52 Loaves (12 page)

To be fair to Beard, it is not unusual to find bread (especially white sandwich bread) that includes some milk and fat in the form of oil or butter. Both milk and fat add flavor and are dough conditioners. Fat coats the gluten strands, making the bread more tender and increasing its shelf life. Additionally, the sugar (lactose) found in milk caramelizes during baking, producing a golden crust.

I followed Beard’s recipe to the letter, with the exception of substituting a little whole wheat flour for some of the white. The result?

“This is better than your bread, Dad,” Katie said. Zach agreed.

“Enjoy it today, then,” I said, the sharpness of my voice surprising me. “You’re not going to have it again. It’s not eligible for the perfect loaf. It has milk and oil in it.”

“Guess that means you won’t be making croissants, either,” Katie groaned.

“Just bread with four ingredients, kids.”

“So why’d you make
this
?” Zach asked.

I just shrugged. They wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
—Mark Twain

It was Father’s Day, so I was having a special Father’s Day breakfast. That I made by myself. And ate by myself. While Anne was weeding in the garden and Zach and Katie were sound asleep.

It felt kind of weird. I’d told everyone that I didn’t need anything for Father’s Day and, for that matter, that we didn’t even need to observe Father’s Day—a holiday for my father, not me—but when my kids actually took me up on the offer, I found myself unexpectedly disappointed. Not even a “Happy Father’s Day” from anyone.

Serves me right.

For my special Father’s Day breakfast, I made a special bread, a delightful quick bread with egg and butter and baking powder, cooked in only three minutes between two hot metal grids. In other words, a waffle. Yes, a waffle is bread, and an interesting bread at that.
*
Most commonly, a waffle is made as a quick bread,
meaning it is leavened with baking powder and baking soda, but waffles can be leavened with yeast. If, that is, you have the foresight to begin preparing your breakfast while still digesting your dinner.

The word
waffle
has the same origin as
wafer,
and in fact they are quite similar, each a flour-water mixture cooked between two hot, embossed metal plates. When the plates are close together and nearly flat, except for the etching of, say, a cross, the result is a Communion wafer. Change the etching from a religious symbol to a shallow grid, add some sugar, and your wafer takes the form of an ice cream cone. Now make the indentations on the iron much deeper, add some leavening, and your wafer becomes a waffle.

Breakfast waffles can be challenging to make at home, because a good waffle is crisp on the outside and soft and airy on the inside (not unlike a good loaf of bread). The indentations of the waffle iron, by increasing the surface area, contribute greatly to the crispness. So does the addition of more fat (I prefer melted butter to vegetable oil); by substituting fat for some of the water, the waffle steams less inside the iron, allowing it to crisp up. There are a number of other tricks various cooks employ for crispness, from adding more eggs to slipping in a little corn meal, but the waffles I was making this morning were in my opinion the best in the world and represented the realization of another earlier bread obsession of sorts, dating back to the mid-1980s, when we were on a family beach vacation in North Carolina.

At a local breakfast/lunch spot, the kind of place where the waitresses call you “hon” and your bone-colored coffee mug gets refilled whenever it falls below the three-quarter mark, we’d breakfasted on the best waffles we’d ever eaten. A card on the table boasted that they were something called Carbon’s Golden Malted waffles. A commercial mix, not a homemade recipe. This
was great news. It meant I could make these at home. It took some work to track the company down in the pre-Internet age, but I eventually talked to someone at Carbon’s in South Bend, Indiana, and was directed to a distributor in Cincinnati, from whom I tried to order some mix.

“Our smallest quantity is fifty pounds,” I was told. I was fond of their waffles, but not fifty pounds fond. I turned to making my own but had no success whatsoever in duplicating Carbon’s 1937 “secret mix” of wheat and corn flour, malt, and unspecified flavorings. A full decade passed, and I’d despaired of ever having such a good waffle again, when I saw a squat circular can of “malted waffle mix” at our local market. The brand wasn’t Carbon’s, but the flavor was unmistakably Carbon. Even ten years later, I could tell. Turns out they sell it today under several brand names, including their own, all in the same circular cardboard container.

I took two lessons away from this experience. Homemade isn’t always better, and sometimes I get to win one. I learned one more thing that evening at dinner, when Katie discovered the left over waffles in the refrigerator.

“You made waffles this morning?”

“For Father’s Day,” I said pointedly.

There—it was out! How would they react? Katie looked at Zach, and they both looked at Anne, and finally Zach cleared his throat nervously and said, “Uh, Dad?”

I waited for the apology.

“Father’s Day is
next
Sunday.”

And I wouldn’t be making my own breakfast.

Alcohol and calculus don’t mix. Never drink and derive.
—
Anonymous

Katie had a question.

“Dad, why do I need to know calculus? When am I ever going to use that?”

Good question, Katie. Thirty years ago, during the three years I spent teaching high school math, I heard this question from students a lot (without, ahem, the “Dad”), and my answer hadn’t improved any. The truth was, Katie was never going to use calculus unless she went into a hard-core engineering or scientific field, and even then it was doubtful. Statistics, trigonometry—that was cool and useful stuff. But calculus?

“Because it helps you to understand the world. And it makes you smart, that’s why.”

Maybe even smart enough to understand the baker’s percentage, which is a secret code that bakers use to describe the proportions of ingredients in dough. Every serious bread book touches on it, some books even giving the recipes in percentages in a side-bar or something similar. The baker’s percentage is—oh, let’s have a professional clearly explain how it’s used:

In the case at hand, I have 4,200 grams of leaven sponge, which consists of 2,100 grams of water and 2,100 grams of flour. I
subtract 2,100 from 6,402 and I find that I must add 4,302 grams of “flour” (approximately) when I make my dough. This will reduce the amount of white flour I add to 2,380 grams. Similarly, 4,097 minus 2,100 means that I add about 1,997 grams of water. I will still add 128 grams of salt (2 percent times 64).

Any questions, class?

You can see why I was avoiding the baker’s percentage—more than avoiding it; I was deriding it every time I came across yet another reference to it. It seemed both unnecessary and unintelligible, at least until this note arrived:

Bill, certain ratios in your recipe stand out. Your total flour weight is 595 grams, so if you were to hydrate that weight to 68% your water weight would be 404.6 (405) grams. This would be the standard percentage.

Meaning the standard baker’s percentage.

Oh, damn. It was time to learn baker’s calculus. This e-mail from a professional baker had dropped “baker’s percentage” into the conversation as naturally as a baseball manager might drop the phrase “batting average.” I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

I had taken to heart the advice of Lallemand’s Gary Edwards—“You need to ask a baker. An authority”—realizing that even though my bread-making books were stacking up faster than pancakes (a bread, by the way, technically a griddle-baked quick bread) at IHOP, they didn’t seem to be taking me any closer to my goal. But who could help me with this quest? I wasn’t about to just start knocking on bakery doors.

As I was pondering this, I happened upon an article featuring Steven Kaplan, an American professor of history who, remarkably enough, is respected (if not celebrated) in Paris as an expert on French bread, having written several books in French on the subject.

I found his e-mail address on the Cornell University Web site and sent a note asking if he knew of a baker who might be able and willing to help with my quest for the perfect peasant bread. I foolishly suggested a bilingual baker in France might be acceptable, giving me a good excuse to run over there for a few weeks or months, but his reply, which came from the southwest coast of France, splashed cold Evian on that prospect:

Who? Charles van Over? Never heard of him. The contact info that followed indicated that he lived in neighboring Connecticut. I did some scholarly research
*
and found that, like both Lallemand and Professor Kaplan, Charles van Over, while not a household name, is apparently well known in the field. His 1997 book,
The Best Bread Ever
(bakers are not generally known for their modesty), won a James Beard Foundation Award.

I contacted van Over, who responded amenably to my e-mail,
in which I detailed my problem with the crumb. He asked for the recipe I was using, and a few days later, his reply, with its casual reference to the baker’s percentage, came back.

Sitting down with a calculator and studying van Over’s comment, “Your total flour weight is 595 grams, so if you were to hydrate that weight to 68% your water weight would be 404.6 (405) grams,” I saw that he simply arrived at 404.6 by multiplying the flour weight by 68 percent. That’s all there was to it?

It turns out the baker’s percentage is actually relatively simple and is used universally in the baking world. It is the ratio of any ingredient in the dough to the total flour, expressed as a percentage. So if you are making a loaf with 100 grams of flour and you use 50 grams of water, the baker’s percentage of water is 50 percent. In the case of water, another way to state this is that the dough has 50 percent hydration.

What’s confusing to those of us who remember any high school science is that, in my example, the water represents
one-third
of the total weight of the dough (which weighs 150 grams, once you add the water), not one-half, so intuitively it seems that the hydration should be 33, not 50, percent. But the baker’s percentage expresses all the ingredients relative
only to the flour,
not to the total, so 50 percent is correct.

This is actually a lot easier than computing percentages of the total, because in that case you’d always have to account for how much the ingredient you’re adding is going to affect the new total, which is the kind of thing that saddled me with a C–in undergraduate organic chemistry and is yet another reason why Anne is the doctor in the family, not me. But we needn’t dredge all that up again. Simple as it is, the baker’s percentage can be perplexing when you encounter percentages of over 100 percent (which means there is more water than flour), or when you use it to figure out how much flour to add to a
poolish,
which itself
contains both water and flour.

I understood enough to know that my dough was seriously underwatered. The “standard” 68 percent called for 405 grams of water, and I was only using 345 grams, which gave me a hydration of just 58 percent!

A number of artisan bakers have written that they are making bread with much wetter dough than in the past, and when I mixed up a batch at 68 percent hydration, I could see they weren’t kidding. The dough started out wet and sticky, but after kneading, it started to come together. Still, it was far less firm than my usual dough and would take a bit of practice to get used to.

To be honest, I didn’t see a huge difference in the final loaf, but I was going to get a hands-on lesson. Charlie had invited Anne and me to spend the weekend baking at his home on the Connecticut River. It wasn’t exactly the Seine, but at least the baker and I would be speaking the same language.

À bientôt!

“Feed the bitch!” said the voice on the phone. “Feed the bitch or she’ll die!”
—
Anthony Bourdain,
Kitchen Confidential,
2000

I was as nervous as a sinner in the first pew, which may have
partly explained the undersized, dense, and misshapen loaf I’d just baked, the least attractive one I’d made in months of bread making.

Zach took one look at it and winced. “Ooh. Doorstop.”

Even worse, one of the four crosshatch slashes had blown out as if a hand grenade had gone off inside, leaving a large tumor on that side of the loaf, while the other three cuts were mere scratches that hadn’t opened up at all. This had happened because my fancy ten-dollar
lame
was already dull and ready to be tossed in the garbage. If ever I wanted a loaf to turn out well, it was this one, for I was on my way to a weekend with Charles van Over, bread authority and author. I was hoping that van Over could diagnose my airless and tight-crumbed peasant loaf.

I kissed Katie good-bye.

“Dad, what if he tells you your ‘lousy’ bread is great? That’d be pretty embarrassing. What do you say then?”