The painting, which is reproduced in Chad’s book, depicts a group of weekend boaters sitting down to a summertime lunch al fresco. One of them is pouring wine while another is holding a gigantic, thickly crusted wheel of bread, from which he’s sawing off big white chunks for his friends. At the time, Chad explained, each worker in France was allotted two pounds of bread every day. Bread was elemental food, yet it was also the stuff of ceremony and community—the giant loaves were made for sharing. And for enjoying: In Friant’s tender, scrupulous depiction, this looked like a bread you very much wanted to eat.
Chad worked night and day to get the flavor he imagined that bread had. With such a tiny number of ingredients in play, this becomes mostly a matter of manipulating time and temperature. But, as with so much in baking, an iron law of compensation is at work. Any move the baker makes in one direction is liable to produce an undesirable effect in another direction, making trade-offs difficult to avoid. So a longer fermentation might give you deeper flavors, for example, but if the extra time tires out the yeasts, oven spring will suffer. Chad found that if he “retarded” fermentation, by cooling the loaves while they proofed, he could slow down the yeasts while encouraging the bacteria that contribute most to the flavor. He couldn’t afford a retarder, however, so most nights he stacked his two hundred baskets of shaped dough into the back of his delivery van, a yellow 1953 Chevrolet, and opened all the windows. But though this move gave him the flavor he was after, the loaves came out of the oven flatter than he wanted. A warmer final proof would add air and volume, yet that risked souring the flavor.
The breakthrough came when Chad turned his attention to his starter. “I realized that I needed a younger culture. So I began using smaller and smaller amounts of starter in my leaven, and then less leaven in my dough.” He experimented with his feeding schedule, using less starter to inoculate more flour more frequently, so that at each step in the process—starter, leaven, dough—he managed to build a fresher, sweeter, younger culture. In effect, he was resetting the fermentation clock, and the results were immediately apparent.
“I could smell the difference: Instead of being vinegary, like most leavens, mine became fruity, sweet, and floral.” These qualities carried over into the flavor of the bread, and the vibrant young yeasts ensured a terrific oven spring. Chad had figured out a way to maximize both flavor and air in his bread, defying, or at least outwitting, the iron law of sourdough compensation.
After the globes of dough had their rest, Chad invited me to try my hand at shaping. My eye-hand coordination is challenged, and I struggled to follow, much less mimic, Chad’s lightning-quick manipulations of the dough. I felt like I did the first few times I attempted to diaper Isaac as an infant—clumsy. But Chad was patient, kept feeding me new rounds of dough, and eventually I managed to shape what I, at least, deemed to be some respectable-looking papooses. I did notice, however, that Chad, ever the perfectionist, carefully segregated my loaves from his batch, putting mine into round, rather than rectangular, baskets. I got the feeling that, when and if my loaves were baked, they would not go on sale with the rest.
My time in the bakery had a salutary effect on my baking at home. I felt more fluent in the ways of dough, more comfortable not just manipulating it, but judging its development—and that of my starter—by smell and touch and appearance. Shaping was no longer slapstick. My starter was livelier than ever, some days even exuberant, probably because I fed it more frequently, or perhaps because it had picked up some good bugs from Chad’s bakery. My time in the bakery also helped me see that baking by the book—any book—can take you only so far toward a decent loaf, and that that’s okay. As I’ve often heard bakers (and also cooks) put it, the recipe is not the recipe. It never is. It would take a great many more pages than Chad’s twenty-seven to capture everything that goes into making a great loaf of bread.
While at lunch, I had shown Chad a crumb shot of my first Tartinian loaf on my phone, the loaf with the sorry case of cavitation. It may not be possible to judge a loaf of bread by its crust, but Chad believes he can judge it by its crumb shot.
“I can see how a bread will taste,” he explained matter-of-factly, as if this were normal. But apparently, to the expert eye, the pattern of alveolation and the sheen of its cells tell of the extent of its fermentation and, by extension, its flavor. In my case, the cavitation indicated that my gluten was probably too weak to contain the gases in their cells as they expanded in the heat. The bread was rising faster than the gluten could stretch, so the gas was busting out, then pooling beneath the hard roof of crust. A few more folds might help to strengthen the gluten, he suggested, as would a longer, slower fermentation. Chad thought I should try overnighting my dough in the refrigerator before baking.
This gave me my breakthrough. The very first loaf I retarded overnight in the refrigerator emerged from the oven a thing of beauty. The loaf had achieved an oven spring just this side of spectacular, and its crust, which in all my previous efforts had been a tentative, wan shade of brown, was now deeply colored, forming a dark, weather-beaten hide rent across the top by a sharply turned and blackened ear. This crust had conviction. As for the crumb, I had to wait an hour for it to cool, but when I finally sawed off a slice, I exposed a cross section of evenly distributed holes in various sizes, their stretched walls glistening just slightly. True, my crumb was somewhat tighter than Tartine’s, the alveolation not nearly so shiny or wild, but this looked like a fine loaf of bread, and I felt an upwelling of pride the force of which took me by surprise. This was immediately followed by the sagging realization that my proud achievement, the product of so many weeks of work and study, would soon get eaten and be forever lost to history.
So I took its picture. I briefly considered posting it to TheFreshloaf.com, thinking I could impress the bread geeks with it, but the impulse soon passed. Too peacocky. I did text it to Chad, however. “Nice loaf,” he texted back, a little more laconically than I had perhaps hoped—I felt like I had been patted on the head—but I didn’t mind. The bread was delicious: sweet, a little nutty, with just the slightest acid tang. Judith and Isaac, at least, were suitably impressed, and together we worked through the great white loaf, first at dinner that night, then at breakfast the following morning, when it made some exemplary toast.
I have spent some time trying to parse the almost absurd pride I felt about this loaf and various others I’ve baked since. I mean, a loaf of bread, big deal. And yet it did feel big. I couldn’t imagine feeling quite this way about a great stew or braise, much less taking its picture and texting it to someone or posting it online.
The only thing I’ve cooked that prompted the same impulse to show off is a whole barbecued hog, whose appeal, especially to the male ego (large beast killed; food enough to feed a village), is all too obvious. But what is it about a loaf of bread, something that is much smaller and yet in some ways even more impressive?
Part of it is aesthetic—the satisfaction of making something, something beautiful that didn’t exist before. A good-looking loaf of bread declares itself as an artifact, an original, man-made, freestanding object, something that cannot be said of too many other foods. Most foods, even the whole hog, are altered versions of nature’s already existing animals and plants, which more or less retain their form after cooking. But a loaf of bread is something new added to the world, an edged object wrested from the flux of nature—and specifically from the living, shifting, Dionysian swamp that is dough. Bread is the Apollonian food. Which might explain some of its appeal to the male ego, as might the miraculous fact that it rises.
Yet the pride I felt wasn’t only aesthetic or, for that matter, necessarily masculine. It had more to do, I th
ink, with the sense of personal competence my success conferred. Or at least that’s how it felt to me. Bread is such a fundamental necessity and comfort of everyday life, as it has been in the West for at least six thousand years. And yet in our time the ability to make this necessary thing has passed out of our hands and into those of specialists. Whether artisans or corporations, it makes little difference: The only way for most of us to obtain it is to trade our professional labor for theirs. I doubt baking bread is something I am ever going to do more than every once in a while. Yet the fact that doing so is now solidly within the orbit of my competence, that my hands now know how to transform a pile of cheap flour and free water (free microbes, too!) into something that will not only nourish but also give so much pleasure to my family, changes everything. Or at least changes me. I am a little less dependent, and a little more self-reliant, than I used to be.
And then there is the matter of the air itself. (Or is it the antimatter?)
To compare a loaf of bread with a bowl of porridge is to realize how much of bread’s power, sensory as well as symbolic, resides precisely in those empty cells of spaces. Some 80 percent of a loaf of bread consists of nothing more than air. But air is not nothing.
In bread, it is where much of the flavor resides, and is the reason bread is so much more aromatic than porridge. The air trapped in the alveoli conducts bread’s aromas—the two hundred or so volatile compounds that have been identified in a well-baked sourdough—to the back of the mouth, where they then drift up into the nasal passages and, by means of retronasal olfaction, reach the brain.
“Retronasal olfaction” is the technical term for our ability to smell food that is already in our mouth. Whereas the nose’s olfactory sense—“orthonasal olfaction”—identifies smells when we sniff in, retronasal olfaction identifies smells when we breathe out, as the molecules released from our food rise from the back of the mouth up into our nasal passages. Orthonasal olfaction allows us to identify smells from the outside world, including smells from foods we are deciding whether to ingest. The purpose of retronasal olfaction is different, as is the range of compounds it detects and the regions of the brain to which it reports. The signals from retronasal smell are interpreted at the highest cognitive levels of our cerebral cortex as well as in regions involved in memory and emotion. This has led some scientists to hypothesize that the function of retronasal smell may be primarily analytical, helping us to archive the vast catalog of food flavors and record them in memory for future use.
Perhaps this helps explain the keen pleasure we seem to take in all kinds of aerated foods and beverages: the sparkling wines and sodas, the soufflés and whipped cream, the lofted breads and ethereal croissants and weightless meringues, and the laminated pastries with their 128 layers of air. Bakers and chefs labor mightily to work sweet nothings into their creations, striving to deliver the most flavorful airs deep into our mouths. The palate of taste is limited to the five or six primary colors that the tongue can recognize; olfaction, by comparison, is seemingly limitless in the shadings and combinations it can register and archive—and retronasal olfaction can perceive aromas to which even the nose is blind.
Symbolically, too, air is not nothing. Air elevates our food, in every sense, raises it from the earthbound subsistence of gruel to something so fundamentally transformed as to hint at human and even divine transcendence. Air lifts food up out of the mud and so lifts us, dignifying both the food and its eaters. Surely it is no accident that Christ turned to bread to demonstrate his divinity; bread is partially inspired already, an everyday proof of the possibility of transcendence.*
What other food could do all this symbolic work and yet still reliably fill human bellies? No wonder long stretches of European history can be told as the story of bread, or, rather, its two stories: a fight for access to bread on the part of Europe’s peasantry and working class, and a fight over the meaning of bread on the part of its elite. For what was the Reformation if not an extended, centuries-long argument over the proper interpretation of bread? Was it merely the symbol of Christ or his actual body?
Around the time I felt like I could reliably bake a voluminous white loaf, I hatched the idea of preparing an entire dinner on the theme of air, and one Saturday Samin and I got together at my house to cook it. In addition to a couple of nicely lofted loaves of Tartinian bread that I’d baked, we made two soufflés, a savory green-garlic one to serve with dinner, and a rose-and-ginger one for dessert. For the main course we served (what else?) a bird, albeit a flightless one: chicken. I broke out a bottle of vintage champagne. And Samin made honeycomb candy, a hard yet weirdly effervescent brittle made by stirring a spoonful of baking soda into a bubbling pot of caramelizing sugar.
The evening was a spree of retronasal olfaction, but what made the most lasting impression was the ginger-and-rose soufflé. There was actually not a speck of ginger or rose in it, just a few drops of essential oil, one distilled from ginger root and the other from the petals of roses. The recipe came from an eccentric cookbook titled, simply, Aroma, the collaboration of a chef, Daniel Patterson, and a perfumer, Mandy Aftel. It called for a tremendous number of egg whites whipped to an airy froth. The albumen proteins in the whites of eggs can hold air much like gluten does, allowing the cells of gas whipped into it to expand dramatically when heated. For the base, instead of calling for an equivalent number of yolks to carry the flavor, or cream, the recipe called for yogurt, which made for a soufflé (the word of course means “blown”) even more dematerialized than usual. Its flavor was powerful yet largely illusory, the result of the way the essential oils played on the human brain’s difficulty in distinguishing between information obtained by the sense of taste and that provided by the sense of smell. Each weightless bite amounted to a little poem of synesthesia—a confusion of the senses that delighted. It made for a fitting end to an effervescent evening.
By now you will not be surprised to learn that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called Air and Dreams, he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound, joy is aerial, and the sensation of freedom defies the bonds of gravity. “Air,” Bachelard writes, “is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.”
Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity, inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday life.
II.
Thinking Like a Seed
Not that I want to puncture my own balloon now that it is finally aloft, but I’m afraid I have no choice. As mentioned, the loaf that I mastered, or nearly so, is a loaf of white bread, and white bread is … well, problematic. I came to see that I had been bewitched by the aesthetics of bread, completely losing sight of certain other desirable qualities in a food, such as nutrition. (Oh, that!) Eating white bread is a little better than eating pure starch, which is itself a little better than eating pure sugar, but not by much. I have been dwelling here on the wonders of gluten, but of course those proteins represent only a fraction of the calories in white flour—at most maybe 15 percent. The rest, I’m afraid, is starch, which, beginning on the tongue, our enzymes swiftly translate into glucose—sugar. Americans obtain a fifth of their calories from wheat—and 95 percent of that is in the form of nutritionally nearly worthless white flour. I say “nearly” because, ever since the nutritional vacuousness of white flour became impossible to ignore, early in the twentieth century, governments have required that millers add back in a handful of the nutrients (B vit
amins, mainly) that they have gone to such great lengths to take out.
Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the seed—the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects—and sell that off, retaining the least nourishing part to feed us. In effect, they’re throwing away the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most of the minerals, and the healthy oils all go to factory farms to feed animals, or to the pharmaceutical industry, which recovers some of the vitamins from the germ and then sells them back to us—to help remedy nutritional deficiencies created at least in part by white flour. A terrific business model, perhaps, but terrible biology.
Surely this qualifies as maladaptive behavior on our part, and yet humankind has been intent on whitening wheat flour almost as long as we have been eating bread. But we didn’t get really good at it till the nineteenth century, with the advent of roller mills that could cleanly scalp all the germ and bran from the seed, and the subsequent discovery that, by exposing milled flour to gusts of chlorine gas, we could whiten it still further by expunging the last remaining nutrient from it: the beta-carotene that tinted flour just slightly yellow. What a triumph!
Before these dubious achievements, the best millers could do to whiten flour was to sift, or “bolt,” wheat that had first been crushed on a stone wheel. But the millstone usually smushed the germ into the endosperm, so people couldn’t avoid eating those nutrients, and bolting could only catch and remove the biggest, chunkiest bits of the bran, leaving behind a fair amount of fiber. The result was an off-white flour that was nourishing enough to keep alive all those people for whom wheat made up the bulk of their diet—which until the last century or so was most of the population of Europe. Though it looks white, the bread “with the old soul” in the painting by Émile Friant that inspired Chad Robertson was almost certainly made with this kind of flour.
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Page 25
