Sourdough no-go

I feel like I ought to be one of those people with their own sourdough starter living in their fridge; I want to be one of those people. I have certainly tried often enough, but the only time I have been successful was when we lived in New York. Eventually we got tired of always having to have sourdough bread or pancakes to keep it going, and it was forgotten at the back of the fridge. A couple of weeks ago, in my current baking frenzy, I decided to give sourdough another go and mixed up a starter. All was well for a while - the starter was bubbling and souring nicely. But one morning when I went to stir it, I found a fuzzy grey scum on the top. Sigh. I am beginning to agree with James Beard, who thought that sourdough bread was far too fickle for the home baker to deal with, and said that "I am not sure it is worth the trouble." At least not in Arkansas.

Umm, yeah, Friday

Picture by Candace Donovan

This has been a long week. The weather has been all over the place - up to the upper 80s for a couple of days, then down to 50 last night; sunny one minute, pouring rain the next. One co-worker has been on vacation all week, so my daily schedule is all switched around, which adds to the slight discombobulation caused by all the technological changes on Netflix, Facebook, and Pandora (yeah, they changed stuff too, but I actually like their changes, so I haven't complained). This weekend promises to be busy, as they all have been recently. Oh, and I just thought of something - the rain means the grass will be growing again and the lawn will need mowing. Drat.

Anyway, I'm not feeling too chatty, and I am sure you don't really care for the minutiae of my daily existence. So enjoy this lovely picture of bread (which is making me hungry) that my mother took recently in France, and have a good weekend. I may or may not be here.

Soup and bread

There isn't much that can top homemade soup and bread for a good Sunday dinner. I know, roast and potatoes or something is traditional, but we don't tend to hold with such traditions (heck, we don't usually even have turkey for Thanksgiving). We just had Polish barley soup and fresh French bread. It was superb. Hearty, filling, healthy. The soup recipe came from our favorite cookbook: Twelve Months of Monastery Soups by Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette. We first heard of this book through my cousin Chris, and since then have been using it a couple of times a month. The soups are mostly vegetarian, usually pretty easy, and always tasty. So yummy.

The bread was just a standard French loaf from my Tassajara book, and it turned out really well. Ahh (sigh of contentment).

No-knead Bread, No Thanks, Not for Me

I have been thinking about bread a lot lately. Last week I baked a loaf of no-knead wheat bread. Have you heard of this fad sweeping through the kitchens of America? Mark Bittman introduced many people to it through the Minimalist column in the NYT, then food pages at local papers picked it up and spread the word. I resisted, since I had time to knead bread, and liked the results I was getting. I also resisted on account of my natural aversion to popular trends - if everyone is raving about something, no matter what it is, I decide that I probably won't like it, and therefore abstain. At least until it is no longer quite so poplular. (I refused to read the Harry Potter books when I first heard about them, but when I did get around to it, it was because I was in Scotland, and I read the first two in a day. I have yet to try the Twilight series, and now that it is a movie, I probably never will.)

Anyway, I tried this loaf of bread last week, and well, meh. It was a decent loaf of bread, but it wasn't anything special. My theory is that the people who were raving about it were people who hadn't eaten a decent handmade loaf of bread in a long time, and were therefore astounded at the taste. Compared to the dry, fluffy, chemical-laced product sold in grocery stores as "bread," no-knead bread is spectacular. Compared, however, to bread that you have spent your time waiting for, working on, feeling beneath your palms as you knead it and shape it, no-knead bread is missing something. Something vital. The sense of accomplishment, for one thing. If you don't have to work at it, then the bread doesn't have that. It is a similar situation to tomatoes or carrots. If you buy carrots at the store in a bag, and that is all you ever know, or the pasty tomatoes in the produce section, then you probably think people who say they love these vegetables (yes, tomatoes are fruit, but for the sake of brevity they are vegetables) are nuts. If you then eat a tomato or carrot from a farmer's market, you begin to get an idea of what they are going on about. These vegetables have a flavor, a scent, something that elevates them from the store-bought (yeah, they weren't grown thousands of miles away and harvested weeks ago...). And that is good. More people should know that joy.

But those farmer's market vegetables, good as they are, cannot compare to the carrot or tomato or even zucchini that you grow in your own garden. That you water with your own hands, weed, stake, tend, wait impatiently for throughout the season, then harvest and eat within 1 minute. Then, then you know what a true Platonic ideal of a vegetable tastes like, what carrotness really is. Many children who do not like vegetables in general will eat vegetables they have raised, because they had a hand in it, they have pride of ownership. I can still remember the excitement and joy I felt when I would help my father harvest carrots, peapods, and tomatoes from his garden, and again when I would get to eat them.

It is the same with bread. If no-knead bread gets more people baking and realizing the joy of homemade bread, and gets them to reject the so-called bread at the store, then I am all for it. I love my farmer's markets, and I love buying from other people who have spent their time looking out for the vegetables or chickens or what-have-you that I am buying, because let's face it, I can't grow much of anything in an apartment (yes, I have done some container gardening, but it isn't very productive). And I love going to bakeries where the bread is made with the same type of care. But if I am going to bake bread for myself, as long as I have the time and the will to spend in the baking of bread, I prefer to knead my own. To spend effort and love in making something that will feed me, my husband, and my friends.

Let them eat bread!

Since we moved away from Austin, I have been baking about a loaf of bread a week. Most of the time, the bread recipe comes from The Tassajara Bread Book, but once in a while I remember my favorite recipe from childhood, a three grain loaf that Mom used to make. I have no idea where she got it, a magazine or newspaper most likely, but I just love it. The bread is delicious toasted with Parmesan cheese on top, or spread with jam, or used in a tuna sandwich. I made a loaf this weekend, to have with vegetable soup, and was inspired to share it with you.

The original recipe makes two loaves, and since we barely get through one loaf before it starts to go bad, I have cut it in half. If you want two loaves, simple double all the ingredients. It also is rather crumbly, so I added extra wheat gluten. According to one of our bread books, whole grain flours are low in gluten, which is what helps the molecules hold together, so adding extra gluten to the mix helps attain a better texture. You should be able to find wheat gluten (also called high gluten flour or just gluten flour) in the baking section of the grocery store, or in the bulk section of a natural food store. It should be kept in the fridge. The recipe calls for rolled oats - do not use quick cooking oats - get the real thing. You could also substitute spelt flakes, or wheat flakes, if you can get some. They are sometimes available at health food or natural food stores. You could also substitute oat bran for the wheat germ, but the bread will probably be a bit heavier. This time around I used some egg substitute I had left over from another recipe instead of an actual egg, and it seemed to work fine. If you want to cut down on cholesterol, this is a good choice.

Three Grain Bread (slightly modified a la Hope)
makes 1 9"x4" loaf

1 1/2 - 2 cups bread flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup wheat germ
1/4 cup cornmeal
3 tablespoons wheat gluten
1 teaspoon salt
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) dry yeast
1/2 cup hot water (but not boiling - this will kill the yeast)
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
5 oz can evaporated milk (if doubling, use 1 regular/large can)
1/4 cup honey or brown sugar
1 egg or equivalent amount egg substitute

1) Stir together 1/2 cup bread flour, whole wheat flour, oats, wheat germ, cornmeal, gluten, salt and yeast.
2) Combine hot water, butter, milk, honey, and egg. Stir into the flour mixture. If using a mixer, beat for two minutes at medium speed. If beating by hand, beat until well mixed, about 200 hundred strokes.
3) Gradually stir in the remaining bread flour until the dough is stiff and comes away from the sides of the bowl. Turn out onto a floured board or counter and knead until smooth and elastic, 5-10 minutes.
4) Place dough in an oiled or greased bowl, cover with a clean towel, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about an hour to an hour and a half.
5) Remove the dough from the bowl, knead a few times, then shape into a loaf and place in an oiled loaf pan. Let rise until the dough is above the top of the pan, or doubled in size. Begin to pre-heat the oven to 375 F. Once the dough has risen, you can make an egg wash with on egg and a tablespoon of milk, or simply brush with milk, if you wish.
6) Bake at 375 F for 20 minutes. Lower the heat to 350 F and bake for 30-35 minutes until the top is brown and it sounds hollow when tapped. Let the bread cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes, then remove from the pan and let cool completely on a rack.

Baking bread

I've spent the morning baking bread. Sourdough, to be exact. I have tried over the years to make a good loaf of sourdough, and have had many problems getting the starter to work properly. Then I found the Tassajara Bread book, a bread cook book from a Zen monastery in originally printed in 1970s. It is very big on the sponge method of baking, where you mix some of the flour and the yeast etc together and let it sit to proof, before adding the rest of the flour and other ingredients. I had very good results with this as soon as I tried it. My bread looked as it came from a bakery, for the first time (usually the loaves taste fine, but look, well, amateur).

For this sourdough bread, you make the starter much as you do with other recipes, but when you get to the bread part, you mix the starter with flour and water, then let it sit overnight before mixing in the rest of the flour. I had a starter going in Texas, but something went wrong - maybe it was too hot, or maybe there were just some very funky yeast spores in the air - but the sponge always ended up smelling more like sulfur than sour mash or beer. I used it anyway, and the bread turned out OK, but not really good. So, I threw out that batch of starter when we left. This week I have been growing a new starter, and it smells just right. Last night I started the sponge, and this morning, it didn't smell bad! Wahoo! It was a bit thinner than the sponges I made in Texas, but since they didn't turn out well, that is probably a good sign. The loaf shaped up and rose nicely.

And, you ask, how did it turn out? Really good! It has a lovely color and shape, and it tastes like a nice, light sourdough loaf of bread. Much better than my last couple of attempts in Texas.