In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (17 page)

I
n our kitchen, I have a huge wall cabinet across from an island counter where I mix bread dough. At one time, the cabinet housed only an electric circuit box surrounded by a lot of empty wall space. This design flaw was the result of a taciturn carpenter, and it lasted for years. But as my collection of flours and grains grew, I decided to colonize the space, so I added shelves. Now with the cabinet doors open, I can observe my holdings: The bottom shelf with bins of all-purpose white flour, whole wheat, and rye flours. Another shelf with polenta, coarse wheat bran, high-gluten flour, pearled Korean barley, and durum flour. On the top shelf, I have a small bin of diastatic malt powder, containing the amylase enzymes that help break down starch into sugar and fuel fermentation. There are garlic flakes, sesame seeds, and a box of Finax Swedish rye bread mix I picked up at IKEA one day. I haven’t had the heart to just add water and bake it because it feels like cheating.
In the refrigerator, I store
more perishable items that I don’t use as often and which might go rancid after months at room temperature: cornmeal and garbanzo bean flour; millet, buckwheat, brown rice, and more whole wheat flour; flax seed and wheat germ; spelt and oat bran; and a large Ziploc bag of Red Star instant yeast and another with Backferment, the organic German sourdough granules that a friendly baker sent me from Berlin. I have whole unmilled grains, too—the latest episode in my baking adventures. They sit in a nearby closet in gallon-size mason jars. There’s hard red winter wheat and rye from Maryland, wheat and spelt berries from Maine, emmer wheat, and freekeh (spelt harvested while still immature, then roasted to a smoky flavor for Middle Eastern pilafs). These last two came from Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens, who are organic grain farmers in New York State.

Compiling this list scares me a bit, because it looks like a full-blown hoarding disorder, but that is not unusual when you get the bread-making bug. For professional bakers who need to produce a full line of breads every day, this wide variety of grains, and their variable performance, would be a curse. If there’s one thing professional bakers need, it’s
consistency
—that is, being able to reproduce the same bread time and again to the same high standards because that’s what their customers expect. That’s the bane of home bakers, whose results are so often inconsistent. The crust might be too hard one day, the interior too dense another. At times, you might get a marvelous flavor but the loaf will be compact. At other times, you’ll get good loft and an airy light crumb, but there’ll be an absence of flavor. Yet without this requirement for consistency, home bakers get something in return: the ability to experiment, to do a lot of R&D. For me, that’s more fun, because it’s in the trying, in playing around, that you arrive at something new. It might even be the result of a simple mistake, and then if you do nail it, well, hopefully you remembered all the steps. Then you can reproduce it, maybe even with some consistency.

 • • • 

T
here’s an impulse, when baking with a range of flours, to make the types of bread that we’re familiar with, because you can simply swap out one flour for another. But that can set you up for failure because flours often perform differently. One simple way to try a variety of flours, though, is to begin at the beginning, which I got a taste of when I took a class with baker Jeffrey Hamelman in the small town of Norwich, Vermont.

Now, I’ve tended to avoid classes, mostly because they involve travel and can be costly. I’m content to try to work on breads by myself, or to talk my way into a bakery. But this class, held at King Arthur Flour, where Hamelman runs the baking department, caught my eye because it focused on wood-fired ovens. And it was during this class that I had a surprising epiphany related to all those diverse grains in my cabinet. It could be reduced to one word: simplicity.

The first thing we baked in the class was a flatbread, which had four ingredients: whole wheat flour, water, a bit of oil and salt, and no leavening. Hamelman had mixed up the dough several hours earlier and then let it sit, so that the whole wheat could fully hydrate. He then had us slice off small portions and roll them into balls. After they rested for a half hour, we flattened them into thin eight-inch disks, and folded the dough around a spicy tomato sauce Hamelman had whipped up with feta cheese and herbs. Then the fun began. We took giant wooden peels and slid the stuffed flatbreads into the hot, wood-fired oven, which was sheathed in stone and about eight feet deep. The heat emanating from the oven was enormous: my flatbread puffed up in about thirty seconds. After a minute I flipped it to darken the underside and then removed it to a piece of aluminum foil, wrapping it to keep the crust soft. The aroma in the classroom was intoxicating. Some students tore into their flatbreads before they were even cool enough to handle. I gave mine five minutes to cool down and then devoured it. It was among the best I’ve eaten.

Flatbreads were probably among the earliest breads, since all you need to do is grind grain and add water. Porridge was easier, no doubt, if you had a vessel to cook it in, but if you combined flour and water and simply flattened the dough in your hands and cooked it on a hot stone, it wouldn’t be too far removed from the kind of bread I was eating that day with Hamelman. In fact, if you want to explore the flavor of a grain, this is one of the best ways to do it. At home, in the absence of a wood oven, I bake flatbread in a cast-iron skillet, then toast it directly over the flames, inspired by the simplicity of a master baker.

 • • • 

W
hen you think about it, the diversity of my grain pantry—which I bought at the supermarket, by mail order, and from farmers—is pretty unusual in the roughly twenty thousand years that humanity has been eating cereals. If you go back, way before packaged flour was sold in supermarkets, and before the global grain trade, people had very little choice about the grains they ate. Instead, they ate what was grown nearby—and whatever was available at harvest time. It might have been wheat. It might have been barley. Or it might have been nothing at all, if the harvest failed.

These grains were propagated and culled by generations of farmers, chosen because they grew well in the soil and climate. Maybe they survived drought, thrived during pest infestations, or stood tall while a fungal rust disease decimated the rest of a crop, making them candidates to be saved and replanted the following year. Given the variety of challenges these premodern farmers faced, they were always looking for the best varieties and hedging their bets. When one grain variety failed, another might make it. So they were careful to plant a diverse population of seeds, or what are known as “landraces.” These weren’t the monocultures of today, where a single variety of wheat might dominate a state, or even a nation. Landraces consist of subtly different varieties, which would also vary from one place to another. These cereals were the
primary source of food
once agriculture took hold, when people were eating two to four pounds of bread a day, with every meal, amounting to 80 percent of their diet. For these farmers, diversity wasn’t the huge bounty of choice in my kitchen cabinet. Diversity was an insurance policy, and thus civilization’s, for it meant at least some grain might make it to fill empty bellies from one harvest to the next.

Diverse seeds not only defined what the farm looked like, they also determined the bread, because the baker had to work with grains of varying quality. The result was a surprising variation not only in what was produced but also in what was done to stretch calories. If there wasn’t enough wheat, which was the de facto case, bakers turned to fast-growing buckwheat, cold-tolerant rye, or high-protein millet. They ate cakes made from oats and barley, as in Scotland, since both grains were especially hardy in northern Europe. Or they mixed coarse bran into rye—so-called horse bread eaten when food was scarce. They added walnuts and acorns and spent grains from the brewery to stretch the loaf out. Chickpeas were ground up, as with
socca
flatbread, in southern France, where the thin batter is baked on a dome-shaped griddle, or with
farinata
, as it is known in Liguria. In Cyprus, fermented chickpeas became a foundation for wheat and barley loaves, and in ancient Rome, the flour from ground fava beans was made into a bread known as
panis lomentus
. Bakers might grind chestnuts into flour, as in Sardinia, when wheat shipments were interrupted. Later,
a New World starch, the potato
, became a major buffer against famine in eighteenth-century Europe as the population exploded. Maize or corn served this purpose as well, baked into the dense
Portuguese
broa de milho
, which is made with rye. Corn-rye also proved crucial to the early American settlers, where it was known as “rye-injun bread,” because wheat grew poorly in the southern New England climate.

But no matter where grain was grown, if scarcity struck, people moved down the ladder of preference from refined flours to breads made with whole grains and then bran. Starvation was a constant motivator, as in Venice in 1585, when bakers resorted to chestnut and bean flours. Or in Sweden, when rye
nödbröd
(“emergency bread”) was made with lily roots, Icelandic moss, and rowan berries. When hunger beckoned, grape seeds, pine bark, clay, and often straw was mixed into dough, though the use of ground bones was likely a myth. Nothing was wasted. Stale bread was remilled and mixed into new loaves or made into porridges or puddings, or simply eaten, for descriptions exist of giant whole grain breads lasting six months or more.

The very concept of “stale bread” might have been unknown, given that
famines occurred
at regular intervals. Thousands struck Europe between 1400 and 1700. In seventeenth-century France, five famines struck in the course of fifty years—about once every decade—and bread prices shot up tenfold. The famines continued into the eighteenth century. More recently,
in Russia, four million to seven million
people starved to death in 1933–34, just a decade after nine million perished from starvation. Indeed, grain shortages have been the rule in history, which could lead one to conclude that grain diversity, while a good measure, wasn’t obviously enough of an insurance policy to maintain a food supply. People ate whatever they could and hoped for a successful harvest the next season—that is, if they weren’t forced to eat their store of seed, too.

Taste no doubt was a part of the equation, because some of these expedient choices became favored ones, defining a region’s bread. But choice wasn’t the driving force, subsistence was. These days, coming across a panoply of breads in an upscale specialty grocery store like Dean & DeLuca in Manhattan, the choice is almost daunting, from the darkest and hardiest Scandinavian ryes to sourdough French breads or their airy Italian cousins. While a link might be made between these breads and a particular country, the long-ago impetus to bake a loaf a particular way, to make it into food, has largely been forgotten. It was heavily determined by what was available, who could afford it, and what would prevent starvation lurking just over the horizon.