Farine

Crazy for Bread

Meet the Baker: Cliff Leir

I first met Cliff Leir, owner of Fol Épi Bakery (“fol épi” is French for “wild wheatstalk”) in Victoria, British Columbia, at the Kneading Conference West 2011 where he gave a talk on building your own bakery complete with a separate mill room and a wood-fired brick oven. Despite his relatively young age (he was then 33), he had already been baking in Victoria for 14 years. He had been at his new location for eighteen months or so.


Fol Épi is located at Dockside Green, a new development in a previously industrial part of Victoria harbor

Cliff explained that he built silos behind his bakery so that he could buy his grain directly from farmers, a setup which benefits both himself and the farmers: he gets a tastier (if sometimes less predictible) product than by purchasing from a distributor and the farmers get a better deal. The only wheat he uses in his bread is organic Red Fife, a heritage grain he buys in Saskatchewan (he gets his pastry flour from Ontario). Since he only had room for a pair of silos, he bakes with two grains exclusively: wheat and rye. He mills his flours himself.

Cliff described how he built his oven with the help of friends and how he learned to dress his milling stones (through Web searches and by attending milling workshops). He explained that he hydrates the wheat before milling (but never the rye) and he talked about developing a tactile feel for the dough (a true self-taught man, he never went to baking school). He shared the plans he had designed for the oven, the mill and bakery. He detailed his initial investment and his current operating costs. Basically he laid it all out for the aspiring baker/entrepreneur, making building and running your own bakery sound both like a huge amount of work and an exhilarating endeavor. I have no doubt both are accurate descriptions.


Cliff Leir’s Rye Bread
However since I was not planning on opening (and much less building) my own bakery (at least not in this current life), I would have filed away all this information in my brain under the label “Interesting story” and moved on to the next topic if, at the end of his lecture,  he hadn’t brought out samples of his breads. I tasted all of them. All were good but one literally bowled me over. It was a 50% whole wheat with a beautiful crust and crumb. I had never seen a bread with such a high percentage of whole grain and yet such an open structure: it was “long en bouche” as French wine lovers like to say when the taste of a wine remains in your mouth long after you have swallowed. It evoked the rustic fragrance of plump wheat berries ripened in a relentless summer sun with a faint note of roasted hazelnuts and caramelized butter. The lecture ended, the audience dispersed, I went home but I couldn’t get that bread out of my mind.


Cliff Leir’s 50% whole wheat bread

So when I found out I was going to Victoria, I emailed Cliff and asked if he would be willing to talk to me about this 50% whole wheat bread and maybe share his formula. He wrote back to say that he would be happy to do so but that it might be hard to find a moment as his workdays were always a bit frantic. Indeed the first time I went to the bakery, back in early April, he was in a rush. He showed me around (that was quick as the bakery is tiny) and we agreed to meet again in May since I was coming back to town to visit Diane Andiel.


Red Fife’s white flour milled at Fol Épi

Red Fife whole grain flour milled at Fol Épi (see the gorgeous bran flakes!)

The second time, Cliff was just as rushed (he had to feed the starters and finish some chores before getting his younger son from school) but he kindly took the time to sit with me and go over his formula. He also gave me two kilos each of his freshly milled Red Fife all-purpose and whole wheat flours (he mills 100 kg of flour a day, most of which white) so that I could try baking the bread at home. I didn’t ask to visit the bakery again (which is why I don’t have more pictures to post) as I could see work was proceeding at a frantic pace in the background: pizzas were going in and out of the oven like clockwork and baskets of fresh loaves were constantly beeing rolled to the front.

He told me how he built his first brick oven in his driveway at age 19, how he learned his trade by trial and error, how he started selling bread to his neighbors, then at a farmer’s market, how he opened his first bakery (Wildfire Bakery on Quadra Street) with a partner and learned about Red Fife wheat through a Slow Food Canada initiative, how he and his partner parted ways and he spent a few years building his present bakery. For a vivid description of Cliff’s journey as a baker from the moment he “discovered” Red Fife, you may want to read Mixing Up Change, the three-part article he wrote for the Baker’s Journal: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) as he tells it much better than I ever could. If, like me, you are interested in the heritage grain movement, you may also enjoy reading this article on the Red Fife community by Saskatchewan writer Penny McKinley. It is a measure of Cliff’s modesty as an artisan that when I complimented him on his 50% whole wheat bread – definitely the best I have ever sampled in its category – he attributed its taste and beautiful crumb to the flavor and excellent baking properties of the Red Fife…

According to Terra Madre – 1200 World Food Communities, a Slow Food Editore publication dated October 2004, “Today, Red Fife has survived due to the work of only a handful of organic heritage wheat and seed farmers scattered across Canada who have been faithfully growing the wheat to keep it from extinction. Artisan bread made from Red Fife wheat has a yellow crumb with an intense scent of herbs and vegetables colored with a light acidity. The nose has notes of anise and fennel, and in the mouth the bread is unexpectedly rich with a slightly herby and spicy flavor.”
Wow, I wish I had thought of all these flavors when I described tasting Cliff’s 50% whole Red Fife bread for the first time but really I would have been making it up: I detect neither fennel nor anise although the intense scent of herbs and vegetables may be what I read as the fragrance of wheat berries ripening in the fierce Western Canadian sun. As to spiciness, I don’t know, I have tasted many wheats that were way spicier than this one.
I detect no acidity either in Cliff’s 50% whole wheat bread and that’s because, Cliff’s modesty nothwithstanding,  grain only tells part of the story. Controlled fermentation tells the rest. All of his breads are made with naturally leavened starters and the 50% whole wheat results from a process in which a small amount of levain ferments the dough very slowly at a cool temperature over a long period of time. 
Fol Épi uses organic gray sea salt and filtered water (no chlorine).  As explained above, the wheat is freshly milled and the flour is allowed to rest for at least six days (and no more than two or three weeks) before being used for baking.
I was so happy to be going home with some of this wheat I clutched it to my chest like the treasure that it was. We sailed through customs (the customs officer completely lost interest when I told him that we had visited bakers and were only bringing back flours and breads) and once home, I split the bags and sent one kilo of each flour to my friend Gérard Rubaud in Vermont so that he could try the Red Fife  for himself. I baked two big loaves with the remaining flours.

Related post: 50% Whole Red Fife Wheat Bread (baked at home)

50% Whole Red Fife Wheat Bread


I made these two rustic looking loaves with the Red Fife wheat flours I brought back from my visit to Cliff Leir’s Fol Épi Bakery in Victoria, BC (see related post Meet the Baker: Cliff Leir).

Cliff’s formula and timeline for Fol Épi’s 50% whole wheat bread 

  • 2:30 PM: first build of the levain: 7% starter + 100% white flour + 100% water. The build goes into the fridge (Cliff explained that some of the oil present in the bran gets smeared on the white flour during the milling. For that reason the starter moves very fast and needs to be refrigerated for this first long fermentation)
  • 6:00 AM: second build: 72% starter (the whole first build) + 100% white flour + 100% water. No fridge this time
  • 11:00 AM: final dough: 50% whole wheat flour + 48% white flour + 2% whole rye flour + 11.5% starter (the whole second build) + 75% water + 2% salt. Mix on first speed. Autolyse: 20 min (no salt, no starter). Final mix: add salt and water. Mix 6 minutes (same slow speed). Dough cooled to 50°F/10°C. Rest until 12 AM
  • 12 AM: dough allowed to warm up to 72°F/22°C (depending on the weather or other conditions, it might need to be retarded some more at this point)
  • 5:00 AM: one fold
  • 7:00 AM: divided @ 750 g – preshaped (20 minutes rest) – rolled into a batard shape – final proof: 45 minutes on couche dusted with white flour
  • Bake for 35 minutes 445-465° F @ 230-240°C

I like how the bread turned out when I made it at home: the flavor of the grain shone through, there was no acidity whatsoever and the crumb was wonderfully mellow. 


My version of Cliff’s 50% whole wheat bread

But, as can be seen from the two pictures (the one above and the one below), I didn’t get as good as oven spring as Cliff.


Cliff’s own 50% whole wheat bread

I used the formula that Cliff had so generously shared with me and did my best to follow his guidelines as to timing and temperatures but in a home environment, life (and sleep) sometimes intervene. Once again the grain is only half of the story, fermentation control is just as important. I didn’t have the means of cooling the dough to 50°F/10°C right after mixing. The best I could do was to put it in the garage when the temperature hovered around 62°F/17°C, leave it there and check it periodically to make sure it wasn’t fermenting too fast. I didn’t want to put it in the fridge which would have been too cold.
The dough behaved in unexpected ways both during mixing and during fermentation: you know how it is hammered in our heads as apprentice bakers that you can’t ever follow a recipe exactly because there are such variations in the flours from one manufacturer to the next (and even from one batch of flour to the next from the same manufacturer) that the percentage of water must be adjusted each time?
Well, I thought that I had that angle covered. I was  using flours milled by Cliff, the dates of the milling were indicated on both bags, I was well within the two-three week period (actually much closer to two) and I figured I could safely go ahead and hydrate at 75% as he does. I didn’t put in all the water in one shot but still I was less cautious with it than I usually am and soon found myself in a spot.
I was mixing by hand (at the bakery, Cliff uses a very slow and gentle old mixer equipped with two “arms” that mimic the rythmic gestures of an artisan baker). The dough was gobbling up the water beautifully but almost as soon as I stopped folding it over itself, it sneakily relaxed to the point of slackness. I now wonder if it could be because I forgot to use filtered water and just used tap water (we have city water and it is chlorinated although not heavily so).


As it were, I thought it just needed more folds and I must have folded it half-a-dozen times but every time I went back to check on it, it had spread again. That being said, it later lent itself rather gracefully to being divided and shaped. I set the batards to proof on a flour-dusted couche making sure I secured the edges on both sides so that they wouldn’t morph into ciabattas behind my back. Still when I put them in the oven, they were a bit flattish and I was definitely not hopeful…
So I was pleasantly surprised to see that the breads did get get some oven rise and turned out acceptable looks-wise. Flavor-wise, they were fragrant and wonderfully evocative of sun-drenched wheat fields (although not quite as complex-tasting as Cliff’s). I don’t have any more flour to try again but Cliff also kindly gave me some Red Fife grain. I am storing it in the fridge for now. I will try milling it to see if I can reproduce the two loaves I made with his flours and this time I will remember to use filtered water!



Ingredients (for two loaves scaled at 980 g):
Levain: first build
  • 1.5 g mature white starter (at 100% hydration)
  • 18 g white Red Fife flour
  • 18 g water
Levain: second build
  • 38 g starter (all of the first build)
  • 51 g white Red Fife flour
  • 51 g water

Final dough

  • 600 g whole Red Fife flour
  • 576 g white Red Fife flour
  • 24 g organic dark rye flour
  • 900 g water
  • 138 g starter (all of the second build)
  • 24 g salt
Method: 

As indicated above, I forgot Cliff’s recommendation regarding filtered water and it may have made a big difference in the way the dough behaved. Also the second build of the levain took forever to ferment and I had to delay mixing by eight hours (a whole night) because I wanted it to be fairly bursting with singing bubbles before putting it to work.
Otherwise I did my best to follow his guidelines in trying to make this amazing bread at home and I am happy to have this opportunity to thank Cliff and all the other bakers I have met so far for their generosity in sharing their knowledge and resources. Seeing the pros at work is truly the best way to learn and I love the fact that these artisans care enough about their product to help a bread enthusiast make better bread. I know no better way to thank them than to support artisan bakeries wherever we go. Truth be told, that’s my favorite kind of shopping spree!
The 50% Whole Red Fife Wheat Bread is going to Susan for this week’s Yeastpotting.

Meet the Baker: Diane Andiel

I am titling the post “Meet the Baker” because that’s the name of the series and Diane Andiel is definitely a baker and an accomplished one at that. But I could just as well title the post “Meet the Farmer”, “Meet the Cheesemaker”, “Meet the Goat Raiser” or “Meet the Community Development Programmer” (her full-time job) because Diane is all that and does all that with a passion and dedication that would leave most of us panting from exhaustion.
I met Diane last year at a BBGA’s baking class in Seattle and was instantly fascinated by what she told me: she lives on a farm outside Victoria on Vancouver Island, makes yogurt and cheese from the milk of her one cow and several goats and bakes bread year-round on Friday nights to sell at the nearby farmstand on Saturdays. She also grows many of the vegetables they eat at the farm (by “they” I mean her partner Ed who holds a full-time job as well and the occasional “wwoofer” who helps with the chores in exchange for room and board). She raises hens and sells their eggs. She also raises chickens for eating. What she cannot raise or grow, she likes to trade or swap for with another farmer or artisan so that she always knows where their food comes from. One eats very well at Diane’s table (she is an excellent cook) as we found out when she kindly invited us to come and visit.
In the spring and summer (her busiest seasons), Diane bakes twenty-five loaves a week. Not a lot by professional standards but no mean feat when you work 9 to 5 outside the home five days a week and your only oven is the one in your kitchen stove. She makes a batch of sourdough white (the Norwich sourdough seen in the above picture) and a batch of 40% sour rye every week. In the summer she adds a multigrain.

She keeps two starters, a wheat and a rye. The wheat lives on the counter in the kitchen and gets fed every day, morning and night. The rye spends part of the week in the refrigerator and gets taken out for refreshment the day before the baking. For the Norwich and the multigrain, she builds the starter on Thursday night…



…scales the other ingredients and does the mixing on Friday morning (including a 20-minute autolyse), shapes on Friday night and bakes early on Saturday morning. For the rye, the starter gets a build on Friday night and the mixing takes place on Saturday morning early. Follow a 90-minute bulk fermentation, the shaping and a 60-minute proofing.

Diane with Mark and Sharon Sinclair at the Back Home Bakery 
(photo courtesy of Mark Sinclair, originally posted here)
Diane says her baking made huge strides forward in 2009 after her one-week internship at Mark Sinclair’s Back Home Bakery in Kalispell, Montana. Not only did she come back with a treasure trove of recipes but she learned how to manage a production schedule (staggering fermentation and proofing according to oven availability) and also discovered that there was more than one way to bake a loaf of bread. For instance she now does all her baking using the convection function of her oven. Sure, she has been taught like most of us that you should bake in a classic oven, if possible on a pre-heated baking stone, but if she did, she could only bake two loaves at a time and her Saturday morning production would be halved: she can’t afford to do that. More than anything else, she is a pragmatist: if it works on convection, then that’s the way to go. And work it does! Her breads get a terrific oven spring and bakes to a beautiful crisp crust. Now that’s a technique she learned from Mark and one I will certainly experiment with at home because if I can make it work for me, I could actually bake more.
Diane’s bread bookshelf is pretty short: besides Mark’s recipes (she uses his sour rye formula every week) and a couple of classics, The Fresh Loaf (where she got the formula for the Norwich sourdough) is her favorite font of new ideas. Martin Burnett, her baking instructor at Vancouver Island University, is also a source of inspiration. One of his recommendations is permanently engraved in her brain: “If you must err, err on the side of wetness, not dryness”. Definitely a good motto to live by for a baker!
Watching Diane at work, I was amazed to see -again because the opposite has been hammered in my brain by various books and instructors- that she never checks the temperature of anything (except her oven). She says: “What’s the point? It is what it is. I have no control over it”. She relies on her experience to judge when a dough is ready to be shaped or baked.  As a baker, she considers herself lucky to be working in an old farmhouse (it was built in 1898) where the kitchen is always warm but where the other rooms are nice and cool, sometimes even cold. In the winter it is pretty easy: Fermentation and proofing both take place at a cool temperature in the dining room (which seldom gets used) and go on for twelve hours each. There is no need to get up in the middle of the night to bake. In summers, things get a bit hairier and she does get up very early!
Diane has been baking seriously for six years and selling her bread for five. She comes from a long tradition of baking women. Her maternal grandmother -who was German- always baked bread, mostly rye, and never let bread go to waste. Whatever wasn’t eaten got ground up and incorporated in the next batch of dough (I really love that idea). Her paternal grandmother hailed from Czechoslovakia and was also into baking, but mostly cakes and sweet pastries. I have seen Diane whip up a spongecake for guests she was expecting in the afternoon and, believe me, a fairy with a magic wand couldn’t have done it more effortlessly (at least that the way it looked like!). She says she uses less fat and sugar than her grandma did. Her cake certainly felt as light as the tip of an angel’s wing. And even though she does not make cakes for sale, she does bake and sell sweet breads and pastries (stollen, hot cross buns, poppy seed brioches, etc.) for specific holidays.

Photos courtesy of Diane Andiel
But her baking genes do not tell the whole story. In a facebook exchange, Mark Sinclair (from the Back Home Bakery ) described Diane as a “jack of all trades” and the description definitely fits. Diane is one of the most multifaceted person I know: she seems to be leading many full lives simultaneously.
As a community activity planner, she plays an essential role in helping develop affordable and accessible programs for all citizens of the district: she meets with community associations to determine the kind of support they need and the best way to provide it; she puts them in touch with the right people; she spearheads projects such as garden-plots for seniors who love to garden but find it too physically demanding to do it on their own or community kitchens for at-risk people who have stopped cooking for themselves. When these activities involve the growing and/or the cooking and the sharing of food, so much the better. Diane is convinced that food is part of who we are and that eating together is a good way of building not only families but also communities. Inspiring others to cook is one of her great joys. Her oldest son bakes his own bread with a starter he made himself from scratch and that makes her happy although she says she would like it even better if he asked her for advice from time to time!
As a goat raiser, she attends meetings and shows (she was the president of Vancouver Island Goat Association for years) and even traveled once as far at Nashville for a goat conference where she got to meet like-minded people from all over Canada.

As a farmer, she grows her own vegetables and greens (with her partner Ed, she even assembled her own greenhouse, a task which she definitely doesn’t recommend as a relationship booster!), raises chickens and hens as well as a Jersey cow and several goats. She is not in the least sentimental about her animals: they are not raised as pets and while she acknowledges the strength of her connection to them, she doesn’t romanticize it or shed tears when they are sold for meat. But they have the best possible existence on the farm: she patiently bottle-feeds the baby goats when the mothers prove incompetent (which apparently happens more often that you’d think) and puts sweaters on them when the nights are cold; her cow has the run of the meadow and so do the goats; Zeva, the Sarplaninac livestock guardian dog, gets walked every day, rain or shine,  even though she roams the grounds freely day and night, and everybody eats very well (including the chickens who get not only grain but all the table scraps and, ever hopeful, flock to the fence the minute anybody appears in the kitchen doorway).




As a baker, she is constantly seeking to hone her skills. I asked Diane what she did for fun and relaxation and she said: “I take baking classes!” Of course she is an advocate for lifelong learning in everything she does and when you are into cheese-making and animal husbandry, every day brings its own discoveries. As she sees it, part of her job as a farmer is precisely to convey what she learns to the public and to convince it that buying food from a farm is a better choice. But bread, ah, bread is in a class of its own: “Eating a slice of freshly baked bread is an experience like no other” and you can’t express it with words.  So she bakes and with her baking, she certainly does her best to make the experience possible for those who are lucky enough to live in her neighborhood.

Diane Andiel’s Norwich Sourdough

Diane borrowed her recipe from The Fresh Loaf and I won’t point you to any specific post in the thread because she doesn’t recall whose recipe she is using (the original one was posted in 2007 on Wild Yeast).


Ingredients (for 6 loaves):

  • 1800 g organic all-purpose flour
  • 240 g organic dark rye flour
  • 1200 g water
  • 720 g levain (100% hydration)
  • 46 g salt
Method

  1. Build the levain 12 hours before mixing and let ferment at room temperature
  2. Mix in flours, water and levain
  3. Autolyse for 20 minutes
  4. Mix 3 minutes in first speed (adding water as necessary)
  5. Mix 3 minutes in second speed
  6. Ferment at cool room temperature (about 55°F) for 12 hours (Note: Diane doesn’t give the dough any folds because she goes straight off to work after mixing on Friday mornings but she said the dough would probably benefit from a fold and she recommends that it be done if at all possible)
  7. Scale at 680 g
  8. Set to proof on parchment-paper lined sheet pans and slide into  large clear plastic bags making sure they tent over the dough and do not touch it
  9. Proof for 12 hours at cool room temperature
  10. Slash and bake for 35 minutes in a convection oven set at 430°F
  11. Cool on a rack.

Since Diane doesn’t have a blog, I am sending the Norwich Sourdough to Yeastpotting in her name.

Of Breads and Beaches

Just back from our first visit to Oregon! We went the long way via the Olympic Peninsula where we got wooshed and splashed by lumbering logging trucks.

We hiked in drizzly rainforests where we were joltingly reminded that  civilisation was but a rusty pun away…

…and gaped in awe at the ruggedness of the shores where forest and ocean meet.

True to form we also went bakeryspotting and right off the ferry in Port Townsend, Washington, made a beeline for Pane d’Amore where we were kindly received by co-owner Linda Yakush, She proudly showed us their signature bread, Nash’s miche, made with wheat grown in nearby Sequim by Nash’s Organic Produce.

There is something elven and Tolkienesque to a land dominated by rain and wind and even though I love sunshine as much as the next person and I have Italian, Provençal and Pays d’Oc’s genes, I am still a Northern girl at heart (after all, I grew up in Paris where the sky has perfected both pearly mists and drizzle). So I loved the clouds over Astoria harbor…
 

We drove on.  Despite our best efforts,  the lovely bread aromas we had enjoyed at Pane d’Amore’s bakery evaded us until we reached Portland a few days later. The only other artisan bakery we spotted was Waves of Grain Bakery in Cannon Beach, Oregon. We hit it early on a Sunday morning. The sun hung bright in a cloudless sky and it was packed. We had marionberrry spelt muffins which were bursting with berries, yet still fragrant with the flavor of spelt (the grain comes from family-owned fields in Eastern Oregon). They were just sweet enough with the barest  hint of cinnamon. Truly excellent… Definitely an address to keep in mind.


Driving further south, we hugged the coast some more, meeting many affable strangers along the way, either at viewpoints (of which there are many along the Oregon shore as the state once had a visionary governor, Oswald West, who claimed it as public land). One of our most memorable encounters was with a fifty-something motocyclist who was riding with a huge goggled and helmeted teddy bear holding on for dear life behind him. With no prodding on our part, he volunteered the information that the bear and he had already logged 100,000 miles of traveling time together and that their relationship was the only one that ever worked for him. He was quite matter-of-fact about it too. No hint of melancholy or nostalgia in his voice… I suspect the bear is a terrific conversation starter (and much less work than a pet).

Hiking on the edge of precipitous cliffs, we saw bald eagles soar above shimmering waves and densely forested hills.

We saw seagulls sunning themselves in daisy-studded meadows.


We saw cars driving on beaches…

…and a coastline that stretched to the horizon.

I missed the ocean once we headed inland but truly enjoyed discovering Portland and its bread scene. There might have been artisan bakeries along the way but we didn’t find them. If you know of any in or around Portland or along the coast, I’d be grateful if you could let me know as we will surely be going back. Pearl Bakery is already on the list. We skipped it because we ran out of time.
Meanwhile here are the few we manage to spot – in the order we visited them – as well as crumb pictures of the breads we bought. Please note that these breads were chosen to complement each other: I knew we were going to bring them back home and freeze them and I didn’t want to load up with just one kind. Their only common denominator is that they were all levain-based and baked in Portland. But the truth is that it was very difficult to choose as there were many more I would have liked to taste.
Since several of them are still in the freezer, I am not going to hazard any comparison or review. I was happy to see however that all the artisan bakers whose bakeries we visited were baking their loaves to a rich golden brown, standing their ground against the current fad for bread “moins cuit” (with a lighter crust).

Grand Central Baking Company Bakery on NW York Street
(Grand Central has several other locations in Portland as well as in Seattle)


Same dough as previous baguette but with toasted walnuts added



St-Honoré Bakery


Cranberry Walnut


I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another food scene we greatly enjoyed in Portland, i.e. the foodtrucks. That alone would be worth a return trip but then we would need so many days to sample them all that unless we move to Portland, I don’t see how we’ll ever manage it. So I’ll just feature the two we ate at on our last day (after visiting the bakeries).
We were at the SE Division Street nosh spot. I picked the Blue City Biscuits truck and happily lunched on a plate of tasty organic with a fried egg and plenty of excellent smoky collard greens while the Man (who seems to think real men don’t ever eat grits) hit the nearby Pie Spot. He went for the chicken pot pie. It made him happy as well.

On the way back north to Seattle, we glimpsed successively Mt Hood, Mt St-Helens and Mt Rainier, sparkling white against the blue sky. No pictures as we were on the interstate and we barely spotted the mountains before they disappeared behind an eighteen-wheeler or a wooded hill but my heart certainly beat faster each time…