exorphin junkie

25% Mesquite Flour Sourdough Bread

2012-01-30T20:59:00.000-08:00

Backyard Bean Trees
In my backyard I have this tall, approximately 50' Catalpa tree that grows big bean pods. These trees are fast-growing, and at the turn of the last century they were widely touted as being perfect for growing railway ties. Well, that didn't pan out: although they are durable when set in the ground the wood is too soft to take the weight of trains, and the tree rarely grows thick enough fast enough to make a regulation size railway tie. Now they are still grown as ornamentals, or have escaped into the wild. They do have pretty white flowers. And a few months of the year the tree even has leaves. So it doesn't always look like a bare stick.

Unfortunately, any book that mentions the tree says that catalpa beans are inedible. To eat them would cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. And they don't taste good. And it might give you dermatitis if you try. Etc.

It just isn't fair.

I've read the online remarks of a few people who have suddenly realized that they have one or two Mesquite trees in their backyard, when previously they didn't know what they had. Upon learning about it, they tried drying and grinding the bean pods themselves and adding it to all sorts of baked goods and preserves, finding it excellent.

I'm jealous.

Recently I made a bean bread, using garbanzo bean flour. Today I'm trying another bean bread with some flour made from mesquite. For me, the flour is imported and expensive.

Mesquite flour comes from the leguminous fruit of a deciduous weedy tree from the southern deserts of North America. The trees don't grow tall, but they do deep grow roots, in search of water. The tree also grows lots of long bean pods, which when dried can be ground into powder. Apparently the bean has lots of protein (13%) -- including lots of the amino acids that wheat lacks -- and lots of sucrose and other sugars in the carbs. Many natives used it as a staple in their diet, and it is quite healthy. Furthermore, no dangerous or bad stuff has been detected in the plant, if you can believe the latest hype.

Mesquite wood is most popularly known in these northern climes as a curious briquette that imparts a specific taste when something is barbecued on its open flame. But in the southern reaches, where mesquite grows, it is often considered a pest for grazing farmers. However, the truth is it actually improves the desert soil upon which it grows, and eradicating it is both difficult and ultimately bad for business.

Bean pods from the mesquite tree are harvested, dried and ground into flour. The current but ever-changing Wiki on mesquite says the flour adds "a sweet, nutty taste to breads."

The Bread I Made with Mesquite Flour
The colour and consistency of the dried powder reminds me of cocoa, and it has a similar exotic scent -- similar but different. It does taste sweet, but it also contains a certain gum that works like carageenen.

looks like cocoa

browns the dough

needs some wheat flour to get it doughy

not so much rise from this dough

Of course, it has no gluten or glutenlike substance, so it won't improve bread's density. My dough did not rise as much as I wanted. But there is something unique about the scent and taste that I really like.

I have been meaning to try making a sourdough, whole grain version of Heidi Swanson's "Black Bread" (From 101 cookbooks), and went so far as to copy her blog recipe to a recipe card. She uses cocoa to get the dark colour. I've seen similar recipes that produce extremely dark bread using coffee grounds. My opinion is that mesquite flour could easily be substituted for these ingredients to make black bread. Without even trying for that effect, this is probably one of the darkest breads I've ever made. And it is naturally sweet, too. I don't think you have to add molasses or any other sweetener to loaves that are made with it.

The bread recipe I used here is Tartine-like, with 200g of starter, 25% mesquite flour, 750g of whole wheat, at 75% hydration. The gringe on one of the loaves burned. This loaf will have to be watched carefully. Even when you toast a slice, it has so much natural sugar in it, Maillard will take his toll. But it smells great while caramelizing.

Results
I wasn't sure I'd like this bread, but it turned out to be a nice treat.

It is expensive for me to make, so I think I'll save it for special occasions. But if you happen to have a mesquite tree growing in your backyard, count yourself lucky and try baking bread with it.

Notes to Myself

I just don't understand why a native tribe (the Catawpa) considered the Catalpa tree important enough to call their tribe after the tree or vice versa. Is it possible that the bean pods are hallucinogenic, and the books are just trying to warn us away? I haven't actually seen a complete analysis of the beans of the catalpa. I guess I just have a suspicious nature, and I suspect here we haven't been told the whole story.
I'm not alone in my thoughts, but I am a lot more timid (or smart) than the author of this YouTube video, "Smoking "Indian Cigars" (Catalpa Beans)". User 1xy42witn decided the beans must be smoked to get a narcotic effect, and gave it a try. Nothing happened. But he reports that the beans can be made into a tea for a sedative effect. He didn't try that. And I'm not about to do so either. He seems to have gathered his info from this site, "Natural Medicinal Herbs"

Mardewi's Semolina, scaled

2012-01-27T06:12:00.000-08:00

My scaled whole wheat version of Mardewi's Semolina Sourdough loaves, one with eggwhite wash

This is take-2 on my attempt to make Yoke Mardewi's Semolina Sourdough loaf. Here I have scaled the amounts so that I can make it as I would any Tartine style loaf, using Tartine-and-Mardewi-style non-standard baker's math. I've reduced Mardewi's salt content to 1.8% of the overall flour, as that seems to be more my taste (see somewhere in a long recent blog where I deconstructed her recipe).

Mixing and bulk fermenting:

Baking:

See what's happening: the loaves close together on the pizza stone don't permit good airflow...

...so even though they aren't touching, that side ends up mushy

I changed some of the process, too, to fit my own schedule. Because I am working nights, I mixed sourdough before leaving for work, and when coming home the next morning I mixed the dough. I stayed awake only long enough to do one short session of air kneading. Then the dough sat and bulk proofed the rest of the day. When I awoke, I baked the loaves before going back to work.

I also changed the temperature of the oven, since the original loaf I made from her recipe was not cooked through.

Here are my scaled amounts (and the rather obvious percentages, using Tartinish non-standard percentages):

730g starter 73% (I'm using a 100% whole wheat starter, at 100% hydration)
550g water 55%
630g ww flour 63%
370g semolina 37%
25g salt 2.5%

The other thing I wanted to try: mid-bake, I painted one of the loaves with an egg-white wash.

Results
The crumb is a bit tighter this time, but it still contains some irregular holes. Part of that could have been the way I shaped the dough, though.

As for air-kneading, I tried to use the technique perfected by Richard Bertinet for his sweet dough. You can find a lot of other videos on the technique, but I think you'll agree that Bertinet gives it something extra that other people seem to miss. For me, the air folding technique of kneading was working, but the dough never did achieve a silkiness. I suspect that it was the bran in the whole wheat flour that kept tearing my gluten strands (or my lower-than-Bertinet water or fat content, or the fact that I stretched too much in the beginning, or...?). For whatever the reason, because the dough was tearing, I probably stopped too early. But the torn gluten may have helped the crumb stay more dense (which again, is what I was looking for).

The bread dough stayed relatively taut when it was upended onto the pizza peel and slid onto the hot oven stone. The deep scores filled in nicely with the oven expansion of the loaf, and if it weren't for the uneven baking of the two loaves side-by-side, the expansion would have stayed largely controlled.

The loaf with the egg white wash

This crumb approaches what I want

The loaf without an egg-white wash

The loaves stale quickly. The one with the egg wash has a nice scent, but it doesn't have a lot of flavour -- which surprises me, because I usually use my sourdough at the 8 hour mark, and this had a lot of sourdough and I was using it at the 14 hour mark after refreshing (the sourdough was older than usual, and more bubbly and active). Furthermore, the dough had a lot of bulk-fermentation (>6 hours), and a short proofing time (about 1 hour). I thought for sure that the sourdough flavour would predominate this loaf, but it doesn't. You can taste a sour "behind-note" only.

I was going to give away one of these loaves, but didn't see the person I was going to give it to for a couple of days -- by then the loaf was too stale to present to anyone (so I ended up eating it myself).

I may make croutons with it if I find myself hankering for fresher bread before its gone.

Notes to Myself

It is unusual for an author to include her email address in the book, but a very interesting step. To do so means the author might unnecessarily open herself to a lot of spam, unwelcome negative comments and time-consuming questions like the one I posed.

Despite an obviously full life, Yoke kindly replied to my initial email requesting clarification on her salt content and how she used baker's math. She simply says
"depending on the type of sour do I make I vary the amount of starter/flour/water/salt…to achieve the result I want. This is based on both math and intuition and years of experience and trials. No short cuts here!"
In short, I suppose it is going to be difficult (but of course, not impossible) to scale any of her recipes. And since I'm already changing lots of things in her recipes, I won't be able to comment on the book's real efficacy. Suffice it to say that her book has opened more doors for me to experiment with different properties of sourdough, so for me it has been well worth it.
Two loaves sitting side-by-side on a pizza stone don't bake evenly. The sides of the bread that point to the other bread are quite mushy. They should be turned to face the other direction at the mid-bake mark.
An egg-white wash on a hearth-baked bread gives it a nice scent and a crusty Italian-bread-like crust. If you like that sort of thing.
I have made Tartine's version of a semolina bread before, and I wasn't a big fan of it. Still, it is more memorable than Mardewi's. Robertson's uses some roasted seeds to give it flavour, and perhaps the amount of seed and the type of seed he used dominates his loaf. So if you aren't a fan of fennel, for example, you are not going to like his semolina loaf. Perhaps Mardewi's loaf needs some seeds to give it some taste too.
I like the idea of using up more sourdough in a bread. I have in the past used only 200g of the Tartine starter, and ended up tossing some of the non-used starter in the compost. But if I don't have to toss any away, even better.
Next, I should scale a Tartine recipe to take about 375g of starter. But probably not this recipe. I'll steer away from semolina to more wholegrain.

Ordinary bread

2012-01-25T16:59:00.000-08:00

A couple of 25% Rye loaves made with 100% whole wheat in the Tartine method

Several years ago I read about a dozen books on "peak oil" -- the claim that our oil-based economy was about to (or already had) run out of easily accessibly non-renewable resources. One of the most interesting ideas to remain with me from all that study was Richard Duncan's Olduvai Theory. Duncan said,

"The life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is less than or equal to 100 years: 1930-2030."

Duncan also quotes Fred Hoyle from 1964:

"With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only."

These are of course global prognostications of our ability to achieve and use intelligence, civilization, reason.

On a more personal scale, it would appear that for each of us there is a short and sobering window of peak intelligence.

In my work I deal with a lot of human frailty as people approach death. I see a lot of dementia. It would seem that we only have a short span of years in our human lifetime where our thoughts can be clear, rational, and infused with energy. Even a tiny electrolyte imbalance can make our thoughts unclear, our energy levels too low to recover rational thought.

We know that human civilization started with agriculture, and the domestication of grains. The baking of bread built civilization. But what if civilization is a short aberration? What if human reason is a failed evolutionary experiment?

I have indicated before that there were older grains than wheat in the human diet: before wheat, we used barley, rye, and possibly rice.

Wheat may be like oil, or like human intelligence: nice to have, but not sustainable.

Here is an ordinary rye bread, with wheat, what I recently called "ordinary faire". It is so good.

But maybe it will not last. Maybe one day I will look back at the memories of this loaf with awe about what we felt was ordinary.

Notes to Myself

What will we remember about this time, this day, this bread?

Just because Duncan's idea has stuck with me doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it. here I just called it interesting.

Bean Flour bread

2012-01-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

In my quest for a denser sourdough loaf, I tried adding some bean flour to my whole wheat and came up with this bread. The bean flour was given to me, so I'm not completely sure where it comes from. I think that it is finely ground chickpea flour, often used in Indian recipes for batter. See the notes on it here from the bulk barn. It can be added to gluten-free recipes. I'm not doing that, just yet. I'm just combining it with whole wheat.

Now, I don't know whether it was because the flour was extremely fine, talc-like, or whether it was simply because it had no gluten, but this loaf turned out with a nice dense crumb. I was using the bean flour at 20% -- 200g of it, along with 80% whole wheat, and I backed off on the hydration to 70%. This time, using my new bannetons worked well. There was no sag, and the loaves slid off the pizza peel onto the pizza stone with no problem.

I was proud of myself that I was able to slide both doughs from the peel onto the stone at the same time, without causing a disaster.

These breads are a bit smallish. Tomato is there to give a sense of scale.

Results
Well, it tastes like beans. And there are no exorphins in beans, as far as I know.

And it staled quickly. If you sliced it thin, it was good with cheese, but the crust was a bit hard and crunchy. You don't want (or need) too much of this loaf.

And so it sits, while I make another rye bread. I'll get through it eventually.

Notes to Myself

Try adding slightly less than 20% bean flour to a bread -- let's say 10 or 15% -- if you still want a denser crumb, but with less bean taste.
What if you use a different very finely milled gluten-free flour with your bread? Something like rice flour, or tapioca flour? Perhaps that would stop the irregular holes as well.

Would a very fine gluten flour work too, I wonder? I will stop short of adding bread flour.
I hate these pictures. My old camera still works, while my better camera still sits, dough-encrusted. I'm going to have to get a better camera. I've been wondering whether the new ipod touch cameras will do the job for me: I need something with fewer moving parts, dough always gets into the zoom and wrecks the camera.

January reflections on addiction and a Yoke Mardewi Semolina loaf

2012-01-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

A couple of early January loaves

What have I been up to? Sure, I've been baking bread in January. What's missing is the blogging about it, as I use January as a time of reflection (don't I want to do something more important with my time?) and work on other things. But am I a junkie for the bread, or for the blogging about it? A bit of both, actually.

I've been reading a very interesting book on addiction: "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" by Gabor Maté, M.D. Mate works in Vancouver with many junkies who are addicted to heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, and who pay their way with theft and prostitution. And inevitably, I'm thinking about my own addiction to bread and its exorphins.

Maté writes,

"Activities such as eating or sexual contact also promote the presence of dopamine in the synaptic space. Dr. Richard Rawson, Associate Director of UCLA's Integrated Substance Abuse Program, reports that food seeking can increase brain dopamine levels in some key brain centres by 50 per cent. Sexual arousal will do so by a factor of 100 per cent, as will nicotine and alcohol. But none of these can compete with cocaine, which more than triples dopamine levels. Yet cocaine is a miser compared with crystal meth, or "speed," whose dopamine-enhancing effect is an astounding 1200 per cent. It's easy to see why the crystal-meth-addicted woman Carol spoke of the drug's effect as an "orgasm without sex." After repeated crystal meth use the number of dopamine receptors in crucial brain circuits will be reduced, just as with cocaine."

So with bread I'm getting that 50% from eating and food seeking, plus whatever the exorphins give me. Writing about it also feeds the addiction.

Standard fare: a 25% Rye with Whole Wheat

I got a couple of real bannetons for the holiday gift-giving season. The first time I tried it out I had a very wet dough and it all sagged. ~~I think I was using some ratio of millet here~~. (I found my notes after posting this. This bread was made with 20% Red Fife, 30% Teff and 50% Whole wheat, at 78% hydration. The problem was the teff had no gluten, so the dough was too hydrated; and the red fife makes everything stale quicker.) The loaves were too ugly to give to my friend and I ate both loaves myself. I remember that they were mostly stale, but that is because they were just not nice and it took me a long time to get through them.

Before leaving on holidays I baked 4 loaves, one to eat, one to give away, one to take with me (!) and one for the freezer for when I got back. I keep trying different ways of kneading it to get to the point where I don't have these wide irregular holes. While they are always fun to explore as you cut into the loaf, they just don't hold jelly.

A trip away
I've just returned from Vancouver Island B.C., an off-season (cheap!) tourist vacation for me, a working trip for my wife. I spent my time wandering around the various bookstores and visiting some wonderful bakeries. I actually took a loaf of my own bread with me in a suitcase, carefully nestled between clean socks and underwear, just in case I couldn't find any loaves to meet my bread-snob levels of discernment. However, my bread didn't get eaten. It got ropey after a week in the island dampness, and I left it behind in our bed-and-breakfast the day we left. I'm happy to report that many bakeries in Victoria and Nanaimo were wonderful.

The Mainland: Vancouver
We took the ferry to the mainland one day, and while my wife did some work, I wandered along Quebec street towards the mountains. I walked through the lovely Sun Yat Sen Gardens in Chinatown, then continued on to see if I could catch a glimpse of the harbour. Suddenly I found myself in Vancouver's east end, actually walking past Hastings street, near where Maté works with his drug addicts. I was accosted by a pimp, and decided that I really ought not to be there. I didn't see any bakeries here anyway. I did find one used bookstore, much further south, and got a bread book there. You know you are an exorphin junkie when you'd rather find a bakery than have sex.

Nanaimo
I'll mention a couple of my favourites. In Nanaimo, the Nanaimo Bakery & Confectionary has some really nice German style breads. Their brötschen are pretty good too, but of course, they use some all-purpose or bread flours. But I especially liked what they call a "full grain" bread (no sign identifies it as a Vollkorn loaf, so I assume they are trying to appeal to English speakers rather than identify themselves as catering merely to Germans). It had a dark, soft crumb and was full of wholegrain taste, sliced thinly like a pumpernickel but without the pumpernickel bitterness. I can't remember now whether they used sourdough. We stopped for a bite there; they have a pretty simple lunch fare, but it is extremely nourishing. Highly recommended if you are in Nanaimo.

Nearby in Nanaimo, also on Bowen street, and pretty darn good too is the Columbia bakery. We stopped in here and had their pretzels and Bienenstich (not as good as my mother-in-law's though). Worth the trip for those alone. I had my eye on their rye bread, but decided I wouldn't get through it on this trip. Watch for the pretzel-shaped door handle.

Victoria
I'll mention a couple of bakeries in Victoria, too. While visiting the insanely overstocked Russell books on Fort Street (I love it!), I passed a couple of bakeshops. The Dutch Bakery is more of a confectionary, I'll say. Give it a pass and walk on to the smaller bread shop next door, Rheinland Bakery. I'd even go so far as to say, if you want a pastry, try Rheinland's first. They have some sourdough loaves, and although they use all purpose or bread flour in most of their loaves (even their wholegrain breads), they do a good job. When I was there, the slicer was busted, but I expect that will be fixed soon. I bought a dark rye here and it was okay. Nice and helpful staff.

But by far and away the best bakeshop I found while in Victoria was the WildFire Organic Bakery & Cafe.

Early morning in Victoria at Wild Fire Bakery

Their mill where they grind their own local-as-possible organic grains


The double woodfire oven dominates the room


A few representative loaves for retail customers. Note the community's art on the walls.

What separates it from the rest of the crowd is their devotion to organically grown, as-local-as-possible grains which they mill right there -- their use of wild yeast -- and of course, their huge wood fire oven. On top of all that, this bake shop was built on the site of an old community centre, and it retains a lot of that community atmosphere. It frankly doesn't get any better than this, although the staff was a bit stunned by my enthusiasm and interest.

The original baker/owner, Erika Heyrman wasn't there when we arrived. From brochures, we learned that she started baking whole grain, wholesome wild-yeast bread from the freshest ingredients and selling it from her driveway. Later she had an opportunity to put a community-built woodfired oven into this old community building. Good bread makes a good community.

Oh, and they make good coffee and pastries -- many of these made with Levain. These pastries are what Tartine pastries should have been.

They were just baking the 100% rye while I was there, so unfortunately I didn't taste their rye. But I did try their whole wheat, and their multigrain loaves. I can't recommend it more highly. Sure it is expensive. Support this bread. You won't find better unless you bake it yourself, and even then, you'd have to find fresher ingredients.

Bread Books
Now let's talk about books. I thought I'd learned my lesson about books: they are cheaper to buy online and have shipped, these days, than they are to buy in a distant land while on vacation. Then, you have to pay extra for the weight of your luggage when you try to stuff them in a suitcase. Books are heavy! But when you go to a distant place, you want to see what sorts of books they have. Every place is different. So it was inevitable that I ended up buying a few bread books that I haven't seen in my area. I found the Tartine Pastry book, for example. And one used book store in Vancouver had Mimi Luebbermann's "Bread Baking with Herbs." I'll wait until the herbs are fresh in my backyard before I try making whole-grain versions of her loaves.

My most intriguing find was the Australian author Yoke Mardewi's "Wild Sourdough: the natural way to bake". It is full of sourdough bread recipes -- again, few of these recipes are truly 100% whole grain, but the pictures and the recipes convinced me to give her book a try.

Crusty Semolina Sourdough Bread
The first recipe I tried from this books was her "crusty semolina sourdough bread". First recipes in bread books are often the "master recipe" or main recipe, the rest of the recipes are usually a variation on it. I was intrigued by how it uses twice as much starter, and less flour and water than a Tartine sourdough bread. Furthermore, the picture shows a moist, denser crumb than a Tartine loaf. So I was interested in the percentages and the rather strange "air kneading" method that Mardewi used.

Let's take this recipe apart to compare it to the Tartine loaf with which I have become familiar.

Ingredients

400g white starter culture (1:1 ratio of flour to water)
300g water
350g unbleached wheat (baker's) flour
200g fine semolina flour
15g fine sea salt

dough is mixed, and still quite tacky

after a brief rest, we're ready for air-kneading

the dough is tossed into the air then smashed down with force

after a couple of rests, and a couple times air-kneading, it is shaped for the long proofing

the dough flattens out on the baking sheet

In the early introductory chapters of her book, Mardewi discusses a general formula for her sourdough breads, and how she discusses the percentages is remarkably similar to Tartine's non-standard baker's math. When discussing "baker's percentages," Mardewi says that a sourdough bread recipe generally falls within these limits:

   •   total flour: 100%
   •   total water: 60-70%
   •   salt: 2%
   •   starter: 15-30%

However, this recipe doesn't seem to fit the pattern. She has a lot of sourdough starter (400g) compared to Tartine's (200g); and there is less flour in the recipe (not counting the starter, Mardewi's has 550g, whereas Tartine's has 1000g). (Mardewi gives 3 methods for sourdough bread, 2 of which are included in the Tartine method -- what she calls the "straight" method, and secondly the "retardation" method. Her third method is what she calls the "starter" method, where the flour to starter ratio is equal. But although this recipe is close to that, it still doesn't fit the pattern.)

First, let's try to put Mardewi's ingredients for this recipe into old fashioned baker's percentages to see what we can learn. Eventually I want to scale Mardewi's recipe to 1000g of flour to make my comparison to Tartine's loaf more easily. Here is a table of her recipe, and 2 different ways of counting the percentages: (1) the traditional or "old style" baker's percentage way (where all the flour from the starter is included in the 100% of the flour), and (2) What I have come to regard as Tartine's non-standard way, i.e. the entire starter is merely given as a percentage of the flour, and whatever flour the starter has is not given as part of the 100% of the flour.

Original Wt.	Ingredient	Manipulations	Non-Std Sourdough math	Old Style Baker's &	Scaled to 1000g
400g	starter	100% hydrated: 200g water, 200g flour	73% of 550g	26% of 750g	730g
300g	water	+200g=500g (total water)	300g is 55% of 550g	500g is 67% of 750g	550g
350g	baker's flour	(550g total added flour) +200g = 750g (total flour)	63% of 550g	47% of 750g	630g
200g	semolina flour	the semolina is included in the amounts in the table cell above this one	37% of 550g	27% of 750g	370g
15g	sea salt		2.7% of 550g	2% of 750g=15g (Probably should be 1.8% of 750g=13.5%)	25g **

Note that Mardewi's brief discussion of baker's percentages appears to be very similar to the way Chad Robertson uses baker's math: i.e. it's non-traditional. I have previously defended the way Robertson used baker's math for his loaves, and I still stand by what I've written. But for all of Robertson's loaves, the starter stood at 20%. Now if you increase the amount of starter (as Mardewi has done here), you will have to adjust the salt -- and that is what we are seeing here.

If this were a Tartine style loaf, we would only have 20% or 200g of starter. Here we have double the amount of starter, and less overall flour, so for this recipe Mardewi's starter is a whopping 73% (using the nonstandard math). In other words, she seems to be using the sourdough as a pre-ferment, not merely as leaven. Which leads me to ask: how long does it take to make Mardewi's bread? A quick glance at her recipe shows that her final rise is 4 hours, and the mixing, resting, kneading, and shaping only require about 1 hour 20 minutes, much less than the Tartine bread method. Which makes sense: if you have more levain, you require less time to develop the flavours in the rest of the flour, and less time is required to rise the dough.

** Salt
And so because the starter was not at 20%, the thing that most stumped me was: how should I scale the salt?

Mardewi says that it should be 2% (but doesn't say 2% of what -- that is left as an exercise for the reader). A tartine loaf says it is 2% of the flour (without considering the flour in the starter), but if you factor in the flour of the starter, it really works out to 1.8%, using old baker's math.

Once Mardewi's recipe is scaled to 1000g of flour (not counting the starter), how much salt would we need? If we add in the flour of the starter for Mardewi's recipe, and take 2% of that total, we get 27g (if we used 1.8% here, like a Tartine loaf, we'd have slightly less, 25%). But in terms of the non-standard way Robertson and Mardewi are using, we want to express this as a percentage of the flour we use, not including the starter. And in this case, 25g of salt is 2.5%. (I will use Tartine's 1.8%, since I found Mardewi's loaf, when I made it, to be a bit on the salty side).

As I try more of these recipes (especially as some of her starters are not at 100% hydration), I will want a graph. As one increases the amount of starter relative to the amount of flour, you want to know the amount of salt remains the same at 1.8% of the overall flour, but you want to express it as a percentage of the flour you are using. Similarly, the hydration will have to be adjusted depending on the amount of starter used, and how much water is in the starter too.

Recipe as-it-is (almost)
Before I could start scaling the recipe, my first step was to make the recipe as-it-is (except I would be using whole wheat flour instead of bread flour or ap flour, of course: that's just my way. Semolina by definition is not whole grain, though, so I'm not sure whether I'll ever care much about this recipe in the long run. I only had on hand some semolina wheat-hearts, not semolina finely milled flour. So this is not really going to be representative of the loaf, truly). I just wanted to know how the bread would look and feel if I followed her directions?

Mardewi's method calls for a rather unusual step that she calls "air kneading": in between appropriate resting periods, you throw the rather wet and sticky dough up in the air and smash it down with force on a surface (advising that you may need to oil your hands and the surface). This is done for five minutes, one or two times throughout the cycle of rests and bulk fermentation. I've seen videos of Julia Child and her French bread bakers doing this, long ago. And it does work: but it is noisy and it is violent and I don't think it works quite as well as teasing the dough into an elastic state.

Results

Looks done

with an interesting blistered crust

Unfortunately, there is a spot in the middle that isn't cooked. And I'm still getting irregular holes!

The dough, when I proofed it 4 hours, was a bit saggy. And there wasn't too much oven spring, either. Mind you, my wild yeast culture may not have been up to snuff after its week-long sojourn in the fridge while I was away. I had only refreshed it a couple of times since I returned, and it probably wasn't as strong as it should be yet.

Worst of all: the bread wasn't baked all the way through. Bummer. I ate it anyway.

Try, try again.

Notes to Myself

I've tried to contact the author regarding how she might scale the salt in her recipe(s), and was hoping to put some of her insight into this blog post, but so far I haven't received a reply.
Initial results of "air kneading" show that the crumb is not as nicely dense as I would have hoped. I'm still experiencing those wide irregular holes throughout the loaf, despite "air kneading" the optional second time.
Kneading for me is a contemplative time, a gentle time. "Air kneading" is definitely therapeutic, but it is anything but gentle. Do it to take out frustrations. But leave the negative energy in the air, and not in your loaf.
I suspect that Wild Fire Bakery does buy some of their own unbleached wheat flour, instead of making it. They can make their own whole wheat flour, of course, but as soon as one removes some of the bran and germ one must supplement the flour according to government regulations, and its just easier to let a mill do this. Maybe someone can set me straight if I'm misleading people in this matter.

Playing Catch-up

2011-12-29T11:37:00.000-08:00

A few breads

Just for the sake of completeness, here are a few of my December breads.

I was working nights right up to Christmas, and we've had a lot of stuff going on at work that required some extra attention, so I haven't been able to blog about my breads. And I haven't been able to give the bread much thought anyway.

I wasn't able to make any nice Christmas loaves like I wanted to. Thank goodness I was able to continue making some of these Tartine-esque loaves that got me through the holiday season. And thank goodness there were so many other things to eat besides bread, this time of the year.

1. Baking 2x100% whole wheat breads and 2x25% Rye/75% whole wheat breads on the same day

These are sourdough Tartine-like loaves
made with 25% rye/ 75% whole wheat (back 2) and 100% whole wheat (front 2)

The Whole Wheat loaf.

We ate these both whole wheat loaves quickly: they were good

One of the rye loaves

It also was good, but misshapen. Gave the better one away.

2 Farine's Idea for Camembert baked within a sourdough boule

This idea sounded a whole lot better than the reality turned out to be. In theory, it is great: bake a loaf, and then cut it horizontally, scoop out a spot for a camembert cheese round, and when you get to the party, bake it. People are supposed to tear off bits of the warm bread and dip it in the molten cheese.

But here's the thing: the bread when it comes out of the oven will burn your fingers as you tear off hunks. And if you wait a couple of minutes for it to cool, the cheese congeals.


size the cheese in the horizontally cut boule

scoop out holes for the cheese

add butter and the rub

score the loaf for easy gription

plunk in the cheese

ready to go to the party

I baked another 2 whole wheat loaves and took extra camembert just in case we needed more.
We didn't. I ate those 2 loaves in December too.

There is, however, a 3-minute window where this is perfection. And as one of my co-workers said, maybe that's all we can ever expect of perfection: 3 minutes of orgasmic bliss followed by sticky, but quickly hardening goo.

Well, most people who tried this loved it. I wasn't as impressed.

3. Some more Tartine-like 17% Rye loaves with 73% by weight 100% whole wheat, no AP flour.

Made 2 of these light rye breads, gave one of these loaves away. They were good with the leftover nutloaf.

I have given the recipe for this nut loaf before, it seems to be one of our family's traditional holiday foods now. We eat it hot with cranberries or mushroom gravy, in place of the turkey that everyone else is consuming. I like the nutloaf the next day, too. It is good cold, with a bit of mustard, on a slice of these rye breads.


Nut loaf with Rye loaf

I also mixed up some whole wheat dough the same time as this loaf: but I didn't make the bread on the same day. instead, the dough sat an extra day in the fridge. I baked it one full day later. It smelled really sour when forming it. Perhaps I will blog about it tomorrow, after I slice into it.

Unless I get busy again.

Notes to Myself

Once again as end-of-year approaches, I am beginning to re-think the bread blog. I know the reason the blogging started was because I wasn't able to write anything at work, and I love to write. And I wanted to make some whole grain bread that I could eat. Is all that still true? Or is my writing actually needed at work now? All December I have been researching and writing, work-related things. And I have been eating the Tartine-style bread that I happen to love (I can never call it a Tartine bread any more, since I only make these loaves with whole grains, and there is no actual recipe for a 100% whole grain recipe in the Tartine Bread book). So end of year, start of year: a time for reflection on what the hell it is I'm doing with this blog. Is it at an end?
I was going to do a '10 best loaves' feature this year (whereas last year I did a '10 worst loaves'). But I just haven't had time. Maybe if things settle down a bit. Or if I get fired.
I really want to explore the chemistry of bread and sourdough more. Perhaps that is my next general direction in blogging.

Ortiz-Tartine Love Child Pain Complet

2011-12-10T08:05:00.001-08:00

Bastard Love Child of Ortiz French Pain Complet and Tartine 100% WW Bread

Has anyone else noticed that the best bread bakers marry the best pastry bakers and they start bakeshops and write cook books together and become dominant forces in America's culinary tradition for a generation or more? Chad Robertson's "Tartine Bread" is poised to be as significant to this generation of home bakers as Joe Ortiz's book "The Village Baker: Classic Regional Breads from Europe and America" was, several years ago. Ortiz' wife Gayle wrote a similarly influential book on pastry. Robertson's spouse wrote her book on pastry in 2006. Just as Robertson & his spouse started Tartine in San Francisco, Ortiz and his wife started a bake shop over 30 years ago in Capitola, California, and it is still going strong.

Bear with me while I ask this rather strange question: what if Robertson and Ortiz had never met their wives, but met each other instead, and then had a bastard love child (because gay marriage is still not legal in California)? What would their bread be like?

That is what I set out to discover in this blog. I found an old used copy of Ortiz's bread book, and I've been keen on trying one or two of the whole grain recipes in it.

I made the Ortiz Pain Complet once before and it was a disaster. That was when I was on vacation and didn't have a scale and didn't know the oven I was working with (a poor craftsman blames his tools). Despite the charred remains of that bread, I felt the crumb showed great promise, and I wanted to try it again.

However, I have this sourdough that needs to be used. I like the taste of bread made with it much better than bread made with commercial yeast. The flavours are complex, and not at all sour, but interesting.

So this time, I've made the Ortiz recipe using my sourdough (rather than the commercial yeast his recipe calls for). I've scaled the recipe up to Tartine loaf size by first weighing the ingredients that Ortiz uses, and then taking the whole wheat flour to 1000g. Your mileage may vary, if you weigh out the ingredients. But this is what I got when I scaled the recipe:

    •    1000g wwflour 100%
    •    830g   scalded milk 83%
    •    140g   water 14%
    •    19g      salt 1.9%

I don't include Ortiz' yeast measurement scaled here, because I used Tartine's sourdough amounts: 200g of my 100% whole wheat sourdough at 100% hydration. However, you can try 3.76% yeast if you don't have a sourdough starter at hand, (that is what his home-baker amount of yeast works out to, when you convert from ounces) and this recipe might work for you. Or you can use Ortiz's baker's math. Ortiz actually puts the percentage weights of all his recipes in the back of the book, for professional bakers (I didn't know that when I started this; the book, while old, is new to me). So the pain complet whole wheat bread's weights are already given, and their percentages laid out for all to see without doing the calculations or weighing like I did above. So how close are my percentages? Ortiz's:

    •    100% ww flour
    •    70% water (milk can replace the water and powdered milk)
    •    2.5% powdered milk
    •    2% salt
    •    2.25% yeast

Hmmm. While searching online for others who have made Ortiz recipes, I found the testers at KitchenCookingRecipes left a warning about his weights and measures that ought to be wisely heeded. His home kitchen recipes can occasionally result in a dough with too much hydration, they say -- and that was my experience here. It would be better to work from the professional recipes in the back of the book (but recognize that they are different -- see here the difference between milk and milk powder in water).


mis en place: scalded milk, wwflour, salt, water, sourdough starter, book

add milk

For the Pain Complet,
The milk is scalded, and Ortiz wants us to wait 20 minutes before adding the water-yeast mixture to it. I waited 30 minutes and I did not expect anywhere near the same rising times that he describes (about 2 1/2 hours). I was prepared to wait much longer, in the Tartine range of bulk fermentation and proofing (about 8 hours, plus or minus a night in the fridge). But the warmth of the milk still got that yeast more active.

add sourdough

mix to goo

salt and water get added after about 30 minutes of rest

When I added the salt and water, I was a bit disconcerted. That was a lot of water for my already very wet dough to handle. My dough sat in a puddle of water even after I scoogled it all in. I was worried about how gooey the dough had become.

But at the very next turn, 30 minutes later, the dough seemed to like being that wet. The gluten was still a bit gooey, but at least it was foldable now. And the water seemed to be more absorbed. Now I was hopeful.

uh-oh. was that too much water?

Dough sits in puddle.

Suck it up!

gee, I guess this dough can take being that wet, after all

the last fold before dividing and forming

The 2 Ortiz-Tartine Bastard Love Child loaves (with one of the Advent cookies, made the same day)

Basically, how I have made it, this recipe is just a high-hydration Tartine-style loaf, using mostly milk instead of water. Alternatively, one could think of it as an Ortiz pain complet that uses wild yeast instead of commercial yeast. If you think of it as an Ortiz loaf, you have to realize that I'm adding the water when I add the salt, a'la Tartine-style. I'm also not mixing it on the counter top like Ortiz would have us do. I had a disaster using that method before, and since I'm sharing the kitchen with my wife while I make it (she is making Advent cookies), I can't make that kind of mess with her watching.

If you want to see Ortiz' technique of mixing the dough on the counter with one hand in the fountain or well, take a look at the first of these two short YouTube videos (10 and 12min). Here, Ortiz teaches Julia Child how to make whole wheat sourdough and bread sculpture. Ortiz makes it look easy.

Sourdough Whole Wheat Sculpture Videos

Meanwhile,
while waiting to add the salt to this mixture, I decided to hedge my bets. I had a bad experience the last time I made the Ortiz loaf. What if it bombed again? I'd still need bread.

So I decided to try making an ordinary Pain Complet using the 75% Tartine Recipe, but to change the method somewhat to reflect the Ortiz way. In other words, I would add the salt to the Tartine-style 100% whole wheat dough that I put together, but then instead of the 4 hours of folding during the bulk fermentation, I would knead it for awhile and then let it rise, and then punch it down and let it rise again -- the "old fashioned" way. This would be a congenital twin of the bastard love child of Ortiz and Tartine. I was hoping that the resultant loaf would have fewer overly-large irregular holes.

I kneaded it for 8 minutes after a 30 minute rest following the addition of salt. The dough felt overworked and flaccid when kneaded that long. The kneading didn't bring me any closer to a tighter dough, in fact, quite the reverse. It actually felt much sloppier than the first bread, the one that was hydrated with (more?) milk.

So on the day my wife decided to bake advent cookies, I had 2 doughs on the go, to make 4 loaves. I did, however, only bake 2 loaves that day: I retarded the congenital twin, until the next morning (for that dough, I was only using 168g of sourdough starter anyway (I reserved some so I could refresh it), and it could stand a slightly longer rise).

Results
The breads turned out well, like any other Tartine loaf I have baked this way. A few of the loaves got slopped into the pan, so they aren't perfect boules.

The crumb of the milk-hydrated bread still has some irregular holes, but they are not nearly so wide and irregular, and they do hold the jam. I find the crumb to be a bit more tender, a bit softer to the tooth, but that could be because I'm comparing it to the ends of a now-staling rye bread, the last bread I made.

milk-hydrated bread


unfocused crumb


I cut one of the boules in half horizontally, and then froze the loaf.

with jam

The crust of this milk-made bread is as crunchy as ever. I think that the crust would have been a bit softer had I glazed it with egg the way Ortiz wanted me to. I had some egg white to do it, too, but I got excited at the last moment when I turned it into the 500 degree F cast iron pan, and forgot.

To Follow:
I've given one of the twins away; the one I kept I cracked into, to see if the kneading I did was able to reduce the size and number of the irregular holes.

Nope.

Back to the drawing board. I think next I'll have to figure out how to manipulate the pH and temperature.

Notes to Myself

I've set aside one of these loaves so I can take it to a work party next week (in case I don't get a chance to bake another loaf before then). I plan to bring along some camembert and try this great idea from Farine's blog with this bread. We each have to bring hors d'oeurves.
The crumb of this bread looks much more Tartine-like, and less like the Ortiz loaf I made on vacation. I should try that Ortiz method again, shaping it as he described, and baking it on a stone.
Notice one of the tips that Ortiz gives to Childs on the videos: if your bread is over-proofed, increase the temperature of the baking.
Found while browsing for Ortiz recipes:

Ortiz Bread (from CIA) - a YouTube video

Here is an interesting misshapen loaf, with onions, that looks easy to make. Maybe I'll try it soon with 100% whole wheat. I suspect it is Joe Ortiz' original recipe (hence the name of the bread), but here it is made by a CIA chef, Jonathan Highfield. I was unable to find the written recipe that the video refers to on the web. It should be here, at wtkr's website but it is not, nor is on the CIA site here. But by stopping and starting the video I gleaned the following info:

Ingredients
- 2 1/2 c cold water
- 1 tsp instant yeast or 1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast sprinkled into a 1/4 cup warm water from the water above and allowed to sit for 5-10 minutes before adding with rest of cold water
- 4 c unbleached bread flour
- 3/4 tsp non-iodized salt
- 1 large onion, diced and soak in olive oil - set aside for later use
- semolina or cornmeal for bottom of the pan
- olive oil
- kosher salt
Method
- combine flour and yeast, make a well and add water.
- add some olive oil to the top, cover with saran and leave at room temperature 2-3 hours.
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
- Prepare a tray with parchment and sprinkle on semolina or cornmeal.
- Put about 3 blobs of dough on the tray, then top with olive-oil-soaked onions.
- Add some kosher salt to taste
- Bake 15-20 minutes until golden brown and delicious

Inedia Rye Bread

2011-12-07T04:40:00.001-08:00

An Inedia Bread?

We've all heard of vegetarians, fruitarians. and vegans. But it was only a couple of years ago that I first heard of breatharians.

Yes, apparently there are some people who believe that they can live on breath alone -- from which they draw prana or life energy. There are fewer and fewer breatharians these days, though: as you can imagine, many of them are dying out.

There is a current trend among artisan bakers to make breads with wide, irregular holes. I'm guilty of loving the look of the crumb of a bread like this too. But I had to chuckle at a couple of other bread forums and blogs that I've recently perused. Chazzone at Sourdough Companion was back baking after many long years, and remembers baking with grandmother. The reason she kneaded her dough for so long, we are told, was to eliminate these irregular holes. Now Chazzone finds that the artisan community is striving for them. What gives?

And the excellent bread-baker/blogger Farine, in her wonderful series on the baking of Gérard Rubaud, reports that Master-baker Gerard says of "les bulles" (the bubbles): "on ne les mange pas."

I've spoken of it before several times. In fact, one of my most popular (20 views!) blogs has been about a "jelly sieve" bread. I assume that the "huge" popularity of that particular page is merely a fluke: no doubt someone has googled the words "jelly" and "sieve" for no good reason and they get steered toward my page. Sorry about that.

The trend toward ultimate airiness can only end in a bread that has no crumb at all. An empty bread, a bread full of air. A bread that only a breatharian can love.

A plain "rye" bread

This is a whole wheat bread with about 20% whole rye flour. It was made in the Tartine style, with wild yeast starter, lots of folds during the bulk fermentation, and a long (though not over-night -- it has been a long time since I did the over-night, refrigerated way of) proofing.

Toppings for a bread like this?
The past little while, when I bake 2 loaves like this, I deliver one to a friend. Lately I've been getting gentle complaints from this friend that the holes are too big, and he "can't put anything on them" -- it just drips right through.

But I like to lightly toast a bread like this and then scrape a minimal amount of butter or peanut butter on top and have it ooze through. If a lot gets onto the plate below, I feel I'm putting too much topping on anyway.

However, jam has a different viscosity, it flows differently. It can blob right through the big holes without even touching the bread. Black Currant Jam may be the exception, you can sometimes spread it thin enough that it won't flow like that, but it doesn't seem to work as well with strawberry jam or blueberry jam. And of course jelly is out of the question. So I don't use much jam or jelly for topping my irregular-holed bread. It's too bad, because we preserve our own jam, and it is marvellous.

I simply love quality cheese, again sliced very thinly, atop such loaves. The bread doesn't have to be toasted. A couple of slices of this bread and some well-aged cheddar (for example), and I can work like a slave for hours and hours. For me, it is the perfect take-to-work lunch bread. I usually don't have enough time to eat anything more than a couple of slices of bread for lunch anyway. So I need something insubstantial but filling. I need a bread with contradiction.

I'm not going any closer to the breatharian ideal than this.

Click on the picture to see the prana

Notes to Myself

A certain number of holes is necessary for the bread to rise. They are caused by the yeast, in their respiration. In the old days, bread dough would have been pounded down to avoid these huge irregularities. But these days, it seems to be a mark of an artisan-made loaf.
Germans typically like a denser loaf. If you give them bread like this, they complain loudly of being ripped off. "This is where the baker and his wife climbed through," they will tell you.
Take a deep breath, and eat.

Pumpkin Bread with Coriander seeds

2011-12-06T19:43:00.001-08:00

A Path to Obscurity

I've been busy the last few days doing official professional development stuff. Every nurse has to make an effort to be a better nurse, every year. There is always more to learn. My only complaint with the process is that it just isn't always what I want to learn, when I want to learn it. So it becomes more like work. C'est la vie.

It has been a long time since I pushed my mind through a curriculum devised by other people. Because of that lapse, now even textbooks, which are a record of another person's train of thought, are difficult for me to study. I'm used to a different sort of random self-teaching. And I trust it to lead me to the next Right Thing.

Everything's working out perfectly.

I've often wondered where I'd be today if I grew up with a tool like the Internet at my fingertips, able to look up virtually anything at a moment's notice. I used to spend a lot of time and money trying to find information, spending it on books and magazines, traveling to libraries. Would I have been better off, had I found the info I wanted immediately? Or would I have missed some serendipitous event -- for example, when I went to a library and found an altogether better book on the shelf next to the one I was looking for, that ended up sending me off in another direction entirely? Would I ever have studied anything to any depth, or would I still be just skittering across the surface of every distraction like a water strider?

I guess the result of my meandering attention is: I have ended up teaching myself a lot of things that most other people are simply not interested in. I'd never call myself an expert at any of them: you need a chain of other experts called Ph.D.'s to tell you that you are that, these days, to make it official.

The point is, I've had to pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time teaching myself things because the things I tend to be interested in are quite obscure. That's what happens when you get off the beaten track. It is expensive, tough slogging.

I've had episodic passions, in my life, trying to find out information on any number of arcane or absurd subjects, immersing myself in things that most of the world couldn't give a damn about.

Perhaps the last couple of years exploring wholegrain bread-making is just a similar episode or interlude.

Long before I ever had a computer, I left notes in my journals as I wandered this trail through my unknowns, lurching from one interest to the next. It has been a very obscure path I've taken, following the stream of my distraction. I have very little to show for it all now, except those shelves and boxes of journals. Well, also perhaps my brain has built some strange neuronal intersections. It was inevitable.

A small section of shelving containing some of my old journals
-- that someday, Some Day, I'm going to have to deal with

Those journals remain like breadcrumbs, so I can find my way back (or perhaps so others could follow, were I to become utterly lost). Hey, maybe that is what this blog has become: another trail of breadcrumbs. And it has some benefits, over the old journals: it doesn't gather dust and it isn't so heavy to lug around when you move. And it is automatically indexed thanks to Google or other search engines. I can probably find anything I want in it without having to remember which book I wrote it in. As long as I know something about what I'm searching for. Today's bread, for example, will be found by me from here-on in if I simply ask for exorphin junkie pumpkin bread.

As if I'd ever go back there.

But I might, for this recipe. It was a good one.

Pumpkin Bread

So here is another pumpkin bread. I am, of course, simply using up that pumpkin puree I made so much of.

I wanted to try it this time with coriander seeds.

Ingredients:
    •    168g Pumpkin Seeds
    •    9g Coriander Seeds ( ~ 1 1/2 Tbsp)
    •    1 tsp Ground Cumin (these ground spices weigh very little, less than a gram)
    •    1/2 tsp Ground Coriander
    •    3/4 tsp Ground Turmeric
    •    1000g whole wheat flour
    •    700g Pumpkin Puree
    •    20g Salt
    •    150g Water when salt and spices are added
    •    Some Paprika added to some whole wheat flour for final dusting of the loaf during forming

Method
The usual Tartine style folding while bulk fermenting and then bench-resting, forming and baking. I haven't grown tired of it yet. Some day I'll outgrow it -- maybe -- but for now, it provides me with some great bread. And that's all I really wanted, when I began all this.

Results
The colour is a distinct greenish orange, made more orange by the turmeric and pumpkin puree, more green by the seeds and other spices. I look at the colour of the crumb (it doesn't show well with this old digital camera and its flash) and I am reminded of pistachios. Next time I might even add some pistachios.

Ugh. The awful focus of this crappy camera.

The taste is pretty darn good. The whole coriander seeds provide an interesting occasional crunch and burst of flavour. I like this combination. And although it is inspired by Continental Indian Cooking spices, it doesn't really taste like Indian food.

Notes to Myself

Don't fight it. Try adding pistachio nuts to an orange-green loaf like this.

Tartine Dough made in a Loaf Pan using Easy Math

2011-11-29T17:42:00.001-08:00

A Tartine Bread, made in a Loaf Pan

I wanted to see what would happen if I made the Tartine recipe but baked it in a loaf pan.

Attempt #1: Black Friday Bread
On my first attempt, I might have missed a couple of folds because I had to rush out to get a computer-printer cable for my wife. I found the crowds a bit thick due to the Black Friday rush. Yes, we now have sales in Canada on that day too (even though our Thanksgiving Day is much earlier). Retailers say they have to, in order to stop the leakage at the border, but our crowds that are shopping on Black Friday will never be as big, our selection never so vast, and our stress levels not nearly so high. Still, it kept me away from my bread folding a lot longer than I wanted.

I think the best place to be on a Black Friday is not in the stores but at home, safely baking bread. I saw people lined up outside stores before the doors opened, waiting for the sales. I saw them tearing apart displays of electronics. I saw them lined up at the cash register. I saw people carrying high-def TVs out 2@ a time in their shopping baskets. Thankfully though, here in Canada we don't pepper spray each other in our frustration or shoot each other for our already-purchased items. Not yet anyway. But we do follow the lead of our more populous neighbour to the south. One day, it might come to that.

No Rise?
The dough had a tiny amount of oven spring, mostly at the expense of the bread, as it tore itself away from the tin, leaving gaps along the side of the loaf. I didn't score the bread because I was afraid it would deflate the dough rather than free it.

pot

Although the bread proofed about 4 hours, it didn't really double in size prior to baking. Perhaps it required slightly longer. An alternative to a longer proofing, and a better solution to the fact that the dough didn't rise to the top of the pan, if I try this again I would increase the amounts of dough.

I was especially timid with this loaf today, and thinking that the top was browning too quickly, I backed off on the heat during the last 20 minutes of the baking, to 425 degrees F. The unfortunate consequence of this was that the bread is not well baked in the middle of the loaf. It remained somewhat gooey there, and after cooling collapsed even further.

Results
Early results, on the ends of the loaves made me realize that this tastes quite all right. I like the flavour of this bread. I wanted something plain for a change, after eating olive bread and bread that was quite grainy.

But the middle parts of the loaf were quite gummy, uncooked, and I berated myself for my timidity.

I resolved to make these loaves again, this time I would see if the loaf pans would fit inside a roasting pan, making it into a "poor man's dutch oven". This time, I would use the newer weights of ingredients.

Attempt #2: Scaled to Perfection
The second time I made this recipe, I adjusted it as follows:

    •    1400g ww flour is the new 100%
    •    980g water is the new 70% hydration
    •    70g water added with the salt will bring it to 75% (or total hydration 1050g)(you might want to bring this up to 80% total, or 1120g, by starting with 1050g and adding 70g of water)
    •    280g of sourdough starter is the new 20%
    •    28g salt is the new 2%

My take on a Bad Review I saw of Tartine Bread
Let's stop here and talk -- at length, perhaps ad nauseum -- about this adjustment in recipe amounts for a minute. I was quite surprised recently to find one of the bread experts, eric hanner, on the "Fresh Loaf Blogs" giving a bad review (dissenting viewpoint) to the Tartine Bread book.

There had been several other, earlier, positive reviews there ( e.g. one by Sam Fromartz and another by dmsnyder)

The dissenting Hanner's comments brought a torrent of replies, some in agreement, and others disagreeing -- many from people who don't own the book and now say they have an excuse not to try the techniques. Hanner did say, further along in his replies, that someone in his household said that the bread he baked from that book was the "best in a while." This has been my experience too: I might pick up Reinhart's book, and my wife will cringe. But when I pick up the Tartine book, she relaxes. She told me, "I know that when I see you with that book, the results will be good." So why the negative review?

It seems that Hanner, an experienced breadmaker at the Fresh Loaf forums, was enamoured by Robertson's "advanced techniques" of using the wild yeast leaven, but he had several smaller complaints, and at least two BIG complaints: (1) that the Cast Iron Dutch Ovens that are swapped out of the oven and loaded with dough while they are piping hot at 500 degrees F is just an accident waiting to happen, and utterly unnecessary, once you get on to the trick of using a baking stone and a pizza peel, along with adequate sources of steam. (2) Tartine's recipe contains non-standard baker's math which will wind up confusing the newbie.

To the first objection, I would agree (with one reservation). I've been burned several times, mostly on my forearms, as I reach for pots in the middle of the oven and touch the side of the stove. That, however, is because I jam 2 dutch ovens in there at a time to save heat. In other words, I'm not following the actual Tartine instructions, which would have you use one pot twice. But I can see how someone with a little less strength might have some trouble moving these heavy pots around. My reservations about the objection, however, come when you consider the alternative that Hanner suggests: a newbie to breadbaking, shaping, proofing and handling these high hydration doughs gently enough for the use of pizza peels. That is significantly difficult for noobs, and you will not obtain consistent results that way -- I tell you that from my experience. The dutch ovens ensure that your loaves, no matter how wet, will retain some shape. I've been burned both ways, literally and figuratively, in the past.

To the second objection, I'm not really qualified to reply. I didn't invent baker's math, and I haven't had a course on it, I've only picked it up from osmosis. I just know that as a newbie, I had a lot of trouble with it, especially when I came to recipes that used different grains, different flours, different preferments and varying ways in which the grains are cracked open. For example, I understand the idea that all the flour in the dough should add up to 100%; but are we to add to this, for example, the cracked wheat that we might have put in the poolish? Why not then the cracked grains that we put on the crust? What about extra bran or germ that we might add to a dough or sprinkle on the crust? If we aren't to add the weight of the cracked grains, how fine must we grind the grain before we include it in the flour weight? I've seen different recipes handle these questions differently. I've also seen hydration handled differently by different people. Is honey or molasses or malt to be included in the hydration? If so, in what ratio? I've seen different experts use recipes with milk, and the amount of hydration might count all or only part of the milk (the amount that is water). So in short, I'd have to say that baker's math has a lot of gray areas.

This is not the case, supposedly, when it comes to the wild yeast leaven. Now, I personally find the Tartine method very simple to use and remember. What Chad Robertson has done is, he has simplified the weights, so I rarely have to refer to the book anymore. He does this by cleverly making the total flour 1000g = 100%. No need for calculators. Everything falls into place after that. The salt is 2%, 20g. The water is 75%, 750g. The leaven is 20%, 200g.

Woops. Wait a minute, says ehanner. That leaven contains both water and flour. "Standard" baker's math says we are to add the flour of that leaven to the flour amounts. And the water of that leaven needs to be added to the hydration amounts. That means, in actual fact, that the total flour of a normal Tartine dough is 1100g=100%. And that essentially throws off our other percentage measurements, so that the final dough's amounts should read:

1100g flour = 100%
850g water = 77.27%
20g salt = 1.8%

Leaven is included in above amounts, but we will also give it here as a separate percentage of the whole so we can build it:

100g flour = 100% of the leaven build, or 9.09% of the total flour
    (to calculate this percentage, cross multiply to find x:    1100g : 100g = 100% : x%)

To calculate the percentages of the water in the leaven can be a bit trickier for the unsuspecting (read: "me"). Here, we have to be absolutely clear what we are comparing our water to. We know that our leaven contains 100g of water, because our water and flour are going to be same weight in the leaven. But do we want to express that water as a percentage of the total water, or a percentage of the total flour? Curiously, bakers generally give it as a percentage of the total flour:

100g water = 100% of the leaven build and x% of the total flour
    (to calculate this percentage, cross multiply to find x thus:
        1100g : 100g = 100% : x%     x resolves to 9.09%)

Alternatively, you could express it as a percentage of the total water thus:

100g water = 100% of the leaven build and x% of the total water
    *if you tried using water and cross multiplied here to find x:
        850g : 77.27% = 100g : x%        x resolves to 9.09%

Just be darn sure that you use the 77.27% percentage, and don't consider all of the water to be 100%.
Confused yet?

For their recipes, I have seen both Hamelman and Reinhart give the amounts of each soaker or preferment individually and then later give a final tally for the "final dough". For this dough, for example, Reinhart might say the main dough was 1000g=100%, and his separate leaven build was 100g=100% flour, and 100g=100% hydration. And then he would give a total for the final dough to be total flour 1100g=100%, final hydration 77.27%. Hamelman does that too, and I seem to recall one of them saying somewhere "no one ever uses the final total percentages in practice". So by mentioning it, are we clarifying or complicating things for newbies?

Let me ask this a different way: would Hanner's insistence on the 'correct' way to measure things have made a difference to a newbie, or to anyone else -- besides a baker already familiar with baker's math? Or would it just have complicated the recipe and left many to scratch their heads with confusion or indifference? I figure that Robertson simply chose to leave out the final dough percentages, as they have no practical purpose, and would seriously confuse noobs to bread baking.

Why is standard baker's math even important? Well, the baker's percentage sticklers say that it makes a difference if you want to scale the recipe. Is that true, though? Let's use a simple example: let's say you want to make a lot of bread for a party or a bake sale.    You want to increase the number of loaves you are baking from 2, to 20, lets say. No problem: We'll just ramp up the Tartine recipe from 1000g of flour to 10,000g of flour. The leaven you will need is going to be 20%, so 2000g -- i.e. 1000g of flour and 1000g of water. We don't even need a calculator for that, Chad has made it easy.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to check these amounts against the sticklers method (or rather, the "conventional baker's math method"). Get out your calculators or your pencils and papers and plug in the percentages that we've already mentioned above.   I believe you will see that all we have done by using "official" baker's math is complicate it unnecessarily.

Example from Life
Now let's take a different example, one from my baking today. Let's say I want to ramp up the amount of flour I originally put into the recipe to 1400g, so I can be sure to have enough dough to put in my 2 tins. I have just pulled that number, 1400g, out of the air as a rough guess of how much dough I'll need, based on my attempt #1 above.

Using Chad's method, my 1400g is the new 100%:

    •    1400g ww flour is the new 100%
    •    980g water is the new 70% hydration
    •    70g water added with the salt will bring it to 75% (or total hydration 1050g)
    •    280g of sourdough starter is the new 20%
    •    28g salt is the new 2%

I think that it was fairly easy to scale the dough, this way.

testing to see if 2 pans would fit in the roasting pan, side by side

Yes they do, and they plump up nicely.

A Sandwich-bread-like crumb

How can we compare this to "standard" baker's math? Using official baker's math, the new 100% should include 1/2 the weight of the starter. But we don't know the weight of the starter yet, because we have expressed it as a percentage of the whole. So there is another step involved: first we have to express our 1400g as a percentage of the whole (it is 100% - 9.09% = 90.91%), and use that percentage to figure out how much flour there will be in the leaven. Now cross multiply to solve for the weight of the flour in the leaven:

1400g : 90.91% = xg : 9.09%
and x resolves to 139.98g

Now we know that our total flour, our 100%, is 1400g + 139.98g = 1539.98g. Note that using the Tartine method, we arrived at 1540g. So far, so good. We're in the ballpark. Let's use this 100% to figure out the weights of everything else based on the percentages we've previously calculated:

1539.98g flour = 100% (some of this is in the leaven)
1189.94g water = 77.27% (some of this is in the leaven)
27.7g salt = 1.8%

Leaven is included in above amounts, but we will also give it here as a separate percentage of the whole so we can build it:

139.98g flour = 100% of the leaven build, and 9.09% of the total flour
139.98g water = 100% of the leaven build, and 9.09% of the total flour

For my kitchen scale, which doesn't do partial grams or decimal points, this rounds out to very close to what we achieved by doing it Robertson's way. But you have to appreciate that with baker's math, you cannot drop the decimal places. When I originally figured this out, I used a hydration percentage of 77% rather than 77.27% and ended up with a final weight that was slightly over 4g off Robertson's method. Not using the decimal places, or rounding off the numbers too early in the calculations, is going to introduce errors that will be magnified the more you scale the recipe. If you did the earlier exercise left to the reader, you would see that the salt in the "standard" baker's math is off by 2 grams. That again is a rounding error caused by the more complex "standard" baker's math.

I admit I'm no genius (I even have been known to misspell genious), but to me, the official way seems unnecessarily harder. And if I hadn't known the correct values to plug into it, I would have made any number of mistakes along the way.

Nope, Robertson's math is much simpler to remember, much simpler to use, and it has one dramatic effect: you think of your leaven as something altogether separate from the final dough. You treat it differently. It is different! It is not a dough, it is a leaven! It is more than the tallies you can apply to the dough. It is not at all equivalent to the flour and water the recipe otherwise calls for. Like salt, it is an additive to the flour and water that makes up the dough. Forget that it too is made also from flour and water. Robertson's method treats it as an ingredient separate from the dough.

You will treat it this way.

If you follow his recipe and method.

And I think that you can trust it.

Results of my Second Attempt
Again, I didn't fold it quite as much as a real Tartine loaf -- this time, because I was out walking the dog during some of the bulk fermentation. I decided that this was beneficial anyway, since I wouldn't get those huge irregular holes, I would have a more consistent sandwich-style crumb if I didn't fold it too much.

This time I had enough dough and during proofing it rose to the top of the tins. I scored the loaves slightly before putting them into the roasting pan. One of the tins had to sit a little sideways, but that's okay, the roasting pan lid still fit overtop of both tins. As an afterthought I put some water in the roasting pan for steam. That worked surprisingly well.

The loaves had a dramatic ovenspring, showing that I ought to have scored them deeper. Or perhaps a cross-hatch method.

This time, the loaves were well and truly baked. A bit of the upthrust crust by the score where it blew apart did blacken somewhat in the heat too close to the broiler. I rubbed a bit of butter on the hot loaves as they came from the oven, to make the top crust a bit softer. That worked well.

And the taste?

Tartine. Not at all sour. Wonderful. I'm going to go eat some now. With buckwheat honey.

Notes to Myself

KISS
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
For years, Ptolemy's method of calculating the position of the planets was the "standard". But it was very complicated, because you had to visualize the planets circling the earth in different spheres, and some had retrograde motion. Copernicus, Galileo and Newton gave us a new non-standard method that was easier to calculate, was provable, and soundly mathematically modeled. It became the new standard. I maintain the Tartine Method of Baker's Math is fully adequate to build excellent bread. It could even become the new standard.
For the second part of the baking, once you take the cover off the roasting pan, you could lower the tray, so it is not too close to the broiler.
Don't listen to the bad reviews. Get Tartine Bread book, and start making good bread.

Overunity Pumpkin Bread

2011-11-29T04:41:00.001-08:00

Overunity Pumpkin Bread

Not many people read this blog, or reply to what I write. That's probably a good thing, because conversations have the potential to keep my thoughts derailed for days. Here's an example: an off-hand remark in the recent reply of a reader Anja to one of my recent blog entries sent me to Google. I had to quickly self-teach myself what she was talking about.

For those who likely missed it, my original blog was about the energy costs of making bread, and Anja (who keeps both a bread blog and a cheese blog, her hobbies) said that her spouse's hobby is working on overunity projects, with the ultimate aim of providing free energy to all.

What is Overunity?
All I know about overunity is what Google categorizes and gives to me in the first page or two of its millions of hits. That is a moving target, of course, and as new findings are posted under the overunity flag, Google will shift its findings and someone reading what Google dishes up might get a different idea. But if one browses through what I found from searching, these days, one quickly comes to the consensus opinion that "overunity" is bunk.

Basically, we have basement electronic experimenters who are winding coils in exacting ways (often around ferrite or magnetic rods or rings), in the spirit of Nikolai Tesla, and they are measuring more energy coming out than what they are putting in. Hence, the prospect of "Free Energy For All" is suggested.

Overunity proponents try to describe the difference between efficiency and the co-edicient of performance of the systems they design. In a nutshell, overunity proponents say that their energy devices can allowably draw some energy from the environment to still obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Ore else it allows for hidden or as-yet-unexplained energy sources.

Google offers up what the debunkers say: to actually do what the overunity experimenters say they will do, can do, and have already done, would require us to re-write everything we know about physics. Any time someone claims to have built such a machine, it can therefore be explained away as a mismeasurement of some input or output. There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. Anyone who claims to have achieved overunity is therefore misguided, a charlatan, a con artist, or delusional.

Undaunted, some of the basement explorers are actually attempting to re-write those physical laws. How they will do this is anyone's guess, but you can already see some cracks in the existing mathematical explanations of how the universe works where they might try it: Dark Matter or Dark Energy, quantum physics, the mysterious edges of nanochemistry and nanotechnology, even the methodology and philosophical underpinnings of Science itself can be drawn into question.

Some overunity explorers claim that they are being debunked because the corporations that currently provide energy to the planet would lose too much money if overunity were widely known. A certain paranoia sets in, where overunity defenders claim they are being silenced, their ideas and even their experiments are being confiscated or ridiculed.

There are electrical plans already online, however, of designs that it is claimed, demonstrate overunity. Make it, the overunity proponents say, make it for yourself and see. And sometimes a debunker will make it and find something strange but still won't believe it: the extra energy comes from the environment, they say. But usually if they build it they don't see the extra energy: the proponents say "you didn't make it correctly," and the back and forth continues. More often the debunkers won't build it, but will look at the designs and say "poo-poo" before trying it.

I am not in any position to say that overunity is possible or not. I haven't made any of these devices and I am not likely to. I don't have the tools, the equipment, the knowledge, the know-how. To me, it seems quite unlikely that a basement experimenter will discover ways to give free energy to the world simply by winding wires around graphite cores in specific ways.

But I can understand their human impulse to experiment, to push the boundaries, and to hope for a solution that will benefit all humans.

Segue to Bread
And in a way, I place myself among their number in this regard: after all, I am merely a home baker who likes to try different recipes for bread. I eat my results, good or bad. All the while I'm baking loaves, I am thinking about the multiple aspects of grain, yeast, flour, dough, bread, and about whether we as a planet are going to be able to grow enough food to sustain our human population without destroying the habitat of all other species. I wonder about the new technologies in grain production, and have taken it upon myself to edit the wiki on transgenic wheat, even though I haven't ever accomplished transgenesis myself, let alone some tried-and-true hybridization techniques. I'm not a farmer, not a seed producer, not even a baker. I am a home baker, a rank amateur who needs to eat something and has discovered bread fills a particular void in my diet. I am a health professional, who is curious about the effects of eating grains in the amount I consume (and in the amount the world consumes), but I do not have a laboratory and cannot do the requisite science to even know what it is I am eating.

To put it bluntly: does it make sense that I will discover a way to make bread that is healthy, different, excellent? Does it make sense that I will find a way to feed the world? I am a basement dweller, a bottom feeder. I am going to continue to do the basement kind of work required to keep a hobby, and I am going to continue to try to think globally, asking whether this could or should work for all. But realistically, what am I going to accomplish by blogging about bread?

By now, most people know the marvellous story of Viktor Frankl, who conceived of logotherapy while interred in a Nazi concentration camp. What he discovered through observation was, the ones who had meaning in their life had a survival advantage. When they lost their reason for being, death was virtually assured.

Perhaps for me, blogging about bread is a small toehold to meaning. I may not save the world, but I'm interested in it. I can't abandon it. And I say all of this in reply to yet another comment Anja has left on another blog of mine.

Maria Speck suggests in her book that when we cook at home, we become aware of our food, we become aware of its subtleties and its flavours. We are less likely to overconsume such food, and it can actually be a way to diet. For me, baking bread is a path of awareness to what I'm eating.

As for writing about it, I find the more I put into it, the more I get out of it. For me, that's overunity bread.

Pumpkin Bread
I finally got around to pureeing the hallowe'en pumpkin. I know, I know, you are supposed to use those "sugar pie" pumpkins for baking, not the jack-o-lanterns. But I always use these, it works fine, and they are a lot easier to find. And this time of year (post-Hallowe'en) you can often even find them for free, tossed out at the curbside or in farmer's fields. I dragged one home yesterday that I found while walking the dog. So I decided to do something with one of them, the one we already had.

I washed the pumpkin thoroughly, then cut the pumpkin in half and placed it down-side in a roasting pan in about a cup of water. Then I roasted it for 90 minutes. My pumpkin was pretty big, and both halves wouldn't fit in the roasting pan. I thought I could do it with 2 roasting pans, but the top one burned a bit under the broiler. That's okay, though. The inner pumpkin flesh was fine. I scooped it out and pureed it.

starter is combined with the puree

after kneading to incorporate all the puree

I made a couple of Tartine-style loaves, using the pumpkin puree as the 75% hydration. I figured that it wouldn't be enough hydration, but I started there, and was able to entirely incorporate the 1000g of whole wheat using it. I did have to knead it for about 5 minutes to get it all incorporated though.

I let it sit for a bit, then added 100g of water. I let it sit a bit longer. Then I added the salt with an additional 50g of water. So who knows exactly what the actual hydration of this loaf is? The original 75% puree was not entirely water. So you can't say it is 90% hydrated. You'd have to know the actual hydration of pumpkin flesh -- and I suspect every pumpkin will be different. So it will always remain a guessing game. But my dough feels more or less like a regular Tartine dough that is somewhere between 70-80% hydrated.

I gave it a couple of turns and then added some pumpkin seeds (150g).

I was also thinking about adding some whole coriander seeds, and some paprika. The Folks at Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day give a pumpkin puree bread recipe that I've used before, and they include some fresh pepper. I was thinking along those lines. But all I ended up doing, this time, was adding some paprika to the whole wheat that I used for the crust, during the final folding, on my counter workspace. It is barely noticeable in the final taste.

Results
A nice loaf. My wife is particularly happy with it, because she can put honey on it and it doesn't drip through the holes. It is a bit denser, but not terribly heavy. I think it has a nice flavour, only mildly pumpkiny. The shelled pumpkin seeds give it some interesting local texture. The unshelled seeds on the crust are just decoration, they don't add or detract much in any way.

It may be that my wife likes this loaf because there is a lot of pumpkin puree and she doesn't like to eat the soup that I make with it. Not that it is a bad soup, but it is just that there is always so much of it, she ends up eating it for weeks on end. "Freeze the puree," she suggested, "and make bread with it again."

Despite her advice, I made some soup with about 6 cups of the puree and the bread and the soup together make a nice lunch meal. But I probably still have enough for a few more pumpkin loaves.

Notes to Myself

Next time I might try adding whole coriander seeds. Nasturtium seeds might be nice too, for a peppery flavour without pepper. Capers might be a bit too peppery.

I've given a loaf away to someone whose cooking I respect, and asked him what spices he would suggest. I hope to get some input from him.
Or: this entire segue to bread from Overunity could just be the junkie in me talking out of my ass. To learn about my own addiction impulses, I'm currently reading Gabor Maté's fascinating book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts". He says

"recurring themes emerge in my interviews with addicts: the drug as emotional anaesthetic; as an antidote to a frightful feeling of emptiness; as a tonic against fatigue, boredom, alienation and a sense of personal inadequacy; as stress reliever and social lubricant. And … the drug may -- if only for a brief instant -- open the portals of spiritual transcendence"

I think we as humans can give anything -- even a drug, even bread, even blogging -- deep meaning. We are basically able to turn anything into a religion. We can find our meaning anywhere, and that might be another definition of animism. That ancient impulse becomes a thread that continues through all our religious expressions:
"Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
Hey, presto. I'm bread.

YAOB - Yet Another Olive Bread and the Choices we Make

2011-11-26T03:52:00.001-08:00

YAOB

"I still need to decide about breakfast"
- Lierre Keith

In private conversations with Macropneuma, following his reply to my very first blog entry, I indicated that I didn't know where blogging about bread was going to lead me, and in fact I suspected from the outset that it might lead me to give up on wheat and bread altogether.

Nevertheless, in this blog I would investigate bread, including the dangers and health benefits of eating grains, and I would strive for whole grain recipes.

I certainly suspected from the outset that bread -- certainly, the bread we have been given in our supermarkets, and probably even most of the loaves that we can make at home from all purpose and polished bread flours -- are unhealthy. But I craved bread. Is it truly the exorphins in the grain that did that to me? Who knows? Perhaps. Is it the junkie in me talking, when I say that I've come to believe that there is no way that the earth with its growing population can sustain an animal-protein diet? Whether or not it is true that the entire world can no longer eat the same way a paleolithic pre-agricultural hominid tribe did, I have come to believe that we need grains to feed the world, and bread is one way to get the protein and calories into us.

No doubt part of my thinking in this matter has been influenced by a book I read several decades ago: John Robbins "Diet for a New America." That book was influential in turning me into a vegetarian. I was a vegan for a year, but at the time I found it especially difficult, and ultimately, for me, unhealthy. My compromise in remaining a vegetarian might not sit well with Robbins, who is pretty entrenched in writing vegan propaganda.

More recently, I read Lierre Keith's "The Vegetarian Myth: food, justice and sustainability," (complete with some rebuttals of some of Robbins' points) and if you read an old review I wrote on it, I think that you can tell I was deeply influenced by that book as well. Not enough to stop being a vegetarian yet -- because I do not believe the book adequately addressed all the reasons I had for becoming a vegetarian in the first place, and I do not have the ability to adequately raise animals sustainably on my small urban landholding for slaughter. Or, after 20 odd years as a vegetarian, it may just be habit by now.

The power of books about our diet to change whole lifestyles cannot be overestimated. We want to eat healthy. We want to do the right thing for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the planet. But we all draw our lines in different places. I have read dozens of books on Peak Oil, but I still drive a car despite my deep moral regret. Likewise, I can understand if someone reads a book on vegetarianism and comprehends the moral and environmental reasons why our current practices in meat production are wrong, but he or she continues to eat meat.

We all make choices about what we are going to eat. We all draw the line somewhere. I have an embarrassing story about that, actually. I was once speaking with a bunch of co-workers who asked me, as a vegetarian, if I ate milk, cheese, eggs, etc. When I said I did, I also indicated that each of them also drew a line about what they would and would not eat: "How many of you won't eat liver? Or kidneys? Or brain? Or cow's tongue?" Just then, another co-worker walked into the room, and everyone became utterly silent. It was almost as if we had stopped talking simply because she was in the room, and the silence grew uncomfortable. I could see in her eyes that she thought we were talking about her. So I tried to include her in the conversation. Unfortunately, I blurted out to her, "Do you like tongue?"

The point is, we all make decisions based on what we read, or what we think we know; and I suspect we all have our own preferences, predilections and prejudices to guide our thinking when it comes to food. That is why I am sympathetic to something that recently happened to another bread blogger that I follow (thanks to Google Translate). Mariana Aga has written thoughtfully and well, and although she writes in a language I can't read, I've come to appreciate her depth and her interesting thoughts on many subjects related to bread in her blog "Выпечка хлеба" (Bread).

Mariana's Avatar

Is this Goodbye Mariana?
However, it seems now that the bread blogging community may lose one of its favourites. At the precise moment when she went to the bookstore to buy half a dozen books on German bread baking, which surely would have turned her blog into one of the premier bread blogs on the planet, she also brought home William Davis' book "Wheat Belly: Lose the wheat, lose the weight, and find your path back to health". And reading Davis' book has caused her to consider forever giving up on wheat, rye, barley. She is now as disgusted with bread made with these glutenous grains as I was with meat, twenty odd years ago.

Google translate will not translate all of the many many replies she has had to her blog entry (it translates some of them, but then it decides no one will read all of them, and so quits translating). But it would appear that many people, like me, look forward to her writing and love the breads and the thoughtfulness that she shares with the world. They all will miss her writing. Some are for the book, some against it. Some are angry about her choice, some applaud it.

But Mariana has not yet totally given up blogging. Since reading Davis' book, she has continued to write and share her baking expertise. In reply to someone who was grateful that she has not stopped, she replied (In Russian, of course, and this is Google Translate's attempt at delivering her meaning to me):

I continue to come from a parcel of books about the bread that I had ordered, and there are very interesting. I decided to share:) after I told them that cooled to wheat, one hundred people went pisyat leave a comment that I was a fool and shook his finger at his temple, and another hundred pisyat add to buddylist. it is strange to me, what are they add, if I said I would write more about. But I decided to at least about these books brand new blog to tell your friends so they know where to look for information. I know how difficult it is when you start and you do not know what to grab.

And so, it seems, she will begin to blog about gluten-free baking.

And I will continue to follow her thoughts, via Google Translate.

YAOB: Yet Another Olive Bread
One of my co-workers likes my olive bread, so I've made her yet another loaf.

A couple of small tins of olives, in salt brine and nothing else: 364g for 2 loaves
The loaves are each about 600g of flour, at 80% hydration

But I keep telling this co-worker how easy it is to make, and I have threatened to give her a modified version of Jim Lahey's recipe so she can make her own. Lahey, of course, uses bread flour and I use whole grain flour; he uses yeast and I use sourdough; and I use Tartine-style folding whereas he uses a no-knead method and a long (18hr) bulk fermentation. Still, the techniques and the methodology in the recipes are essentially the same.

You mix up the flour, water, leaven and olives and let it bulk ferment. Then you shape it and stick it into a flour-lined tea-towel in a basket to proof. You stick a Dutch Oven (or as I did for a year before owning one, a casserole dish) in the oven to preheat (450 degrees F), and plop the dough into it, covering it for the first 20 minutes of a 40 minute bake. The last 20 minutes are uncovered, and then the bread comes out of the oven to cool on a rack. Simple.

I made 2 olive breads here. In the bread I made for myself, I added some boiled, soaked, spiced and roasted wheat berries to see what would happen.

This is one cup of wheat berries added to a thermos, and it sits in boiling hot water overnight. Then they are sieved, and a few spices (I guess I've got salt, paprika, cumin, turmeric and coriander) are added to them while still damp. Then the berries are roasted in the oven. I stopped roasting this batch when the grains were still a bit chewy. By adding them to the olive bread though, the ones on top are quite crunchy, and the ones on the interior added a variety of textures. The crunchy ones mostly roll off while slicing, so that is just messy. But they make a nice snack on their own, so hey.


She cracked into her loaf right away at work.

I waited until the next day to crack into mine

For now at least, I continue to eat and blog about bread.

Perhaps because it doesn't disgust me as much as many other things I could eat.

Notes to Myself

Where do you draw the line, between what you will eat and what you won't eat? Remember that this line is a shifting line. Remember that every choice is a political act.

I hope we don't all end up eating Soylent Green.
You can give a starving girl some olive bread and she will be satiated for a day; or you can teach that same girl how easy it is to bake bread and she will be satiated for a lifetime. Even if she does prefer her friend to make it for her.

What's in my Cupboard? Bread

2011-11-25T11:21:00.001-08:00

"Whats in my cupboard?" Bread

Upon return from vacation, I just required some quickly made bread. Coming home was like arriving again at some place I'd never been before. I had to take a look in my own cupboards to see what was available. There was a lot there, and I just used what caught my eye, what was close at hand, or what seemed interesting.

After refreshing my sourdough, I made a simple whole wheat 100% wild yeast integrale bread, Tartine-style, but I also added on a whim some sunflower seeds that I covered with 50ml of water, and added some spices to:

ww flour 1000g
water 70g + 5g (+5g later with seeds brings this to 80% hydration)
salt 20g
leaven 200g

sunflower seeds 100g
water 50ml
ground coriander seed 1/2 tsp
ground cumin 1/4 tsp
paprika 2/3 tsp

The salt was added on the first turn, the sunflower seed mixture was added on the second turn, and I continued turning Q30min for another 3 hours.

The final result tasted good. When fresh, the crust of this loaf was nice and springy, not hard and crunchy (like what my wife complains about).

A Baker's Clay Basket?
As the gift-giving season approaches, I've had a couple of people wonder what they can get for me. Daniel Handler (of Lemony Snicket fame) wrote in Adverbs that you have to be very careful of what you say you like, as holiday season approaches, because even an offhand remark might result in you getting something unexpectedly weird and not so wonderful.

I think I already asked for some real bannetons -- these are proofing baskets too expensive to warrant the purchase of, if you are shopping for yourself. I use colanders, or wicker baskets, nothing over a couple of bucks. I love the official look of breads that have been proofed in real bannetons, but I've never felt the need to pay that much money for a real cane basket.

I don't know if I should have mentioned the banneton, though. You see, I've had this idea in the back of my mind for some time now that I'd like to try something a bit different. I wondered if I could make my own basket out of baker's clay, and have it work for proofing. So today I had the kitchen all to myself, and decided to see what would happen.

The recipe for baker's clay is tons of flour, lots of salt, and some water. You mix this up and knead it until it gives you something that feels like playdough. You could add food colouring to make it pretty, but I didn't want to bother. Some recipes also call for alum, and I didn't use that either since I didn't have any on hand.

4 c flour (626g) 100%
1 c salt (240g) 38%
1 1/2 c water (360g) 58%

I mixed it up, rolled it out and spread it overtop of one of my wicker baskets that I'd lined with foil. Then I baked the whole thing for about 45 minutes at 250 degrees F (yep, the wicker was in there too, on some parchment paper atop a baking pan). Afterwards, I put it into my dehydrator overnight on a low setting. The idea is, I want it to dry out enough so that it will get hard and retain its shape.

There was enough baker's dough left over for me to make a few large cookie-sized disks. This was just a trial for another idea I had -- that of making something that would leave an impression in the proofing dough. I was thinking, you could put them in the bottom of the basket and dust around them and on top of them, and it would leave a design in the final loaf, sort of like stencilling a loaf, only different.

Results
I don't suppose a baker's clay basket could really be used for proofing bread. The reason I say that is because the cookie-sized disks with designs on them did not come off the top of the bread easily. Furthermore, they left the final loaf a bit salty in the spot where they intersected. A proofing basket would intersect in all places with a proofing loaf, so the whole idea just sucks.

But it sure was fun to play in my own kitchen again.

Ah, home sweet home.

Notes to Myself

The spices didn't add all that much to the loaf, but it tasted quite nice. I think I chose them based on the thought "what would taste good with sunflower seeds?"
What other herbs and spice would taste good with bread? Variety is...
What other seeds would taste good with bread?
My friend got one of these loaves. I was going to deliver it and walk his dog with my dog one day, but my wife wouldn't let me go, she had jobs around home that I had to do. So it goes.
I don't suppose it could really be used for proofing bread. The reason I say that is because I thought I'd try to use some scraps I had left over to make some cookie-sized disks with designs on them that I could toss into the bottom of a basket, to imprint a design on the top of a loaf. I used a couple of these baker's clay disks here, but they did not come off the top of the bread easily. Furthermore, the left the final loaf a bit salty in the spot where they intersected.

Calabogie Breads

2011-11-21T06:44:00.001-08:00

Autumn oak leaves atop exposed Canadian Shield

We took a week off mid November and travelled to Calabogie near Ottawa. This is off-season for Calabogie, which is a summertime swimming and boating paradise, or a winter skiing area. This time of year, it's cheap! We've been here a couple of times before, and usually this late in the year we'll have snow, but this year the weather remained quite lovely.

The weather was perfect for hiking and exploring and shopping in the nearby small towns.

Old logging road, nearby a sacred clifftop. Seriously?

Some of the views from the various surrounding hills are spectacular, even at this time of year when most of the leaves have fallen.

Lookout overlooking Otter Pond

Distant hills

steep trails

Kayaking Madawaska River

We even did a bit of kayaking on the Madawaska River. It was cold, but it seemed like we had the whole river to ourselves...

What I brought: rye flour, sourdough, ww flour, some wheat berries
some old bread, some potatoes

Of course, I brought along some sourdough, and a bit of ww and rye flour; I even brought a few wheat berries. I figured I could find everything else I'd need in the cabin. I was wrong about that, but I made do.

A loaf made with Handfuls of Rye: about 25%, more or less

The first bread I made at Calabogie was a whole-wheat, rye bread, made with sourdough. I didn't measure anything, just added some water, sourdough, flour, salt and flour by handfuls, until I had it a certain familiar consistency.

I made it without much in the way of a well-stocked kitchen. There wasn't even a baking pan. Instead, I would bake the bread in the only casserole dish. I mixed up the dough in a chip bowl. There was no scraper to fold dough with, so I used a mason jar lid.

I proofed the dough in a colander. There were only 2 tea-towels. so using them to line the colander at the start of vacation was out of the question. I decided to try to just put some flour on the colander, and to get it to stick to the plastic, I used a tiny bit of water. But the dough stuck to the plastic anyway. It was quite a mess. I had to scrape it into the casserole dish with a spatula.

It was quite the mess, but I did get it into the oven. Then, because I was unfamiliar with the oven, I think I had it on broil instead of on bake. But I ended up with a loaf, more or less. There was no rack to cool it, so I put it on one of the stove's burners to cool.

Totem Pond at Lost Valley Trail

Second and Third Loaves: Two Attempts at "Pain Complet"

I was asked to bring a bread to my son's place in Ottawa, and decided to try Joe Ortiz's "Pain Complet" or Whole Wheat Bread. This bread uses milk for most of the hydration, and lots of yeast for the rising of the dough. In place of baking with steam, this recipe calls for a heavy glaze of egg and milk.

The mixing of the dough is a bit unusual too, as Ortiz would have us do it on a countertop, without using a bowl. This is where I ran into my first trouble. My flour dam burst several times, and with milk going every which way, I was unable to keep one hand clean as he describes. I made a horrible mess, my only saving grace was that my wife was still asleep and could not see it. Without a scraper of any kind, this makes for a big cleanup job.

I also didn't have a baking tray. I was told that I could have one at the main desk, but I had to sign for it. And I didn't have any parchment paper, either. I had a tiny bit leftover from beneath some chelsea buns that we had purchased at a bakery on the way up, and I used that.

I found the dough to be terribly sticky and difficult to work. Without the proper tools, I couldn't stretch the dough properly, so I feel the gluten wasn't developed enough. The formation of the loaf therefore failed because it wasn't tight enough. And of course, the hour-long proofing meant it sagged terribly before even hitting the oven.

But when it finally hit the oven, that is where the real problems began. I think that the pan was far too close to the element. And this oven runs a lot hotter than my oven at home. And the recipe might have been bad. Or I had a bad day. Who knows?

Anyway, I was reluctant to open the door to the oven to have a peek at the loaf, and there was no light in the oven to see through the window, so it was a mystery until I noticed smoke in the kitchen.

This bread was so badly burned and smoking, it had to go out on the balcony

Inedible crust. I never tried eating this bread, although the crumb wasn't scorched.

I pulled out the charcoal bread. What a disaster.

Good thing I started a Tartine-style "Pain Complet" made with sourdough around the same time as this one. I baked it in a casserole dish, and it turned out slightly better.

Those who ate it with the borscht seemed to like the Pain Complet.

Kolivar Bread

I have been thinking of making some kolivar to take with me to a work-related Christmas party: it is a house party, where we bring our own booze and bring an hors d'oeuvres. But I wanted to trial the kolivar before committing to it: what if it isn't the right thing to take?

Kolivar is one of the first recipes featured in Maria Speck's "Ancient Grains for Modern Meals". By the description in her book, I was under the impression that this is some sort of confection, but as I began to make it, I realized that it is not exactly a fingerfood, so one could not really conceive of it as an hors d'oeuvres.

It is made with boiled and soaked wheat berries, with walnuts, flour, spices (cinnamon and cumin and salt), dark raisins, sesame seeds, confectioner's sugar and silver dragees. I didn't have the last three ingredients, so my trial was incomplete. Still, I have an idea of what kolivar is supposed to look and act like.

Today I was baking a bread that I would take home with me from Calabogie, so that I would have something to eat when I returned to work on the weekend. I mixed up a 100% whole wheat sourdough, in the Tartine Style, but instead of making the usual boule, I put some of the kolivar on the bread and rolled it up. I might have baked it like that, in a batard-loaf shape, but I didn't really have any way to properly bake it in this understocked kitchen. So I cheated and folded the ends under again, only to end up with a boule shape, to fit the cabin's casserole dish.

Despite going into the casserole dish unevenly, it baked beautifully. I'm learning to reduce the heat a bit during the last stage of baking when the lid is off. However, my wife says that the loaf is very heavy. So it is probably very dense, compared with my other sourdough loaves. And I suppose this is due primarily to how I overhandled it during the shaping, so as to spiral up the kolivar.

So what I have here is a walnut and raisin whole wheat bread, with lots of whole wheat berries in it too.

Results:
tasted a bit bland. Probably could have used more salt. Once in a while you'd get a raisin or a walnut, or some wheat berry with cumin and there would be an interesting flavour. It went well with old cheese.

Bon Echo, after the campground has been closed for the season.

We were still able to walk in and see the "rock" although we couldn't get the kayak near it.

Notes to Myself

The Rye bread was a trifle gooey. Rye breads require a bit longer bake, I guess.
Make Ortiz' "Pain Complet" again soon. The crumb looked quite nice, and I'll bet if you don't burn the crust, it will be quite a nice bread.
Kolivar without sugar isn't a great addition to bread, but it has promise. I wonder what it would have been like if I had added it to the dough instead of just rolling up the dough around it at the end?
I also wonder what the wheat berries would be like roasted, after pouring boiling water over them and leaving them in the thermos overnight. They really plumped up nicely, but they didn't have a ton of flavour or texture after that. Perhaps roasting them following that boil and soak would give them both. They might also taste a bit like roasted soybeans. Would you turn them in a bit of oil first, too?

WW-Amaranth-Millet Loaf

2011-11-09T07:28:00.000-08:00

WW-Amaranth-Millet Loaf

Cleaning out my cupboards of tiny bags of flour, this loaf worked out to 60% Whole Wheat, 25% Amaranth, and 15% Millet. I used a standard 75% hydration.

I missed a couple of folds in the early bulk fermentation. Whether it was that, or the type of flour used, or if my sourdough is a bit old, I don't know: at any rate the end result was a slightly denser loaf. That seems to be what my wife prefers anyway. She cracked into the loaf and took a picture of the crumb before I was awake one morning (I had been up until 0200 the night before, baking).

However, now she complains that the loaf is too sour for her taste. So it probably was the sourdough mixture being a bit too old.

When to bake?
Let's talk for a moment about when I bake. Mostly, due to my job, I bake at ad hoc times. Sometimes it is late at night, sometimes it is in the middle of the day, depending on whether I'm working nightshift or dayshift. Our province recently installed "smart meters" into homes so that Ontario Hydro could penalize people who use hydro during peak times. If I bake late at night, the cost of electricity to bake my bread will be about 6.2 cents per Kilowatt Hour; but if I bake in the middle of the day, that same bread will cost me 10.8 cents/kWh (winter rates, which we are now following).

These are the times I should bake my bread: after 7 at night, or before 7 in the morning.

The provincial government has been behind this initiative, for several reasons.

The stated goals are to have affordable electricity for all -- especially for industry which will put people to work. If people are working, they pay taxes, and if they are not working, they drain taxes. So the object of the smart meters is to get people out of their homes during peak times and into their workplace. Woe to ye, if you work at home. Woe to ye wee little ones if your mom is a stay-at-home type, or if she has a little daycare going at home to try to keep a roof over your head.

The other reason our homes are being penalized is also due to a government initiative. I actually credit the government with some foresight and the realization that burning fossil fuels for energy generation is not going to last forever. It is currently still the most affordable way to generate fuel, but it is not the most efficient and it is increasingly less and less politically correct. I've read dozens of books on peak oil, and it makes no sense to continuously depend on a dwindling resource. We have to diversify our energy source. The Ontario government footed the bill to get us started on wind and solar energy. They have said to producers of green energy: "we will pay you premium prices for clean energy." Wind and Solar companies leapt at the chance, and signed contracts that will give them tons of (our) money for the next few decades.

We are in a transitional time. We have lots of people who are used to paying cheap prices for a fuel that will run out or that is destroying the earth's climate. These are the people who complain loudly at higher electrical prices, and the same people who say that windmills are not studied enough and there should be a moratorium on their use until all the studies are in. I've heard the arguments against wind generation, and to me, none of them are compelling. Sure, they are an eyesore, sure they interfere with migratory birds, sure they cause vertigo, headaches and maybe worse. But compare all that with the true effects of the use of the burning of fossil fuels, and factor in the true costs of using coal and oil -- asthma, allergies, cancers, the destruction of the atmosphere, global warming -- and you immediately see that wind is the better alternative.

Ontario is in a rather enviable position in regards to its energy. We overproduce it now. We don't have the brown-outs that are quite regularly experienced in, say, Michigan, our neighbour to the west. And when we overproduce, being neighbourly, we like to share our energy with them. But get this: it costs us money to send them energy. So the provincial government has started asking the wind farms to stop their giant turbines if it gets too windy. We don't require that much power, so why should we generate it at such vast sums?

Backyard Woodfire Brick Oven?
So what does all this mean with regards to me and my bread? My wife is alarmed that the cost of my bread baking is prohibitive. It is too expensive. She wants me to bake at non-peak hours, if I must bake. It would be cheaper to buy a loaf of wonder bread. Well, sure it would (unless you factor in the true costs of eating crap that is transported long distances, which are asthma, allergies, cancers etc….).

She would like to see me build a wood-fire oven in our back yard. I'm not so sure that's the best idea. It certainly would save money, but probably not in our lifetime, as the cost of making the oven and the cost of wood to fuel it would have to be factored into the cost of each piece of bread I make. (Of course, we have been known to do things that are prohibitively expensive just because we want to do them and we are continuously laughed at by friends and neighbours for it -- example, our 6 suburban chickens, which live the life of Riley in their expensive handmade chicken hut, eating their expensive organic grains and regularly ripping into our lawn and garden when they escape. We often get teased about our $5000 eggs.)

And there is also the carbon footprint of such an oven. These ovens have been used for thousands of years, but you can't call them "green energy". They burn carbon. Directly into the atmosphere. At one time in the early history of our nation, just about every farmhouse had a bread oven. In Canada, we never really got to the stage where people banded together in villages and shared a communal oven, like they did in Europe, simply because there was so much land, so few people to begin with. By the time there were villages, the rules changed with the advent of electricity and gasoline-powered transportation.

If I fired up a backyard oven for just my own two loaves of bread, and maybe the occasional pizza, it just wouldn't make cost or environmental sense. These ovens stay baking hot for a long, long time.

If I made such an oven in my backyard, I think that I would have to offer its services to others in the community who would use it. I was thinking the local food bank, or perhaps the women's shelter; or even the nearby retirement community. There might be one or two people there who'd be interested in fresh home-made wood-fire baked bread. I have no problem with sharing as long as its not going to cost me extra. That means, it's okay as long as they bring their own dough. And as long as I don't have to do all the baking myself. Is this actually going to happen though? Probably not. Realistically speaking, most people are too busy to make their own bread, or to take their dough to a community oven. Probably what will happen is, I will end up giving away any bread that I bake in such an oven, and people will tease me about my $1000 loaves, like they tease me about my chickens.

Still, it might be fun to meet with one or two like-minded local bread experimenters.

The True Cost of Bread
All of this curiosity about how much energy it takes to bake bread, and where such energy comes from, has made me wonder about the true cost of bread that I make, and what it costs to just buy some.

I have long been fascinated with an amazing resource I found while browsing German bread websites.

Arndt Willeke has been teaching apprentice bakers in Lower Saxony for a couple of generations now. He has put together an incredible package of inter-related exel spreadsheets that he calls "Sauerprofi" (or "Sour Professional"). Frankly, I was surfing for German Bread recipes and found a whole lot more with this package. This freely downloadable resource teaches not only recipes and baking techniques, but also how to incorporate the use of computers into the baking workplace, and easily calculate costs of making loaves for customers in a production bakery. It is all in German, of course, and it is designed to fit the German sourdough methodology, but it is a huge resource that I have barely scratched the surface of. Herr Willeke has been very generous with this resource, and it is "jetzt gratis!". Take a look at it, I guarantee you've never seen the like anywhere in English.

Stellen Sie sich der Realität!
Führen Sie Ihre Bäckerei wie ein Profi!
- Arndt Willeke

(Face the reality!
Run your bakery like a pro!)

I start looking at these spreadsheets and I begin to wonder: do I really want to face the reality? Do I really want to run my (home) bakery like a pro?

Well, no. Actually I don't. I don't want to know that my loaves that I'm eating are impractical. I know they are impractical. That is the point, dammit! I can't get this kind of bread anywhere because it would be impossible for a bakery to make it, it is too costly for them, and there are too few people around who demand it. I begin to see why not. I begin to see the economic pressures on bakers, on us all. Survival is going to be tough for all of us. The odds are never in our favour. I say go for it anyway.

Notes to Myself

Bake when you can, and damn the consequences of whether you are spending 4 1/2 cents a Kilawatt hour more for your bread, or 10 1/2 cents. In the long run, your health and your sanity will be better for it.
Have fun. Admit it, bread baking is your hobby, and it is fun.
Never face the reality. Always face the dream.
Run your home bakery like an amateur.

Whole Wheat Bread with Fermented 8-Grain Mixture

2011-11-07T15:40:00.000-08:00

Whole Wheat Bread with Fermented 8-Grain Mixture

EatDrink is one of those little "FREE PLEASE TAKE ONE" magazines that you find in various places around town that are essentially paid for by being full of advertising. Most of the ads in this little glossy mag are from local restaurants, so it caters to people who are interested in food as entertainment (and that is virtually everyone with a penny of disposable income). There are a few light articles, some recipes, and a few tips on timely travel spots. As free mags go, this one is much better than most. It must be expensive to produce, it is high quality paper and the writing is succinct and valuable to people who are interested in food. Obviously the writers (like Chef Christie Massé, more about her to follow) are passionate about food, are interested in what's available locally, and they know their stuff.

One of the recent magazines (July/August) had a couple-of-paragraphs blurb on "FreshFest" in St. Thomas (held in August), and a recipe for pizza from Writer and Chef Christie Massé of Crust Catering and Bakery in St. Thomas.

Massé is trained in psychology, art, philosophy and food. She and her significant other, Chef Wil Gaynor started the Crust Catering and Bakery and they also provide artisan breads to the Horton Farmer's Market and Farmgate Markets in St. Thomas. Here is a link to Crust's bakery page. I'm sure that if I lived anywhere nearby this place I would never have had to learn how to bake a loaf of my own bread.

If you have time to wade through the online interactive pdf file of the archived eatdrink magazine, you will find Massé's original pizza recipe on page 44-45.

FreshFest Fire-Pit Pizza
The recipe for pizza caught the eye of my wife because it is a multigrain pizza recipe that contains ingredients from Arva Flour Mill's 8-grain mixture. I happened to have some of that mixture on hand, so she thought I'd like to try it out.

Unfortunately, the recipe calls for soaker and biga that take 12+ hours to put together, and I didn't have time for that, on the evening when she wanted me to "whip up" some crust. This recipe calls for time and prep.

But I got to thinking: why did bakers come up with soakers and bigas in the first place? Wasn't it mostly to duplicate the fuller, more complicated flavours of a sourdough? Why not just use sourdough to make this pizza?

Dividing the dough(s): Half gets the 8grain mixture folded in gently, the other half it is kneaded in

Well, my reasoning might not have been sound -- biga and soaker will make its own taste that is not sourdough-like -- but I decided to try some 8-grain mixture with the sourdough I had on hand. It would still take some time, sitting overnight, but at least I would use up some of the sourdough I had on hand and continuously refresh. I used my 100% hydrated whole wheat starter on both the dough and the 8-grain mixture, and then combined them at around the time of dividing the dough. With half of it, I baked some bread, and with the other half of the dough, I used some of it to make a pizza.

And the result was my own pizza and bread that I am sure is nothing like Crust's Pizza and Bread. But I've saved Chef Massé's recipe, and I might still try it some day soon.

My Pizza
I used about a quarter of the dough for the entire pan. The folded-in 8-grain mixture was a bit chunky, but I just pressed it into place. I used too much oil, and too much cheese, so the result was a bit too wet and greasy. The dough was a bit sour. Masse's recipe would have yielded better results, but I outsmarted myself.

My Bread
This was a bit misshapen. Was it slightly over-proofed? Probably: I baked the pizza first, when the dough was ready, so the bread had a bit longer to sit.

It tasted fine to me. But it was a bit sour for most people's taste, I think: probably a soaker for the 8-grain mixture would have worked better, instead of adding 200g of sourdough overnight, to add ferment. I could have used more of the mixture too: this was merely 100g or so of the mixture, per loaf, and although you can taste it in the bread, double the amount would have shown up better.

Notes to Myself

Watch for further articles by Chef Christie Massé. She obviously likes to write, and knows a thing or two about bread (and pizza). To find out what she's writing about recently, try Crust's Facebook Page, that seems to be updated frequently.
My pizza dough was a bit sour -- surprise, surprise. I also put too much olive oil on the pan before making it, and it made the dough a bit soggy rather than crisp. I would make Massé's recipe or mine again, but next time I would slide it onto a hot stone rather than just press it onto a tray like Jim Lahey does.
The bread was a bit sour too: the fermented 8 grain mixture added quite a bit of sourness on top of what was already in the dough. But I liked it anyway. Next time I think I'll divide up the amount of starter between the 8-grain mixture and the dough. The idea of adding the 8-grain mixture at the very end of the bulk fermentation was iffy. I think I overworked the dough by kneading it in at the last minute like that. The bread turned out to be a bit flaccid.
Next time you make a bread like this, you can try putting 200g of 8-grain mixture into a soaker, which you can add during some of the turns of the bulk-fermentation stage of the dough.

50:30:20 Whole Wheat, Rye, and Red Fife loaf

2011-11-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

A 50:30:20 WW:Rye:Red Fife loaf

This is just a 30% Rye, since Red Fife is a type of wheat. For one of the loaves I didn't put any rice flour in the basket while proofing, and the crust was burnished like an old copper penny.

2 loaves, a penny, and some sourdough chocolate chip cookies

Loaf is kinda flat. Cookie is kinda fat.

Now Serving 7 Billion

Nobody knows for sure exactly how many people there are on this planet: after all, on the average there are four births and 2 deaths every second. So it's hard to keep track. But I just read a report that says we've passed the 7 billion mark, and the tally is still rising.

Back around the time I was born, there were about 3 billion people on the globe. The number has more than doubled today. By 2041, there will be 9 billion, and by 2081, 10 billion (if the projections hold).

We don't really know the carrying capacity of the earth's agriculture for human sustenence. Malthus showed that population is limited to subsistence; and it seems he was right at least in his prediction that population will increase so long as we have an increase in subsistence. Since the latest so-called "green revolution", we've had that increase in subsistence, and likewise the increase in population.

The question I wanted to ask here: "How are we going to feed all these people?" You frequently hear that it is not that we don't have enough food to go around, it is just that we are not very good at distribution that causes all the famine in the world. So is this true, or not?

Let's just look at wheat production and see where we are at.

I regularly bake 2 loaves from 1000g of wheat. And this could, if I was careful, last me about a week. It frequently doesn't because I like to bake, I like to experiment, and I give some loaves away. But let's say each of us could more or less make due with a minimum of 1000g of wheat flour every week. The details here are not going to be exact, of course. I once baked a loaf with 450g of whole wheat berries that only gave me 428g of flour. So there may be about a 6% loss of weight if you grind the grain into flour. But let's see what happens with the numbers anyway.

Let's say that everyone needs 2 loaves/week minimum, and that's 1000g of flour.
That's 52,000g per person each year.

Now multiply that by 7 billion (7,000,000,000).
You get 364,000 billion grams (364,000,000,000,000g).
Or 364 million metric tons.

Now in 2009, the world produced 684.6 million metric tons of wheat. Which seems like a lot more than what we minimally need. But not so much more if you crank up the population numbers to 10 billion, without increasing the yields somewhat. Not to mention, making distribution less of a problem.

We regularly feed a lot of this grain to our animals, instead of eating it directly. Is this appropriate use of the grain?

One blogger took it upon himself to continue counting the burgers that McDonalds has stopped counting. The tally is not updated often, and the blogger seems to have grown bored by the attempt, stopping at 247 billion (burger patties) served. Total.

Without doing the math, I frankly don't think we can all eat a burger patty every day.

Sourdough Cookies
I used my sourdough discard to make some sourdough cookies. With all the starving people in the world, how can I throw away perfectly good sourdough? Doesn't seem right.

This recipe comes from Cultures For Health. I don't know much about them yet, but I like what I see so far. Their chocolate chip recipe is here.

I wasn't careful with the amount of starter I used, it wasn't a full cup, it was just 200g. So my cookies are a bit fat. They baked 15 minutes, and probably could have used a few more minutes, some of them.

Notes to Myself

Recently there has been a lot of people saying "I am one of the 1% haves, and 99% of the world are have-nots. Tax me!", etc.

Ask yourself: What makes you think you deserve this bread you've made? It's just pure luck, pure random dumb luck, that you are able to feed yourself.

When you eat it, think of the starving people in the world that was, the world that is, and the world to come.

Everyday Breads: 30% Rye, 100% Red Fife

2011-11-02T06:37:00.000-07:00

Everyday Breads: 30% Rye; 100% Red Fife Sourdough

I baked some more bread. Big deal. Big fat deal.

One dough (2 loaves) was 30% Rye with the rest Whole Wheat. The other dough was 100% Red Fife flour (except for the 200g of whole wheat starter). Both loaves were at 75% hydration. The Red Fife loaf really felt gritty at first, and the gluten kept tearing. But later on, after I added the salt and gave it a few turns, it started to silken a bit. But it was always much tighter than the partial-rye dough. The Red Fife smells really unique when you are turning it by hand. Fresh, nutty -- you know, the usual, when you have newly cracked wheat oils.

L: 2 misshapen 30% Rye loaves R: 2 100% Red Fife loaves

Results
Both loaves turned out okay, but I was tired and they may have been slightly overproofed and slopped a bit upon going into the Dutch Ovens. They are not beautiful to look at.

The Red Fife loaf stales a lot more quickly. And the crust is much tougher. Nice as a novelty, nevertheless I happen to like the taste of the partial rye loaf more. Not bad toasted with some Montfort Goat cheese and a fresh Honey Crisp Apple.

Let's Move On
Here is an experiment with what to do with sourdough that would otherwise be discarded. I meant to make a sort of sweet-n-sour bar. The intention was to have a cookie-like crust, and then layers of granola-ey stuff, and top it with a teensy bit of icing. I just laid layers of stuff and baked it, no recipe. Obviously just making it up as I go along. Which can be a fun way to spend some time in the kitchen when no one is looking.

Butter a 9x9 ovenproof pan

Sourdough. We're dealing with about 200g of 100% stuff here. Discards, but not real old.

Add some ww flour. About 150g. No more water though.

Yeah, it's pretty dry.

Just a hard ball of gunk.

Pressing it down into the buttered pan

Didn't I add salt? Okay, add some salt.

Trail mix. With dried cranberries. Later you'll learn that they are the best part.

Coconut.

Cocoa. The real deal, not that sugared stuff.

What's that? Cracked wheat I think.

Now I'm mixing some eggs.

A bit of honey. Looks like about a tsp.

More sourdough?

Yeah, its sourdough

More cracked wheat.

Looks like Turbinado Brown sugar. Heaping tsp.

Just pour it on

Oatmeal. Okay, it was an afterthought, but who's gonna notice?

Bake that stuff. Maybe 400 degrees F for 20 minutes.

Some ingredients for icing: butter, some icing sugar

and enough vanilla to make it work.

Looks like icing.

Stuff should be baked

If you were in less of a hurry, you'd let it cool before trying to ice the thing.

Results
Meh. No doubt others could improve on this. I ate it, and a couple of others did too, but I got no raves about it. Mostly no one noticed.

Just a typical bar

Ordinary looking

Sweet and Sour! Geez, not what you'd expect.

Notes to Myself

Try a Red Fife and Rye loaf together. Might keep a bit better.
The bottom layer of the bar needs something to make it more shortbread-like. A bit of sugar, no doubt. You could add an egg to it if it isn't moist enough to hold together.
Wait until the baked bars cool before icing, or suffer the consequences of the icing looking not like icing.

Halloween Sweet Potato Bread

2011-10-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

Halloween Sweet Potato Bread

A Tartine 100% Whole Wheat Bread or Integrale with some sweet potatoes for a Halloween colour treat.

The Sweet potatoes are roasted in the oven in foil for 90 minutes at 400 degrees F

267g of one sweet potato are mixed with the water for hydration

I started with 70+5% hydration, but I ended up adding more because the dough required it.

Half of the yam is broken up in the water

mixed with dough, you get flecks of orange

I added the other half of the sweet potato too, but left it in rough chunks

Chunks are added after the salt and another turn.

Squooshed in and then turned

One of the loaves had some paprika in the rice flour that lined the banneton -- to end up in the crust

Proofed loaves

The 2 Sweet Potato Loaves in the forefront; some everyday Integrale loaves behind it.

This bread is 80% hydrated, but some of that hydration comes from the sweet potato itself. Then chunks of sweet potato are added for extra colour and sweet flavour.

Results
It is a bit strange, but this bread actually tastes quite good, toasted with blue cheese.

Notes to Myself

Happy Halloween

Inte-holy-grale 100% Whole Wheat Bread

2011-10-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

Another Everyday Bread

My bread of choice lately. This is just another 100% Whole Wheat Bread, the so-called Integrale or "Holy Grail" of Tartine Bread.

Made with my 100% Whole Wheat Wild Starter Culture, Whole Wheat flour, some sea-salt from Portugal, and water from our twice-filtered sandpoint.

a little bit of flax meal and rice flour on the crust

Simple and elegant. Lots of flavour, tons of sustenance.

A Variation of the Tartine Pizza
I tried again to make a pizza with the Tartine Country Bread dough, but I made a mistake and proofed it. In re-reading the recipe from the recipe book, I discovered that the pizza dough is not proofed, but the pizza is made just after the bulk fermentation stage, at the time of dividing the dough. And only 400g of the dough is used, i.e. just a little over 1/3. So once again my pizza was too airy, too doughy. I made one for me and one for my wife, and mine fell apart when transferring it to the stone. Tasted good anyway.

I made it with some hard peccorino goat cheese, and some spinach. I used spinach instead of nettle, and the goat cheese instead of the cheese called for in the original Tartine Pizza recipe. Also added some mushrooms, some tofu-pepperoni.

All that was left of the pizza after charging up the old camera

Just at the moment when I was putting the pizza together, my camera died. The focus is shot. I suspect it is because dough got into the mechanism. I have moved back to an inconvenient older, digital camera I have hanging around, but I am disappointed with the results. And transferring the pictures to the computer is now inconvenient and takes too long.

Because of the camera situation I may be at an end to blogging about my bread. Not that anyone cares. I'm just doing this for fun, and when it ceases to be fun, I'll just stop.

Notes to Myself

You can quit blogging any time. Maybe channel your energy into something more meaningful.
The Tartine Pizza isn't from proofed dough, just bulk-fermented dough.
Make sure that there is lots of flour on it and on your hands before trying to put it on the peel or transfer it.

Everyday Breads

2011-10-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

Everyday breads

The last time I baked, I made about 6 or 7 loaves in one day. The details are a bit fuzzy now: I should have written it all down earlier, but here's what I remember.

1. Some millet bread
I added some millet flour (25%) to a whole wheat loaf made with Tartine methods and ended up with some very dense bread.

This actually was a boon, since my wife has been complaining that her jelly will not stay on the breads with the huge irregular holes. Honey also passes through when that other bread is toasted, and the honey warms enough to flow. So this millet bread turned out pretty well. I can only eat 1-2 slices at a time though, it is so filling.

I cracked into the first loaf while it was still warm.

2. SuperSourdough Bread

This started with an experiment with pizza, of all things. I had some old spent sourdough starter. Not overly old, but past its peak: Tartine-style breads call for young, vibrant wild yeast cultures, and this was about 8-10 hours past that peak. Still, I was once again tired of just tossing out my discards, and I decided to see if I could make a pizza with this one. I made some dough with my already-mixed Tartine flour (a 50:50 mix of whole wheat and all-purpose that in the Tartine Recipes is used for starter. I no longer use this flour anymore for my wild yeast starter, opting instead to keep just one starter going, and since my interest is whole grains, my wild yeast culture is a 100% whole wheat starter at 100% hydration, with which I am now baking all my bread. Long story short: all this mixed flour was just sitting there no longer being used). I mixed all of the sourdough (not just 20% of the dough, so it was probably 40-45% of the final dough), and I let it sit before adding the salt, and maybe even gave it a turn or two. But then: I forgot about it until the evening. So it had an extra long bulk ferment, at room temperature, maybe 12-14 hours.

I made a pizza with half of the dough and it turned out okay, but it was very sour tasting. I didn't toss the rest of the dough out, though. I refrigerated it, and again forgot about it for a day or two. Suddenly, there it was, and I could now toss it out or do something with it. I decided to bake it into a bread, knowing that it would probably turn out super-sour and even inedible, but something that perhaps the backyard chickens would eat and turn into eggs.

The sour dough was only out of the fridge long enough to shape and preheat the oven, so it was still quite cold when I put it into the dutch oven. At the very last moment, I also decided to drop on top of it a bit of fermented millet that I had been keeping in the fridge, to use it up. It too was past its prime, and too sour for ordinary use. But if I was just feeding this to the chickens, why not put it on top?

the dough proofing

last minute idea was to add some refrigerated fermented millet on top of the proofed loaf when it hit the oven

fresh from oven, still in dutch oven

millet crust of a sour bread

looks crunchy: but it isn't

sour sour sour sour sour

can't see where the millet begins

weird loaf: different but not inedible

This dough even smelled sour when it was baking. The finished loaf had a sour scent to it, and it looked awfully strange, with the millet on top giving it a very odd textured crust.

But wonder of wonders: the crust is not crunchy, it is soft. And the texture of the loaves is gentle. Yes, it is sour tasting, but the bread is not inedible. I actually quite enjoy it for a change of taste. And when you slice into it, you can't really see where the wheat dough ends, and the fermented millet begins. A very odd loaf, I admit, but quite a fun experiment.

The chickens got none of it.

2. Olive Bread
One of my co-workers was complaining that I hadn't made any olive bread recently, so I made up a sourdough bread with 85% whole wheat and 15% all purpose wheat flours. To this I just dumped in some drained Kalamata Olives that we had in the fridge (about 358ml). So it wasn't the official Tartine Olive bread.

two different doughs bulk fermenting: olive is on the right

after dividing and baking: the olive loaves

the olive loaf I tried to give away and ended up cutting into myself: lucky to get this crumb shot

more holes than olives

I gave one loaf away to my yoga instructor and her spouse, and was going to give another one to my coworker. But she wasn't working on the day I arrived with the loaf, and wouldn't be back for a couple of days. I decided to slice into it myself and share it with whoever else happened to want to try some. Very few of my coworkers even bothered to try it.

That's the thing, when I work with so many girls who are watching their figures and believe that not eating bread will help. I can't give the stuff away.

I dragged the loaf home again, and my wife had a couple of slices. There was just a fraction of the loaf left when I dragged it to work one last time a couple of days later and gave it to the co-worker who had originally asked for it. She was grateful even for the tiny starting-to-stale crust that remained ("You mean I can take the whole thing? Are you sure?").

3. Whole Wheat with 15% Rye
This was baked for me. I figured I'd need a couple of loaves of this, to get me through a 3-day weekend of working 12 hour shifts. But this bread is so filling, I really only required the one loaf. Today, now that the weekend is over and I can sit down and write about the breads I baked, I sliced into the second of these loaves for the first time. And it will last until the bread I bake today is ready to eat tomorrow, easily.

And that's the thing about whole grains, that still have all the fibre intact: you don't get fat on this bread, because this bread satiates. Even with all the cheese and butter that I tend to use. And I believe it is because the sense of fulfillment lasts a long time. You don't feel hungry again after 20 minutes the way you do if you eat white bread. You don't get such a spike in insulin, a glucose rush in the bloodstream. It doesn't sit like a rock in your stomach, but you feel full longer. You won't want to gorge on this bread. But taste it, and you will want to eat it.

I try to tell my coworkers this, but some of them just don't get it. And why would they? They have no experience of it, because true whole grain bread is something that doesn't exist in the marketplace any more (unless you live within 10 minutes of an artisan baker, and lets face it, how many of us do? And so often even artisan bakers won't make truly 100% whole wheat bread without some bread flour. I've met with two different artisan bakers who told me "it is impossible to make bread without some all purpose or bread flour").

impossible bread

Furthermore, my bread is very suspicious looking to people who have never seen anything like it before. And the nurses I work with are taught by the hospital's Lords of Infection Control that All Bacteria are All Harmful and must be eradicated with sterile procedures, frequent hand-washing, alcohol-based chlorhexidine scrubs, etc. In the hospital we try to be careful but nevertheless superbugs are growing that are hyper-resistant to antibiotics. Bacteria are evolving immunity to our drugs far faster than any antibiotic medicines can be made to destroy them, and the so-called superbugs especially thrive in hospitals that fastidiously remove with powerful cleansers their less evolved competition.

Bill Bryson writes of bacteria in his book, "A Short History of Everything":

"Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day... In the same period, a human cell can just about manage a single division.

About once every million divisions, they produce a mutant. Usually this is bad luck for the mutant -- change is always risky for an organism -- but just occasionally the new bacterium is endowed with some accidental advantage, such as the ability to elude or shrug off an attack of antibiotics. With this ability to evolve rapidly goes another, even scarier advantage. Bacteria share information Any bacterium can take pieces of genetic code from any other."

All the cleaning and hand-washing (hand-wringing, more like) leads to one inescapable conclusion: we can't win against bacteria. Not now, not ever. So we might as well learn how to get along with it (them). In fact, we couldn't live a moment without some of them (Bryson again: "Microbes... supply the greater part of the planet's breathable oxygen..."). We only hear about the negative effects of some of them. Re-educating people about the positive benefits of some bacteria is sometimes difficult.

I tried to describe what was in my sourdough culture (wild yeast and lactobacilli bacteria) to a nurse that had recently graduated from nursing college. She wanted to know where my sourdough came from and I told her that I grew it myself from a mixture of water and flour, allowing it to ferment. I described the process, thinking she was fascinated by it, but I misread her interest. When she finally exhaled and told me that it sounded disgusting, I realized that her curiosity was similar to people who slow down at car-wrecks to survey the human wreckage.

This is the kind of uphill battle I fight when I try to describe to my coworkers what is in my bread and why I believe it is good for them, and even that it is safe for them to eat. My bread and the culture it is derived from is probiotic. This is living in concert with the bacteria that can't be eradicated. This is harmony with the unseen world around us. This is symbiosis with life that is nearer the source of the evolutionary tree than we are, life that is related to us and will support and sustain us if we do not neglect it.

My bigger fear is that I will bring home from the hospital some antiseptic, anti-bacterial cleanser on my hands and inadvertently destroy my sourdough culture that I have spent years developing.

Sandor Katz said it first and best in "Wild Fermentation":

"Your life and my life and everyone's lives and deaths are part of the endless biological cycle of life and death and fermentation. Wild fermentation is going on everywhere, always. Embrace it. Work with the material resources and life processes that are close at hand. As microorganisms work their transformative magic and you witness the miracles of fermentation, envision yourself as an agent for change, creating agitation, releasing bubbles of transformation into the social order. Use your fermented goodies to nourish your family and friends and allies. The life-affirming power of these basic foods contrasts sharply with the lifeless, industrially processed foods that fill supermarket shelves. Draw inspiration from the action of bacteria and yeast, and make your life a transformative process."

Amen to that, brother.


everyday breads

Notes to Myself

You can use older wild yeast starter if you don't mind a more sour loaf. I like it fine for a change once in a while.
Millet that has been boiled, cooled, fermented and refrigerated turns into a sort of porridge. Coating a loaf with this cold, damp porridge yields a rustic crust that is soft and sour.
100% Whole Wheat Bread is possible. Sourdough and frequent gentle folding during the bulk fermentation is key to developing the gluten.
Once in a while one likes to have a denser crumb, just to hold the jelly and honey.
Stay close to the source of life. Believe in the culture that you develop from ingredients close at hand to make your bread.

60% Rye with Coffee Hydration

2011-10-19T16:42:00.000-07:00

60% Rye 40% WW loaf made with coffee, malt, and boiled rye kernels

Just like it says.

It is a sourdough, made with a rye starter.

The liquid was mostly coffee: I asked for the darkest roast that the coffee shop had, and allowed it to cool to room temperature. To bring the hydration up to 60%, I added a bit of water. Another 100g of hydration in the form of 1/2 liquid malt, 1/2 water was added when I added the salt.

the starter

the coffee

cup of rye kernels, before boiling

some malt, some water

I wanted a dark, dense loaf, sort of vollkornlich.

I did fold it about 3 times, once after adding the salt, once to add the rye kernels, and then once more before dividing.

Dough went into a buttered tin and it was allowed to rise 5 hours. Just before putting into the oven, I painted the top with egg white and tossed a tiny bit of turbinado sugar on it. I scored it and baked it with steam.

Results
Not quite what I wanted. I wanted a rich, dark loaf that had lots of chew, some coffee-like bitterness, and tons of flavour. What I got -- what I often seem to get when I bake these denser ryes -- is a bread that is overly moist inside. The knife drags through. I keep wondering how bakers achieve a dark, dense crumb. Is it from extremely long bakes, at low temperatures? I want something like pumpernickel, but a bit less bitter. My crumb is not dark enough, too wet, not quite right.

This bread is only mildly coffee-flavoured.

Just before posting this, I see that Nils Schöner is experimenting with bread again. His "first attempt" at the Russian Black Borodinsky Bread is closer to what I am trying to do I think. But Nils is more careful than I am: he only published a tantalizing picture of a piece of bread. I assume that he feels he hasn't perfected his recipe, so he does not yet give it to us. I'll have to keep careful watch.

Meanwhile, having to look elsewhere for the recipe, I find The Fresh Loaf blogs have a forum for the Borodinsky bread, with several variations. One variation suggests a very high initial temperature, then a long bake at low temperatures. I'll have to look into this some more. In the meantime, I have a lot of 60% Coffee-flavoured rye loaf to get through. Perhaps some of it will end up as altus in another bread…

Notes to Myself

Look into the Borodinsky Bread to see if this is the sort of loaf you want.
The Turbinado sugar on top of the loaf turned it a rich, bittersweet dark brown, and that is sort of the taste I was going for throughout. Is it possible that the dough itself requires more sugar, or more roasted flavours?
Try boiling and then roasting the rye kernels. I have never heard of anyone malting rye kernels, but why not? Sprout them and then dry them and roast them, see what happens.
Once upon a time, this loaf would have been good enough for me. Now it isn't.

Horseradish Bread

2011-10-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

Horseradish Bread

In the News
The Canadian Federal Government is dismantling the Canadian Wheat Board. This will be good news for American farmers, who have long sought a level playing field against what has amounted to a giant Canadian prairie monopoly over grain markets and exports in western Canada.

The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) has been an integral part of Canadian grain farming since the 1920s, when smaller farmers banded together to sell their grain, pooling resources in order to get the best prices for their farm produce in what has always been a volatile market.

I admit to being quite ignorant of how the CWB was formed. I wish I knew more about the actual history, but the wiki article upon which I am dependent for information seems to be torn apart by recent strong opinion, negative and positive. I am feeling a great deal of ambivalence about the news of the demise of the CWB. I suspect that there has been a great deal of propaganda used on both sides of the issue, and whenever this is true, it becomes even more difficult to get the facts. I find it interesting that the wiki article both reflects my own ambivalence, and becomes the stage where ideas and conversation begin to take place in the world. There are battles going on behind the scenes, as lobbyists on both sides are trying to capture the support of the public. These days, the wiki article is where it all takes place. Have a look at the wiki's discussion page to get a taste of the arguments behind the scenes.

I know that the CWB has influenced delivery of grain in the western provinces but I am only vaguely aware of how it has coloured the whole history of agriculture in the prairies. And since the opening of the western provinces is the story of agriculture and the transportation of grain, the CWB has played an important part in the history of my country.

Certainly the CWB has socialist roots -- but Americans might be surprised to learn that it was originally organized with the help of an American. I believe the original mandate of the CWB was to protect the rights of the little farmer. By banding together, the many little voices made up a unified sound.

But times have changed.

Who benefits from the dismantling of the CWB? Who benefits from keeping the CWB?
There are today fewer and fewer little farmers. Larger farms have swallowed them up, and these large farms are no longer so much family farms as they are corporations. These huge operations think that they can do far better at marketing their grain, and they want to cut out the middleman.

Still, the CWB serves the entire farming community, from the smallest farmstead operation to the largest. They say they polled their community and learned that a small majority of farmers were still in favour of keeping the CWB in place. The Federal government has ignored the plebiscite, saying it is flawed (I haven't heard why; I might just as easily say that the last Federal election was flawed, without substantiating that statement). The Feds will go ahead with its plans to dismantle the CWB, with little more than a conservative ideology to guide their plans for the future marketing of grain.

Who will benefit from the dismantling of the CWB? Probably the larger farms -- the corporations. Most likely wheat traders who can capitalize on the volatility of the market. Certainly the American grain farmers. Who will not benefit is the smaller Canadian farms, the ones still in the hands of ordinary farming families. And absolutely not the end consumers of grain -- all of us -- who will end up paying higher prices for grain that will not be shipped as far nor as widely.

The dismantling of the CWB ends an era of Canadian wheat primacy in the world's markets. Now it will be more difficult for foreign markets to buy our grain, and the price of the end product will reflect that. The costs will be handed down to the consumer. And I predict that very little more will end up in the pockets of the smaller farmers.

It might be the right decision, but the way the federal government is doing it is wrong. The farmers -- and damn it, the consumers too, since taxpayers have helped pay for the CWB! -- should have a say in the matter.

I wish I knew more facts. But like everything else, decisions are made for us by others that we elect, and elected officials are making those decisions, as anyone would, with insufficient data. They are instead guided by intuition that is supported by ideologies and wishful thinking. This leaves a lot of room for strong interests -- the big money -- to step in and take over the infrastructures that are being dismantled. And they won't ultimately do it for the good of the consumer or to help out the small farmer. They will do it for profit, at the cost of all else.

How this all will play out in the future is anyone's guess. My bet is, it will ultimately affect the bread I can bake in my own kitchen.

Today's Bread
Here is a variation of Tartine Rye bread (17% rye, but with 83% ww), to which I have added a block of sharp cheddar cheese and some mashed horseradish.

I thought of making the bread with horseradish the other day, when the garden tomato bread used mashed ginger. That's when I began to wonder if I could make a bread with horseradish -- a sharp taste that I love but don't eat much because I don't eat roast beef, and the two are generally served together.

Of course, you can google anything now and find that someone else has already come up with the idea. Here is a loaf from Choosy Beggars blog.

The Choosy Beggars' loaf had shredded horseradish root, and although I looked for the root in the vegetable section of our two local supermarkets, there was none to be found. I had to use the processed horseradish, which contains a bit of vinegar and some preservative. Sigh. I used 15% of the horseradish in my sourdough loaf, and I think that is somewhat less than Choosy Beggars used. They used a cup of fresh, mine was about 1/4 cup of processed.

Instead of using regular cheddar, I've used a sharp cheddar: I thought that it probably had enough flavour to carry the bread on its own, but the horseradish is going to dominate this bread now, I'm sure. The sharp cheddar can't be shredded, it is far too moist for that, so I've just cut it into chunks. Just before I put it into the oven, my wife said, "you know that cheese that you put into the dough? Well, it doesn't melt well. It just turns granular when melted. All the oil oozes from it, and it turns gritty."

Oh well. Too late now.

These loaves smelled great when baking. The scent is strongly horseradish, of course.

The bread was the first ever to stick to the cast iron Dutch ovens. So I suspected, even before cutting into it, that my wife is right. This bread has a lot of cheesy oil on the bottom of the loaf, where it has seeped, then encrusted.

Results
The scent of horseradish is there, but there isn't enough horseradish taste. The vinegar in the processed horseradish root has made it too sour. I would really like to try this bread again with the real root. I'll watch for it in the stores, and when it becomes available, I'll make this again.

Every so often one gets a hint of cheese, but perhaps the way the Choosy Beggars folded their loaves would bring more cheese taste to every bite.

The cheese did granulate but it still held its spot in the loaf. My wife seemed to think that the holes in the loaf around the cheese were due to the oil seeping from the cheese, but I'm not sure. There are plenty of Tartine-style holes due to the expansion of the gases around the yeast.

Notes to Myself

If you have to make this again with the processed horseradish with vinegar, use some more malt or honey or molasses to counteract the sour notes. And use more horseradish! I would double it, to 300g, or even more.
Use a less expensive cheddar cheese that will hold up to melting: an old orange cheddar of lower quality would work okay here.
Use grated horseradish root, the real deal, and why not use a cupful like Choosy Beggars did?
What other roots could be similarly used? I have heard of people eating poke root, but to me that just seems dangerous because of its mutagenic properties. But what about beetroot? Or parsnips? Jerusalem Artichokes probably won't work. But what about returning to ginger?

Three Starter 20% Rye bread

2011-10-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

20% Rye bread with cracked wheat and rye flakes

A wet morning. I baked this bread before anyone else in the house was awake except me and the nocturnal cat, who came in out of the rain for some breakfast. Even the dog chose to sleep in on such a dark, damp morning.

This was an experimental bread. It was probably too wet for me to work with.

I've been looking for malt to toss in a bread for some time, and finally found this product.
I can make my own malt by sprouting grains, but I don't get anything like this syrup.

200g Rye Flour
800g WW Flour
750g+50g Water
200g 100% WW Starter @ 100% hydration
200g Rye Flakes Starter @ 100% hydration
200g Cracked Wheat Starter @ 100% hydration
50g liquid Barley Malt
20g salt

If you add up all the water (and include the malt in the total), this has 1000g of hydration. But if you add all the flour and all the rye flakes and cracked wheat, this has 1100g of grains. So the hydration is about 91%. No wonder it felt so sloppy!

Method
The bread was built as an ordinary Tartine bread. But there were differences: I used 20% Rye Flour; I used 3 starters, each of 200g; so I had less time to turn the dough. And I was adding ingredients you won't see in a Tartine loaf. Like liquid malt. This was something I found recently and decided to try. It is rather like molasses in consistency, perhaps not so thick, and similarly sweet but without such a bitter kick to it.

The three starters were built on Wednesday night before bed. They each had 24 hours to mature. That was more time than any of them required, so each was a bit old and sour. One was made with whole wheat and water, another with rye flakes and water, and the last with cracked wheat and water. WIth 3 different starters, I didn't expect the dough to sit as long as an ordinary Tartine style bread. The cracked wheat and rye flake starters were quite mushy, and if I made this again I would try somewhat less than a 100% hydration for them.

Rye Flakes and Cracked Wheat Starters

The malt is like molasses or chocolate syrup in consistency

adding the salt and ... more water??!

so far, so good

Adding the rye flakes ... and more hydration

Adding the cracked wheat... and even more hydration.

Amorphous blob prior to dividing and forming

After retarding in fridge 6 hours

I autolysed the flours, water, and ww starter prior to adding the salt. The salt was added at the 30 minute mark with the malt and 50g of water, the Rye Flakes Starter was added 30 minutes later (at the first turn), and the Cracked Wheat Starter was added 30 minutes later (at the second turn). After 30 more minutes, I divided the dough, gave a short bench rest, did the best job I could, forming boules with sloppy glop, and then I placed the dough into baskets to retard overnight (six hours).

The dough had gotten a bit puffier in the fridge. I was amazed I got these sloppy doughs into the hot Dutch Ovens without mishap. The knife dragged a bit when I scored them. The tall one was baked for 40 minutes, the short one was baked for 45.

They came out singing.

La la!

Results
I'm happy enough with this bread, which turned out better than I'd hoped. In terms of looks, the bread is acceptable. But the taste is somewhat lacklustre. The reason, I think, is that it just hasn't had enough time to ferment at room temperature. Yes, I am using three starters, and yes, that makes it somewhat more sour than my usual wild yeast breads. That in itself doesn't bother me. I like a more sour loaf once in a while.

a bit of soft cheese for brunch

My wife likes the texture of this bread. It is somewhat soft, and very moist. But I feel the taste lacks dimension. It is not a full bodied taste. It is missing grace-notes, or overtones. I don't think that the taste you come to expect can be achieved by increasing the amount of starter you add. That special taste occurs only if you add more time for the flours to be fully transformed by the yeast in the starter.

There are no short-cuts.

Notes to Myself

Despite the gooeyness of the dough, these breads turned out pretty nice, I think.
If you want a more traditional-feeling dough, try backing the original hydration off to 70%, and still add 5% of water with the salt. Try backing off the hydration of the various starters to 50-60%. Try a dryish soaker instead of fermenting the cracked wheat, to keep it from becoming too mushy.
I wonder if this would have tasted better with not as much hydration?

Tomatillo Salsa Verde Bread

2011-10-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

Tomatillo Salsa Verde Bread

Since the success of my recent sourdough garden tomato breads (50% ww version here and 100% ww version here) I have been curious about whether a Salsa Bread is possible. Today I dumped some of our home-made Tomatillo Salsa Verde into some whole wheat sourdough bread dough to see what would happen.

Tomatillos
A lot of people don't like tomatillos in their garden, because they are slightly opportunistic, and keep coming up even if you don't replant them. And a lot of people don't know what to do with them. Unlike tomatoes, they require a bit more work (you have to peel them from their outer, paper-lantern husk), they have quite a different texture (waxy on the outside, sort of soft spongey on the inside -- they remind me of bread, in a way), and they are not as versatile as tomatoes in recipes.

Linda of Tree and Twig blog has recently shared a tomatillo salad recipe that looks good, and I will try soon. But simply Everyone has a tomatillo salsa recipe, and tomatillos fulfill a big niche in our own salsa, a Salsa Verde. We've been making a Salsa Verde with tomatillos for several years now, and every year it is a bit different because the recipe is just the taking off point. In effect, you use what you have.

The Tomatillo Salsa Verde Recipe With Which We Start:

5 1/2 c chopped tomatillos, about 900g/2pounds
1 c chopped onions
1 c chopped hot peppers
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp finely chopped cilantro
2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1 c white vinegar
1/4 c lime juice

We use an onion chopper for our onions, and it works well for the tomatillos too, so once they are husked and washed, this goes fairly quickly. Everything is combined in a big saucepan, it is brought to a boil, stirring frequently, and it is allowed to boil down to the desired consistency. We boil about 10-20 minutes. Then the jars are canned/preserved as usual.

But it is hard to say precisely how much of any ingredient we are actually using. Jazz musicians have been heard to say "good enough for jazz!" when they hit a note that to our ears might seem a bit "off" -- but as Thelonius Monk said, "There are no wrong notes in jazz." Any note can be used, incorporated, mistakes are not mistakes but serendipitous sounds that can lead to incredible improvisations. Well, in the same way, we start with a recipe but add various ingredients and say, "Good enough for salsa!" (The jazz reference may be confusing to those who dance salsa or play salsa music. The jazz reference was a metaphor. When I say "good enough for salsa", I am not disparaging salsa music or dance, just as I didn't intend to slight jazz. But I am referring to the literal salsa, i.e. the sauce made from a recipe, not salsa the dance or salsa the music, which may have specific rhythms that cannot be changed and have it remain salsa)

This year I added about a third again more tomatillos to our salsa because we simply had to use them up or waste them. And why would anyone want to waste them? You can't compost them or your whole garden would be tomatillos. I don't think the seeds are destroyed by anything, not even the high heat of compost or even passing through a chicken's stomach. And if you add more tomatillos, you must add more onions, more hot peppers, more garlic, more vinegar, etc. etc. This year, the limiting factor was lime juice. My wife tasted the boiled down ingredients and pronounced it could have used more.

The Bread
The jar of tomatillo salsa that I opened had about 463g of material in it. I didn't measure the ratio of juice:matter that is, but considered the whole thing "hydration". To this, I added 337g of water to bring the total to 80%. However, I did separate the solids and used juice and water initially for the first mixing. But I had to add the solids to get it all moist enough to mix together.

Tomatillo Salsa Verde and a bit of water added to dough

The Salsa Verde chunks are part of the hydration

Salt added after autolyse

expanstion of dough during proof

Wicker design

Another 5% water was added with the salt after a short autolyse to bring the total wetness to 85%.

The dough was folded and turned Q30min for 4 hours with wet hands and a wet scraper. Especially in the early stages, this dough had a propensity to tear rather than stretch. I was tempted to add more water, but didn't (except for the water that was on my hands). After 4 turns, though, it began to get a bit more flexible. It never did get silky, however. I'm thinking that the vinegar in the fluids didn't sit too well with the yeast, or it didn't give the gluten what it required to make nice long strands.

Results
The bread turned out quite all right, except for a problem I had with the dough sticking to the basket when I inverted it onto the peel, prior to scoring and sliding it into the oven. As usual, I'm not using the right baskets, I'm still using inexpensive wicker. This time I assumed my dough was not so sloppy that I required a cloth liner. I was wrong. But even though one of the loaves is terribly misshapen, it is still bread.

But the taste is unusual. There is something unexpected about it, as if my taste-buds, encountering salsa, were wanting corn rather than wheat. Perhaps the salsa idea would go better with an Anadama type of loaf. The scent is rather strong and vinegary and the hot peppers dominate the taste.

It does taste okay toasted with a bit of herbed soft cheese.

While I do not think that this bread is really wonderful, my wife liked it, and a co-worker who tried it liked it well enough.

I gave the better loaf to a friend to try. Perhaps I should give them an ESAS-like subjective scale to rate the various breads I'm giving them.

Notes to Myself

Try an Anadama loaf with some salsa, the next time you are compelled to add salsa to a bread dough.
Try pouring off the liquid and using it sparingly. You won't need much. Use water instead, and add the salsa matter on the second turn. At that time, you can add a bit more of the juice. Let the gluten develop first.

Whole Wheat Integrale with Carmelized Onion

2011-10-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

Whole Wheat Integrale with Carmelized Onion

I work as a nurse on the palliative care unit of a nearby tertiary care hospital. At the end of shift a short while ago a patient asked me what I would be doing on my day off.

I told her that I was going home to bake some bread. "I've been baking my own sourdough bread for some time now," I told her with a shrug.

She smiled and nodded gravely, as if it all made perfect sense now.

"Ah," she said. "the staff of life."

This woman is no longer with us. But I remain haunted by what she said.

Perhaps it really is this simple: why I am so obsessed with baking bread. All day long I work with death, I hold the hands of the dying, my arms are around those who are grieving. When I come home, I breathe deeply, and let it all slip away: thoughts of mortality, fleeting time, the empty question-mark of death, and the endless chasm of loneliness left in the wake of love forever more unrequited -- I surrender it all.

I plunge my hands into the mystery of basic ingredients: grains, water, salt: the lower number elements of the periodic table. Something here is alive, something here is transformed anew, something here is resurrected. I awaken again to the mystery of life.

Caramelized Onions
One of my coworkers made some wraps with caramelized onions for a Thanksgiving potluck the other day, and it gave me the idea to try them in a bread. The Tartine Bread book talks a little bit about caramelizing onions for a brioche hamburger bun dough. I just wanted to add them to my everyday Tartine Integrale bread. I had a couple of medium-large onions, but one of them had a significant bad spot, so I ended up with a mere 1 1/2 onions, diced.

They were caramelized over med-low heat in olive oil for about an hour or more, and then I cooled them between some paper-towels for 30 minutes before adding them to the 80% hdrated Tartine 100% whole wheat integrale dough. I also added a quarter cup each of pumpkin and sunflower seeds. It was turned q30min for 4 hours, then I plunked it in a basket to proof for a couple of hours.

This was the first time I've used my new Baking stone. It's been a long time since I used a stone, and I had the oven too hot. I had preheated to 500 degrees F and forgot to turn it down for the actual baking. And the one loaf that I did remember to turn it to 450 degrees F, was still a bit overdone at 40 minutes.

Results
So my crust is a little burnt. And the loaves are a bit misshapen.

C'est le vie.

Actually, even the darkest bread tastes quite all right. Maybe it is the onions, or the oil they were caramelized in, combining with the dough: perhaps thereby the Maillard reaction is intensified. The roasted nature of the onions and grains imparts more flavour and scent. Not a bad bread, for all that. I will eat the darker loaf, and give the other one to my friends.

Take it and eat: the staff of life.

Notes to Myself

Try a temperature of 425 degrees F for the same amount of time and see if the loaf improves. Alternatively, you could pull the bread out of the oven after 35 minutes.
More steam might be required. I have been using a hot pan with a glass full of water at the moment the bread is introduced to the oven, but perhaps spritzing water would be a good idea for the first 10-12 minutes too, to keep things very moist. Others use water-soaked towels in the pan, and I might try that once too (if my wife doesn't mind me destroying yet another towel)
Longer proofing for more airy crust. This is quite all right the way it is, though.

Wild Yeast Garden Tomato Integral Bread

2011-10-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

100% Whole Wheat Sourdough Garden Tomato Bread

Fast on the heels of the last Garden Tomato Bread, and while I was working all weekend and alone in the house over Thanksgiving, I was free to make a mess in the kitchen and use what limited time I had even when working 3x 12 hour shifts in a row to see if I could make a 100% Whole Wheat Garden Tomato Bread with my wild yeast.

It was serendipitous. At the last minute (late on Saturday), the nurses on our floor of the hospital decided to have a pot-luck on Sunday, and I was able to bake this bread on Sunday morning before heading off to work. Thank goodness I had started making this bread on Friday night, because it takes about 3 days to make.

It meant a rather different schedule for the bread, lots of 12-14 hour retarding of the dough in odd places (even violating some of of Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread rules), but nevertheless it made for some tasty bread.

This time I made a typical Tartine-style bread, only I used my 100% whole wheat starter, and 100% whole wheat flour only (what Chad Robertson describes as an Integral). There is no all purpose or bread flour in this bread. I have hydrated it at 80%+ (75% to mix it up, with 5% extra to add the salt, paste, ginger, and seeds as before, plus whatever hydration the tomatoes bring), This time I used only 3 tomatoes. I didn't squish the tomatoes down, so the tomato juice didn't get spread around quite as much as the last garden tomato bread I made.

The schedule:
Friday night, after work, @2030: refresh the sourdough, ensuring that you will have 200g of it ready to use in the morning (about 8 hours for this sourdough build). Measure out the ingredients for the morning, since you'll be too pressed for time and sleep-groggy to do it properly in the morning. Take a flashlight to the garden to collect the tomatoes and the herbs, since it is now dark when you leave and dark when you get home. This time get a handful of nasturtiums too.

Saturday morning, before work @0500: mix the dough, giving it a 20 minute autolyse before adding the salt, paste, ginger, and seeds. Turn it once 20 minutes later, then cover it and put it in the refrigerator to retard. Forget it for 14 hours.

Saturday night @2030: get home from work, take the dough out of the fridge, let it rest a couple of hours to bring it to room temperature, then divide it and shape it and set it in baskets. Put the covered baskets back into the fridge overnight, and fall asleep because you'll be getting up early.

Sunday morning: wake at @0450 and bake the bread: take the dough from the fridge, preheat the oven 20 minutes, and bake it 40 minutes. Jump in the shower and then go, driving to work with a cooling loaf filling the car with fresh-baked bread scent.

Results
This was a good bread. The crumb was mostly wide-crumbed, as a Tartine loaf is, but the very centre of the loaf had a couple of spots that were still a tiny bit moist. I think that it could have used another 5-10 minutes of baking, but the crust was a gorgeous tawny, light-brown colour. Overall, I was very pleased with this bread.

Few others appreciated it as much as I did. As far as potlucks go, there was little else for me to eat, as I am a vegetarian: the store-bought pizzas, the home-made quiches and wraps all had meat or seafood on them. So I ate my bread and some salads. But few others ate my bread, from what I could tell. I came home with half a loaf.

You can taste the peppery flavour of the nasturtiums. I love it.

Notes to Myself

I think that squeezing the tomatoes to get the hydration up is a better idea than using water and simply adding chunks of tomato. It spreads the tomatoey flavour around more. Next time I will again press the tomatoes through a sieve to get the liquid separate, rather than using (so much) water.
I have been using fine spelt flour for the lining of the proving baskets, and this seems to work as nicely as rice flour.
The double retarding of the dough worked fine, even though Robertson says that the dough requires a long room-temperature bulk fermentation. The final dough didn't seem overproofed to me. But probably it would have been a bit better if I had been able to bring it to room temperature a tiny bit longer than 20 minutes. Say, an hour?
Most people other than me prefer a bit of all-purpose or bread flour in their bread. I love whole wheat, whole grain, best, and will continue to bake to ensure I get it. Just look at all the vitamins and minerals and fiber and oil you lose when you use a more processed flour! And don't forget, you get less exorphins...