Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (31 page)

The best bread I ever tasted was a big
country loaf shot through with holes the size of marbles and golf balls—easily more air
than bread. It had a tough hide of a crust, very nearly burned, but held inside a crumb
so tender, moist, and glossy it made you think of custard. There was something sensual
about the strong contrast between these two realms—outside and inside, hard and soft.
The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been
tempted to push my face into it. But I was at a dinner party in
Oakland with people I didn’t know very well, so I limited myself to eating as much
of it as possible and asking questions about it. One of our hosts worked in San
Francisco and had stopped by a bakery in the Mission District to pick it up on his way
home. It seemed that the bread made at this bakery didn’t come out of the oven
till late in the afternoon, which explained why when I first tasted it the bread was
still slightly warm.

When I started baking bread, this memorable
loaf loomed large in my mind, as an unattainable ideal, perhaps, but a loaf to shoot for
anyway. By then I knew the name of the bakery—Tartine—and the name of the baker—Chad
Robertson. (I live in a part of the world where bakers can be celebrities.) Here and
there I picked up bits and pieces of intelligence about the man. I heard that the reason
the bread came out so late in the day was that he was a surfer; he wanted to keep his
mornings free in case the waves were good off Ocean Beach. (This turned out to be only
slightly apocryphal.) I read that he baked just 250 loaves a day, and refused to bake
more, even though on most afternoons a line of customers snaking down Guerrero Street
snaps up all the loaves before they have had a chance to cool. People phone ahead to
reserve a loaf.

So it came as very good news when I learned
that Chad Robertson was publishing a book that would reveal the recipe for his iconic
country loaf. I managed to get hold of an advance copy of
Tartine Bread
. It was
an unusually handsome volume, bound like a textbook with a cover that somehow managed to
be simultaneously hard and soft—like his bread. I cracked the big book open, my sense of
anticipation rising. It quickly collapsed, however, as soon as I began reading the
“basic recipe.” The recipe started on page 42 and didn’t arrive at the
point of putting a loaf in an oven until page 69. Along the way were plenty of helpful
pictures, mostly of dough but a few of Robertson
himself shaping
loaves. He looked to be in his thirties, slender, bearded, and monkishly intense. After
the twenty-seven-page recipe came another ten pages titled “The Basic Loaf in
Depth,” a scientificoTalmudic explication of the principles behind the recipe. I
was daunted. This was going to be a project.

Yet even if I had felt dauntless enough to
jump in on it right away, I couldn’t, not according to the recipe. I needed first
to build a “starter”—a culture of wild yeasts and bacteria to leaven the
bread, a process the book said could take weeks. Why not leaven the bread with instant
yeast from the supermarket, as in most bread recipes? Robertson explained that a
sourdough culture contributed not just air to a bread but much of the texture and the
flavor—precisely what I felt was missing from my earlier efforts to bake bread. So, if I
was really serious about this baking project, a starter was apparently somewhere in my
future.

It would be a few weeks before I felt
sufficiently mentally prepared to embark on my Tartine loaf. In the meantime, I built up
to the undertaking by wading out into what turned out to be a deep, fermenting pool of
online chatter inspired by the recently disclosed Tartine recipe.
TheFreshLoaf.com
, a chat group for amateur
bakers, was abuzz with reports on people’s earliest efforts to bake the legendary
loaf, and on Facebook, somebody had started a page (“Recipes from Tartine
Bread”) to help hobbyist bakers struggling to master the recipe.

I noticed that most of the posts were from
men, many of them sounding less like home cooks than twenty-something computer geeks
trying to master a new software platform. (I found out later than in fact both the Web
site and the Facebook group had been started by young Web developers.) Only a few of
these amateur bakers had ever tasted the bread they were striving to emulate, but this
didn’t seem to slow them down—they had seen pictures and video. They posted
pictures of their starters, Tupperware containers
bubbling over with
masses of pearly glop—or, all too often, masses of grayish slime that stubbornly refused
to bubble at all. They compared notes on “feeding schedules” for their
starters as if they were caring for new kittens. Portraits of finished loaves of every
size, shape, and alveolation were posted, sometimes as boasts, other times as plaintive
cries for help.

“How do you adjust when it’s
very humid?” went one. “It’s 88% humidity here and I just experienced
some impressive TBF.” It took me a few visits to the page before I figured out
that “TBF” was short for total bread failure. (PBF meant partial bread
failure.) Someone else was struggling with a “cavitation” problem, and
posted a cross-section picture, known in this subculture as a “crumb shot,”
of a loaf disfigured by vast caverns of air that had formed directly beneath the
crust.

The chatter of the online bakers made me
only more anxious about the prospect of attempting a Tartine loaf. Here was exactly what
I worried about: baking as carpentry or, even more intimidating, computer code. Yet when
I finally sat down to read through Robertson’s entire opus, I was surprised to
discover that the recipe read nothing like code. Instead of a precise set of
instructions, he offered a fairly casual, open-ended set of guidelines. Sure, he
specified how many grams of flour and water and starter to use, but after that, the
recipe was more narrative than numbers. It left a lot up in the air. Robertson made
ample allowance for the vagaries of weather and humidity, flour, and even one’s
personal schedule.

Robertson encouraged bakers to be observant,
flexible, and intuitive. Rather than specify exactly how many hours the bulk
fermentation stage should last, he offered a few indicators of dough development to look
and feel for: Does the dough feel “dense and heavy” or
“cohesive”? To someone accustomed to computer code or carpentry, this sort
of advice must have seemed frustratingly vague and subjective.
“If the dough seems to be developing slowly, extend the bulk fermentation
time.” Okay, but,
by how much
?! Robertson refused to say. “Watch
your dough and be flexible.” He talked about dough as if it was a living thing,
local and particular and subject to so many contingencies that to generalize or make
hard-and-fast rules for its management was impossible. Robertson seemed to be suggesting
that success as a baker demanded a certain amount of negative capability—a willingness
to exist amid uncertainty. His was a world of craft rather than engineering, one where
“digital” referred exclusively to fingers.

Clearly Robertson’s loose, novelistic
approach to the whole notion of baking was driving a certain kind of person absolutely
crazy. And then all at once, I was buoyed by this thought:
I am not that kind of
person!
This was the moment when I decided I was ready to jump in. It was time
to start my starter.

Considering what it is (a living thing) and
what it does (leaven and flavor a bread), the instructions for starting a sourdough
culture could not be much simpler. Take some flour, preferably a fifty-fifty mixture of
white and whole grain, and mix it by hand in a glass bowl with some warm water until you
have something that feels like a smooth pancake batter. Cover the bowl with a cloth and
leave it in a cool spot for two or three days. If by then nothing has happened, wait a
few more days and check it again.

Simple maybe, but not foolproof: My first
attempt at starting a starter didn’t start. After a week of inactivity, the batter
separated into a layer of cement beneath a layer of perfectly clear water. It remained
absolutely inert and odorless. I did some reading to figure out what was supposed to be
happening but wasn’t. Wild yeasts and bacteria
were supposed to
find their way into the batter, take up residence, and eventually organize themselves
into a more or less stable microbial community. Curiously, none of the authorities I
consulted could say with certainty just where these yeasts and bacteria came from or how
they got here, if and when they did. They might already be in the flour, or on my hands
(which is why Robertson suggests mixing by hand), or in the air. Indeed, one of the many
mysteries of sourdough culture is the origin of its resident microbes, some of
which—like the all-important
Lactobacillus
sanfranciscensis
—have never been found anywhere on earth
except
in a
sourdough bread culture.
^*
This suggests these
“wild” microbes are actually in some sense domesticated—dependent upon us
(and our love of bread) to create and maintain their highly specialized ecological
niche. But either I had failed to create a niche to their liking or the bugs had failed
to find it, because even after two weeks my starter was as lifeless as plaster.

I started a new culture, but this time after
mixing it I gave the bowl an hour or two outside in the sun, hoping to snag some
airborne microbes. I also gave it some vigorous stirs whenever I remembered to, in order
to work some oxygen into the mixture. Within a week, my batter was showing tentative
signs of life in what seemed very much like an instance of spontaneous generation:
proposing the occasional bubble and giving off a faint, not-unpleasant scent reminiscent
of rotten apples. But a couple of days later, the odor had taken an unpleasant turn,
veering toward strong cheese or worn sock. Something bacterial was definitely afoot. So,
following Robertson’s directions, I discarded 80 percent of the starter, more or
less, and fed what remained a couple tablespoons of fresh flour and warm water. Within a
day, the bowl was burbling contentedly. I had a starter! Whether it
was lively enough to leaven a dough, I wasn’t yet sure, but it was definitely
alive.

A couple weeks later, when my starter seemed
to be settling into a predictable daily rhythm, rising in the hours after its morning
feeding and then subsiding again overnight, I embarked on my first loaf of naturally
leavened bread.

Step one is to turn a small amount of the
starter into a “sponge” or “leaven”—basically, use it to
inoculate a much bigger mass of sourdough culture, which in turn would inoculate and
leaven the entire dough I would mix the next morning. Placing a glass bowl on my new
(digital) kitchen scale, I zeroed it out and added two hundred grams of flour (the same
fifty-fifty mix I used to feed my starter), then an equal amount of warm water. To this
I introduced a heaping tablespoon of my starter, mixed it all together, covered the bowl
with a dish towel, and went off to bed.

I faced a test in the morning, one that many
of the participants in the chat rooms and discussion groups on line had struggled to
pass. To wit: Would this so-called sponge take on enough air overnight so that, when
dropped into a bowl of water, it would float? If instead it sank, that would indicate
there wasn’t enough microbial activity to leaven a loaf of bread.

The question would be decided while I slept:
There was nothing to do now but wait, while my culture either did or failed to do its
fermentative thing. Already this felt like a radically different way of
“cooking” than I had done up to now, but not because it was any more
exacting or precise. To the contrary: I’d delegated my accustomed kitchen powers
and responsibilities to this invisible cohort of unidentified microbes.

Up to now, most of the things I’d cooked
and ingredients I’d cooked with had been dead, after all, and therefore more or
less tractable. The raw materials responded in predictable ways to physical and chemical
processes that I controlled; whatever did or didn’t happen to them could be
explained in terms of either chemistry or physics. Obviously those laws play an
important part in baking, too, but the most important processes unfolding in a naturally
leavened bread are biological. Though the baker might be able to influence and even
manage those processes, “control” would be far too strong a word for what he
does. It’s a little like the difference between gardening and building. As with
the plants or the soil in a garden, the gardener is working with living creatures that
have their own interests and agency. He succeeds not by dictating to them, as a
carpenter might to lumber, but by aligning his interests with theirs. To use a metaphor
a little closer to Chad Robertson’s frame of reference, what the baker does is a
little like the surfer’s relationship to the wave.