with the door open. I forgot to do it but I’ll give it a try next time.
JT was kind enough to allow me to shoot videoclips as he worked. So if you are curious to see a champ at work, by all means take a look!

Related post: JT’s 85×3

Levain: Where do the aromas come from? What are the health benefits?

Have you ever wondered how come no bread leavened with wild yeast ever tastes the same from one bakery to the next, even when made from the same formula? Ever wondered whether or not there are any health benefits to eating bread made with levain as opposed to bread leavened with commercial yeasts? And if so, what those benefits could be? Well, wonder no longer.
Robert Low, a Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Vermont and a lifelong baker and levain aficionado himself as well as a good friend of Gérard’s (which is how I happened to meet him), has been reading the scientific literature on the subject for some time now and he has kindly agreed to share with his conclusions with us. Please click here to see his paper (a work which will be updated as needed when new material comes to light).
Interestingly I was just reading here this morning in the French version of Wikipedia that, even though commercial yeast can be a source of vitamins and other nutrients, it isn’t a good idea to leaven whole grain breads with it as, contrary to levain, during the fermentation process, it doesn’t destroy the phytic acid present in the grain. This acid prevents the body from assimilating calcium and other nutrients. The article asserts that, in the long run, consumption of yeast-based whole grain breads can contribute to calcium deficiencies.
So I checked Wikipedia under “phytic acid” and here is what I found. It dovetails with what Professor Low is saying in his paper. There is so much to learn about nutrition. What an interesting science! In my next life I want to be a baker AND a nutritionist.

Batard/baguette shaping: Gérard’s method

Last time I was up in Vermont, Gérard demonstrated his way of shaping a batard. I guess there are as many ways as there are bakers but I liked his way. Unhurried and gentle, it looked as if it were dictated by the dough itself.

At that point the student who was apprenticing with Gérard that week asked to be shown how to shape baguettes. Gérard evinced surprise at this request as he was clearly under the impression that he had been demonstrating it all along. That’s when I realized that what he calls a “baguette” is what we Parisians call a “bâtard”.
The confusion probably stems from the fact that he learned his trade in the Savoie region (a section of the French Alps that is close to both Switzerland and Italy) at a time when the Parisian baguette was an oddity outside the capital. Outside Paris, truly skinny breads were considered with suspicion. They were a “fantaisie” (a whim), not true bread. As Gérard says (only half-jokingly), real men didn’t eat baguette then and still don’t. His bakery isn’t equipped to produce baguettes, it lacks wide-enough boards and couches. He produces batards which he will call baguettes if pushed. No Parisian would call them that.

Gérard suggests that the beginner identify and count his or her movements when shaping batards and then analyze them one by one in order to eliminate those which aren’t truly necessary. Sometimes we overwork the dough out of sheer nervousness or excitement or because we think we need to rush.
Just as you don’t compete in the Tour de France when you first learn how to bike, in the same way, one cannot expect (or be expected) to roll out hundreds or even dozens of batards or baguettes a day before one has assimilated the basics. So take your time and get a feel for the dough (what it looks like and what it feels like).
With experience, shaping becomes a second nature. Only then does it make sense to try and speed things up. That’s Gérard’s advice and I like it. By the time I was done shaping a dozen or more “baguettes” his way, my seams looked way better than they ever did before.
Gérard was pleased and said I should be a baker! That comment went straight to my heart…