Farine

Crazy for Bread

Blender Bread

I never thought I would make bread in a blender. Yet that’s exactly what I did yesterday and I can explain why in two words: extensor tenosynovitis (ET). Unless you are a physician or have had ET yourself, chances are you don’t know what I am talking about. Until day before yesterday I didn’t either and believe me, I wish I never learned. It is diabolically painful (and this, from someone who is known for having an abnormally high threshold for pain).

ET is a repetitive stress injury and I got it from watching Grey’s Anatomy on my handheld device. Which is why I should sue both ABC and the manufacturers of the device. Although maybe not ABC if they let me pick my doctor from the show…
See, what happened was that I was trying to get ready for Season 8 (which just started) by watching all seven previous seasons (which I had never seen before). That’s 148 episodes and by episode 140, I guess my left hand grew tired of holding the thing up so that I could better see MerDer drill holes in people’s skulls. It gave up without prior notice, leaving me unable to tie my shoe laces, cut veggies, feed my levains (which had to be forcibly dehydrated, poor babies), mix bread and, worse, hold my youngest (one-month old) granddaughter in my arms.

However since:

  • I own one of the powerful blenders you can see demonstrated at big warehouse stores
  • I got a grain attachment for it (for these seeds or beans which might damage my regular mill)
  • This grain attachment came with a booklet of recipes
  • Two of these recipes looked interesting: one for sourdough bread, one for hearty multi-grain yeasted bread
  • I had levain galore (as usual)

I decided to combine these recipes by just replacing the yeast by liquid starter.

The blender was going to do the work, so I didn’t have to worry about anything, right? Well, almost true. But let me tell you, I still found it exhausting to make bread that way. Too many ingredients. Weighing 5 g of this and 7 g of that countless times to get just one loaf in a 8.5 x 4.5 pan! Call me lazy but I don’t think it’s worth it.
The original multi-grain loaf recipe makes no mention of salt (did they just forget it or is it deliberate?) and eschewes bulk fermentation. The dough goes straight from the blender to the oiled pan. It is supposed to rise in 30 minutes, go into a 350°F oven for 30 to 35 minutes and voilà, bread done.
Well, it didn’t quite happen that way. The blender did a good job of milling the minute quantities of millet, buckwheat, flax seeds, wheat, spelt, rye, barley, sunflower seeds, etc. It did mix the dough reasonably well (but I had never had a dough come out at 87°F before and that, even though I used really cold water). I added salt (which is listed as optional in the sourdough recipe). I did upend the blender over the pan to let the dough drop gently into it. But I waited almost 5 hours for it to rise enough to go into the oven (and it had been in a warm place all that time). In all fairness I must say the recipe for the sourdough bread indicates that it might take anywhere between 30 minutes and 8 hours, depending upon the temperature of the room.
The result is as can be seen above. Not pretty but better than just edible. Will I make it again? No. Will we eat it? Yes. At least I will. It actually tastes very healthful. I am hoping it’s good for extensor tenosynovitis.

Local Loaf (Hazelnut Cider Barley Bread)

Do you sometimes wish you could eat the landscape? I do. Like babies, I need to taste the world to apprehend it. If that means I am stuck at a pretty archaic stage of personality development, well, so be it! I will readily grant you that I am the oral type. My grandfather probably had a lot to do with it: he had had two sons, one of whom, my uncle, had tragically died of tuberculosis at age 19. My father gave him three grandsons and one granddaughter. My grandfather had never had a little girl in his life before. He fell hard for me.
To be closer to us (we lived in Paris), he and my grandmother moved from Southwestern France (where they were born and had lived all their lives) to Normandy. We went and visited them every weekend, all year-round and in all kinds of weather. Which means that they saw a great deal of us and often while my brothers were playing war games in the wonderfully half-tamed garden, he took me walking. He had made a little wooden basket for me and when we were not looking for eggs in the chicken coop, we wandered the nearby woods and meadows. But we never walked just for exercise or leisure.
Our neighbor, the farmer, had given us access to the land across the road where he pastured his cows and there was a wood at the end of the bramble-hedged lane that went up the hill: I learned to gather baby dandelions (so utterly delicious in a salad that I still yearn for them almost six decades later) and button-mushrooms in the fields, chanterelles and boleti in the forest, blackberries, wild apples, hazelnuts and walnuts on the way back. I can still recall the puckering taste of sloes and the black stain the walnuts left on my hands. And then of course, there were the fruit and vegetables my grandfather grew, the chickens and the rabbits that he raised and the ducks we bought from the farmer, not to mention the milk we went to get every evening in metal milk pans.
The only thing I didn’t really care for was the bread which we bought from a baker who made his rounds in an old van. On the baker’s days off, my grandfather (who by then was already over 80) rode his Solex (a motorized bicycle) three miles away to another village to get it. It wasn’t good either (I guess I was born and raised at the time bread in France took a precipitous turn for the worse).
Well, these days are long gone but for the past couple of months, they were somehow brought back as I wandered the lanes around our new home enjoying the sun (yes, summer can be gorgeous in the Northwest) and picking blackberries. The blackberries were nothing like the ones I remembered from my childhood though. For a start they were generally sweeter (maybe because August had been so sunny) but also, of course, this being America, they were twice the size. But I filled buckets after buckets. I also ate a lot of them.
Walking, eating and picking and fighting my way out of countless thorny grips, I was listening to a French recorded book on my iPod. That book is one of my favorites. I have read it (in print) over and over to the point that I can often guess what is coming at any given moment. It was written in the early years of the 20th century and the action (such as it is) takes place mostly in and around Paris. The writing is gorgeously descriptive and listening to its music along these brambly lanes in the Pacific Northwest had the strange effect of knitting together the past and the present for me. The cadences of the language and the fragrance of the blackberries slowly wove themselves into a new whole and that’s when I knew with absolute certainty that moving here had been the right call.
Just as I can recall with uncanny precision the exact taste of my childhood, I started to yearn for the taste of the landscape around our new home. We joined a CSA where, wonderfully, part and parcel of the weekly share is the freedom to go to the fields and pick the greens, herbs and flowers we want (out came the little wooden basket which I had cherished but not used all these years). We visit farmers’ markets around our home and recently, as you know if you read my previous post, I went to the Kneading Conference West 2011 where I met local bakers, farmers and millers. I bought local organic all-purpose flour from Fairhaven Mill. Having attended Leslie Mackie and Andrew Ross‘ inspiring presentation on baking with barley, I also purchased local organic barley flour.
I was at the farmers’ market the other day when the sight of gorgeous hazelnuts gave me the idea of baking the flavors of the surrounding landscape into what I love best, bread. I purchased some hazelnuts as well as a quart of honeycrisp unpasteurized cider and I went home. I had previously bought delicately flavored blackberry honey from a local beekeeper who sells through the CSA but I decided against caramelizing the hazelnuts with it. I didn’t want a sweet bread. I wanted a clean-tasting loaf where the soul of the levain would soar to the accompanying music of the roasted hazelnuts and the tang of the cider. I wanted a bread, not a dessert. And that’s what I got.
The fermented taste is mysterious and almost inebriating in its complexity. The flavors of the barley and the cider do not really shine through but they definitely contribute to the whole as by themselves, wheat and hazelnuts would never have yielded such aromas.
I imagine there are endless variations on the theme of the local loaf and I might look for others as the seasons change. I’d love to know which ones you would come up with to define your own landscape if you felt so inclined and didn’t mind sharing.
Meanwhile I am sitting by the fire staring at the rain which has finally come and thinking of the many ways in which my corner of the Pacific Northwest reminds me of Normandy. As for the blackberry honey, it is incomparably delicious on a slice of the landscape…
Ingredients (for 2 loaves):
  • 585 g all-purpose flour
  • 60 g barley flour
  • 387 g water
  • 97 g unpasteurized honeycrisp cider (*see note below)
  • 194 g liquid levain (at 100% hydration)
  • 100 g hazelnuts (roasted for 10 minutes, rubbed together to remove skins and roughly chopped)
  • 13 g sea salt
  • * Note: what this farmer calls cider is basically apple juice. It has no alcoholic contents whatsoever. What I did though was to keep it unopened in the refrigerator for a week before using it. By then it had reached the stage where, with the boost of the levain fermentation during the slow rising of the dough, it started fermenting in earnest. At least that’s how I explain the slightly boozy taste of this bread. Maybe a scientist would see it differently…
Method:
  1. Mix flours and water until combined and let rest for 45 minutes (autolyse)
  2. Add levain and salt and mix until medium soft consistency is achieved
  3. Add cider and mix until absorbed (I had to put the dough into the mixer at that stage and mix on high for a couple of minutes until the dough came off the sides of the bowl)
  4. Add the hazelnuts and mix on slow for a few minutes until combined
  5. Set the dough to ferment for as long as it takes for it to stop springing back quickly when poked with a finger
  6. Divide the dough in two, pre-shape as boules, shape and score as desired (I did one boule, one batard)
  7. Pre-heat oven to 470°F/243°C
  8. When loaves are fully proofed (the dough no longer springs back quickly when poked), bake at 470°F/243°C with steam for 10 minutes, lower temperature to 450°F/232°C, bake another 10 minutes, turn the loaves around if necessary and bake another 12 to 15 minutes or until their internal temperature reaches about 210°F/99°C
  9. Cool on a rack.
The Local Loaf is going to Susan’s Wild Yeast for this week’s issue of Yeastspotting.

Kneading Conference West 2011

I am lucky enough to have spent the last three days immersed in local flavors and bread talk at the Kneading Conference West, held at the Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center of Washington State University in Mt Vernon, Washington. The Conference was an extraordinary opportunity to encounter world-known researchers and bakers and to meet with bread people of all kinds:

There were also several hands-on workshops: the basics of artisan bread, sourdough bread at home, pizza baking in a wood-fired oven, malting, earth-oven construction, baking with fresh-milled grains, baking with barley, preferments, etc., as well as presentations and panel discussions.

Located in the Skagit Valley and set against the misty blue background of the Cascade mountains, the Center is surrounded by fields, gardens, meadows and orchards. The Conference took place partly in the main building and partly under the big white tents which dotted the meadow. The food was local, healthful and delicious. We had an opportunity to taste magnificent cheeses, hard ciders and beers, not to mention breads and pastries which were so good they defy description.
And we were kept busy from morning to night. Steve Jones, Director of the Research and Extension Center, showed maps illustrating the centralization of wheat growing in the Midwest over the past 100 years for reasons that had to do with economies of scale and big business, not the quality of the soil. He said that the renewed focus on local has as much to do with flavor and terroir as with helping farmers make a living wage in our communities. He showcased Ebey’s Prairie on nearby Whidbey Island, a farm which produced 119 bushels an acre on its land 100 years ago (a world record) to be compared with the current Midwestern yield of 45 bushels an acre. He explained that the main challenge today for the local farmer was the lack of infrastructure: combines, mills, silos (he showed us a picture of the local silo, now a café) and money for research: for instance the Perennial Grain Project is no longer funded at the federal level.
George DePasquale (The Essential Baking Company) remembered visiting the ruins of Pompeii near Naples on a trip to reconnect with his family roots in Southern Italy: looking at the ancient bakery, he felt he was standing in a river of history and tradition and suddenly understood that his responsibility as a baker was to keep this river moving forward.
Jeffrey Hamelman (King Arthur Flour Company) had everybody laughing when he recounted his beginnings as a bumbling baker in Massachusetts but held the audience’s rapt attention when he read an excerpt from The Nature and Art of Workmanship by David Pye: the author distinguishes between the workmanship of certainty and the workmanship of risk. For Hamelman, bakers (and farmers) are very involved in the workmanship of risk. The concept is central to how they organize their life since they can’t possibly make identical products time after time. Yet they perform fundamental work for society by providing its nutritional foundation. They are public servants (although not in the same sense as the ones in Washington).
Quoting Pablo Neruda’s Nobel lecture, Hamelman concluded: “I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind’s products: bread, truth, wine, dreams.”
Like the original Kneading Conference held every summer in Maine, the Kneading Conference West constituted one more step towards changing the conditions in which we live, work and dream. And that, my friends, was its whole purpose.

Larry’s Buckwheat Batons

A few years ago, as I was visiting my Mom in Paris in her retirement home not far from the Eiffel Tower, I decided to take advantage of the fact she had to leave for her physical therapy session to go and check out the nearest Eric Kayser bakery. I had read a lot about Kayser and his bread on the Internet but hadn’t actually seen any of his bakeries. I knew he had one in the 15th arrondissement.
I set out at a brisk pace and 15 minutes later arrived 79 rue du Commerce. The store was sleek and elegant (for an idea of what it looks like, click on “Where are we?” on Maison Kayser’s website, then on “Paris”). The salespersons were a bit harried since it was around lunch time and it didn’t look like they would be available to chat, so I took a quick look at the breads (which were all gorgeous) and asked for a “baguette Paline” (which I knew to be a buckwheat bread).
(I don’t know why Kayser named this bread Paline but, in case you are wondering, he certainly didn’t do it after the former governor of Alaska. His buckwheat bread came into being way before Ms. Palin found her way into mainstream American – not to mention French – consciousness.)
I paid and two minutes later I was back on the sidewalk with, under my arm, a dark brown baguette sticking out of a paper bag. Being pretty hungry I broke off a piece and bit into it. Instant disappointment… The crust was not crunchy enough, the crumb greyish and too tight. I love buckwheat, having been raised on the buckwheat “galettes” (i.e. savory crêpes) with which my paternal grandmother – who was from the Southwest of France – always accompanied her divine rabbit or hare stews but the Paline triggered no Proustian memory. It tasted dull. I was crushed. So much for buckwheat bread if even a master baker couldn’t produce a tastier loaf…
Now I had read good things about Kayser’s Paline, so my disappointment may have stemmed from the combined facts that I had high expectations and that I tried it on a bad day. I will check it again next time I go to France (which sadly is less often now that my Mom passed away) and report back .
Anyway, fast forward to the first time I saw Tree-Top Baking’s spread at the Bayview’s Farmers’ Market on Whidbey Island, Washington. There, among scores of baguettes, rye loaves, levain miches, challahs, etc. I caught sight of luscious batards sporting a burnished look. Getting closer, I read the labels: Buckwheat Batons!
I bought one and was charmed. The crust crackled. The crumb was on the dark side but open and the taste delicate: earthy but not overly so, showcasing the flavor of the buckwheat but also the complex aromas of the levain. I was hooked! That baton was everything I had hoped a Paline would be. Whidbey residents clearly share my enthusiasm. Larry bakes these loaves every week and they always sell out.
Of course I asked for the recipe and that’s how I learned it was actually based on a Kayser formula as demonstrated to Larry by Boris Villatte, a hugely talented young French baker he had met at SFBI. Villatte had worked for Kayser for many years and helped open several Maison Kayser bakeries around the world.
Kayser has published several of his recipes, including in his book 100% pain: La saga du pain enveloppée de 60 recettes croustillantes (summarily translated, the title means: “100% bread. The saga of bread, wrapped in 60 crusty recipes”.) I don’t own it and have no access to it but the author of La Table de Mamou, a French blog, says she has successfully baked several recipes from 100% pain, including baguette Paline. I checked Kayser’s recipe as posted on her blog and noticed that it differed considerably from Boris’: among other things, it called for much more buckwheat. Interestingly while Mamou writes that she liked the taste, she also says that the crumb was too tight and that the next time she would use less buckwheat. In his book Local Breads, Daniel Leader gives another recipe for the Paline and he too uses less buckwheat (although he calls for buckwheat levain). The recipe below is the one which Boris has shared with Larry.
You will note that it flies in the face of everything we have been taught about gently mixing the dough and promoting good fermentation by maintaining it at warmish room temperature. Here the dough gets literally whipped around in the mixer at the highest possible speed until it comes together and then it is shocked into the fridge until ready to bring to room temperature, divide and shape.
The first time I made the batons, it was a total failure. I thought it was because I had used all-purpose flour while Larry uses bread flour (which contains more gluten). But that wasn’t the reason: I have made it several times since with all-purpose flour and consistently gotten excellent results.
No, the sad truth is that this dough is a masochist. The first time I hadn’t dared yield to my inner sadist and beat it enough. So it just sat there and did absolutely nothing. I had to throw it away. I went back to Whidbey and Larry showed me how to punish it into action (see first part of the video below). Now I get it right every time.

Once you get the whipping part, this dough is easy to make and very flexible. It adapts readily to your schedule (how often can you say that with bread?). You can autolyse all day or all night in the fridge and mix in early morning. Or you can have a 45 minute autolyse and go right on to mixing. You can mix the dough and refrigerate it for as little as a couple of hours and then bring it back to room temp before dividing, or you can leave it in the fridge all day or overnight. I have done all of this with equal success. As Larry says, you don’t necessarily get exactly the same bread but it’s always good.

Ingredients (for 4 batons)

  • 940 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 60 g buckwheat flour (I milled buckwheat groats for this but store-bought buckwheat flour works fine)
  • 800 g water
  • 25 g salt
  • 2 g instant yeast
  • 120 g mature levain (hydration: 100%)

Method (requires a stand mixer):
TIP: Didier Rosada says in Breadlines vol. 19 no.2 that if using a vertical mixer or a mixer without a bowl-reverse option, to avoid having flour stuck in the bottom of the bowl without being incorporated into the dough it is a good idea to add half of the water first, then all of the flour, then the rest of the water as needed to achieve the desired dough consistency. I tried it and it worked to perfection. No more scraping the sides of the bowl for me!
  1. Mix water and flours until combined (see tip above). Refrigerate 45 minutes to one hour (Larry says he has successfully autolysed the dough anywhere from 5 to 9 hours)
  2. Take the dough out of the refrigerator, add levain, salt and yeast , starting slowly but moving quickly to high speed (using first the paddle, then the hook) until the dough comes together away from the sides of the bowl (see above video). When ready, the dough must be tacky but not sticky. Desired dough temperature is 75-77°F/24-25°C
  3. Transfer the dough to an oiled container and put it back in the refrigerator for 9 to 12 hours
  4. Take it out and bring it to room temperature (Larry puts it in the proofbox for 2 to 3 hours)
  5. Divide at around 500 g, pre-shape as a cylinder, shape as a baguette taking care to leave a lip of dough along the loaf (see above video)
  6. Flatten this lip using the flat of your hand, then flap it over the bread
  7. Proof the loaves, flap down, on a heavily floured couche for 45 minutes to one hour
  8. While the bread is proofing, pre-heat the oven to 470°F/243°C after placing in it a baking stone (on middle shelf) and a metal oven dish (on the lowest shelf)
  9. Bake for 10 minutes at 470° F/243° C (with steam) , then lower the oven temperature to 450°F/232° C and bake another 20 minutes
  10. Cool on a rack.

Larry’s Buckwheat Batons go to Susan from Wild Yeast for this week’s issue of Yeastspotting.

Meet the Baker: Larry Lowary

As his partner Gerry Betz likes to remind him (rather teasingly and usually in the middle of the busiest pre-market nights when sleep is in short supply), Larry Lowary is a man who is living his dream.
A journalist by trade (he is a graduate of the prestigious Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri), he came rather late to baking despite the fact that his grandfather was a baker. Growing up in Chicago, he spent a big part of his childhood in and around bakeries and even though he loved journalism to the point of once acquiring and running his own newspaper (The Big Timber Pioneer) in the town of Big Timber, Montana, ultimately when his passion for reporting started to subside and he began looking for a profession that would bring him back to the basics and allow him to actually make a product that people would come and buy, he saw himself at work in his own bakery baking bread.
Today the dream has come true. So much so that life is a bit hectic during the baking months of the year. But that’s in part because Larry brings to his new profession the same curiosity that drove him to the old one: he is constantly on the lookout for new tastes, new techniques, new recipes, new master bakers.
Endearingly, like many bakers I have met and despite years of experience, Larry doesn’t think he knows best: every day brings opportunities for learning, whereas from books (he has all the books I covet and more), from baking classes and fellow students (as I could see first hand when I met him at a San Francisco Baking Institute weeklong workshop) or from tasting trips (what he and Gerry call “tasty travels”). The result is that he is never bored (except by repetitive tasks that no longer offer a challenge) and, more importantly, neither are his customers who flock to the Saturday Bayview Farmers’ Market where he and Gerry have been selling their baked goods from May to October since 2007. Larry bakes the bread and Gerry makes the cakes (he’s a pastry chef).
Now how did Larry get from Big Timber, Montana to Whidbey Island, Washington? Well, by the time he decided to become a baker, he was working in Oakland, California. He took his training at the Dunwoody Industrial Institute in Minneapolis, then a trading school for bakers underwritten by General Mills, today Dunwoody College of Technology. As luck would have it, Gerry, a native Californian, had trained at the same school, albeit years before. A baking convention coincided with a class reunion. They met. After a stint working together for a German baker in San Francisco, they hit the road in the best American tradition and explored their options. The trip took them from California to the Southwest then back north to the Midwest and finally to Seattle where they settled and worked for several years as bakery managers in an upscale family-operated grocery store. At one point, they bought what they thought would be a weekend house on Whidbey Island and started spending their free time there.
But the lure of island life proved irresistible. After some extensive and much necessary remodeling, they moved in. They had a building built on the property. A couple of years later, an oven was put in and they started to bake for the market. The rest is history.
Now I said Larry was living his dream. But did I mention that he does so in a place that many bakers can only dream of? For those of you who live a world away or are just unfamiliar with the Puget Sound area, let me take you on a short trip: coming from Seattle, the shortest way to get to Whidbey is on a ferry.
Leaving on the ferry from Mukilteo

Sailing towards Whidbey Island
A short crossing and a maze of tree-lined country roads later…
…you are at Tree-Top Baking.
First go in and visit the bakery , then check out its website. Like me, you’ll probably be amazed at the impressive array of baked goods Larry and Gerry manage to produce each week in such a small space.
Last time I was there they were recuperating from a market day where they had sold most of the 728 items they had brought with them, including more than 200 loaves of bread: Bayview baguettes, seeded baguettes, herb pain rustique, challah, white chocolate orange viennois, five-seed multigrain, Genzano bread, flaxseed rye, cracked wheat sourdough, buckwheat baton, barbecue buns, etc. (see complete list).
As we all know, baking is hard work involving long hours, short nights and back-breaking chores. Artisan bakers are usually not in it for the money. Larry and Gerry are no exceptions. In-between market days and during the winter months, they take in orders for various private customers, coffee-shops and restaurants. They deliver each week a large number of muffins, scones and cookies and other pastries as well as the occasional festive cupcake, not to mention wedding cakes. Sometimes they get tired. They’d like to be able to go away more, to have a more normal life but as Gerry put it, if we stop doing it, then these families and businesses would have no choice but to opt for buying, freezing and reheating warehouse baking products. They see their work as contributing to the quality of life on the island. I couldn’t agree more. I like bakers with a social conscience…
Now I have tasted many of Larry’s breads and fell in love with more than one, including his sprouted wheat or spelt breads which are to die for. But the one I would like to showcase this time is his intriguing Buckwheat Baton.