Authors: Andy King
Baking by Hand (5 page)
Dust your work surface with a good amount of flour, and gently scoop your rounded loaves up with your bench knife and place seam side down on the flour. Sprinkle some flour on the top of the loaf as well. Grab the thinnest rolling pin you have, such as a French one or a 1-inch/2.5-cm diameter dowel, and press down in the middle of the loaf. Remove the pin to reveal a bisected loaf. Roll the two sides together, gently flip the loaf over and place cut side down in the banneton.
Pre-shape your dough into loose cylinders. Covering and cooling the dough at this point helps with shaping, as it reduces activity and allows you to more easily stretch the dough. Then 30 to 60 minutes in the refrigerator or out on a cold porch should do the trick.
Flip your pre-shape onto your work surface—use very little flour. Fold the bottom third of your loaf into the middle, and pat down. Fold the top third of the loaf into the middle as well, and pat down again. Leading with your nondominant hand and going from the bottom up, roll the dough three-quarters of the way onto itself and seal it with the heel of your dominant hand—that’s right to left if you’re right-handed. Repeat this motion again, this time sealing the seam against the table with the heel of your hand. Then, using firm but even pressure with both hands, simultaneously stretch and roll the baguette out to the sides, stopping when it reaches 12 inches to 15 inches/30 to 40 cm. Lay the baguette onto your couche seam side up, and pleat it; that is, grab opposite sides of the couche with your fingers and “pinch up” a little cloth wall between the loaves.
Slashing achieves two purposes: it releases pressure as the dough is peeled into the oven, creating a loaf of maximum volume as the “oven spring” occurs, and it makes beautifully decorative ears and patterns on the loaf’s surface. Some patterns are dictated by tradition, like the distinctive baguette, and others will be up to your own creativity.
The angle of the blade will determine whether the slash just falls open or results in a distinctive “ear.”
90°:
Will open loaf up with no burst
45°:
Will achieve a nice burst on a larger loaf, like a sourdough boule or batard
30°:
Will achieve a burst on a smaller, thinner loaf, like a baguette
BREAD BAKER
SOURDOUGH, GRAINS AND HYBRIDS
I got into baking and got out of restaurant cooking early. There was just something about working with dough that grabbed hold of my brain and wouldn’t let go. But, if there’s a shift at the bakery that most resembles working on the line at a fancy bistro, it’s the PM bake. Apart from the hours being similar (2 or 3 p.m. until whenever you’re done cleaning), the rhythm of the days, the peak of hustle and the running-on-fumes denouement of switching off the lights mirror each other nicely. The baker arrives, checks the night’s numbers and prep list, determines the correct order of operations, sets up racks and bannetons—the baker’s mise en place—roasts garlic, dices apricots and grabs a coffee as the mix begins.
About 2 hours in, things start to heat up. Doughs are up, dividing begins and it’s all kinetic energy from there on out. Friday night service? It’s nonstop, hot in front of the oven, keep hydrating, where’s my lame, empty the trash, rotate the dough, that damn levain better be out of the oven in 40 minutes or I’m dead, sneak into the walk-in to cool off. Then comes the cleaning, then cleaning some more, then it’s over. Then comes the beer, and Lord, I need a shower.
“
The thing I love about my shifts is that I can see a project from start to finish every day. In each shift I’ve got a new set of problems to solve, but when it comes down to it, the process is the same. As night bakers, we’ve got about 5 hours to invest in the sourdoughs before proofing. Sure, we use this time to mix, fold, cut and shape, but also to dance with it (sometimes literally). If we pay close enough attention, we can feel what the dough needs and work with it. Whether that means moving it between rooms for temperature control, adding more flour or listening to more Queen. My best day is when I’m working a big farmers’ market bake in the middle of summer, thermostat reads 90 degrees, my dough feels overhydrated, I’m sweating my ass off and I pull my bread out of the oven and it’s picture perfect. The bursts, the color, the shape. It means I did the dance correctly.
”
JESS LEMIRE
PM Baker
On my first day of training at the Standard Baking Co., I grabbed a freshly baked sourdough boule on my way out the door. It was on this long walk home through the summer crowds of Portland, Maine, that I fully realized the power of a loaf of freshly baked bread; short of walking our Labrador puppy through a preschool, I’m not sure what I could have done to receive more attention than I did that night. Folks just love a nice loaf of sourdough. Despite the occasional “I don’t like sourdough!” comments we get at the bakery—to which my response usually is “No, you don’t like
bad
sourdough. “—they are the loaves that the real bread lovers gravitate toward. Nothing makes me happier than someone coming in first thing in the morning and ordering a cup of coffee and a beautifully burst, deeply caramelized boule.
That’s
a bread lover.
It’s probably this deep love for the complex tang of sourdough that has led to the somewhat ridiculous mythos surrounding it. Bakers likely feed them twice a day, keep them warm and safe, name them silly names … To be honest, they’re very much like pets. Heck, if you can call sea monkeys pets, I think
saccharomyces cerevisiae
and
lactobacilli
can also be honored with that title. The difference is, the sea monkeys sit on your shelf and eventually are spilled by your little brother. The yeast culture can produce bread to which your friends and customers will become addicted. Hence, the reverence.
But, on the other side of the coin sit all of those other crackpot theories on sourdough starter. I’ve heard everything from “You can’t ever wash the bucket it lives in or the whole thing will die” to “I can get you real San Francisco sourdough starter here on the East Coast.” None of that is true. Washing the bucket won’t do it much harm. I’ve restarted my starter from a small trace of it in our rinse sink when I realized I had dumped it down the drain before making a backup. I’ve kept it frozen for years, only to thaw it out and have it start foaming away in my sink. I’ve forgotten to feed it for days on end, and watched it bounce back with just a couple of refresher meals. It’s pretty resilient stuff! It will survive in your kitchen just fine.
It’s also incredibly local. Any sourdough starter grown and maintained in your house will have a distinct flavor profile, as the local bacteria to your region will be the organisms that produce the sour flavor in your dough. San Francisco contains some local flora that produced a tang so unique it was named
lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.
Despite its fame, however, that poor, homesick bacteria will be overtaken by the local cultures when it is brought eastward and fed and maintained. Thus, it’s impossible to have a true San Francisco sourdough here on the East Coast.
Last, sourdough starter is incredibly easy to make. It’s got two basic ingredients: flour and water. It takes a bit of time and monitoring, but if you plan it out a couple of weeks in advance, you’ll have a starter that you can pass on to your kids.
All sourdough starters are really the same thing: a balanced symbiosis of wild yeast and bacteria suspended in a mixture of flour and water. The yeasts are harvested from healthy flour when the culture is first developed; the bacteria is floating all around us as we speak and is attracted to the culture as it develops; the flour serves as food, and the water is the medium through which the yeast move to snack on the starches in the flour. If you remember 10th grade bio lab, you’ll recall that starches are basically carbohydrates, which are strings of glucose molecules.
See where we’re going? Feed sugar to yeast and you have one of the most basic biological processes—fermentation. It’s what drives everything we as bakers do, and that’s why we’re touching on it here. How does it apply to home baking? If your kitchen is too cold, your yeast is sluggish and not eating your flour fast enough. Slow fermentation! If you throw your loaf in the oven and it collapses into a deflated heap, you let the yeast eat through too much of the gluten structure—the flour. Too much fermentation! If your loaf comes out perfectly proofed, you’ve let the yeast break down your dough just enough to open up that crumb but keep its shape. Nice fermentation, buddy!
So remember this: If you don’t know how to properly ferment, you don’t know how to bake bread. Controlling your atmosphere, adjusting your temps, mixing by hand and folding your dough are all ways of managing the snacking of your single-celled organism collection.
“
The first day I worked at the bakery, Andy pulled a large bucket down from a shelf and made me take a sniff out of it. The smell was vinegary and yeasty and sour. The surface was wobbly and studded with bubbles like a tiny albino swamp.
When he had finished explaining the starter’s feeding schedule, I recalled something I’d read about a beehive. At any given moment, there are one or two baby bees being fed exclusively on this cream-of-the-crop pollen called royal jelly, so when the queen keels over, after giving birth to her billionth baby, they have the fattest, most awesome baby bee ready to take her place.
The bubbles alone looked enough like honeycomb for the similarity to get lodged in my head, and I remember Andy’s face when I said, “Oh! Like a baby bee!” He smiled and nodded.
As I mixed the the starter the next day, all I could think about were fat little baby bees. So it stuck. Baby Bee.
”
JESSICA MANN
PM Baker
By the way, the same is true for doughs made with commercial yeast. You’re just using harvested yeast specially developed for baking rather than wild yeast. So keep that in mind when making the baguettes, ciabatta and all those nonsourdough breads in this book, okay?
Also, the fun stuff: You can name your sourdough starter whatever you want. When visiting chefs, bakers and home enthusiasts stop into the bakery, they’ll usually ask where the “mother” is, or the “chef,” the “levain,” or whatever it is they call their culture where they bake. People often ask where ours came from, as if I’m going to reveal that I pulled it from a flaming crevasse on the side of Mt. Poilane. Fact is, I developed our sourdough culture on the counter of a very normal family kitchen, in very normal bowls and with very regular feedings. And I didn’t name it. I wanted my future bakers, the ones who would be responsible for the day-to-day production in the bakery, to have that honor as they developed the special bond that all bakers have with those little creatures that raise their dough to such heights. So our sourdough starter is called the Baby Bee. Why? See above.
The equipment, ingredients and time involved in starting your own sourdough culture are minimal. You’ll need:
Two containers.
Make them big enough to hold the starter, taking into account that it will, at some point, be expanding as it ferments. You also don’t want them to be too large, or the starter will just be a thin layer on the bottom. Plastic quart=liter-size containers worked great for me.
A spoon.
Or something to stir with. Or your hands.
A scale.
Weigh all ingredients. Weigh all ingredients.
Weigh all ingredients.
Unbleached, unbromated white flour.
This is the food for your growing culture, so you want it to be as untreated as possible. Remember, bleaching is just a way to make flour look whiter by using lovely chemicals Don’t feed it to your yeast, or for that matter, your family, okay?
Whole rye flour, preferably organic.
Whole rye has a higher nutritional content than white flour and will make for a more appealing environment in which wild yeasts and bacteria will thrive. Getting the organic stuff will ensure that it has not been chemically altered or enhanced in any way. It’s not completely necessary, but it may speed the process along.
Dechlorinated water.
When you’re just getting started, it’s best to give the yeast every possible advantage. If your tap water smells like the YMCA pool like ours does, it’s a good idea to let it sit in an open container overnight to disperse some of that chlorine. If you forgot to do that and you’re raring to make starter, a gallon of bottled water from the store will get you a week or so into making your culture. At that point, the culture should be booming and won’t be harmed by what comes out of any home’s tap.
6 oz/170 g white bread flour
6 oz/170 g whole rye flour (organic preferred)
12 oz/340 ml distilled or dechlorinated water
Mix all the ingredients and store in a covered container at 75°F/20°C or warmer for 24 hours.
10 oz/280 g flour/rye flour mixture
8 oz/230 g white bread flour
10 oz/280 ml distilled or dechlorinated water
There will be minimal, if any, activity at this point. Mix all the ingredients and cover. Keep at 75°F/20°C or warmer for 24 hours.
10 oz/300 g sourdough culture
8 oz/230 g white bread flour
10 oz/280 ml distilled or dechlorinated water
You should start to notice small bubbles and/or foam forming at this point—you can now call it a (very weak) sourdough culture! If that is
not happening, make sure your mixture is warm enough. It will not smell particularly nice at this point. Mix all ingredients and cover. Keep at 75°F/20°C or warmer for 24 hours.
10 oz/300 g liquid sourdough
8 oz/230 g white bread flour
10 oz/280 ml distilled or dechlorinated water
Development should be continuing, with slightly larger bubbles forming as well as foam. Small amounts of liquid may form at the top of the mixture, which is normal. You should begin feeding two times per day at this point.
Mix all ingredients and cover. Keep at 75°F/20°C or warmer for 12 hours.
Continue this 12-hour feeding schedule for at least 3 days. After one full week from your first mixture, your sourdough culture should be strong enough to begin maintenance feedings, which will contain a lower percentage of sourdough culture. You can also start using your regular tap water at this point:
2 oz/40 ml liquid sourdough
8 oz/230 g white bread flour
10 oz/280 ml 75°F/20°C tap water
Once you have a healthy, vibrant starter chugging away, you can do one of two things. First, you can keep it on your counter and feed it every day. You can certainly get away with once-a-day feedings if you reduce your starter amount by half. If you plan correctly and know when your next bake is going to be, just switch back to your 12-hour feedings a couple of days before the big day so it can gain some momentum.
Or, if you know you’re not going to be baking for a while, or you’re going out of town, or you started one of those fad diets that tells you that the staple of civilization is suddenly going to kill you, just give it a feeding and pop it in the refrigerator. When you know your next baking day, or you come to your senses re: the fad diet thing, pull the starter out. Give it 12 hours to warm up, and then give it at least 2 days of 12-hour feedings to get the yeast and bacteria back on track.
Whether you’re warming your starter up from hibernation in the fridge or just keeping it going on your counter, once your starter is nice and strong, you’ll “build” to your mix. That is, 12 hours before the mix, you’ll make a batch of starter sized for two things: enough to fulfill the needs of the recipe, and some extra to carry on the starter until the next batch. If you’re building a different style of sourdough starter, say, a stiff starter with rye flour called a levain, you’ll still carry on that liquid starter in a separate container. For example, if you’re making Pain au Levain, 12 hours before the bake you’ll use a small amount of liquid to make the stiffer levain starter. At the same time, you’ll take another portion of the liquid and use that to carry your starter into the future, be it in cold storage or at room temperature. To simplify, just make sure you always have a bit of liquid starter left over to keep for your next batch of bread. Carry on the life cycle! It’s the Baby Bee—or whatever you decide to call it.
