Farine

Crazy for Bread

The Grain Gathering 2014: Whole Grains Galore

Here are a few more images gleaned during the Gathering…

Wood-fired Pretzels with Jeffrey Hamelman from King Arthur Flour



Wood-fired bagels with Mark Doxtader from Tastebud Farm



Flatbreads from the Tandoor oven with Frank Milnard from Wood Stone Corporation

Cookies with Renee Bourgault from BreadFarm

Four Wheats, Four Miches and Four Madeleines with Jonathan Bethony from The Bread Lab and Dawn Woodward from Evelyn’s Crackers

Quesadillas from Patty Pan Cooperative



Breads in Braids with Andrew Melzer



Related posts

The Grain Gathering 2014: Pizza Porn

I can’t decide what I like best about wood-fired pizzas: the chewiness of the crust, the layer of melted cheese cushioning each bite, the flavor-imbued toppings, the caramelized edges…

…but I know that Mark Doxtader, owner of Tastebud Farm near Portland, Oregon and master pizza baker at last week’s Grain Gathering, hit all the boxes on my list with whatever pizza came out of his traveling wood-fired oven (not that I actually tasted them all, there were so many different ones that I don’t think anybody could have, but I breathed in their fragrance and I feasted on their rugged good looks and I got a pretty good idea of what they tasted like).

A former farmer (which is probably why the toppings are so fresh, diverse and creative), Mark is rumored to be planning a restaurant. For now though, you can find him, his pizzas and his bagels at the Portland Farmers Market on Saturdays and you’d better believe that when we have an opportunity to go back to Portland, I will try and make sure we hit that market.

I took a few pictures and I was going to post only those but when I saw the luscious ones my friend Gerry Betz took, I got such a bad case of the drool that I asked for permission to use his as well. Gerry is one half of the team of bakers at Tree-Top Baking in Clinton, Washington, and a talented photographer. Consider yourself warned, you are entering browse-at-your-own-risk territory! Thank you, Gerry!











I forgot to ask Mark what percentage of whole wheat he put in his dough but I am pretty sure it was substantial as the flavor of the crust was deep and complex. I have asked for the formula and I’ll post it if/when I get it. Meanwhile, enjoy!

Related posts

The Grain Gathering 2014: Wood-Fired Artisan Bread with Richard Miscovich

Richard Miscovich is the author of From the Wood-Fired Oven: New and Traditional Techniques for Cooking and Baking with Fire, a book you definitely want to check out if you haven’t read it yet, even if you don’t have access to a WFO (as is my case). WFO owners will love to find out how to make optimal use of their oven’s heat cycle and serious home bakers (or anyone wishing to bake bread at home) will treasure the wealth of information it offers on mixing, fermenting, dividing, proofing, etc. I like it that the book is never dogmatic and that the reader feels Richard’s presence every step of the way. In the fall of 2011, I had the privilege to attend a BBGA class he taught at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island (where he is an associate professor at the College of the Culinary Arts) and I remember being awed both by his teaching and by his baking. Needless to say, when I discovered he would be doing both at the Grain Gathering, I made a beeline for his workshop (although I unfortunately had to leave smack in the middle to attend a talk on natural leavening). The linearity of Time is indeed the scourge of the human condition, isn’t it?



I love to watch professionals score their proofed loaves. It always reminds me of dancing. The movement starts before the lame (or blade) even touches the dough. As Richard explains in his book, “Ideally, the motion is continuous, with the moving blade cutting neatly through the dough and continuing on its trajectory.” Another baker I know phrased it differently but the idea is the same: “The lame has to hit the ground running!”

 

The bread was 40% whole wheat. As you can see from the images below, it turned out beautifully even though it started over-proofing a bit out in the warm air: if you let your dough over-ferment, the yeast uses up all the sugar and there will be no caramelization. So the proofing baskets had to be carried back all the way through the orchards to the retarder in the lab and brought back out again when the oven reached the right temperature. Fermentation does go more quickly with whole grain (the bread was 40% whole wheat), a wet dough (hydration was at 82-85%) and warmer temperatures.

Richard uses a garden mister to steam his oven. Someone asked how much steam to use. The answer: “You know there is enough steam when you can no longer keep your hand inside the oven to add more!” It is important to bake in a humid environment because the bread expands more, the score marks open more fully and you get a really good color with shine. If you bake at home and don’t have a wood-fired oven, Richard recommends using a cast-iron combo cooker or to bake on a hearth stone or a sheet pan with a large metal bowl inverted over your loaf for the first twenty minutes.



 


For those of us who can’t get to his classes, Richard mentioned he had a video out on Craftsy, Hand-made Sourdough – From starter to baked loaf. I haven’t seen it yet.

The Grain Gathering 2014 : In the garden of Eden

The 2014 Grain Gathering (formerly known as the Kneading Conference West) took place last week on the gorgeous grounds of Washington State University Agriculture Research Center in Mount Vernon, Washington. It was the fourth of these events and as we now live in California (I had sent in my registration long before I knew our move would be a done deal by the time mid-August came around), I truly thought, before flying up, that this one would probably be the last one for me.

After all, I do get it: eat locally and seasonally, be gentle with the landscape by favoring organic or at least environmentally friendly agricultural methods and always remember that farmers need to make a living too (after all, if there were no more farmers, there’d be nobody between us and Big Food, a thought too scary to contemplate). So I had more or less convinced myself that this year’s event would be mostly a rehash and that having attended the first four ones, I was done!

Well, I am happy to say that I was wrong and that I flew home with dreams of the fifth Gathering dancing in my head! The name of the event was changed from Kneading Conference to Grain Gathering because, as Steve Jones (wheat breeder and Director of the Center as well as of the Bread Lab) puts it: “Nobody kneads anymore.” Plus bakers are not the only ones interested in grain: farmers, millers, breeders, brewers, etc. flock to Mount Vernon as well. In fact, more than anything, the “gathering” dimension is what will keep me coming. I love the energy and dynamics of encounters with participants from all over (twenty American States, three Canadian Provinces, the United Kingdom and South Africa.) I love it that bread isn’t the only focus, that classes, lectures and workshops on milling, malting, brewing, breeding, building earth ovens, transforming a stationary bike into a grain mill, etc… are all mobbed as well.

For an idea of the scope of the Gathering, you may want to take a look at the schedule. In an ideal world (where Time wouldn’t exist or if it did, wouldn’t be linear), I would have attended all classes, lectures, tours and workshops concurrently but as it is, I had to choose. So I forewent production baking (even though the workshop was run by two bakers I greatly admire, Mel Darbyshire from Grand Central Bakery in Seattle and Scott Mangold from Breadfarm in nearby Bow-Edison), the roundtable on the farmers’ perspective, the one on milling and nutrition, the tour of the orchards and gardens, the visit to the wheat, barley and buckwheat fields, the talk on the science of bread, and many more that I won’t  even mention because I feel bad for missing them all over again, but if you check out the program, you’ll have a good idea of what I am talking about.

In the end I opted for workshops that spoke louder than others either to my imagination or to my practical side or more often than not, to both. I attended all three of Naomi Duguid and Dawn Woodward‘s instructive and stimulating demos on the use of whole grain in everyday baking and cooking. I watched Richard Miscovich score proofed loaves before loading them in a wood-fired oven (Richard is an extraordinary baker and instructor and seeing him work is both a teaching moment and an experience you are not likely to forget.) I only caught the tail-end of Jeffrey Hamelman‘s pretzel workshop but still, I arrived at the wood-fired oven in time to see him score the pretzels (or not as he said it was a matter of personal preference) and hear most of his account of the tough love teaching methods of his German baking instructor.

I listened to a very interesting presentation by two high school students who won first place in the food science category at the 2013 Washington State Science and Engineering Fair for their project on fermentation and gluten.

I attended a lecture on natural leavening which went largely over my head but gave me the great pleasure of finally meeting microbiologist Debra Wink and hooking up again with Andrew Ross, professor of crop and soil science and food science at Oregon State University. I spent time with beloved friends, connected with other bloggers, met bakers, writers and Facebook friends I had never seen in person before, I took part in the Bread Lab‘s tasting of four different wheat varieties, all grown in the Skagit Valley, and I ate my way through three days of the most seductive event food imaginable.


Peach and bacon pizza

In between, I took pictures (or, shall I say, “gathered” images) with joyful abandon (making up for last year when my left arm was in a cast.) I will post some (okay, a lot) of them in the coming days. If there are any recipes you are specifically interested in on the basis of the photos, please let me know and I’ll ask for permission to post them. As far as I know, no pizza recipe is available but from the look of the ones I saw, the only ingredient that appears absolutely necessary is a boundless imagination!

Related posts

How to make 2,000-year-old bread…


Video by the British Museum

Recipe, courtesy of the British Museum
I love the string technique…
In the video, the baker says he’s using buckwheat flour as the Romans did in those days but the list of ingredients in the posted recipe calls for equal amounts of spelt and whole wheat flour. Note that the bread is shaped right after mixing and that there is only one fermentation. Not a very long one at that, most likely because of the very large amount of starter and the use of wholegrain flours. No mention of steam to promote oven spring, probably because the bread found during the excavations looks quite flat. If you make the recipe at home, remember that the posted baking temperature (200°) is expressed in Celsius: it translates into 392°F.
The recipe lists gluten as an ingredient, which I find slightly odd. I can’t imagine the Romans being in a position to supplement weak flour with gluten flour although, according to this article (scroll down to the paragraph titled Grains in Rome), they did favor high-gluten wheat. So maybe the added gluten is today’s baker’s way to approximate the wheat variety used in the original recipe.
For more info on ancient Rome’s access to grain, you may want to read Grain Supply to the city of Rome on Wikipedia.
Too bad the British Museum doesn’t provide a crumb shot. I would have loved to see one. My guess is that the bread turned out rather dense.
What makes my head spin is the idea that a bread could stay in an oven for close to 2000 years…