52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  I left with a new respect for yeast and felt I was on the right track with sponge and dough methods, but how to get rid of that dense crumb? How to make some air holes?

  “You need to ask a baker,” Gary suggested. “An authority.”

  WEEK

  16

  A Chill in the Air

  Bread is relief for all kinds of grief.

  —Spanish proverb

  “I’m turning the heat on,” Anne said, wrapping her hands around a mug of coffee.

  “But it’s May.”

  “I’m freezing.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied through chattering teeth. “What’s the temperature in here?”

  “Sixty.” Fahrenheit, that is.

  Outside, it was thirty-eight on this chilly spring morning.

  “Once the sun hits the side of the house, it’ll warm up.” With a gallon of heating oil costing more than a gallon of milk, the oil bills for our rambling, nominally insulated old house were enough to support a modest Arab emirate, despite the fortune we’d spent on new, energy-efficient windows, and I was eager to end the heating season. I knew the house would be up to sixty-eight degrees by noontime and didn’t see the point of wasting oil to simply get it up there a few hours earlier. Let the woman wear a sweater. Or three.

  Anne went upstairs to put on a second sweater, get under a down comforter, or both, and I returned to my loaf. That’s when I realized that my bread wasn’t going to rise much in a sixty-degree kitchen, considerably colder even than Bobolink’s proofing room. I turned the heat up, hoping that Anne wouldn’t guess why, especially given my recent coitus interruptus sourdoughus. All that coddling I did with the dough that day, my incessant gentle folding and turning? There had been no discernible change in the bread whatsoever. My attentions would’ve been better spent on my wife.

  WEEK

  17

  The Short, Unhappy Life of an Assistant Baker

  In Turkey in the 18th century . . . it was common to hang a baker or two. This was common enough that it was the custom of master bakers to keep an assistant who, in return for slightly higher wages, was willing to appear before the courts in case a victim were needed.

  — Halvor Moorshead

  We bakers have never had it easy. I suppose the more society depends on you, the more society is going to scrutinize you. Bakers were so mistrusted in the Middle Ages, a time when a slice of bread could mean the difference between salvation and starvation, that thirteen years before the Magna Carta, English magistrates felt it necessary to write into law severe penalties for bakers who committed fraud by selling underweight or substandard loaves.* This isn’t to say that the bakers were always innocent victims. Often times, if the millers weren’t adulterating the flour with sawdust, the bakers were. Bread tensions in jolly old England came to a head in the 1266 “bread trials,” which resulted in a new regulation: each baker was required to mark his loaf with a distinctive mark—perhaps the world’s first commercial trademark—to make offending loaves easier to trace.

  Why do I bring all this up? To be sure, I was in no danger of being hanged (my kids belonging more to the tar-and-feather crowd), but I was starting to sense a level of discontent with the all-peasant-bread-all-the-time menu. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I’d even heard the words “Groundhog Day” whispered. And we were only in week 17, just a third of the way through the year.

  Perhaps it was time for a new recipe. I’d been reading James Beard’s Beard on Bread and noticed he had a free-form loaf made from a poolish, using a long fermentation. I’ve always been a fan of James Beard’s, and not only because the dust jacket of Beard on Bread has my all-time-favorite author photo: here’s the old man, bald as a cue ball, dressed in his tweed jacket and bow tie, looking every bit the aging, uncomfortable, closeted gay man that he was, stiffly holding at arm’s length an enormous, misshapen loaf of bread that more resembles a giant wild mushroom than a miche (an imprecise word for a large, flattened loaf).

  It’s absolutely marvelous. Thus I was distraught when I’d lost it. I’d been reading outdoors on this pleasant, breezy day and had put Beard down to retrieve the mail. And predictably forgot all about him. “Predictably” because my memory lapses and confusion were becoming more frequent and disturbing. I’d been forgetting to pay bills and giving contradicting instructions at work, and most upsetting, I had recently spent a good five minutes looking for sunglasses that were perched atop my head.

  Anne handed me the naked book. “Where’s the jacket?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see a jacket on it.”

  Didn’t see a . . . I ran out and started searching the yard, then the neighborhood, studying the wind and trying to calculate how far the jacket might have traveled, all the while wondering how the wind could’ve stripped a dust jacket off a closed book. Regardless, I had to find dear old Jim. After a fruitless search, though, I dejectedly headed back to the house. There, patiently waiting at the front door, on my welcome mat, was James Beard, offering up that huge loaf of bread to me.

  Wow. Relief was followed by a deep chill that stayed with me for days. If I saw this scene in a movie,* I’d say, “Oh, please, that’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?” But there it was. No, there he was, having returned home after his tour of my neighborhood. And what did that ugly, misshapen loaf being passed to me by a dead American culinary giant represent?

  I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had to bake his peasant loaf (he calls it a “white free-form loaf”) this week. There was only one small problem. It included oil and buttermilk.

  Adulterated bread. Okay, so it wasn’t sawdust (or chalk, pea, bean, or potato flour, alum, sulfate of zinc, subcarbonate of magnesia, subcarbonate of ammonia, sulfate of copper, or plaster of paris, to name a few of the additives that have been snuck into bread to cut costs or improve poor flour), but I was a charter subscriber to the school of thought that “true” bread, the stuff of peasants, has only four ingredients—flour, water, yeast, and salt—and with the single exception of my rich Easter bread, I’d stuck to my guns. Oil and buttermilk? I’d as soon add plaster of paris.

  To be fair to Beard, it is not unusual to find bread (especially white sandwich bread) that includes some milk and fat in the form of oil or butter. Both milk and fat add flavor and are dough conditioners. Fat coats the gluten strands, making the bread more tender and increasing its shelf life. Additionally, the sugar (lactose) found in milk caramelizes during baking, producing a golden crust.

  I followed Beard’s recipe to the letter, with the exception of substituting a little whole wheat flour for some of the white. The result?

  “This is better than your bread, Dad,” Katie said. Zach agreed.

  “Enjoy it today, then,” I said, the sharpness of my voice surprising me. “You’re not going to have it again. It’s not eligible for the perfect loaf. It has milk and oil in it.”

  “Guess that means you won’t be making croissants, either,” Katie groaned.

  “Just bread with four ingredients, kids.”

  “So why’d you make this?” Zach asked.

  I just shrugged. They wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.

  WEEK

  18

  Waffling

  When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

  —Mark Twain

  It was Father’s Day, so I was having a special Father’s Day breakfast. That I made by myself. And ate by myself. While Anne was weeding in the garden and Zach and Katie were sound asleep.

  It felt kind of weird. I’d told everyone that I didn’t need anything for Father’s Day and, for that matter, that we didn’t even need to observe Father’s Day—a holiday for my father, not me—but when my kids actually took me up on the offer, I found myself unexpectedly disappointed. Not even a “Happy Father’s Day” from anyone.

  Serves me right.

 
For my special Father’s Day breakfast, I made a special bread, a delightful quick bread with egg and butter and baking powder, cooked in only three minutes between two hot metal grids. In other words, a waffle. Yes, a waffle is bread, and an interesting bread at that.* Most commonly, a waffle is made as a quick bread, meaning it is leavened with baking powder and baking soda, but waffles can be leavened with yeast. If, that is, you have the foresight to begin preparing your breakfast while still digesting your dinner.

  The word waffle has the same origin as wafer, and in fact they are quite similar, each a flour-water mixture cooked between two hot, embossed metal plates. When the plates are close together and nearly flat, except for the etching of, say, a cross, the result is a Communion wafer. Change the etching from a religious symbol to a shallow grid, add some sugar, and your wafer takes the form of an ice cream cone. Now make the indentations on the iron much deeper, add some leavening, and your wafer becomes a waffle.

  Breakfast waffles can be challenging to make at home, because a good waffle is crisp on the outside and soft and airy on the inside (not unlike a good loaf of bread). The indentations of the waffle iron, by increasing the surface area, contribute greatly to the crispness. So does the addition of more fat (I prefer melted butter to vegetable oil); by substituting fat for some of the water, the waffle steams less inside the iron, allowing it to crisp up. There are a number of other tricks various cooks employ for crispness, from adding more eggs to slipping in a little corn meal, but the waffles I was making this morning were in my opinion the best in the world and represented the realization of another earlier bread obsession of sorts, dating back to the mid-1980s, when we were on a family beach vacation in North Carolina.

  At a local breakfast/lunch spot, the kind of place where the waitresses call you “hon” and your bone-colored coffee mug gets refilled whenever it falls below the three-quarter mark, we’d breakfasted on the best waffles we’d ever eaten. A card on the table boasted that they were something called Carbon’s Golden Malted waffles. A commercial mix, not a homemade recipe. This was great news. It meant I could make these at home. It took some work to track the company down in the pre-Internet age, but I eventually talked to someone at Carbon’s in South Bend, Indiana, and was directed to a distributor in Cincinnati, from whom I tried to order some mix.

  “Our smallest quantity is fifty pounds,” I was told. I was fond of their waffles, but not fifty pounds fond. I turned to making my own but had no success whatsoever in duplicating Carbon’s 1937 “secret mix” of wheat and corn flour, malt, and unspecified flavorings. A full decade passed, and I’d despaired of ever having such a good waffle again, when I saw a squat circular can of “malted waffle mix” at our local market. The brand wasn’t Carbon’s, but the flavor was unmistakably Carbon. Even ten years later, I could tell. Turns out they sell it today under several brand names, including their own, all in the same circular cardboard container.

  I took two lessons away from this experience. Homemade isn’t always better, and sometimes I get to win one. I learned one more thing that evening at dinner, when Katie discovered the left over waffles in the refrigerator.

  “You made waffles this morning?”

  “For Father’s Day,” I said pointedly.

  There—it was out! How would they react? Katie looked at Zach, and they both looked at Anne, and finally Zach cleared his throat nervously and said, “Uh, Dad?”

  I waited for the apology.

  “Father’s Day is next Sunday.”

  And I wouldn’t be making my own breakfast.

  WEEK

  19

  Playing the Percentages

  Alcohol and calculus don’t mix. Never drink and derive.

  — Anonymous

  Katie had a question.

  “Dad, why do I need to know calculus? When am I ever going to use that?”

  Good question, Katie. Thirty years ago, during the three years I spent teaching high school math, I heard this question from students a lot (without, ahem, the “Dad”), and my answer hadn’t improved any. The truth was, Katie was never going to use calculus unless she went into a hard-core engineering or scientific field, and even then it was doubtful. Statistics, trigonometry—that was cool and useful stuff. But calculus?

  “Because it helps you to understand the world. And it makes you smart, that’s why.”

  Maybe even smart enough to understand the baker’s percentage, which is a secret code that bakers use to describe the proportions of ingredients in dough. Every serious bread book touches on it, some books even giving the recipes in percentages in a sidebar or something similar. The baker’s percentage is—oh, let’s have a professional clearly explain how it’s used:

  In the case at hand, I have 4,200 grams of leaven sponge, which consists of 2,100 grams of water and 2,100 grams of flour. I subtract 2,100 from 6,402 and I find that I must add 4,302 grams of “flour” (approximately) when I make my dough. This will reduce the amount of white flour I add to 2,380 grams. Similarly, 4,097 minus 2,100 means that I add about 1,997 grams of water. I will still add 128 grams of salt (2 percent times 64).

  Any questions, class?

  You can see why I was avoiding the baker’s percentage—more than avoiding it; I was deriding it every time I came across yet another reference to it. It seemed both unnecessary and unintelligible, at least until this note arrived:

  Bill, certain ratios in your recipe stand out. Your total flour weight is 595 grams, so if you were to hydrate that weight to 68% your water weight would be 404.6 (405) grams. This would be the standard percentage.

  Meaning the standard baker’s percentage.

  Oh, damn. It was time to learn baker’s calculus. This e-mail from a professional baker had dropped “baker’s percentage” into the conversation as naturally as a baseball manager might drop the phrase “batting average.” I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  I had taken to heart the advice of Lallemand’s Gary Edwards—“You need to ask a baker. An authority”—realizing that even though my breadmaking books were stacking up faster than pancakes (a bread, by the way, technically a griddle-baked quick bread) at IHOP, they didn’t seem to be taking me any closer to my goal. But who could help me with this quest? I wasn’t about to just start knocking on bakery doors.

  As I was pondering this, I happened upon an article featuring Steven Kaplan, an American professor of history who, remarkably enough, is respected (if not celebrated) in Paris as an expert on French bread, having written several books in French on the subject.

  I found his e-mail address on the Cornell University Web site and sent a note asking if he knew of a baker who might be able and willing to help with my quest for the perfect peasant bread. I foolishly suggested a bilingual baker in France might be acceptable, giving me a good excuse to run over there for a few weeks or months, but his reply, which came from the southwest coast of France, splashed cold Evian on that prospect:

  I salute you from Biarritz, where there is an acute dearth of good bread, despite my most evangelical actions.

  I am dubious about finding a solution to your quest for a baker-mentor, especially on the French side. There are two structural barriers. The first, your apparent lack of mastery of spoken French. I know hundreds of French bakers, only a small handful of whom have some English. The second is more forbidding: active bakers have an acute, chronic penury of free time. I just cannot imagine anyone who actively works in the fournil taking you on. Probably a retired baker is a better prospect.

  On the American side—especially for home-baking protocols—you might consult Charles van Over.

  Who? Charles van Over? Never heard of him. The contact info that followed indicated that he lived in neighboring Connecticut. I did some scholarly research* and found that, like both Lallemand and Professor Kaplan, Charles van Over, while not a household name, is apparently well known in the field. His 1997 book, The Best Bread Ever (bakers are not generally known for their modesty), won a James Beard Foundation Award.

>   I contacted van Over, who responded amenably to my e-mail, in which I detailed my problem with the crumb. He asked for the recipe I was using, and a few days later, his reply, with its casual reference to the baker’s percentage, came back.

  Sitting down with a calculator and studying van Over’s comment, “Your total flour weight is 595 grams, so if you were to hydrate that weight to 68% your water weight would be 404.6 (405) grams,” I saw that he simply arrived at 404.6 by multiplying the flour weight by 68 percent. That’s all there was to it?

  It turns out the baker’s percentage is actually relatively simple and is used universally in the baking world. It is the ratio of any ingredient in the dough to the total flour, expressed as a percentage. So if you are making a loaf with 100 grams of flour and you use 50 grams of water, the baker’s percentage of water is 50 percent. In the case of water, another way to state this is that the dough has 50 percent hydration.

  What’s confusing to those of us who remember any high school science is that, in my example, the water represents one-third of the total weight of the dough (which weighs 150 grams, once you add the water), not one-half, so intuitively it seems that the hydration should be 33, not 50, percent. But the baker’s percentage expresses all the ingredients relative only to the flour, not to the total, so 50 percent is correct.

  This is actually a lot easier than computing percentages of the total, because in that case you’d always have to account for how much the ingredient you’re adding is going to affect the new total, which is the kind of thing that saddled me with a C–in undergraduate organic chemistry and is yet another reason why Anne is the doctor in the family, not me. But we needn’t dredge all that up again. Simple as it is, the baker’s percentage can be perplexing when you encounter percentages of over 100 percent (which means there is more water than flour), or when you use it to figure out how much flour to add to a poolish, which itself contains both water and flour.