I wasn’t sure I was crazy about this. Why did I have to take a supplement with my bread?
A good question, and one that deserved an answer. But first I had to start some bread. Last week’s touchstone loaf was well named: hard as rock and nearly as heavy, even though the dough had risen quite nicely. To an outsider—say, my wife—it may have looked as if I was making the exact same loaf this week, but not so! Today I was omitting the second quarter teaspoon of yeast from the dough, relying only on the yeast in the poolish, on the theory that the heaviness might be the result of too much, not too little, yeast, causing the bread to overrise, then collapse in the oven.
A mere quarter teaspoon seems like an awfully small amount of yeast. Most recipes call for between one and two teaspoons of yeast, but those recipes make bread in a few hours. Mine would take eight or nine hours, giving a smaller amount of yeast more time to do the job, especially while in the poolish, which is a breeding ground for yeast.
Four hours later, the surface of the poolish, dotted with small bubbles, was already smelling vaguely of bread. After adding the remaining flour and two teaspoons of salt, I attached the dough hook to the mixer and set the timer for twelve minutes. This should’ve been twelve minutes I had available to do something else, but as the mixer flung the dough around the bowel with the dough hook, it started dancing across the countertop with an unerring instinct for the edge, keeping me standing at the counter with one hand on the mixer the entire time. The kneaded dough was slightly elastic and just a bit sticky, which I’d read is exactly what you’re after. It should provide some “tack” to a hard surface but pull away nearly cleanly when you apply a little force. I misted some plastic wrap with vegetable-oil spray and covered the dough, leaving it to rise for two hours.
While the dough was rising, I went up to my Office to call the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Hotline to find out why their “naturally wholesome” flour had an ingredient list that read like a medicine chest inventory. A pleasant woman with just a snowflake of New England in her voice answered on the second ring. “For flours that are used to make staple products like bread, it’s federally mandated that we add vitamins and minerals to flour,” she explained. This had been true since the 1940s, “when refined flour was becoming popular and Americans were becoming vitamin-deficient.”
Wait a second—the “Greatest Generation” was vitamin-deficient? Tom Brokaw had left that part out. Interesting.
“You’re probably not the person to ask,” I said apologetically, “but do you know why these particular vitamins were chosen?”
“Well, actually, I am,” she said, a little put off.
“Sorry.” I found myself apologizing again.
“These are vitamins that are known to prevent certain nutritional diseases—diseases of nutritional deficiency—like rickets.” That would be the riboflavin. Thiamin was to prevent beriberi, which had disabled almost as many Japanese soldiers as the Russians had in the Russo-Japanese War, and iron, of course, prevents anemia. Folic acid was to prevent birth defects like spina bifida. I asked her about the fourth B vitamin in the flour, niacin.
“Niacin prevents something called, I think, pellagra.”
“Pellagra? What’s that?”
“You’re right. I’m really not the person to ask.”
I apologized yet again, thanked her for her help, and hung up, almost satisfied. Something bothered me. Rickets, beriberi, anemia—I had heard of these diseases, but not pellagra. Why was there a vitamin in my flour and in every slice of commercial bread sold in America in the past sixty years to prevent a disease I’d never heard of? Maybe there was some other, more familiar name for it (like “polio” or something). I scribbled “pellagra” on a piece of paper and shoved it into my desk drawer along with receipts, rubber bands, pens new and old, and the other detritus of the home Office.
Then I went downstairs to read the Times.
WEEK
3
The Winter Wheat of Our Discontent
“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said, “Is what we chiefly need.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
“It sure looks dead,” I said to Anne, examining the stubble of wheat that poked through the snow.
“But so does the lawn this time of year.”
Good point. And to be expected. After all, both were grasses; one just had an edible seed head. I had a greater reason to be concerned, however. I’d just come across the following quotation from a baker: “I use wheat flour from spring wheat in all my traditional country breads.”
Spring wheat? I was growing winter wheat, which I thought was the preferred variety! Hard spring wheat, which is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, has more protein (13 to 16 percent before milling), and therefore gluten, than hard winter wheat (10 to 13 percent), planted in the fall. Gluten is what makes the dough elastic, allowing it to trap gases released from the yeast, which in turn allows the dough to rise. Although you can have too much of a good thing. An excess of gluten can make the dough too tight. I suppose gluten is like rubber bands: A single thin one will break easily if stretched too far, but a handful together, while stronger, may provide too much resistance to stretching. The trick is in finding the right number of bands to do the job.
I’d thought the right number was to be found in the King Arthur all-purpose flour I’d been baking with. All-purpose flour has a moderate protein (or gluten) level, between cake flour and bread flour. King Arthur’s all-purpose is high in protein for an all-purpose flour, but not nearly as high as its bread flour, which is recommended for use in bread machines. Yet reading that this artisan baker used harder wheat, I wondered if I needed more gluten. The next morning, I made a loaf of peasant bread using King Arthur bread flour, made from the hardest of hard spring wheat. After a poolish, followed by kneading in the stand mixer and a two-hour rise, the dough had nearly “doubled in bulk,” as just about every bread cookbook in the world describes it. I gave it a vigorous whomp down the center, as I’d seen Julia Child do on TV decades ago, watched the dough sadly deflate onto the counter, flattened it out, and pulled the sides together to form a ball, or boule, the characteristic shape of rustic breads.
The round boule is the original peasant loaf, so original that it lent itself to the French word for baker, boulanger.* You wouldn’t know it, walking past a Parisian bakery window today, but it wasn’t until 1750 that elongated loaves surpassed round loaves in popularity. Because the fantastic bread I’d eaten that fateful morning in New York City years ago was a boule, it was the only loaf I was interested in making. To me, it wasn’t peasant bread if it wasn’t a boule. Plus, I loved the look of a boule, with the bold, decorative slashes on top that sometimes open up like a flower, revealing the crumb within. In bakeries, you can see boules that have lovely concentric ridges rimmed in flour, the result of the bread’s having risen in the basket the French call a banneton, whose circular rings leave their imprint on the dough. Lacking such a classy (and expensive) container, I simply lined a colander with an old, well-floured linen napkin and placed the boule inside, seam side up. After covering with plastic wrap again, I put the loaf aside for the second rise, also called the proofing. This would take another ninety minutes.
It was all quite easy and calming. Until it came time to load the oven, when too often the easy rhythm of bread making yields to chaos, and all sorts of objects start flying around the kitchen as I try to flip the loaf from the colander onto the wooden baker’s peel, dust the top (with flour) for that country boule look, quickly make a few slashes (with a razor), slide the loaf into the oven (with a peel), and give the oven walls a shot of mist (with a plant sprayer), all with a minimum of time and jostling, so as not to lose any of the precious gas I’ve spent hours building up in the dough.
More often than not, I end up forgetting one of the steps, or realize I don’t have my razor or mister handy, or do something out of sequence, or something else goes wrong, and I panic. Today was no differ
ent. The bread would not release from the peel, which I thought I’d dusted well with cornmeal, the loaf clinging from one end as if hanging on for dear life—“No, not the hot stone, I won’t go!” A few more vigorous shakes and it plopped off, but by then my loaf, which had risen so beautifully, was totally deflated, and it baked into a brick.
There was no way I could serve this to my family. What to do? I remembered a recipe I’d seen recently that called for a piece of cod to be supported by a thick, dense slice of country bread in a bowl of light broth. Perfect! No one would notice how terrible the bread was in the bottom of a bowl of soup. This also gave me an opportunity to show off at dinner.
“Did you know that the Gallic word soupe originally referred to the slice of bread placed in the bottom of the bowl of broth?”
“Mmm. Good fish.” Katie is wonderful to cook for, always appreciative of my efforts.
“And eventually the bread moved outside the bowl—”
“Um, Dad?”
“—but the name stayed with the thickened broth—now ‘soup.’”
“Where’d my broth go?”
The dense bread on the bottom was a preternatural sponge, soaking up a hundred times its own weight in broth. I swear, you could almost hear a whooshing sound as the bowls dried up before our eyes.
We all put down our spoons and watched, mesmerized. The show over, everyone looked to me for an explanation. “It’s fast food,” I said. No one seemed amused.
“Can we go out for dessert?”
WEEK
4
The Purloined Letter
Water is a particular thing. You cannot pick it up with a pitchfork.
—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860
Water?
Stunned, I stared at the letters on the page. W-a-t-e-r. In a baker’s version of “The Purloined Letter,” the source of my despair had apparently been in plain sight all along, flowing out of the faucet. The reason my bread wasn’t rising properly, wasn’t developing gas holes, was simply that I’d been using tap water!
It’s true; I’d just read that bread must be made with spring water, for chlorine and other impurities found in municipal water inhibit yeast activity. Furthermore, the author stated it in such a matter-of-fact way that she made me feel I must be the only creature on the planet not to have realized this.
Naturally, chlorine isn’t good for microorganisms! That’s precisely why I dump it into my swimming pool every day. This suddenly seemed so obvious that I wondered how I could have overlooked it. But could it really be that simple? Was my quest for perfect bread about to end almost before it had begun?
While I waited for the weekend and my next opportunity to bake, the mailman delivered my ninety-nine-dollar, two-volume, fourteen-hundred-page set of E. J. Pyler’s Baking Science and Technology, a book more suited for a graduate student than a home baker, but I devoured it like a good novel. Chlorine, it turned out, wasn’t even the half of it. I learned from Pyler that hard water will produce a firmer dough, and acidic water—say, the kind of water found in our northeastern reservoirs, which are filled with acid rain—weakens the gluten structure, diminishing the ability of the dough to rise.
I grabbed some swimming pool testing strips to analyze my tap water. The pH was so low (that is, acidic) as to be off the scale! But then I realized that the scale on these strips ended at 6.8, just a little under the neutral 7.0. But how much lower was it? I expressed my concern to Anne. Being married to a doctor is a mixed bag. Once again, she arrived home late—very late—for dinner, but at least armed tonight with a handful of urinalysis dip strips.
“Try these,” she said. The bad news was that the water’s pH was about 6.2 or 6.3, quite acidic. The good news was, it wasn’t pregnant.
Chlorine, low pH—the evidence pointing to water as the culprit was mounting. And there was more: Not long before, someone had told me she’d heard that the secret to authentic French bread is authentic French spring water. At the time I was dubious, but considering that bread is (by weight) about 40 percent water, it didn’t seem at all unreasonable that water might affect not only the texture of the bread but the taste. Thus I figured if I was going to use spring water for my French boule, it might as well be French.
I picked up a bottle of Evian, delivered straight from the French Alps, fully expecting that my bread, once liberated from its chlorinated, acidic manacles, would rise in the oven like a soufflé, tasting of the Alps, evoking the character of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the eroticism of Brigitte Bardot.
Yet as I measured out the Evian, the very act of watching this stream of water flow from France into my bread bowl depressed me. I always feel guilty about drinking bottled water, particularly water that has made a transatlantic journey. Or worse, a transpacific journey. (Why this is worse, I don’t exactly know, but it feels worse.) How much energy was expended to transport it here, how much carbon emitted into the atmosphere? In my writing, I’ve urged people to buy locally grown farm products, and here I was, using water shipped four thousand miles.
When did drinking water become such a burden? My father didn’t spend one moment of his life worrying about the ethics (or the purity) of the water he drank, I guarantee it. He was just happy to have indoor plumbing. Every trip to the faucet was a small miracle, and he thankfully drank whatever came out.
In fact, my parents’ generation didn’t have to deal with half the decisions, ethical or otherwise, we have to make today. Forget paper or plastic. They didn’t have to select from a dozen cable TV packages or choose between a PC and a Macintosh; they didn’t have to decide between free-range and mass-produced chicken, between well-traveled organic and local conventional carrots; and they certainly never had to pick their own flights (and seats) from a zillion listings on the Internet. Sometimes I feel as if my head is going to explode. Fortunately I have a usually reliable antidote to this neuron overload: I retreat to the kitchen to do what men and women have been doing for six thousand years—bake bread on a stone.
As I watched the loaf rise in the oven (and truthfully, it did seem to be rising a bit more than usual), I had mixed feelings. As badly as I wanted this loaf to be the one, what was I to do if it indeed was the perfect loaf, if when I sliced into it, Belmondo and Bardot phantasmata came streaming out, swirling around my kitchen, anointing me the god—or devil—of bread? Make bread for the rest of my life from imported water? Environmental issues aside, I wanted my bread to have that terroir, the taste of the land, and when the Hudson Valley wheat growing in my garden matured, I wanted to bake it with Hudson Valley water.
Calm down, I said to myself. It’s only bread.
It’s only bread.
WEEK
5
To Die For
“Nothing in Christianity is original.”
—Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003
I always know when it’s Passover because a box of matzo invariably materializes in the Office kitchen. I don’t know who brings it; I never see anyone eating from it; and a week later the box is empty. Very strange. This season of celebrating miracle and mysticism, of Passover and Easter, is also a season of bread, unleavened and rich, so I couldn’t help noticing how in one work of art, the mystery and the bread coincided.
Contrary to popular opinion, the biggest mystery to be found among Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings isn’t Mona Lisa’s smile. Nor is it a thin yarn about secret codes that reveal the existence of Jesus’s descendants or some such nonsense. This true-life puzzle is in plain sight, in arguably Leonardo’s greatest painting, The Last Supper. Look at a reproduction, the larger the better. Notice the dinner rolls. The world’s most famous representation of the final meal Jesus shared with his disciples shows a table strewn with plump, unmistakably leavened dinner rolls to die for. So what’s wrong with this picture? It was Passover. Jesus was a Jew. What’s he doing eating leavened bread? There’s nary a matzo in sight!
Matzo, of course, is a variety of unleavened bread. You might say strenuously u
nleavened bread. Not only is it made without yeast, but it must go from mixing to oven in no more than eighteen minutes, Jewish tradition specifying eighteen minutes as the time it takes for the leavening process to begin, even without the addition of yeast.
Christianity in effect co-opted bread as an important religious symbol when Jesus uttered the famous words at the Last Supper, speaking of bread as his body, an event Christians continue to commemorate in the form of Holy Communion. In the Catholic Church and some Protestant denominations, the bread that is eaten at Communion is unleavened; more accurately, it’s an ultrathin wafer with the consistency of blotting paper that has the annoying knack of sticking to the roof of your mouth. Yet it wasn’t always this way. The bread used to be leavened bread, as it still is today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Around the year 1000, the pope, reasoning that the bread at the Last Supper must have been unleavened, given that it was Passover (and certainly Jesus was already in enough trouble with the temple priests that he would not have been eating leavened bread at Passover), transformed the Eucharist bread into the unleavened wafer.*
The pope’s argument for unleavened Communion bread seems pretty convincing, even as it makes for a poor gastronomic experience. Why, then, does the Orthodox Church use leavened bread to mark this holiest of holy Christian ceremonies? Partly it’s because risen bread is symbolic of the Resurrection and the ascension to heaven of all believers. But how do they get around Passover? Well, they cite scripture that suggests the Last Supper actually took place the day before Passover. It has also been suggested that the Orthodox Church had another motivation: unleavened bread is the symbolic bread of the Jews, representing a tradition from which the church was quite happy to make a clean break.
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