In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (25 page)

A
fter I had been making loaves with white flour for a while, then loaves with a bit of whole wheat, I decided to move on to rye breads. After all, I had distinct memories of rye as a child, though mostly in the form of Levy’s Jewish Rye. Levy’s was a hybrid product—an assimilated bread, you might say—which merged eastern European rye with the familiar airy softness of American white bread, and ended up with a light slice studded with caraway seeds that at best hinted at the possibility of true rye bread. That said, the story behind the bread is quite telling.

Levy’s was a true Jewish bakery when it was founded by Henry Levy in 1888. It served an Orthodox Jewish clientele a mix of rye, challah, bagels, and rolls. But after World War II, as Jewish communities and tastes dispersed, the bakery fell on hard times and then went bankrupt. Seeking to resurrect the business, its receiver engaged one of the true Mad Men of Madison Avenue, an advertising executive who felt the brand would survive only if it moved out of the Jewish community. The memorable tagline was born: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye.” Along with the airy reformulation meant to appeal to broader tastes, it rescued the company. Levy’s ended up becoming a bit like the General Tso’s chicken of Jewish rye (though even its bankruptcy receiver felt the new rye was bread “no Jew would eat”). That wasn’t true, however: it was the rye I often ate as a child and I found it made particularly good toast.

Real rye breads were anything but light and airy, which I discovered when I went with my father to the Lower East Side or Flatbush in Brooklyn, where the bread was dense, chewy, tasty, and dark. Another close family friend, Sol Yurick, a novelist who grew up in the Bronx, had a real taste for “corn rye”—a misnomer because it doesn’t have corn in it. It’s derived from the Yiddish
kornbroyt
.
Korn
simply means grain, and
broyt
(or
Brot
in German) means bread. While the corn rye Sol bought at a deli in Brooklyn wasn’t whole grain, it did have a very tight, chewy crumb, with a thick, crisp crust that was quite pleasant. Visiting the Yuricks in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn as a teenager, I recall that Sol would take the fat, shiny loaf out of a paper bag, cut off thick slices with a long bread knife, and then smear his slice with a thick slab of butter. He would eat the bread, roll a cigarette with the tobacco he bought at a Ukrainian smoke shop on the Lower East Side, and then have a smoke with a cup of muddy black coffee. What could be better?

Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg point out in their book
Inside the Jewish Bakery
that historically rye “was the mainstay of the Jewish diet.” Rye thrives in the colder regions of Europe and grows well in marginal soils so was a cheaper option for those who could not afford wheat. Ginsberg and Berg write: “Bread could consist entirely of rye or of rye and some other flour—often barley or buckwheat, but rarely wheat. In the shtetls of what is now Belarus, Jews ate
plovnik
made from a mixture of finely and coarsely ground rye flour. In Poland and Lithuania, they ate sourdoughs like
gebatlt broyt
(about 55 percent rye flour) and
razeve broyt
(about 95 percent rye flour);
sitnice
, a light brown bread of mixed wheat and rye, and
kornbroyt
, or corn rye, which survived the journey to America and became a Jewish bakery mainstay.” The exception, of course, was challah, made with eggs, oil, and wheat, on Friday for Shabbos.

Now, when I began to make rye breads at home, a few years into baking, I didn’t have a firm idea of what they would be like, other than the distant memories of the breads from my childhood in New York. Most of the artisan breads that were becoming the rage in the nineties had a French or Italian lineage. If a bakery happened to have a rye bread, it was often a mild rye with caraway seeds—the artisan riff on Levy’s perhaps. But when I tried a few recipes, the loaves I made had a fantastic, sharp, tangy taste that were a world away from Levy’s. They were closer to the dark ryes I had had as a kid, and were almost a meal in itself.

Still, these early attempts at rye were trying. The grain was unfamiliar because, lacking gluten, it performed very differently from wheat. When I tried to knead the grayish-colored dough by hand, it was impossibly sticky. Dough would get caught between my fingers, cover my palms, and sit like a flat blob in my hands. When kneaded on the counter, it stuck there, too. So I resorted to my KitchenAid mixer and kept mixing and mixing because when I pulled at the dough, it would just tear off, rather than stretch, as I thought it should. Where was the elasticity, the spring? I had no idea what was going on, so I turned up the speed of the mixer and dumped in more white flour so that I eventually achieved a gluten structure that was familiar. Recipes pointed out that rye doesn’t perform like wheat but that didn’t help me much. So I ended up making ryes, but often ones with a good deal of white flour.

Like my early stabs at the baguette, this was discouraging, and I left these loaves behind for a time. But, as I began to dive into whole grain flours, I knew I had to return to rye and figure it out. I wanted to capture its remarkable, almost addictive taste, which I find superior to whole wheat flour. And what better way to learn about rye, in all its varied possibilities, than to visit a place where rye was at the pinnacle of the bread culture—Berlin?

I talked about this idea with Jeffrey Hamelman, a rye aficionado who worked in Germany early in his career. He suggested that I talk with a woman who had taken some baking classes from him, and who did a stint at a bakery in Berlin. Through a few e-mails and phone calls, I got the name of Weichardt Bakery, which specialized in whole grain breads made from freshly milled flour. Relying on Google Translate and the generosity of a German-speaking friend, I composed an e-mail and sent it. Luckily, the bakery manager spoke English and wrote that they were game to have me. We arranged a date—after their holiday rush. So, one chilly day in January 2011, I flew to Berlin, to learn how to make rye bread.

 • • • 

W
hile I was excited about the trip, a part of me was uneasy. After all, I was visiting Germany to connect with Jewish bread—bread that came out of an eastern European culture, the Jewish portion of which was annihilated. My father had also fought in World War II (in the Pacific, not Europe), and I have friends whose relatives perished in Nazi concentration camps. While contemporary Germany is more closely associated with images such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and all-night youth techno raves, for me, having never visited before, it dredged up much darker associations. For a long time, I had never had a desire to visit Germany, and I still know people who avoid the country. So, when I did decide to go, I flew a couple of days early, because I wanted to be sure to take in a few sites and memorials. One of the first stops would be the Jewish Museum.

Now, winter is a terrific time to travel. It’s inexpensive, and the hotels and museums are relatively empty. On the transatlantic flight, you might even get a row of seats to yourself in economy. It might be gray most of the time, and the wind might bite, but it feels appropriate if you’re making the rounds of all the Holocaust-related memorials in Berlin—and there are quite a few. Taking the Berlin subway, the U-Bahn, from my hotel, I got off at Kochstraße, or Checkpoint Charlie, which is now just a gatehouse in the middle of the road. There’s no hint of the former wall at this spot. From there, I walked the several blocks down to the Jewish Museum, which is housed in a grand old mansion in the former East Berlin.

While I had planned to visit the museum for a couple of hours, I ended up spending the entire morning, making my way through the multifloor exhibit that painstakingly detailed the vast scope of the Jewish experience in Germany, which for centuries vacillated between assimilation and exclusion and led to mass extermination. One particular print from the twelfth century stood out—an illustration from the Middle Ages of Jewish bakers burning Christian babies in an oven. It was the kind of myth that caused Jews to be ousted or killed, and was ironic, considering how history turned mythology on its head. But the exhibit interestingly did not dwell on the Holocaust, which almost seemed like an exclamation point in this long historical slog.

In the modern wing of the museum, the Holocaust Tower designed by Daniel Libeskind depicts this moment architecturally. It is eerily effective—a thick door through which one enters a small angular cement room that went up and up, a window of light at the top of the unheated structure. I stood there for a few moments in the cold, the silence echoing through the narrow room, and then I pushed reassuringly through the door to reenter the museum.

After completing the tour of the exhibit and eating a pleasant lunch in the cafeteria, I walked several blocks through the neighborhood—filled with socialist-era apartment blocks, stunning pop-art wall murals—to the Typography of Terror Documentation Center, housed in the former headquarters of the Gestapo. Although revisiting this history was exhausting, I felt like I had made some peace. What was so fascinating was how ubiquitous this history was in Berlin. The memorials seemed to be everywhere. There was no escaping the past.

 • • • 

T
he next morning, I rose early, had breakfast at the hotel’s buffet, where the whole grain rye wasn’t half bad, then walked the several blocks to Weichardt Brot. It was located in Wilmersdorf just off Berliner Straße, past a school, kabob take-out joint, café, supermarket, grand apartment buildings, and all the things you’d expect in a residential neighborhood. I turned off the main street and walked up to the bakery, which occupied two shops—one where customers were already lining up for their bread and a storefront next door where stone mills ground the whole rye and wheat into flour.

Heinz Weichardt, who trained as a pastry chef, founded the bakery with his wife, Mucke, in the early 1980s. He runs the business from a tiny, cramped office at the back of the shop. The couple were passionate about whole grain baking and biodynamic farming, a subset of organic agriculture founded in Germany which is much more prevalent in Europe than in the United States. Now, there are mystical aspects to biodynamic farming—which involves planting by lunar cycles and preparing nutrient sprays for fields and compost piles—but the upshot was that the grains they bought were of high quality. Since they viewed the rye and wheat as vital and nutritious, they believed the flour should be ground on the stone mills the same day the loaves were baked.

This is a debatable point among bakers, since white flour, at least, benefits from oxidation that occurs during aging, helping gluten to strengthen. But Weichardt and other bakers I’ve come across argued that
freshly ground whole grains were the richest nutritionally
, a point which is borne out by the science. Also, given the breads they were making, gluten strength wasn’t an issue. Freshly milled flour also has an unmistakable taste and smell, reminiscent of a field of freshly cut hay, which you’d notice if you ever walked through Weichardt’s milling room. Most of their breads were also naturally leavened, risen with Backferment, a sourdough culture popular in Germany and produced with biodynamic ingredients.