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Crazy for Bread

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Bread Bowls

Going back to the buttered baguette “soldiers” we used to dip in soft-boiled eggs when I was a child, I have always been fascinated by bread as a container or as silverware. I may yet make a “pain tranchoir”, a slab of bread on which medieval ladies and lords heaped their meat as the valets made their way around the great halls with chunks of roasted animals on huge platters. The bread would slowly absorb the dripping juices and since the mighty only ate the meat itself (which they cut with a knife close to their mouths), it was distributed to the poor (or sometimes sold to them by the servants) the day after, nourishing and flavorful.

Maybe I’ll try that over the summer. Mighty Man can have the steak and, as I’d pick bread over meat any time, I’ll have the humble tranchoir.
In the meantime, I like the idea of making bread bowls as vessels for soups (here a New England clam chowder), salads, chilis, appetizers, side-dishes, etc. (for some suggestions, check out The Sourdough Bread Bowl Cookbook, by John Vrattos and Lisa Messinger).
This time (I made the dish for the first time last year, using baguette dough, and posted about it here on my French blog) I made the bowls out of the same batch of dough as the rustic batard. The dough was a tad too wet (85 %) for the purpose. If you make the dough specifically for the bowls, you may want to go for a lower hydration rate (maybe 70-72 %) as it will make it shaping easier.
However I was more or less able to reproduce the technique that Gérard demonstrated for me on a piece of his firm levain (a much less hydrated piece of dough) last time I visited.

Gérard says that we are going to let the dough rest a few minutes and that he made one a bit bigger as the other.

Gérard says the shaping is the same as for a brioche, the idea being to embed the top (or head) in the main ball. During the proofing, the dough will rise in a pear-shape (or cone). No scoring is necessary if the top is well buried in the main part as the base will widen a bit and get more stable. The lid is cut out after the baking.
Gérard offered a further tip, which is to melt some butter and after scooping out as much of the crumb as possible, to use a brush to gently (and sparingly) “paint” the inside of the bowl with it. The bowl is then put in the hot oven for about 5 minutes until nice and crisp inside.
For last night’s soup, I got my inspiration from Barbara Kafka’s recipe for clam chowder in Soup – A way of life, which I adapted somewhat. For instance I used canned minced clams and bottled clam juice instead of fresh clams which I would have had to scrub and cook myself. I also added a tiny bit of bacon (about 1 strip, chopped in tiny pieces and cooked separately until crisp).

Ingredients (for 2 bowls):

  • 2 baked 270g-bread bowls (you can make the bowls smaller if you’d rather serve the soup as a first course. Even as a main course, we ended up eating only a small part of the bowl)
  • 15 g butter for the soup itself + 30 g to “paint” the inside of the bowls
  • 10 g unbleached all-purpose flour
    ground mace to taste (I didn’t have any and used freshly ground nutmeg) 
  • A pinch of cayenne pepper
  • 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
  • 225 g firm potatoes, peeled and diced
  • 125 g heavy cream (or more to taste)
  • 1 10-oz (280 g) can of chopped clams, drained
  • 1 bottle (450 ml) of clam juice
  • Pepper and salt to taste
  • 1 strip of bacon, diced, cooked till crisp and drained on a paper towel
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 scallion, finely chopped

Method:

  1. Melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Stir the soup flour, the mace (or nutmeg) and the cayenne pepper. Cook over low heat for 2 minutes, stirring
  2. Stir in the onion and cook, stirring and scraping the flour from the sides of the pan frequently, for 10 minutes, or until the onion is translucent
  3. Slowly whisk the clam juice into the pot until the mixture is smooth. Stir in the potatoes and the bay leaf. There should be enough liquid to cover the potatoes. If there isn’t, add additional water to barely cover them. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Lower the heat and simmer for 12 minutes, or until the potatoes are almost done
  4. Stir in the clams and cream. Heat through. Remove the bay leaf. Check the seasoning
  5. Carefully pour into the bowls, garnish with chopped scallion and bacon bits. Bon appétit!

The bread bowls go 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…

Related posts:

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.

Leek & Shiitake Mushroom Foccacia

Leek & shitake mushroom focaccia

Even though Gérard lives and works in a remote area, his home/bakery is clearly a magnet for local food and nutrition enthusiasts, including serious home bakers, many of whom are long-time friends. That is how I met Bob Low, Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Vermont (UVM), who is currently teaching a course on endocrinology and metabolism, including nutrition, at UVM Medical School.
Professor Low – an avid home baker and long-time levain aficionado – is interested in the nutritional benefits of levain-fermented bread. From what I understood, he is currently reviewing the existing research. I was all ears, as you can imagine, and can only hope that his synopsis will soon be made available.
The conversation around the table was rendered all the more lively by the fact that Gérard poured Sancerre all around and served a marvelous foccacia covered with fragrant and meaty mushrooms (grown nearby) and other local organic produce.
Gérard kindly allowed me to share his recipe on Farine.

Ingredients:

1 flatbread (dough made with firm levain; hydrated at least at 80%; containing 30% freshly milled whole-grain wheat, rye and spelt flours)
400 g shiitake mushrooms, stem removed, sliced (oyster mushrooms can be substituted)
1 leek, sliced and parboiled for a few minutes with a pinch of baking soda (to make it tender)
1 large onion, sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
Freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano
Olive oil
Clarified butter

Method:

  1. Sauté the onion in a mixture of olive oil and clarified butter
  2. Add the garlic when the onion is golden
  3. Cook at very low heat for about 10 minutes (do not let the garlic turn golden)
  4. Add the mushrooms and cook about 15 minutes
  5. Add salt and pepper to taste
  6. Remove from heat
  7. Preheat oven at 475ºF/246ºC
  8. Slice open the flatbread and drizzle some olive oil on both open faces
  9. Spread the mushroom-onion mix on both
  10. Grate fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano over the mushrooms
  11. Bake for 15 minutes
  12. Sprinkle the cut-up and parboiled leek on top
  13. Slice and eat hot with a glass of cold Sancerre. Bliss ensues…

The foccacia goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.