The Essential Book of Fermentation (16 page)

Acidity strengthens the gluten in bread, and you’ll notice that sourdough breads and those made with natural starters have a tougher and more elastic texture than breads made with commercial yeast. That’s because the natural starter produces more acid, and the longer it sits without being refreshed, the more acidic it becomes. Too much acidity in the starter could be a problem for a baker like Lou, who only bakes twice a week, and so he keeps his four pounds of seed starter in the fridge to slow it down. In large sourdough bakeries producing hundreds and thousands of loaves a day—each needing a big dollop of starter—the natural leaven is refreshed several times a day.

Once the starter is introduced into fresh flour and water to make dough, it starts to produce acids. If the fermentation is cool and drawn out,
Acetobacter
is favored and the bread acquires a sharper, more vinegary flavor. If the fermentation is warm and relatively quick, lactobacilli are favored and the bread acquires a softer type of acidity with a milky flavor. Lionel Vatinet of La Farm Bakery in North Carolina lived in San Francisco for years when he was an instructor at the San Francisco Baking Institute, and he says, “The typical San Francisco sourdough is too sour for me. It has too much acetic acid and not enough lactic. I prefer the flavor lactic acid gives to bread.” He and many other professional bakers (except for those dedicated sourdough aficionados in San Francisco) strive to achieve a fermentation at warmer temperatures so that lactic acid predominates over acetic. It’s not that acetic acid is bad—it’s one of the substances that make for complex flavors in bread—but rather that it should be subordinate to lactic acid to produce the most pleasing type and level of acidity, these bakers feel.

Another factor in the mix of yeast and bacteria found in a natural starter is the flour. Conventional flours are treated with chemicals to bleach them and preservatives to prevent any microorganisms from colonizing them, to say nothing of the fumigation they get in grain storage and further chemicalization of the bread made from them. Organic grain, on the other hand, comes equipped with a strong, natural mixture of yeast and bacilli that the wheat berries acquired on the organic farm and in subsequent handling on the way to the miller. The milling process, especially stone grinding, spreads these microscopic bits of life through the flour and adds more bacteria from the stone and the millhouse atmosphere. All those microorganisms contribute to the complex layers of flavor that organic breads reveal to the careful palate. In the organic scheme of things, microorganisms are not only good, they are essential for life and its quality. Yes, there are the occasional oddballs and rogues that cause problems, but that’s as true of people as it is of bacteria. The answer is not to kill off all the oddballs (who’d want a world without them?), but to overwhelm them with the sheer number and diversity of the good guys.

One of the most influential voices giving advice for baking good, wholesome natural bread is that of Professor Raymond Calvel of the French milling school École Française de Meunerie. In 1990, he published
Le Goût du Pain,
which was published in English in 2001 as
The Taste of Bread.
While he believed that a lightly acidic natural starter bread could be quite good, he felt that its sourness limited its culinary usefulness and he preferred bread made with just a little bit of commercial yeast allowed to work in a very wet dough called a poolish for several days. This results in just a mild tang. He would also let freshly made dough of flour and water rest for a period of about an hour before adding it to the poolish on baking day. He called this rest period the autolyze. Along with many artisan bakers in the United States, I find much that’s instructive in Professor Calvel’s work, and I’ve included several of his ideas in
my recipe for bread
. Another influential voice is that of the late Elizabeth David, author of
English Bread and Yeast Cookery.
Her charming book describes ancient, medieval, and modern methods of bread baking—all of which help to inform the baker about what’s possible using the simple ingredients of flour, salt, yeast, and water.

Simple Flour Is a Complex Subject

That simple ingredient—flour—is not so simple once you start examining it.

Some varieties of wheat produce slightly yellow flour, and Professor Calvel claimed these have more carotene and more flavor than pure white flour from hard red winter wheat or hard spring wheat.

Spelt is a European grain that’s a species of wheat (triticum) with slightly more protein. It makes delicious, mellow, nutty bread, and some people with wheat allergies can eat it.

Triticale is a cross between wheat (genus
Triticum
) and rye (genus
Secale
); it has less gluten than wheat but more protein and thus must be combined with regular wheat flour to create moist bread with a stretchy crumb structure.

Flavor is also dependent on location. For forty years, Arrowhead Mills has sold organic flour grown in Deaf Smith County, Texas, that’s known for its intensified wheat flavors. This wheat is grown at an altitude of 3,500 to 4,000 feet, so the grain develops the same kind of protein levels—12 to 13.5 percent, according to Arrowhead’s director of technical services, Dr. James Glueck—as hard wheat grown farther north. And, Dr. Glueck says, when supplies of Deaf Smith County wheat aren’t sufficient to meet demand, they’re blended with wheat from the wheat belt of Kansas and Nebraska. Arrowhead’s sixteen types of organic flours are distributed nationwide through its parent company, the Hain Celestial Group.

Some of the lower protein flours grown in Europe and the southern part of the United States have incomparable flavor, but need additions of hard, high-protein wheat to strengthen them. In both Europe and America, a small amount of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is sometimes added to low-protein flours to strengthen them, as acidity increases flour’s ability to develop gluten from its proteins. Some yeast packagers also add a small amount of ascorbic acid to their yeast in order to boost its rising power.

An Organic Wheat Farmer

One of Giusto’s Vita-Grain organic farmers is Richard Grover of Brigham City, Utah. He farms between 1,600 and 2,000 acres each year in nearby Snowville, Utah, just south of the Idaho border. I mentioned that I’d worked on
Organic Gardening & Farming
magazine in the 1970s, and was gratified to hear him say, “
Organic Gardening
was my bible back then.”

He grows hard red winter wheat of between 10 and 16 percent protein, “and also a hard white winter wheat called Golden Spike that was developed a couple of years ago and has 12 or 13 percent protein.” He sows his wheat in late August, and it takes eleven months before the crop is ready to harvest in the following July. That’s because of the limited rainfall in Utah. He’s tried improving his soil by plowing down cover crops of peas and using soil amendments with lots of micronutrients, but what works best for him “is chicken manure,” a high-nitrogen manure that gets crops off to a healthy start. He’s noticed that in some areas of his acreage, the amount of organic matter in his soil has increased, despite its being cropped each year. That’s good organic farming and the very definition of sustainable.

He gets $5.60 to $5.70 per bushel of his organic red winter wheat, compared to the going price of $3.20 for regular wheat. “Your readers should understand why organic wheat is priced higher,” he says. “A lot of people think organic farming is simply not using chemicals, but there’s a lot more to it than that. There are inspections by certifiers that have to be paid for. Organic techniques take more insight into how the land and nature work. I have to plan ahead for insect control rather than just spray when the Russian wheat aphid shows up. This takes time—I have to be out in the fields, examining plants. I had to learn a different way of farming, such as changing planting dates to avoid insects and building the soil as I’m farming it. My tilling practices have to be timed to kill Russian and Canadian thistle (two noxious weeds) seedlings. Only then can I plant wheat. I also have to be a lot more careful than conventional farmers in how I store my wheat. All my sheds have aerators to keep down heat and moisture that stimulate weevil eggs to hatch. It also keeps down molds that could grow on the wheat.

“But there are other reasons why I’m organic. The first is economic. It’s worked out financially for me to have different markets than the standard ones. Another is that I don’t have to work with toxic chemicals. I think of my family’s health and those who’ll eat the products we grow,” Grover says.

Chefs around the country, sparked originally by Alice Waters’s dedication to organically grown foodstuffs, have formed the Chefs Collaborative and are demanding pure, wholesome organic foods, which creates the niche market that Grover has found to be profitable.

Once the grain is picked up by Giusto’s, it goes to one of the distributor’s own mills in California or Utah, where it waits until orders come in. The grain is blown pneumatically from place to place in order to remove dust and by-products before being milled. It’s then milled to order, using roller, stone ground, or hammer mills with an air-cooled system that keeps the product as cool as possible to preserve vitamins and enzymes. Organic flours are then aged for two weeks to allow the natural enzymes in the wheat to reach full development. In the baking process, these enzymes turn starch into sugars capable of being fermented by the yeast. The flour is tested for protein and ash, then tested with a farinograph, a device that records the dough’s resistance to kneading over about fifteen minutes or so, indicating its gluten development and toughness. The flour is then bagged and sent to buyers around the United States. (Incidentally, instead of a farinograph, the French use a device they call the
alvéographe de Chopin,
which tests a flour’s elasticity by blowing a bubble of air into the dough and seeing at what point it bursts. The alveograph is named for the man who developed it around 1920, Marcel Chopin.

Suzanne Dunaway of Culver City, California, is a baker who loves organic flour but complains about its cost. Her Buona Forchetta Hand Made Breads was voted the best bakery in Los Angeles by
Los Angeles
magazine. “I started out all organic,” she says, “but now I make so much bread that the cost of being all organic is prohibitive. Fifty pounds of organic flour is $14 compared to $7.50 for regular flour.” Now about half her loaves are made from organic flour and the other half from conventional flour. Still, she says, “Organics put us on the map. Like my customers, I love knowing where my food comes from and knowing what they
don’t
put in it.”

She makes bread in a unique way, detailed in her book
No Need to Knead.
She starts by making a sponge of flour and water that sits overnight and begins to ferment. “I use sponges for everything. It’s really a no-nonsense method. I call it the One-Stir Revolution [an allusion to
The One-Straw Revolution,
a classic book on organic rice farming in Japan, written by Masanobu Fukuoka and originally published in 1975]. Next day, I mix the sponge into flour and water to make a very wet, sticky dough. Then I just let the bread sit. I handle it like a newborn baby, infrequently, very gently. I fold it rather than push and shove it. The more you knead bread, the denser the texture.” Her breads are full of holes, chewy, and tangy with a slight hint of rye to boost the flavor. “It has a good crust,” she says, “but it doesn’t puncture the roof of your mouth.” I’ve found Suzanne’s advice to be sound. I’ve made bread without kneading, but it’s so full of large holes that it’s not very good for sandwiches. So I’ve taken to kneading the bread to get a slightly denser texture. You’ll find
my recipe for homemade bread
.

Has she struggled to get her bakery off the ground? “Well,” she says, “the pitfalls of business are the tough part. But I just put the bread out there to see who salutes.” Obviously, many have saluted, but not all. “The public in the United States doesn’t know bread. We have to change many prejudices about bread. I hear people say, ‘Oh, I don’t eat bread. It’s so fattening.’ That bugs me. It’s only the quantity of bread that people eat that makes them fat—not the bread itself.”

A Hotbed of Organic Baking

Several factors explain why the coastal region of Marin and Sonoma counties in Northern California is such a hotbed of organic baking and good bread. First is the longtime commitment to organic food in the region. Because of its cultural and climatic influences, the region is known as the Provence of America. The three-hundred-plus-day growing season allows for nearly year-round production of crops, especially fine organic salad ingredients and vegetables.

A second reason is that the availability of these foods has attracted great chefs like Alice Waters, John Ash, and Thomas Keller, among many others, who consider locally produced organic to be a mark of high quality. The proximity to the Bay Area cities of Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose means chefs in these places can get high-quality organic produce rushed spanking-fresh to their restaurants. Naturally, where chefs demand fine organic produce, they’ll also be looking for fine organic bread. Produce in this region is truly cosmopolitan—it includes local oysters from the cold-water bays, lamb and beef from the hills, milk and cheese from the dairy farms, and world-class wines from the vineyards. You’ll notice that many of these products are fermented, and there’s an active community of fermenters in Sonoma County.

A third reason the area has so many organic bakeries is because of the late Alan Scott, who built brick hearth ovens. From Mendocino in the north to the Bay Area in the south, he has seeded the region with wood-fired hearth ovens that turn out amazingly delicious bread.

Finally, the social milieu of the region includes a population that will demand and buy fine organic bread, supporting the bakers who elevate the quality of life in the area. Where the bread, cheese, and wine are good, life is good. Although this part of coastal California is blessed with the climate for producing fine food, citizens who want this kind of quality in their foodstuffs and in their lifestyles extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific in North America. A trip to Europe shows us that much of the quality of fermented foods we’ve come to enjoy in recent years has long been established there, including grassroots movements for small, organic, locally produced fermented foods that characterize various regions and help give them a distinct identity.