Farine

Of Breads and Beaches

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:47:00 +0000

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)

Ken's Artisan Bakery

Same dough as previous baguette but with toasted walnuts added

St-Honoré Bakery

Cranberry Walnut

little t american baker

Petite Provence

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...

Teresa's Mill Grain Loaf

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:12:00 +0000

My friend Teresa Greenway, of Northwest Sourdough, certainly needs no introduction. Anyone who has ever researched sourdough baking on the web is familiar with her most informative website and companion blog (Discovering Sourdough) and may have experienced directly how prompt she is with advice and a helping hand when support is needed. But what you may not know if you haven't checked back with her lately is that she has shared her journey and experience from fledgling apprentice to seasoned baker in an eponymous e-book, Discovering Sourdough, available from the Kindle Store at amazon.com. In the interest of complete transparency, let me add that Teresa never asked me to review her book and that she only learned I had bought it when I wrote to congratulate her and say I was planning to review it on Farine.
Divided in four volumes (Beginning Sourdough, Intermediate Sourdough, Advanced Sourdough A and Advanced Sourdough B) all available separately, the book covers everything you need to know about baking with wild yeast, from making your own starter(s) from different grains and at various hydration levels to mixing, folding and proofing your dough, then scoring your bread and baking it to golden perfection. Each volume contains recipes (22 in Beginning, 20 in Intermediate, 18 in Advanced A and 30 in Advanced B), all of them illustrated by photographs and listing the ingredients by volume, standard units, metric units and percentages.
Having the book on your mobile device is like having a teacher at your side ready to hold your hand every step of the way: for instance, in the Intermediate section, it explains in what order it is generally best to add the ingredients when mixing and suggests different possible solutions to the problem of keeping the dough warm enough when proofing; it also shows pictures of beautifully scored loaves and explains how the slash influences the direction the dough expands while baking.
The recipes range from easy or batter breads (Beginning) to complex motherdough loaves (Advanced B). A reader who would endeavor to make them all would be kept busy for a good while and would also be embarking on a learning journey that would bring his or her skills to new levels as each booklet builds on knowledge acquired along the way. Short of going to baking school, there are probably not many better ways to learn for a novice baker. More experienced bakers may learn new tricks or techniques and will enjoy following a fellow bread lover on her voyage of discovery.
In an ideal world, I would like the book to contain more hyperlinks (it would be helpful for instance if the words "desem" or "motherdough" were referenced throughout the text) but the Kindle search engine works well and once a definition is found, it is easy enough to bookmark it for later retrieval.
Also, many of the recipes are based on a 166% hydration starter: I keep my liquid starter at 100%. But Teresa has foreseen the objection: Volume I points the reader to an online hydration conversion calculator (by RKG consulting) for the recipes that require it.
Finally because the color photos are a big help, it is best to read this book on a mobile device with a color screen, such as a Kindle Fire or an iPad or, if you don't have either, on your computer. I can't imagine the book being easy to use on a black and white Kindle. I read it on a second generation iPad and I love the way I can pinch the tables bigger or smaller as needed.
At a loss to choose between the many tempting recipes, I asked Teresa for advice and knowing I am a big fan of multigrain breads, she suggested I try the Mill Grain Loaf. I followed her suggestion and made the bread. I loved it (I have a huge weakness for crunchy crusts over creamy crumbs) but then I suspect I would love most of the breads in the book. I will certainly try them all over time, one after the other. I find it a big plus to have the recipes at my disposal in electronic form: no schlepping of heavy bread books for me this summer when we go back to our little camp...
I didn't have to use the conversion tool and adjust my starter to 166% hydration since Teresa has thoughtfully provided a converted recipe for the Mill Grain Loaf @ 100% on her blog. So I kept my starter at 100% and cruised merrily along, following her suggestion to replace part of the white flour with whole wheat flour (white whole wheat in my case). My only change was to roll the loaves over a wet towel and then onto a seed mixture (sesame, fennel, sunflower and poppy) before scoring and baking.

Teresa's Mill Grain Loaf is going to Susan for Yeastspotting.

How to make bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou: errata

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 21:30:00 +0000

Fig-Anise Bread from How to make Bread

In a previous post I mentioned How to make bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, a book which both beginners and more advanced bakers may find useful, inspiring and fun. I have already made half-a-dozen breads from the book and they came out really well, except for the last one I tried, Levain de campagne Bread (see Troubleshooting dough hydration: A trick "à la Gérard"). That last dough was so dry that there was no way it could be a simple matter of flour or weather differences.
So I wrote to the author who, to his credit, immediately emailed me back and subsequently called to ask which edition of the book I had. He then listed a few errors or omissions in the American edition (which is the one I have). I don't know if the same errors are to be found in the British edition but those of you who have it may want to take a look.

Since quite a readers have written or commented that they ordered the book, in case you have the exact same edition as I do (and if you bought it from amazon.com, chances are you do), I thought it'd be useful to share the list of corrections:

page 61: Bagels: In step 1, add the softened butter to the dry mixture
page 94: Levain de campagne Bread: replace "150 g warm water" by "250 g to 300 g warm water" (the author cannot be more specific as a lot depends on the capacity of your wholegrain flours to absorb water. Generally speaking American flours are stronger (have a higher protein content) than their British equivalent and therefore require more water
page 81: Gluten-free Bread with two variations: read "potato starch" instead of "potato flour"
page 82: Gluten-free Cornbread: read "corn starch" instead of "cornmeal/maize flour"
page 109: Beetroot Sourdough: In step 3, add the oil to the wet mixture
page 129: Semolina Bread: In the list of ingredients, add 15 g of olive oil for folding

If you notice anything else that doesn't seem to make sense or if you have trouble with one of the recipes, Emmanuel Hadjiandreou says he can always be reached for questions through the School of Artisan Food (info@schoolofartisanfood.org). If you do contact him, please let me know what you learn so that I can update the list as necessary.

If you are on facebook, you might also wish to comment on the book's page and start a discussion.
In case you are wondering, I should specify that I have no financial or other interest in the book except that I like it and that I paid for my copy out of my own pocket.

Happy baking!

Troubleshooting dough hydration: A trick "à la Gérard"

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:57:00 +0000

Update: If you are planning to make the Levain de campagne Bread from How to make bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou (the bread I am talking about below), please note that there is indeed a typo in the recipe and that the amount of water should be more or less 300 g and not 150 g. This was confirmed to me today by the author himself.

Spring break brought us a passel of kids and grandkids and made for an extremely lively ten days in our household. Anyone who has had the good fortune of living in close quarters with five-and-a half-year old twins and their even younger first cousins will probably agree that the experience isn't exactly conducive to meditation, reading and gourmet cooking.
By popular (and youthful) request, macaroni and cheese have been seen in my kitchen this week with unprecedented frequency while greens were the object of much suspicion and arduous negotiation. Asparagus and broccoli prevailed. Spinach was voted down. Frozen peas passed muster. Usually beloved, avocado was categorically rejected. Fruit was regarded with a marked lack of enthusiasm in its original form except for bananas, apples and mangos (save for one kid who expressed total revulsion at the sight of sliced mango in his fruit salad) but was widely appreciated in disguise (notably in the shape of the blackberry frozen yogurt I made from the berries we picked last summer).
A large part of the family went back home today. A second installment (grown-ups only) is expected tomorrow. In-between I found myself in the mood for a baking Sunday.
Since I am still exploring Hadjiandreou's book, I decided to make the miche Emmanuel Hadjiandreou calls his "Levain de campagne" Bread (shown on the cover) for which he won a Great Taste Award. The recipe calls for 150 g of mature white starter (at 100% hydration) and 150 g of water (as indicated above, the water amount is incorrect as printed in the book. It should be 300 g) as well as for 250 g of all-purpose flour (he actually recommends strong/bread flour but then he bakes in the UK where flours are different from ours), 150 g of whole wheat flour and 50 g of dark rye flour. So far so good.
Cruising along after weighing everything, I was feeling quite happy (the fragrance of the levain will do that to you!) when I hit a snag. Hadjiandreou says to "mix until [the dough] comes together. The mixture will be a bit soft, but don't despair and don't be tempted to add more flour". I certainly wasn't! Far from being alarmingly soft, my dough was as stiff as could be. I wet my hands, I added a few spoonfuls of water, then a few more. It still didn't look good. I set the dough to rest for ten minutes prior to the first stretch and fold, hoping that it would have relaxed, but no such luck. I tried adding more water but it made matters worse: the dough showed signs of breaking apart.
That's when I remembered a trick Gérard Rubaud showed me last fall. He said it is never too late to add water to a dough and he proved his point by hydrating a dough that had just finished fermenting and successfully making a whole batch of baguettes with it.

This above video was done for demonstration purposes only: the dough was already fine as it was. But Gérard does use this trick to troubleshoot production situations: he says that each time he gets a new delivery of all-purpose flour, he has to recalculate the percentage of water and sometimes he's off in his calculations for the first batch and doesn't know it until after the autolyse is over. If he has used too much water, it is simple enough to add more flour but if he hasn't used enough, it is much trickier. In his experience, it is way easier to add water (up to 2% of the flour weight) at the end of the first fermentation than at the end of the autolyse.
The dough that was slowly taking shape in my bowl had none of the silkiness and pillowiness (is there such a word?) of Gérard's. It was still rather stiff and forbidding and didn't look like it would take kindly to a bath "à la Gérard". Still it could clearly use some water, so I gave it a shower instead (using a spray bottle) and that's clearly what it was waiting for.
After each stretch and fold episode (and there were a total of six at ten minute-intervals), I sprayed it thoroughly with warm water and covered it again with an inverted bowl. It absorbed the water while resting and became progressively more flexible. It was still a very different dough from Gérard's but then Gérard's contained mostly white flour while this one contained close to 80% whole grains.
I am sure the crumb won't sport big holes (Hadjiandreou's doesn't) but will it be dense or not? In other words, should I have sprayed more? Or less? That's what I am hoping to learn from the experience... Don't you love the everlasting challenges of breadbaking?
I wrote to Emmanuel Hadjiandreou to make sure the recipe is correct. The dough seemed way too dry, even accounting for the differences in flour, climate, etc., for the prescribed amounts of flour and water to yield the soft dough pictured (and described) in the book. I will let you know what I hear back, if anything.

Chocolate and Currant Sourdough

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:24:00 +0000

The recipe comes from an excellent book on bread-baking I recently discovered, How to Make Bread by South-African born and UK-based baker Emmanuel Hadjiandreou. Here are a few of the things I love about this book:

It stresses that "accuracy is crucial in bread baking" and encourages the baker to use a precision electronic scale
It lists all quantities in metric weights first, followed by American cups and/or ounces, tablespoons, etc.
All recipes are illustrated with clear explanations and gorgeous pictures (some of the pages can be seen online on this blog)
All recipes are mixed by hand (stretch-and-fold method) but they are wrist-friendly because the quantities are always on the small side (the downside is that the yield is smaller than what I am used to and I am tempted to just double the amount of ingredients but then the wrist-friendly aspect becomes less obvious. A professional baker would also tell you that because the amounts are small, there is no mass-effect which makes it harder to coax all possible flavors out of the grain. Life is all about compromise, isn't it?)
The book explains the basics of bread making, then offers recipes for yeasted breads, sourdoughs, flatbreads, soda breads and pastries (among which pains au chocolat for which the reader is shown how to make his or her own chocolate batons). There is even a gluten-free bread recipe with two variations (I love the fact that it doesn't use any xantham gum or other barbarious sounding binder). Hadjiandreou writes that he learned his trade as a baker in a German-style bakery and he includes a recipe for dark rye bread which he says is one of his all-time favorites. There are also wheat-free breads, including a prune and pepper rye bread that looks marvelous and is definitely on my to-bake list! He also includes an award-winning recipe for a marzipan stollen
I find How to Make Bread a great resource for both new and experienced bakers and if I ever teach bread-baking, I would be tempted to use it as a workbook since it covers a lot of ground in a friendly manner and makes home baking look deliciously rewarding (which it is, I can testify to that!).

Although I have already baked quite a few recipes from the book (including a pretty pink-dotted beetroot sourdough for the Easter dinner bread basket), I am showcasing the chocolate bread since I recently made and froze a new batch in anticipation of our grandkids' arrival on spring break at the end of the week. It is a kid-friendly bread that even adults not blessed (or cursed, depending on the point of view) with a sweet tooth can enjoy, all levain-based and chokeful of good-for-you currants. I used bittersweet chocolate chips as that's all I had on-hand (Hadjiandreou suggests using milk or semisweet which we would probably have found too sweet anyway). This blog entry comes with a warning though: once you have made this bread, you'll likely find yourself compulsorily making it again and again.

Ingredients: (for two small-loaves)

200 g Zante currants
80 g semisweet chocolate chips
330 g unbleached all-purpose flour (Hadjiandreou says to use "strong or bread flour" which contains a high amount of protein (up to 17%) to trap the carbon dioxide during fermentation and give the bread a good texture. That would be considered too high here in the US but then our flours are quite different. To be on the safe side, if you do live in the UK, your best bet is to follow Hadjiandreou's advice)
8 g salt
20 g cocoa powder
170 g white levain (sourdough starter) at 100% hydration*
250 g warm water

* The starter I used is one that my friend Teresa from Northwest Sourdough kindly sent me when I came back from my trip to France (saving me the tedious task of reactivating my dehydrated levain). Appropriately called Northwest Starter because it was originally cultured near Willapa Bay, Washington, it is wonderfully fragrant and so active that I was able to bake with it after just one feeding. No wonder it was once featured in a TV show (in 2006 during the "What's Cooking?" segment on KNOE TV Channel 8/CBS affiliate). Why, if I had been the one to capture these wild ~~workhorses~~ yeasts, I would probably have tried to get them on Animal Planet! Well done, Teresa, and thank you!

Method (slightly adapted):

Mix the currants and chocolate and set aside
In one small mixing bowl, mix the flour, salt and cocoa powder together. This is the dry mixture
In a larger mixing bowl, mix the sourdough starter and water together until well combined. This is the wet mixture
Add the dry and chocolate-currant mixtures to the wet mixture and mix until incorporated
Cover and let stand for 10 minutes
After 10 minutes, stretch and fold the dough inside the bowl by going twice around the bowl with four stretches and foldings at each 90° turn (8 stretches/foldings in all)
Let rest 10 minutes again. Repeat twice
Complete a fourth stretch and fold cycle and let the dough rest one hour (I actually let it rest closer to three hours before it was fermented enough, probably because my house was colder than the lab where the recipe has been tested)
When the dough has double in volume, punch it down to release the air (I didn't really punch it as I am always weary of completely deflating it), lightly flour a clean work surface and transfer the boule of dough to it
Divide the dough into two equal portions and roll each one into a ball
Dust two small proofing baskets with flour (Hadjiandreou uses a long oblong one into which he fits the two balls snugly together but I don't own one like that) and set the boules in them, seam-side up
Let the dough rise until doubled in size (it can take between 3 and 6 hours)
About 20 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 475°F/240°C with a baking stone on the middle shelf and an empty roasting pan at the bottom. Fill a cup with water and set it aside
When the boules have doubled in volume, tip them out seam-side down on a parchment-lined semolina-dusted rimless half-sheet pan and slide them onto the baking stone. Pour the reserved water into the empty roasting pan and lower the oven temperature to 425°F/220°C
Bake about 30 minutes. To check if the bread is ready, tip it out upside down and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow
Let cool on a wire rack
Enjoy!

The chocolate and currant sourdough bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting.

Happy Egg Day everyone!

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:32:00 +0000

Meet the cheesemaker: Lin Bourdais

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:07:00 +0000

Remember I told you in my last post how we had the baguette from Normandy with cheese the same night? Well, it wasn't just any cheese: it was this cheese, a tomme from the same terroir as the baguette, i.e. Pays d'Auge in Normandy.

The notion of terroir is of supreme importance to the artisans we met that day. Erik the baker moved to the country to be closer to the wheat. He started using a small mill close to his bakery but the miller moved away. So for now he gets his flour from le Moulin de Persard in Western Normandy. When Manu realizes his project of growing and milling wheat for the bakery however, the full circle they both have been dreaming of all along will become reality.

(photo courtesy of our friends at Tree-Top Baking, along for the visit)

Lin Bourdais, 47, has been making organic cheese for 6 years at Bois Canon, the farm he bought from his parents. He has thirty cows who produce milk all-year round on 52 ha (128 acres) of land. He sells his cheese on two open-air markets (Mézidon and Caen) as well as to a few natural food stores and to CSA's. This year he had to deny cheese deliveries to other stores: the farm doesn't yield enough milk to make more cheese (it takes 450 liters of milk to make 45 kg of cheese) and he doesn't want to buy milk elsewhere, even from a neighbor, because he wouldn't know first-hand what the cows had eaten and wouldn't be able to control the flavors. He works with the tastes of his terroir and wants it no other way.
He has help: Sophie Martinet, who became his business partner a year-and-a-half ago; Xavier, who is interning at the fromagerie and David, an expert cheesemaker who came to replace him when he had to leave for a while (sorry, I don't have last names for Xavier or David). Three people need to work full-time to maintain production levels.
Now Lin's cheese isn't typical of what Normandy usually produces, i.e. soft cheeses (such as Camembert, Pont-L'Évêque or Livarot). Tommes are normally to be found in mountainous areas, such as the Alps or the Massif Central, and they are often low in fat. Lin's isn't. He uses full fat raw milk and the resulting cheese is wonderfully tender. The one he cut open for us had been aging since the previous June (since we visited in March, it was about nine months old). It gets better as it ages but Lin says the demand is such that it is difficult to keep enough tommes around to age them.
He currently sells cheeses made in January 2012, November 2011 and June 2011. He says that once he kept a cheese for two and a half years to sell at Christmas time. He put it for sale at twice the regular price -which is €12/kg or a little bit under $8 per pound- and it flew off the table.
Lin's tomme is an uncooked pressed cheese (like Cheddar). I know this is normally a bread blog but just in case you are interested in cheese (I know I am: wine and cheese have got to be my favorite food pairings), take a quick look at how it's made (the first photo is kind of foggy because it was very warm in the room and we were coming from outside, so glasses and camera lenses misted up right away!).

(photo courtesy of Tree-Top Baking)

The first few weeks, the cheese is washed two to three times a week and at the very beginning, it gets flipped over at each washing. Afterwards, the washing occurs only about once a week: it starts from the top shelves (where the older cheeses reside) so that the bacteria naturally occurring on the rind can trickle down and bring more flavor to the younger tommes. The shelves have to be made out of white wood (ash tree, Norway spruce, fir tree). Any other wood would impart an unwelcome taste to the cheese.

We were sent to Lin's farm by Seth, from Boulangerie Les Co'Pains, but I am not sure Lin is eager to have unannounced visitors. If you are in the area and want to try his cheese (which I strongly recommend because it is very tasty), your best bet is to go the markets at Caen or Mézidon and look or ask for Fromagerie GAEC du Bois Canon. You won't regret it...

In Normandy, a different kind of bakery: Boulangerie Les Co'Pains

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:20:00 +0000

There is so much that blows my mind about this bakery that I find it hard to even start writing about it. Part of me would be tempted to let the photos tell the story (there is something singularly eloquent about the way light settles on flour, dough and bread), another part needs to talk about the bakers and yet another part wishes to dwell on the bakery's unique bread-baking philosophy. Each of these elements, the visual, the people, the philosophy, tells it all and yet there is more. So I'll just forge ahead and try.
I'll start by setting the decor: the bakery is located in Saint-Aubin-sur-Algot, a small village near Lisieux (Calvados), a lovely area of Normandy famous for its apples, its cider, its apple brandy, its cheeses (Camembert, Pont-L'Évêque, Livarot), its milk, cream and butter, etc... Barely off the main road between Caen and Lisieux, the place is so rural you wouldn't be faulted for thinking you have crossed an invisible border and find yourself in a different country or, possibly, century.

The treehouse Erik the baker built with his teenage son

The bakery gets the wood for its oven (wood scraps really) from the nearby sawmill: cutting it to the right size is a three-hour job that two of the bakers tackle every week (they alternate).

(above photo by our friends from Tree-Top Baking, along for the visit. Reproduced with permission)

The wooden troughs and boxes are the work of a local artisan. As for the molds and sheet pans, their previous owner was an old Dutch baker whose family had used them for more than a century of artisan bread-baking. When he retired, he couldn't bring himself to throw them out. Erik's mom lives in Southern Holland in the same small city as this old baker. When he learned her son was opening a bakery in France, he was glad to give them to him...

But here I am using first names when I haven't even introduced any of the bakers. Let me do it now:

Meet Erik Klaassen, 52, one of Les Co'Pains' co-owners ("Co'Pains" is a play on words: the bakery is a cooperative (a "société coopérative ouvrière de production" or SCOP) which initially had three owners, hence the "Co'". "Pains", well, you know it means "bread" in French, right? As for "copains" -all in one word, mind you- it means "buddies".)
The three original baking buddies were Erik, Antoine and Manu. Antoine has moved on to open his own little bakery; Manu is still there but currently apprenticing to a farmer for a year because he's planning to eventually grow and mill the grain for the bakery. We didn't get to see him. We heard about Mickael, another of the current bakers, but he wasn't working that afternoon and we didn't meet him either.
Getting back to Erik, this giant of a Dutchman didn't plan on becoming a baker. He trained as a forestry engineer in his native Holland but after one boring meeting too many, he quit his job to travel around the world. In 1984-85, a girlfriend led him to France.
Determined to work with his hands, he started baking three breads per hour in an old gas stove he had refurbished and installed in his small city apartment (he then lived in Caen). He sold them at the open-air market. After a while, eager to move closer to the grain, he left the city for the country, soon getting his hands on more castaway gas stoves... At one point, seven of those could be counted lined up in his living room.
He dreamed of a wood-fired oven but his budget didn't allow it. Luck intervened: he heard of a baker up north who was planning to dismantle his old oven and would be willing to sell the metal parts for scraps. He bought the scraps and trucked them back and with his buddies' help, he finally built his wood-fired oven. It took him a year...
That was in 1993-94. The oven has been in constant use since then. Erik says that once he switched ovens, his bread quickly became so much better that he could no longer satisfy the demand. He needed to make more. He had a choice: invest in equipment or invest in labor. He chose to make more bread with more hands instead of with more machines. He also decided he no longer wanted to be boss: time had come to share the burden of garanteeing a steady income to all those who worked at the bakery. The cooperative was born.

Meet Seth Wiggin, 27, employed at the bakery. Like Erik, Seth didn't originally embark upon a career as a baker. His degree is in civil engineering. Although he comes from a small port on Lake Erie in Ontario, he holds dual British-Canadian citizenship which gives him the right to work in the European Union.
As he tells it, about two years ago he biked his way around France for a month, exploring the countryside and eating baguettes every day. Once back home, he realized that he wanted to make bread. So he built himself a levain from scratch and started baking. The first bread turned out okay and it spurned him to make more, much more. He finally made it back to France the following April, first working as a volunteer (wwoofing) at an organic goat cheese farm (cheese is his other passion), then seeking an organic bakery that would use a wood-fired oven.
He contacted Les Co'Pains through a mutual acquaintance and they agreed to let him "wwoof" at the bakery, at the beginning just for room and board. He is now a full-time salaried employee. He enjoys many aspects of the bakery and finds great personal satisfaction in the atmosphere it fosters among the bakers and their network of friends and acquaintances.

Meet Didier Bodelot, 44. I didn't get to talk to Didier as much as I would have liked to. I have since written to him. If he decides to share more about his life as a baker, I'll be sure to update the post. At this point, all I know is that he too comes from a different professional background (he used to work for Doctors without Borders) and is taking advantage of a French government's re-training program to go back to school and get certified as a baker. Within this program he must alternate between classes and internships. He chose to intern at Les Co'Pains because he is interested in the cooperative bakery model.
Now that you have met the bakers, let's talk about the baking. Erik describes an epiphany he once had as a student in a high-school chemistry class: "Aaargh! I never want to be precise again!", he vowed, and to this day, he describes himself as a "latitudinarian". He bakes by feeling, not according to any formula. There is nothing written in the bakery (except a schedule of bread prices) and no ingredient is ever weighed or temperature measured.
As Manu writes in Boulange: "Empty the bag of flour into the trough. Throw in pinches of salt (more or less one for each kilo of flour plus another for the sheer beauty of the gesture). Dip your hand into the levain. Estimate how much you need depending on the temperatures, both indoors and outdoors, the proofing time, the flour you are using, the composition of your levain... Careful! Things get a bit more complicated. Head towards your source of water. Use cold water if the temperature is warm, warm water if it is cold. If you don't know whether the temperature is warm or cold, ask Erik. If Erik isn't around, improvise! The dough will let you know the day after if the water was too warm or too cold..."(my translation).
On the whole it surely evens out. The bakery has been successfully selling its bread for more than 20 years, so it must know what it is doing. I imagine an intern has a hard time of it until he finds his bearings though. And it is hard work, no doubt about that. Although to the onlooker, it may look like sheer poetry...

Shortbread cookies are made the same way: nothing written, nothing measured. Asked how many eggs he uses, Erik will tell you: "As many as necessary..." Sugar? Butter? Same answer. Would I be able to reproduce his recipe? Not really. Did I love watching him make it? Yes, totally! Out of one dough, he makes four different batches: plain, sesame seeds, chocolate and raisins. I only took pictures of the chocolate ones. There is magic in the way a shaggy mess of flour, butter and eggs slowly morphs into an orderly line-up of ready-to-bake cookies. Look!

La marche des sablés (The march of the shortbread cookies)

Let's turn to the bread...

(above photo by our friends from Tree-Top Baking. Reproduced with permission)

You are probably thinking that, save for the occasional baguette, the bread doesn't look much like bread normally found in France and you are right. Erik says his customers mostly want bread they can slice and freeze and conveniently re-heat in their toasters. That tells me that many of them are probably foreigners and when I ask, Erik confirms that indeed many British or Dutch families own country homes in the area. They want organic and they buy his bread. He knows what they like and he gives it to them. 80% of his customers are return customers.

Four days a week he sells at markets: Wednesdays in Honfleur, Fridays in Caen, Saturdays in Lisieux, Sundays in Caen again. He delivers to several natural food stores and CSA's. People in the know even make their way to the bakery on baking days to pick up their bread as it comes out of the oven. But local villagers typically do not get their bread from Les Co'Pains: first of all they are not necessarily able or willing to pay a premium for organic and secondly, they prefer the baguettes they can buy at Carrefour or Leclerc, two ubiquitous chains of supermarkets typically found in most cities or on their outskirts.

Did I like Les Co'Pains' bread? After a whole afternoon spent at the bakery, you'd think I would have an opinion, right? Well, to my everlasting mortification, I can't say anything about the way the bread tastes because I never thought to sample it! I was so spellbound by the slow ballet of the bakers at work, the heady fragrance of the wholegrain levain as it incorporated with the flour and water, the smell of the burning wood, the play of light on the loaded peel, the song of the cooling breads that I went on sensory overload and completely ignored the fact that my tastebuds needed to be consulted.
We did buy a baguette and had it that night with cheese. It tasted wonderfully wheaty but it was also saltless. Yes, you read it right: there was no salt in it. Clearly the follow-no-script method has its pitfalls ! But then what method doesn't? I have taken to always measuring the salt first and putting it very close to my mixing bowl so I can't possibly not see it when the autolyse is over. Salt-less does happen. Levain-less too sometimes... Not fun! The baguette was otherwise excellent.

Erik explained that they basically mix three different doughs, all organic and all-levain based: one entirely wholewheat (based on T150 flour), one semi-whole wheat (based on T80 flour) and one all-white (based on T55 flour). For more info on the French classification of flours, you may want to refer to this page on the artisan website.
Out of these three doughs, they make nine to ten different breads, adding various seeds (sunflower, poppy, sesame or flax) and other flours, including spelt, buckweat and a 5-grain mix, also walnuts or hazelnuts. They make an emmer bread that Erik describes as their most expensive at € 5.30/700 g ($ 7/24 oz.) but which always sells very well.
Mixing is typically done at the end of the day, entirely by hand. There is no mixer. No stretch and fold or other form of gluten-development either. Erik describes the resulting dough as slightly more than no-knead. That's all. Fermentation takes place from 8 PM to 4:40 AM. The dough is never refrigerated or otherwise retarded. That's baking like it was done in the old days, folks! A mind-boggingly different business model from the ones we saw in Paris during our BBGA-sponsored visits (see In Paris with bread on my mind, Two more Parisian bakeries and Award-winning baguettes in Montmartre) where shiny modern stores hide diminutive labs (often located in the basement) and where the husband toils in the back while the wife officiates at the cash register. No cash register is visible at Les Co'Pains, only a cash box and Erik's wife commutes to a nearby small town where she teaches French. There is no woman in sight actually and I forgot to ask if the bakery ever had a woman apprentice.
When at Europain I attended a roundtable of women bakers and I remember the participants bringing up the issue of pénibilité (the demanding nature of the work) and the way labs could be adapted to women's physical requirements to make professional baking more appealing to them. Well, at Les Co'Pains, such adaptation hardly seems possible. But what goes for women also goes for aging workers. Erik is probably already thinking of the day when his back rebels or his arms slow down.
Young partners and/or workers will need to be secured and he himself might choose then to focus more on what he already says he greatly enjoys: perpetuating a skills by training apprentices and teaching breadbaking to school children. Many classes already visit regularly as a group. For a set fee of € 6 euro per child, the kids play with flour and levain and get to bake pre-shaped loaves that they can take home. These visits are a good source of income for the bakery and they help strenghthen its ties with the community. They may also help train the tastebuds of future generations of local customers...
As Manu writes in Boulange, today the Co'Pains are bakers. Tomorrow they might be farmers too (he's working hard towards that goal). Together with other like-minded artisans in their community (such as Lin or Sophie, who make cheese, Nicole, who makes cider and apple-juice, etc.), they are forging ties both to the land and to the people who nurture it by working it the old-fashioned way. Their network grows with every passing year and their hope is that twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now the artisan model will the prevalent one. The land will have been re-parcelized and supermarket-shopping will be no more than the memory of a quaint aberration in a not-so-distant past... We will all be thinking like stewards of the Earth. The Co'Pains already do.

External resources:

Boulange (a book, co-authored by Les Co'Pains, in French)
Boulangerie bio Les Co'Pains (a video, in French)

Le Pain de Pierre: a village bakery near Paris...

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 01:14:00 +0000

We "happened" upon this little bakery (actually my friend found it thanks to a wonderful touring app on his French smartphone) in the sleepy village of Lardy, Essonne, south of Paris, during a day outing. We didn't "visit" it or even got to talk to the baker (who was probably sleeping off his busy shift) but we bought bread and the salesperson kindly allowed me to take pictures. I later checked out the bakery's website which is all in French but features a lovely gallery of pictures: although the bakery changed hands last fall, the new owner has picked up where the previous one left off and continues to bake all organic bread, using levain spontané (wild yeast) and a wood-fired oven.
The bread is on the expensive side, which means the village is not your run-of-the-mill French country village but probably a village-dortoir (a dormitory village) or a village of résidences secondaires (weekend homes) where the residents can afford to pay a premium for organic and hand-stenciled bread. As much as I might like it to be the case, most country bakeries in France do not look like this one... Still I enjoyed seeing it and I thought you might too.
The whimsical turtle below is one of the loaves the baker had made from leftover dough with kids in mind.
Update: Since I posted the above, my niece Flo Makanai has written to say she knew the bakery well when it still belonged to Pierre and that judging from the pictures, the breads sadly do not look as good today as they did then. They were already on the expensive side, which can be explained by the fact that the bakery uses Demeter flours, obtained through biodynamic agriculture (that, at least, hasn't changed). She also recalls that Pierre didn't necessarily bake everyday as his baking was influenced by the activity of the moon...

A slot machine for baguettes? Only in France!

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:42:00 +0000

The company's flyer as given to me at the show

When I was a child growing up in Paris, my grandparents moved from their native Southwestern France to Normandy to be closer to us. We used to go visit them every weekend and sometimes for small vacations as well. They grew all their own fruit and vegetables, raised poultry and rabbits, got milk and eggs from the farm next door, foraged in the nearby woods and meadows for wild greens and mushrooms and generally-speaking lived pretty much off the grid. One thing they didn't make though was bread.
They had grown up in households where breadbaking was a bimonthly chore and they probably felt that it was a huge improvement to be able to buy bread instead of making it themselves. An itinerant bread-delivery van circled the villages, it beeped outside the kitchen door, my grandma got out with her change purse, exchanged a few words with the driver (who might have been the baker doing his rounds but I never thought to ask, so I can't vouch for that) and went back inside with her bread. On the days the van driver was off, my grandpa got onto his Solex (motorized bike) and, into his early eighties, rode 2.5 miles to the nearest bakery. He came home with long fat yellow loaves fastened to the back of his Solex and since he wore a béret at all times (even indoors, except at night when he replaced it with a night cap), he must have looked like the poster Frenchman of bygone years we all have seen at some time or other.
I don't know if many bereted grandfathers still roam the roads of France on Solexes but while bread is still delivered door to door in some communities, I suspect that with the multiplication of grandes surfaces (large supermarkets selling everything under the sun) on the outskirts of most little cities, many families get their bread another way.
However there may still be a need for an alternative: elderly people with no means of getting around may live in remote villages with no bakeries and no bread deliveries; workers on different schedules may not want industrial bread and yet can't make it to the bakery before it closes for the day; gridlock and parking issues in busy downtowns may make it a hassle to actually get to the bakery; costs of doing the rounds may be too high for itinerant bakers, etc.
Whatever the reason, I saw at Europain an automatic baguette dispenser that stopped me dead in my tracks. Here is how it works: the artisan baker loads the machine with a batch of baguettes (62 is the maximum number) and the machine keeps them at room temperature. There is an optional alarm-system which alerts the baker when the distributor is empty and needs to be re-loaded. There is also a lockdown mechanism which prevents the sale of day-old baguettes. Sold at the same price as at the bakery, the baguettes are as good (or as mediocre) as the baker makes them.
The company, aptly called maBaguette, has sold and installed fifteen of these distributors in Western France since it started in July 2011 and it is looking to expand. Its main hurdle is to convince bakers that the machines shouldn't be installed right outside their bakeries where they can keep an eye on them but in remote places where bread isn't easy to come by. It emphasizes the fact that they are very low-maintenance and should be seen, not as stop-gap devices, but as additional points of sale which can be put inside shopping malls, offices, gas stations, railroad stations, even hospitals, and make it possible for the baker to reach a new customer base.
Whether or not the company will succeed is anybody's guess. Personally I know that I'd rather get my bread from a bakery where it is most likely fresher and where I can ask for "bien cuit" (nicely browned) but in a pinch, hey, why not? The baguettes thus distributed are probably better than their supermarket equivalents. As for the machines, they do make it easier for bakers to perform what some of them consider as their professional duty, i.e. facilitating acccess to artisan bread in their communities.

Maison Kayser: Le restaurant du boulanger (The Baker's Restaurant)

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 21:25:00 +0000

Gourmets will tell you that wine and food should complement each other. Restaurants therefore sometimes go to great length to pair different wines with different dishes. In Gaillac (in Southwestern France), we once dined at a restaurant where you could pick either your menu or your wines but not both as the chef was adamant he wasn't going to let his carefully prepared meal be marred by the choice of the wrong wines. It wasn't a fancy place and my very elderly parents (with whom we were traveling) were a bit taken aback: in all his born days, my Dad had never heard of such a display of authority by a restaurant owner. Since he wasn't about to let anybody dictate his choice of wines though (too momentous a decision), he picked one for each of his three courses (he obviously wasn't the designated driver) and ended up quite happy with the dishes that accompanied them (anticipatory curiosity probably had a lot to do with it as I don't recall the cuisine as particularly memorable). We did the opposite and picked the dishes and were equally happy with the mystery wines that were brought with them. Altogether a different kind of dinner and a fun evening...
But have you ever been to a restaurant where food is systematically paired with bread? Well, thanks to Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, author of the compelling Dictionnaire universel du pain (a must-have reference for French-speaking breadophiles) whom I met in Paris last week and who recommended I try Maison Kayser's new restaurant in Bercy Village, I now have and I love the idea. The restaurant is so new that at the time of this writing, it isn't even listed on the Kayser website.
It is located 47, Cour Saint-Émilion in the 12th arrondissement. Prices are not cheap but considering the location, they aren't outrageous either: a lunch consisting of an appetizer plus an entrée or an entrée plus a dessert (I am not a dessert person so I picked the soup but the Kayser desserts are gorgeous) will set you back €14,90 (about $20) per person, tax and service included.

I took this picture of Kayser pastries at Europain as the Kayser bakeries seem to have a very strict policy against in-store photography. At the restaurant they reluctantly let me photograph what was in the plate in front of me when I told them I would blog about it but they clearly didn't like it. So I kept it to a minimum.

Of course pairing food and bread isn't a revolutionary concept in France. Certain cheeses are best accompanied by specific breads, oysters on the half-shell are traditionally served with thin slices of buttered rye bread and my paternal grandmother wouldn't have dreamed of serving her famous "civet de lièvre" (hare stewed in red wine) without "galettes de sarrazin" (buckwheat crêpes). But Eric Kayser, the famous Parisian baker whose liquid levain tsunamied through the home-baking web some years ago, went one step further recently by opening a restaurant where each course is served with a different bread.

Among other offerings, the menu pairs "coeur de sucrine" (bib lettuce salad) with pain au levain, foie gras with fig bread (a classic), lamb tagine with olive bread, entrecôte Béarnaise with buckwheat pavé, etc. It doesn't make use of the full array of Kayser breads but I suspect the breads will change with the seasons. What I had was both light, tasty and fresh. Ironically though, the mushroom soup that I picked as an appetizer was supposed to be served with a slice of buckwheat pavé (garnished with slivers of smoked salmon) and it actually came with turmeric bread, the very same bread that also accompanied the main course (poached chicken breast and vegetables with horseradish sauce). I didn't even notice because we were too busy talking and by the time I did, it was too late. So if you go, make sure you get the "right bread" for your dish. It wasn't a big deal (I couldn't see myself complaining about fragrant turmeric bread studded with almonds, nuts and hazelnuts) but the whole idea was to try a new bread with each course and that didn't work as planned!

Still we had a most pleasant lunch. Of course it doesn't hurt that Maison Kayser is located in picturesque Cour Saint-Émilion, the center of the French wine trade in the 19th century and well into the 20th. The friend we were with had grown up in the Marais and has fond memories of coming to Bercy with her father to pick up small barrels of wine for family consumption (I too grew up in a family where wine was normally bought by the barrel and bottled at home but our barrels usually came straight from the producers and I never visited Bercy when I was a kid).

The neighborhood has grown on me though and Parc de Bercy has become one of my favorite spots for dreaming in the city. And now that it has a good bakery, I can even dream about living there, cooking my way through my favorite recipes and pairing them off with the whole gamut of Kayser breads...

Gâteau battu picard (Picardy beaten cake)

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 07:03:00 +0000

Imagine... Imagine a land of sand and mist between river and sea... A tiny market on a sleepy shore...Brooding boats... Dangling mittens... Ghostly jammies... Solemn salads... A man making tiny waffles on an old-fashioned iron...

The baker, Denis Playez, was sandwiching the waffles on the spot with a mixture of cream and light brown sugar (flavored either with rum or vanilla) and selling them by the bag. They were pleasantly crunchy but a bit too sweet for my taste. The golden cakes definitely caught my eye though. Monsieur Playez told us he had been up half-the-night beaten them into submission: the dough needs to rise and be punched back, rise and be punched back, rise and be punched back, and it will only ferment properly if kept at warm temperature (in the old days, folks used to tuck the bowl of dough between them in their beds). Baked in a high corrugated pan, the gâteau battu looks a bit like an inverted chef's toque.

The original recipe is so rich in egg yolks (hence the deep yellow color) and butter that, for health reasons, I will not even attempt to make it at home. But it is fluffier and lighter than a regular brioche and, to my taste, much more delicate than a kouglof. We bought one to bring to our friends' house and we had it for dessert with canned peaches from their garden. What a treat...
In case you are wondering about the exact location of this magical land, it is in Northern France and we happened upon it while driving back down from Belgium where we had been visiting family. The village is called Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. It has a rich history: William the Conqueror left from its harbor in September 1066 to conquer England. Its prison briefly held Joanne of Arc in December 1430 when the British troops chose to overnight there on their way to Rouen.

I can only shudder when I think of how cold, damp and forbidding it must have been for her within these walls on that winter day, especially knowing that she was on her way to her death...

The village is on the shores of the River Somme. It used to be much closer to the sea but the construction of the Somme canal and various other waterworks have had an impact on the estuary which has filled with sand. It is now a heaven for seabirds and mammals (it harbors the only seal colony in France) and a true paradise for nature lovers.

Women bakers speak up...

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:44:00 +0000

If you are familiar with the term "autolyse", you may have heard of Professeur Raymond Calvel, the French baking professeur and author of The Taste of Bread, who invented the technique in the 70s as a way to improve the taste, texture and overall quality of French bread. Calvel was such an indefatigable promoter of artisan bread both in France and abroad (his memory is particularly revered in Japan which incidentally just won first place at Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie) that his former students and friends have created Amicale Calvel, an association designed to disseminate, perpetuate and build upon his teachings.
A great place for bread people to meet and chat, the Amicale had organized a roundtable during Europain on the theme "Paroles de boulangères" (Women bakers speak up). The room was packed with a majority of men, most of them bakers and/or baking instructors, many from distant countries (including Japan). Jeffrey Hamelman, director of King Arthur's Bakery in Norwich, Vermont, and author of Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes was in the audience and wrote an account of the meeting on King Arthur's blog. You can read it here.
I was particularly impressed by the testimony of Domitille Flichy, a jurist who decided to put to direct use her expertise in the field of professional reinsertion by opening a bakery founded on the principles of solidarity, equitability and sustainable development. Needless to say, the banks didn't break down her door trying to provide financing, especially since she wasn't a baker by trade. It was an uphill struggle but she managed with the help of social-minded sponsors. Today her bakery, Farinez'Vous, employs eight people. Four of them are enrolled in a two-year economic and social reinsertion program at the end of which they'll be ready for a job in the outside world. Since they usually struggle in more ways than one, a psychologist comes and spends the day once a week to help solve any social issues they may have either inside or outside the bakery. Domitille gets her flour from Normandy, less than 70 miles away, from a farmer who farms sustainably. She is clearly a woman who lives by her convictions. I have yet to taste her bread but it is such an honest one (she uses local flours, no chemicals, no dough enhancers, works with levain, etc.) that, if nothing else, the taste of the ingredients must shine through. Baking having the reputation of being a male reserve in France (typically with the husband in the lab and the woman minding the store), she was asked about her relationships with other bakers. She said she had been made very welcome.
Another woman baker, Cécile Piot, a translator by trade, came to bread because she deeply felt the need to understand how it was possible to create so many tasty products with so few ingredients. She went to baking school, got a "panoplie d'outils" (literally, a toolbox of skills) and after a few years at the Ritz in Paris (where, unsurprisingly, she was the only woman baker, she moved to a farm with a little mill and a bakery. She sees the fields change with the season, bakes with what grows around her and gets high on the fragrance of fermenting dough and baking loaves. She cherishes the memory of Monsieur Ganachaud's hands. A famous Parisian baker, now retired, Bernard Ganachaud could take a shapeless piece of dough, barely move his fingers and voilà, a flûte would emerge. This memory will stay with her forever. She too is living the life she wanted for herself.
As for Fuyumi Katano, another baker on the panel, she left her native Japan at 15 on a quest for bread because of a show she saw on TV at the age of 5: it showed how African street children had to toil all day to get enough money to buy bread. Pooling their earnings, a group of ten kids had managed to buy one loaf. They shared it, grinning at the camera. She was appalled that they had so little and resolved to learn how to make bread so that one day they would have more. Now 20, she is in the last year of her training with les Compagnons du Devoir. When she's done, she want to go work in Italy and in Germany for a while. She would love to train for la Coupe du monde one day. She might go back to Japan but mostly she wants to use her baking skills to do something in the humanitarian sphere.
Marianne Ganachaud comes from a family of bakers. She describes the French baking world as resolutely male but as luck would have it, her dad, the above-mentioned and justly famous Monsieur Ganachaud, had three daughters and no sons. Her two sisters stepped right into his tracks but she went her own way and became a nurse. She reminded the audience that this macho thing is fairly new. In the old days, the women were the ones entrusted with the making of bread (I myself recall my father describing his grandmother and his aunt making huge round loaves of bread twice a month with a levain they kept under the sink). In other words, women bakers are nothing new. Bakers work both with their hands and with their heads. Both sexes have those. Of course heavy flour bags and huge batches of dough are an issue for women but in the Ganachaud bakery, the problem has been solved with the use of smaller mixers (15 to 18 liters). Smaller mixers mean smaller batches, smaller cooling racks, smaller everything. Everything is done by hand and a woman can hand-shape 200 to 300 baguettes just as easily as a man. When Marianne decided to join her sisters at the bakery, she let go of her job as a nurse and went to baking school. She had one goal: learn to be the best possible baker. She knew what a masculine niche the profession was (un monde d'hommes, literally a world of men) and wanted to "seduce" (her expression) her male colleagues and competitors by the depth of her knowledge. She succeeded. Her former instructor, Gérard Brochoire, who was also on the panel, later made the audience laugh by saying that, yes, Marianne knew how to seduce but one only had to see her negotiate with a miller to know that seducing wasn't her only weapon. On the occasion he clearly had in mind, nothing was left of the miller!
Madame Riblet manages an artisanal bakery. She has been in business for thirty years. She wants to erase from memory the image d'Épinal de la femme du boulanger (traditional image of the baker's wife). Women are agents of change and come naturally to the baking world where they can move effortlessly from the lab to the store to the office.
After the interventions of Antoine Lemerle, an equipment manufacturer who said his profession now focused on lightening the tasks of the baker while leaving him or her free to create, and of Gérard Brochoire, a baking instructor who said progress had been made but there were still too few women in baking school (3% to 6% of students at the national level), Hubert Chiron, a brilliant baker, teacher, writer and Professeur Calvel's fils spirituel or true heir, brought the round table to an end. He said he had seen male and female bakers work together and that the male bakers often ended up copying their female colleagues' gestures and learning to be more gentle with the dough. Women were usually more motivated and wanted to challenge themselves. But there were practical issues: bakery premises are usually tiny in France and it is sometimes a huge hassle to have to put in a separate locker room. Men don't always like the competition. Some wives don't like the idea of a young woman working all night with their husbands. Society still favor men in the métiers de bouche (food professions). There has been been no woman Meilleur Ouvrier de France in the bakery category (Best Baker in France) yet for instance. But there were reasons to think the situation was evolving, slowly but surely.
As for him, he loved the fresh outlook women were bringing to a thousand-year old job: excellence, yes, but also, sharing, caring and a more sensuous approach. Cécile's image of Monsieur Ganachaud's hands dancing over the dough was a beautiful reminder that women see differently from men and having them on a team was a tremendous asset.

Award-winning baguettes in Montmartre

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 04:11:00 +0000

It was drizzly and cold as we climbed up the street from the métro station to the rue des Abbesses but we hardly noticed. As part of the bakery tours organized by the Bread Bakers Guild of America, we were on our way to Au Levain d'antan (6, rue des Abbesses), the bakery who won the best baguette in Paris award in 2011, and we were excited. The owner, Monsieur Barillon, was away in Japan but he and his wife had kindly agreed to let les boulangers américains visit the lab and talk to Jean-Luc, the head baker.

The baguette which wins the prestigious award becomes a staple at Palais de l'Élysée (the French equivalent of the White House) for a year. Eating the best bread in Paris everyday, now that's a presidential perk I truly envy! If I lived in France, it might even be enough to make me want to run for office...
Since the baguette is presidential material, I thought its specs might be a secret d'État (a state secret) but no, Jean-Luc kindly agreed to answer our questions: the baguette is made with T65 flour (the only flour that can be used by law in baguettes Tradition, it contains no additive whatsoever) over a 6-hour period (from start to finish), using .8% of yeast and 74% water. It is autolysed for 45 minutes and mixed for 17 minutes on first speed. It ferments in the mixer for one hour with one fold at the 30-minute mark.
Another fold is done just before taking out of the mixer and divided into several bins. It ferments for another hour in the bins, then it is divided and shaped. Proofing time is an hour. The baguettes you see Jean-Luc dust with flour had been shaped an hour earlier.
We had a taste before we left (Jean-Luc even gave us a few baguettes to take with us). The crust was delicate and crunchy at the same time and the crumb literally melted in the mouth. I thought the taste was rather bland but then that has been the case with all of the "best baguettes in Paris" we tasted so far during these bakery visits. That's because bread -and especially the baguette which is eaten daily at every meal- is not supposed to be the star. Its job is to accompany a dish or a cheese or any other type of food and showcase its flavor. From that perspective these baguettes are indeed ideal.

Two more Parisian bakeries...

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:43:00 +0000

Today we had two BBGA-sponsored bakery visits on the agenda before heading out to Europain to cheer the US team during the presentation of its handiwork to the judges. The first visit was to Basile Kamir's famous Moulin de la Vierge (105 rue Vercingétorix). Le Moulin de la Vierge (literally the Virgin's Mill) is located in a historic building and its painted ceilings and ornate display counters are truly a throwback to another time. As is often the case in a Paris bakery, the lab is in the cellar, accessible through a very steep staircase (almost a ladder). It is rather larger than a regular Paris lab but that may be because it is really out there on the outskirts of the city.
Basile Kamir started working on the premises in the late 70's, albeit not as a baker: he was actually selling records for Richard Branson, his childhood friend and founder of a record mail-order company that would evolve into Virgin Records. The bakery (which dates back to 1907) had been abandoned for five years and the cellar was mostly a favorite hangout for spiders and mice. However the city of Paris had been demolishing the old buildings in the neighborhood to build new housing and soon threatened to take down the bakery as well (Kamir told us of countless power outings because excavators were tearing out underground power cables all around them). The only way to preserve the building was to make it an operational bakery again, which automatically made it off-limits to the wreckers. So he hired a baker with whom he apprenticed and the rest is history (you will find more details here).

M. Kamir showed us his LeFort wood-fired oven (you can read more on that oven in Dan Leader's Bread Alone), describing how he discovered it behind thick curtains of cobwebs all these years ago and didn't even know it was in working order until he had it checked by a descendant of the artisan who had originally put it in. He also showed us his levain (which had just been fed and wasn't as aromatic as it would presumably be later in the day). We didn't see any bread making as production happens in the afternoon but he told us how he came upon the name Moulin de la Vierge and I thought it too poetic not to pass it on: it so happened that at the time he had a Swedish girlfriend who was originally from Öland Island. He went there on vacation and fell under the spell both of the island and of the hundreds of windmills which dotted its rolling hills. That's for the "moulin" part. As for "vierge" (which means "virgin"), it is a tribute to the early days when the bakery was a storage and mail-order center for Virgin Records. The fact that there is an eponymous street somewhere in the neighborhood is a mere coincidence.

The other bakery on our list for the morning was Boulangerie Voiriot (61, rue de la Glacière). We were not supposed to meet Monsieur Voiriot himself as he was going to be at Europain that morning but his son, who normally does the morning shift and was going to show us around, had injured his back and couldn't make it to work. I was of course very sorry to hear about the son's medical problem and wish him a speedy recovery but I am delighted to have met with M. Voiriot himself. I didn't take any pictures of him but if you click here, you'll be able to meet him and his wife.
Christian Voiriot is passionate about his profession which he tirelessly advocates in baking schools, professional organizations and, as a judge, in national or international competitions. He says that he sometimes works from 3 AM to 10 PM and still wakes up happy the next day: "J'adore mon métier" (I love my job).
He keeps a liquid levain which he uses for his country bread. He has had that levain for many many years. Since the bakery is open year-round (just closed on weekends), he has never had to think about what to do with his levain during vacation-time but he says some of his fellow bakers successfully freeze theirs for three or four weeks with no adverse consequences. Any frozen levain would have to be brought back to room temperature and refreshed once a day for at least three days before showing any sign of activity. It should be usable again after a week.
As was the case in the first two bakeries I visited in Paris, I was struck by the diminutive size of the lab (55 sq. meters, i.e. less than 600 sq. feet). Throw in another 20 sq. meters (215 sq. feet) for the store and you'll have the full dimensions of the premises. I didn't take any notes (I was too busy translating back and forth) but I remember M. Voiriot saying that he had once been told he had the highest output rate per square meter for any bakery in Paris. Ten people share this space (three in the store, saven in the back) and they churn out picture-perfect breads, cakes, viennoiseries, sandwiches, etc. An amazing feat!
We were in a rush to get to Europain before the competition was over for the day and since we were not heading home, we didn't buy any bread but Boulangerie Voiriot is definitely one I am keeping on my list for further visits.

A happy kind of bread line

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 01:27:00 +0000

Judging by the length of the line this morning outside Boulangerie Ducomte in Antony (a Paris suburb where we were invited to lunch at a friend's house), the French are still very much in love with their boulangeries-pâtisseries.

The air was laden with moisture and rather cold on that misty morning and all these people could easily have bought their breads and pastries at a nearby grande surface (supermarket) while stocking up on staples. Instead they were patiently and calmly waiting outside until it was their turn to be helped. Despite the national propensity for jumping lines, nobody was shoving anybody aside or pretending to have forgotten something inside the shop in order to be served faster. It was all very disciplined and quite focused as well once the display windows came into view. After all, choosing Sunday dessert is serious business...

Once the cake or pastries daintily wrapped or boxed, it was on to the bread counter and to the cashier.

The line moved forward slowly and methodically and the very same people we had seen shuffling benignly along the half-block and into the store now emerged with their arms or baskets bristling with crusty loaves and walked briskly away, a new sense of purpose on their faces.

Needless to say, I loved it!

Smile! It's breakfast time at McDo...

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:22:00 +0000

I knew McDonald's had heeded la différence and created a whole new breakfast menu for several of its restaurants in France (see article here in Le Figaro as translated by Google. The translation is pretty funny but it still conveys the gist of the article, especially if one remembers to replace the word "wand" by "baguette" throughout the text. If you read French, the original is here).

But it is one thing to know and quite another to actually see with your own eyes and what my eyes did this morning upon glimpsing the McCafé which adorns the Avenue de la Gare in Antony (a Paris suburb) is bulge right out of my head! I couldn't believe this was the same restaurant whose golden arches grace the landscape from sea to shining sea on the other side of the Atlantic. Come on in and see for yourself...

It was late morning and I didn't see any McBaguettes: I guess they had all been spoken for already but the macaroons were out in force and looked very sympathiques. The waitress, sorry, barista, was quite amused to see me taking pictures. I explained that we lived en Amérique and that this was our first McCafé ever. She smiled indulgently.

I wish we had known about the McCafé and made plans to have breakfast there. But we had had our morning brew before getting on the train and anyway we were expected. So we said our goodbyes and left, postponing to another visit our first taste of the French exception as seen by McDonald's.

In Paris with bread on my mind...

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 05:53:00 +0000

Having arrived in Paris a couple of days ago for Europain, I had the great pleasure and honor of leading my first bakery tour yesterday on behalf of the Bread Bakers' Guild of America. Being the appointed guide and interpreter, I couldn't really take many pictures or any notes but I'll share what I have.

We visited Boulangerie Julien (75 rue Saint-Honoré) and Maison Cohier (270-272 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré). "Les boulangers américains" (the American bakers) couldn't have asked for a warmer and more gracious welcome. We were shown and explained everything and all our questions (of which there were many) were answered. Both Jean-Noël Julien and Jean-Pierre Cohier have received awards for their baguettes: Julien for best baguette in Paris in 1995 and Cohier for best baguette Tradition in Paris in 2006. Monsieur Cohier - who supplied the Elysée Palace with baguettes for three years and catered in the process to two successive presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy - shared with us that Jacques Chirac liked his baguettes "bien cuites" (baked to a crusty brown) whereas the prevailing taste in today's France is, sadly, for the opposite (a much blonder baguette).
Both bakers churn out an impressive amount of breads, cakes, viennoiseries, salads, sandwiches, etc. in a space that's barely larger than the kitchen in many American homes (having no flour storage space at all, Monsieur Cohier gets his flour delivered every two or three days). As is often the case in Paris, the labs are located under the store in the cellar. Neither is air-conditioned, by choice. Monsieur Julien actually had the air-conditioning system dismantled because the workers kept getting sick. Room temperature was in the 20-22°C/68-72°F during our visit but I imagine it climbs way higher in the summer.

Both master bakers make their famous baguette tradition the same way: with no poolish or levain or any other kind of preferment. They use .6 % of yeast and go for a very short and gentle mixing (with three folds at 20 minutes' intervals) then a long cold fermentation for 20 to 24 hours (Monsieur Cohier told us that on weekends the fermentation goes on for 48 hours and the resulting baguette has incomparable flavor). Then the baguettes get scaled and shaped (here the techniques differ: Julien uses a divider and a shaper whereas Cohier does everything by hand), they rest 45 minutes and they go into the oven. In both cases, the ovens are electric and a different temperature is used for the sole and for the top.

Having bins of baguette dough fermenting at all times enables both bakeries to churn out loaves as needed all day long. Boulangerie Julien actually closes only two hours a day (in the late evening): the rest of the day and night it is bustling with activity. We visited on a Saturday morning and a large order of mini-viennoiseries (1500 pieces) had just gone out. They had been mixed and shaped the day before, frozen overnight (for ease of storage) and baked at dawn.
We asked Julien and Cohier whether they ever use levain: Cohier doesn't. Julien uses a rye liquid levain in certain types of bread other than the baguettes but he doesn't make or keep it himself. He buys it and gets it delivered. I had heard about German bakers subscribing to a levain delivery service but I didn't know it was also done in France. Julien said that the logistics of keeping a firm levain would be mind-boggling with so many bakers working in shifts as fermentation would tend to get out of hand. The liquid levain was easier to handle.

Bluebird Grain Farms' No-Knead Emmer Bread

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:12:00 +0000

Or should I say, Flat Sophia's Emmer Bread? See, I got the recipe from a flyer on the Bluebird Grain Farms' table at the Ballard Farmers Market in Seattle when I bought a bag of their beautiful emmer grain. But I actually baked the bread with Sophia, my 7-year old grand-daughter who lives 3,000 miles away in New England. Sophia has been helping me bake practically since the day she was born. She mastered the switch on my SP5 mixer before she knew how to talk and she always loved scaling ingredients (getting her jammies all floury in the process). She adores raw dough (especially naturally-leavened) and slices of rustic batard with honey are her favorite snack at my house.

So of course when her first grade teacher put Flat Sophia, her avatar, in a big yellow envelope and sent her via first-class mail to stay with us for a week, I knew bread-baking would be on the agenda. But as (bad) luck would have it, I am levain-less right now. Between a quick trip back to the Northeast a couple of weeks ago to see the grand-children and the upcoming trip to Paris for Europain (followed by visits to family and friends), there is no way I can take care of my levains and since I don't much like the aroma of the acids created when they spend a long time in the fridge, I have dehydrated them and stored them in ziploc bags for later use. Not that I look forward to the rehydrating process which I find tiresome and which requires a healthy amount of faith in the zest for life of these tiny organisms but it sure beats the alternative (which would be to bake a levain-fermented bread I don't enjoy eating).

So no levain in sight and Flat Sophia chomping at the bit to get her hands on some dough. What to do? For those of you who are not familiar with flat kids, please take a look at the Flat Stanley books: I had never heard of Flat Stanley before getting Flat Sophia from the teacher but after a week of taking her everywhere we went, I can tell you that many many people know of his adventures and, as a result, have shared their lives with a flat kid at some point. A fishmonger at Seattle's Pike Place Market told us he once was sent a 5-foot tall flat boy and schlepped him around for a week. An elementary school teacher we met at the register at Costco offered to adopt Flat Sophia and take her back with her to Alaska. She promised to send her back with pictures of her classroom. She was very kind and cheerful and a trip to Alaska sounded like fun but would you entrust your grandkid (however flat she might be) to a complete stranger? I didn't think so. So we kept her with us and she had innumerable adventures (she jumped from a hot air balloon and narrowly avoided landing in a pond and once was rescued by a super watchdog from the open jaws of a giant fish) and we put together a picture book which will be sent back to Connecticut tomorrow. On the final day of her visit, the weather outside was bleak (it snowed huge flakes in the early morning and the one thing paper kids don't handle too well is wetness), so we stayed home and we baked.

It was a lot of fun. Ok, I admit, not as much fun as baking with the real Sophia, but still! I for one will be sorry to see Flat Sophia go. I found that doing things with her and taking her sightseeing was a great way of staying connected to her namesake, dreaming up adventures that she would enjoy reading about and sharing with her teacher and her classmates. Still tomorrow she must be slipped into the big yellow envelope and mailed back...

Ingredients:

420 g freshly milled emmer flour
165 g unbleached all-purpose flour
1.3 g instant yeast
11 g fine sea salt
360 g water

Method:

For the method, please refer to the Bluebird Grain Farms website as I mostly followed it except that:

I milled their emmer grain instead of using their flour
I didn't sprinkle the dough with coarse sea salt before baking
I used rather more water than they do
I fermented the dough for 22 hours (first 8 hours at 74°F, overnight at 70°F and the last 4 hours at 74° F again)
I proofed it in a Dutch oven and when ready, put the Dutch oven in the cold oven with the lid on. I baked the bread for 45 minutes at 470°F, took it out of the Dutch oven and placed it directly on the hot baking stone. It baked for another 15-20 minutes at 450°F. It made a nice hollow sound when thumped. That's how I knew it was done...

Taste-wise, I find it hard to describe this bread. I don't want to use words like "nutty" or "delicious" because they have been used so often (including by me) that they are no longer very meaningful. I can only say that there is something deeply satisfying about the taste of emmer: it is certainly wholesome (you can almost taste the sunshine ripening the fields and the wind softly rippling the rows of spiky stalks). Unlike spelt (to which it is genetically related), it doesn't taste of honey and like kamut, another ancient wheat cereal, it bakes into a mellow crumb which almost melts in the mouth. I also find that this bread tastes better the day after it's baked: yesterday, the flavor of the yeast (never truly my favorite) overpowered that of the grain. Today the taste of yeast has all but vanished and all is left is the grain. Definitely a good and easy bread to have in one's repertoire. It also slices very nicely, which will come in handy for the honey sandwich I plan to send home with Flat Sophia for sustenance en route...

Bluebird Grain Farms' No-Knead Emmer Bread is going to Susan for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Morning Cuddle Bread with Oats, Plums and Hazelnuts

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:32:00 +0000

The anxiety of influence is most certainly a reality for some. After all, a whole book has been written on the subject (although the author probably didn't have the art of baking in mind) but I am happy to report I don't suffer from it. I love leisurely browsing through books and/or exploring online worlds and letting ideas wash over me, leaving behind precious little nuggets of inspiration. Sometimes - and that's the most fun - these nuggets combine to form something completely different.
That's how the morning cuddle bread came to be. A couple of weeks ago a British Columbia food podcast had pointed me towards an oatmeal, walnut and plum bread, which the Man pronounced to be a wonderful breakfast bread...

...and as I was contemplating what to bake for him for Valentine's Day, I remembered another fruit and nut bread I had once bookmarked in Les 20 meilleurs ouvriers de France et médaillés d'argent se dévoilent et vous offrent leurs recettes choisies, a book put together by l'Équipe de France de boulangerie (the French Baking Team) in the early 90's. What I had liked most about it was its endearing shape (two entertwined pieces of dough) and its name, pain câlin du matin (literally morning cuddle bread).

Oven-roasted hazelnuts

The two recipes got reborn as one: from Chef Bruce (the British Columbia baker), I retained the idea of the plums (the Man is a huge plum fan!) and the nuts (but instead of the walnuts, I used the fragrant hazelnuts my friend Meeghen had brought me from her own orchard). I also stayed with the mix of wheat (whole-grain and all-purpose) and oatmeal (I love the tenderness of an oatmeal crumb). From the French recipe - by Gérald Biremont, "meilleur ouvrier de France" (best artisan baker in France) - I took the shape and the name. After all, what's more appropriate on Valentine's Day morning that a sweet little cuddle?

Interestingly both recipes call for a straight dough but I always prefer using a preferment: the bread keeps better, if nothing else, and I find it tastier too. So I reinterpreted the Canadian recipe to use both a poolish (made with only a speck or two of instant yeast) and some levain. It took its own sweet time to ferment but, hey, Valentine Day comes around only once a year. Besides the dough did all the work, leaving the cuddling to us...

Ingredients: (for 8 morning cuddle breads or 4 cuddle breads and a loaf)

For the poolish

280 g all-purpose flour
280 g water
one tiny pinch of instant yeast (0.06 g)

For the final dough

200 g mature white starter at 100% hydration
320 g all-purpose flour
150 g white whole wheat flour
115 g old-fashioned oat flakes, coarsely ground in a food processor
180 g water (amount to be adjusted up or down depending on your flours, the humidity in the air, etc.)
100 g oven-roasted hazelnuts, roughly peeled and chopped
110 g dried plums, roughly chopped
19 g salt

Method: (this bread is made over two days since the starter and the poolish both need to be fed the evening before and to ferment overnight)

The night before, mix the poolish and feed the starter. Let both ferment overnight at room temperature (if very warm where you live, fermentation could be faster, which means you may need to adjust your schedule accordingly)
On baking day, mix the flours, the starter, the poolish and the water until all the ingredients are well distributed and all flour is hydrated. Let rest for 20 minutes
Add salt and mix on low speed until a soft pliable dough is formed (don't overmix)
Add the plums and hazelnuts and mix gently (I find it easier to take the dough out of the mixer at this stage and mix in the fruit and nuts by hand)
Set in an oiled container and let rise until at least doubled (it took close to 6 hours at 72°F/22°C)
Divide in two pieces of roughly 850 g each
If you want to make only cuddle breads, then divide each of these pieces in 8 and make 8 baguette-shaped cylinders. Twist them together by pairs. If you want 4 cuddle breads and one loaf, divide and shape accordingly
Proof until doubled in size (in my case, it took one hour and a half at 72°F/22°C). Pre-heat oven to 400°F/204°C
When ready bake for 15 minutes (with steam the first five minutes) then check the color and if necessary turn oven down a bit. Turn the breads 180° and bake another 15 minutes. They will be ready when they have a rich color and sound hollow when thumped on the bottom.
Cool on a rack!

Enjoy!

The morning cuddle bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting.

Hutzelbrot with dried cherries and cranberries

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:20:00 +0000

Besides the delightful taste of this bread, what I love about this Peter Reinhard recipe (from his book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor) is that it uses a mash and that the mash can be made in part with "old bread". To me there is already something deeply satisfying about pre-soaking whole grain flour and having the enzymes start working hours and hours before you even begin to mix your dough but when you can feed them your stale bread too, wow, it's just too good to pass up!
Reinhart uses (or suggests using, it's hard to figure out which) a mix of dried fruit for this bread, such as citron, apricots, figs, plums, cherries, cranberries, golden raisins). Even though I had pretty much everything on hand but the citron, I decided to focus the flavors a little more and go for the sweet dried cherries my friend Kim had brought from Wisconsin (each one like a burst of summer in the mouth, thank you, Kim!), paired with slightly tarter dried cranberries from Washington State. I also decided to soak the old bread in apple juice since I had some I needed to use up and it would nicely boost the fruit taste. The bread turned out crusty and surprisingly light.
It takes two days to make which is perfectly fine with me since most of the time the ingredients toil away all by themselves....

Ingredients (slightly adapted): makes 2 batards

For the soaked bread (altus)

1/2 inch-bread cubes with crust left on soaked in hot organic apple juice or water and left at room temperature for at least 4 hours and preferably overnight. Use just enough liquid to saturate and soften the bread. Reinhart advises using rye bread but he says whole wheat is fine too. Squeeze out excess liquid before adding to the mash (I didn't weigh anything to start with, just used up all my stale bread and made a big bowl of actus. When required by the recipe, I took out the 170 g needed for the mash, weighed the rest, put it in a ziploc bag, labeled it and stored it in the freezer for next time)

For the mash

300 g water
64 g coarse whole wheat (I used flour from Cedar Isle Farm in Agassiz, British Columbia, which my friend Meeghen kindly brought me)
64 g 75% sifted rye flour (I used flour from True Grain Bread on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, which Meeghen also brought me. Thank you, Meeghen, for giving me the opportunity to bake with these gorgeous flours!)
1 g diastactic malt powder
170 g altus

For the starter

71 g whole wheat or rye starter
213 g whole rye flour
170 g water at room temperature (70°F/21°C)

For the dough

all of the starter (454 g)
all of the mash (397 g)
99 g white whole wheat flour + 200 g (which I had to add because my dough was way too wet, possibly because I had pre-soaked the fruit which Reinhart doesn't say to do)
99 g whole rye flour
100 g sweet dried cherries (briefly pre-soaked, then drained)
70 g dried cranberries (briefly pre-soaked, then drained)
14 g salt (I didn't add to that amount even though I added more flour: I just tasted the dough and it seemed fine)
7 g instant dry yeast

Method:

On Day 1

Mix the mash ingredients (save for the altus) (using water heated to 165°F/74°C) making sure the flour is fully hydrated and the end product resembles a thin pudding or gravy. Cover and keep warm (150°F/66°C) if possible for 3 hours or at least for 60 minutes. Reinhart suggests using the oven for that step (turning it repeatedly on and off if it doesn't have such a low setting)
After 3 hours, stir in the soaked bread and refrigerate until ready to use (you can also leave it overnight at room temperature) if you are planning to use it within the next 24 hours
Mix all of the starter ingredients and knead with wet hands to form a ball of dough. Let it rest 5 minutes and knead again. The dough will be tacky. Allow it to double at room temperature (which can take up to 8 hours depending on the temperature). When fully developed, knead for a few seconds, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight if necessary to coordinate timing with the mash. Remove from the refrigerator about 2 hours before mixing the final dough

On Day 2

Using a metal scraper, chop the starter into 12 smaller pieces, sprinkling some extra flour over them to prevent them from sticking to each other
If mixing by hand (which I did), combine starter and mash in a large bowl with the whole wheat and rye flour, cherries, cranberries, salt and yeast. Mix for about 2 minutes until all the ingredients are evenly integrated and distributed into the dough. The dough should be soft and slightly sticky. If not, add water or flour if needed (that's where I had to add the extra 200 g of white whole wheat flour as the dough was definitely not going to take shape otherwise)
When dough feels soft and only slightly sticky, form it into a ball and let it rest for 5 minutes while you oil a container
Knead it briefly again for one minute and make any final adjustments to water or flour. It should be malleable and tacky but no longer sticky
Form into a ball again and place in prepared container, rolling to coat with oil
Cover loosely and let rise at room temperature for about one hour or until it is at least 1 1/2 times its original size
Transfer to a lightly floured surface and shape into two batards. Place the batards on a sheet pan lined with semolina-dusted parchment paper. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or a cloth towel and let rise at room temperature for 45 to 60 minutes, until 1 1/2 times their original size
While the batards are proofing, preheat the oven to 425°F/218°C. When ready to bake, dust them with flour and score the loaves as desired using a sharp knife or blade
Place them in the oven (with steam), lower the oven temperature to 375°F/191°C and bake for 25 minutes
Rotate the loaves 180 degrees and continue baking for another 20 to 35 minutes or until the loaves are well-browned and make a hollow sound when thumped on the bottom
Cool on a rack and wait at leasts 12 hours before slicing open.

Enjoy!

The Hutzelbrot with dried cherries and cranberries go to Susan for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Chickpea flatbread with mushrooms (Farinata ai funghi)

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:44:00 +0000

Farinata is basically a flatbread made of chickpea flour, water and olive oil (sometimes with the addition of onion and/or rosemary). It is a regional specialty, eaten as streetfood without a topping both in Nice, France (where they call it socca) and in Liguria (the part of Italy where Genoa is located). I have made it over and over as an appetizer since Mark Bittman published the recipe in the New York Times and he's right, it does disappear fast...
We tried the Ligurian version in Genoa a couple of years back and ate it in the street and thoroughly enjoyed but I would never have thought of making a whole meal of it if I hadn't happened on an Italian cookbook listing dozens and dozens of recipes using the farinata as a base for all kinds of tasty toppings, including mushrooms. That gave me an idea for a quick dinner the other night.

I wanted something really light, no sauces, no tomatoes, nothing runny, a topping that would enhance and not cover the taste of the chickpea flour (which we love). I had stuffing mushrooms on hand and half a bag of baby spinach. A few citruses were awaiting their fate in the fruit bowl and I thought they would do nicely for a marinade. I was going to juice a Meyer lemon and a tangerine and blend that with some white balsamic vinegar when I remembered the balsam calamansi vinegar my friend Kim had kindly brought me. Calamansi is a sweet and sour citrus, very popular in the Philippines. It added an interesting and exotic layer of flavor, but if you don't have any in your pantry, any combination of sweet and sour citruses and mellow white vinegar will work.
I mixed the farinata batter (it has to rest for a while, four hours at least says the Genoan cookbook, while the oven heats up and as long as 12 hours, says Mark Bittman) and set it to do its thing on the counter. Meanwhile I washed and sliced the mushrooms, drizzled calamansi vinegar and olive oil over them, added some finely chopped garlic (no salt at this stage or no pepper either since there is lots of pepper in the farinata itself) and set them to rest companiably next to the batter.

The farinata is normally baked in the oven in a cast-iron skillet but I tried something different this time and cooked it like a crepe on the stove top. Although it has advantages (it cooks faster and cleaning a regular crepe pan is less work than cleaning, drying and re-seasoning a cast-iron skillet) I don't think the taste is quite as delicate as when it is oven-baked, so by all means follow the original recipe if you do have access to an oven and don't mind turning it on.

Ingredients :

For the farinata (below are the proportions I used for 5 small flatbreads. You should use Bittman's if you are making the larger oven-baked flatbread)

150 g chickpea flour
320 g water
35 g olive oil
salt
freshly ground pepper (as liberal an amount as you think you can stand)

For the topping

170 g small portabella mushrooms (I used the stuffing variety from Trader Joe's)
170 g baby spinach (twice that amount would have been better but I only had half a bag)
3 tablespoons balsam calamansi vinegar (or one tablespoon each of lemon juice, tangerine, clementine or mandarine juice and white balsamic vinegar)
2 tablespons of extra-virgin olive oil (for the marinade) + 1 tablespoon for sautéing the mushrooms
2 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
salt to taste
red pepper flakes to taste (optional)

Method:

For the farinata itself, please follow Mark Bittman's recipe. When it is almost done baking:
Heat up a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan, drain the mushrooms, saving the marinating liquid, and gently sauté them until done (they cook fast) taking care not to overbrown them so that they remain moist
Add the baby spinach to the mushrooms and drizzle over them a scant teaspoonful of the marinade (no more as you don't want an overload of raw garlic) and sauté them briefly until they barely start softening a little.
Add salt and red pepper flakes. Remove from heat
Take the farinata out of the oven, cut it in slices like a pizza and serve hot, topping each slice with a heaping spoonful of mushroom and spinach.

Enjoy!

The chickpea flatbread with mushrooms goes to Susan for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Blood of the Dragon: Healthy New Year Orange Cake

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:38:00 +0000

My brothers and I grew up eating a marvelous orange cake which I sadly probably won't make again even though I have the recipe and it couldn't be easier to make or more delicious: 150 g butter + 150 g flour + 150 g sugar + 2 whole eggs + 1 orange (juice and zest) + 1/2 packet of baking powder. Mix everything (except juice). Bake. When cake is done, drench with juice. Revel!
Over the years, I have made it over and over and it always met with the same unmitigated success. I even made it once ages ago for friends who were coming for tea one snowy Sunday afternoon and I burned my wrist when taking it out of the oven and it fell to the floor face down! There was no time to bake another one, so I took a spatula and rescued as much as I could of the part that wasn't in contact with the floor. Of course it was all broken but I pressed it into a charlotte mold and since it was still warm, it took the shape of the mold very nicely. When it had cooled enough, I unmolded it and drizzled warmed up apricot preserves over it. It was beautiful and even better than the original. My guests asked for the recipe which I provided - skipping the floor part - and all was well.
I had forgotten all about it until our youngest son's fourth grade teacher enrolled her whole class in a New York State writing program and the kids were asked to write about specific incidents in their childhood. So he wrote about the cake being scraped off the floor minutes before our guests arrived and his writing was so good and so funny that his piece was chosen to be read aloud in assembly! I was mortified but that wasn't the worst of it.
The worst came what he wrote about a very bumpy flight from Athens to Paris when he was 5 years old. He explained that he had been seating next to me and that the whole plane had been jolted when we were hit by lightning (true), that we had made an unplanned landing in Lyon to check for damages (they were minor) and that we continued to Paris under the cloud cover and that everybody got sick (true again); that we landed in Paris so fast that we were on the ground barely one minute or two before we took off again at warp speed and everyone was deadly pale and afraid and the flight attendants were running down the aisle with a strained look on their faces (still true) and that I turned towards him and shook his hand and said: "A..., it was nice meeting you" (the hand shaking and stiff upper lip discourse all figments of his imagination, needless to say). That too was read in assembly!!! I was never happier to see a kid graduate to middle school so that I become anonymous again...

Well, to come back to the cake, I can't make it anymore for health reasons but that doesn't mean we don't yearn for it every winter when huge baskets of oranges arrive at the grocery store... Last week it was blood oranges.

Blood oranges! When I was growing up in France, blood oranges were very sour. They truly had a bite, so much so that I actually didn't care very much for them. They came from Spain and I don't think they had as much sun as the ones we get here which come from California and are sweet and fragrant.
Blood oranges (don't you love the name?) are rich in vitamin C, of course, but also in anthocyanin which is a powerful antioxydant. That gave me an idea. In honor of the Chinese New Year, I would bake a health-friendly orange cake (after all striving to keep my loved ones healthy throughout the year is certainly a priority) and call it Blood of the Dragon (as you can see, my youngest son doesn't have a monopoly on imagination!).

Now I won't lie and tell you the result is as airy and lovely as the original all-butter orange cake. You wouldn't believe me anyway. The texture reminds me more of a pudding than a cake proper but it is very tasty and refreshing. Orange and ginger combine to give it a nice kick (next time I might even add a bit of fresh ginger) and, in the health department, you can't beat the ingredients: nutrient-rich white whole wheat, natural starter (which makes it easier for the body to assimilate the nutrients present in the grain), ginger (a powerful antioxydant in its own right), fresh oranges, cultured buttermilk, olive oil, etc... So here is to a wondrous and healthy New Year!

Ingredients (for a 9-inch cake pan):

For the starter

180 g mature levain (starter)
180 g white whole wheat pastry flour
180 g cultured buttermilk
25 g ginger syrup

For the batter

80 g extra-virgin olive oil
juice and zest of 2 blood oranges
100 g unsweetened applesauce
50 g bits of crystallized ginger
pinch of salt
note: the oranges I used were very sweet and with the crystallized ginger and the bit of syrup in the starter, I didn't need more sugar. You should taste the batter prior to baking (one of the advantages of baking without eggs is that you can actually have a taste) and determine whether or not sugar should be added

For the finished cake

blood oranges
confectioner's sugar

Method:

Starter is prepared at least 4 hours before baking: mix all ingredients with wooden spoon, cover tightly and let rise at warm room temparature
When the starter has doubled, add other ingredients, mix with wooden spoon and pour in oil-sprayed pan. Bake for 40 minutes in pre-heated 350°F/177°C oven
When done (a cake tester comes out clean), turn off the oven and leave the cake inside for another 5 to 10 minutes with oven door ajar. Cool on a rack
Dust with confectioner's sugar
Serve with freshly sliced blood oranges. Alternatively drench with blood orange juice before serving.

Blood of the Dragon Orange Cake is going to Susan's for this week's issue of Yeastspotting...

Beet Quiche

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:58:00 +0000

If you live in the United States and you have been following the news, then you already know that Seattle got snowed in and iced over this week, all in one fell swoop with no breather in between. Our world turned one solid color (or at least a continuum of white, black and grey) and it was all I could do not to check my camera over and over to make sure I hadn't inadvertently changed the settings...

At first it was new and lovely and we marveled at the transformations it brought to the landscape : odd shapes suddenly appearing where there were just bushes before; cats' pawprints quilting together otherwise untrodden lawns; stately evergreens slumping against the windless sky. But I soon found I wanted color back and I wanted it soon and since the forecast didn't look encouraging, it had to be in our plates. No way we could hazard down the hill to the grocery store however, so making do with what we already had was a must. I looked in the crisper drawer: the beets we had bought last week at Ballard Farmers' Market woke up and winked at me. I looked in the pantry: flour, poppy seeds and olive oil? Check! I looked in the refrigerator again. Eggs? Check! Cream? None! Milk? Check! Cheese? Fresh goat cheese only. Perfect! Beets and goat cheese are a match made in heaven... I decided to make a quiche.

First I steamed the beets. I considered roasting them but I wanted them to keep their firm cheeks and vibrant colors. There is a wonderful dignity to just-steamed-enough vegetables, don't you think? Serene emissaries of the vegetal world, they carry the unadulterated tastes of the soil, the wind, the sun and the rain, combined and summed up in unique flavors. A gift too precious to be roasted away on a day when they have been cast as the stars of the show (don't get me wrong, I love roasted beets as much as the next person, only not for this particular quiche...)

While the beets were steaming (thoroughly scrubbed but uncut and unpeeled), I mixed the dough for the crust (adapting a French recipe by Laurence Salomon which can be found here), rolled it out and baked it blind. Then I let beets and crust find their cool.

I had steamed three different kinds of beets (dark red, yellow and pink) and all were the same dull brown when they were done. But under their drab coats, their flesh was as exuberant as ever. The crust got a coat of mustard paint and a powdering of ground hazelnuts. Then the sliced beets amiably arranged themselves in nestled circles.

If there had been a way of making a quiche without a filling, I would have done it (just so the beets would continue to shine). But there wasn't. Or rather if there was, I couldn't find it. So I poured the egg, milk and cheese mixture over the beet petals and hoped the oven would do its magic.

Which it did. Pretty much.

Ingredients: (for an 11-inch tart pan)
For the crust (crust recipe adapted from Laurence Salomon)

150 g white whole wheat pastry flour (all-purpose flour can be used instead and will likely require less water)
10 g poppy seeds
50 g old-fashioned oat flakes
33 g extra-virgin olive oil
4 pinches of salt
50 to 70 g of ice water (depending on the flour, you may need to use more or less, so go easy on the pouring)

For the filling

Assorted beets (I forgot to weigh them but you won't go wrong if you buy and steam four or five big ones. Leftover beets are delicious in soups or salads), scrubbed but unpeeled with roots and top stems (not leaves) uncut
150 g fresh goat cheese, crumbled
50 g ground hazelnuts (optional)
52 g whole milk
3 eggs
French Dijon mustard (you don't have to use fancy - I used Trader Joe's - but you need to make sure it contains no sugar as its role is to counterbalance the sweetness of the beets)
Hot pepper sauce to taste but preferably sparingly (I used Sriracha)
Salt and pepper to taste
Nutmeg to taste, freshly grated

Method:

Steam the beets and let them cool down. Then peel and slice them
Assemble the crust: pour flour, poppy seeds, oat flakes, salt and olive oil in the food processor with metal blade attached, pulse for 10 seconds (until oat flakes turn into coarse flour) and with the motor running, slowly pour in the water (just enough for the dough to form into a ball). Stop the moment it does. Wrap the dough in plastic and let it rest for 30 minutes (I put it in the refrigerator but I am not sure it was actually necessary as it may have made it harder to roll out)
After 30 minutes, roll out the dough and place it in 11-inch ungreased tart pan. Place a piece of foil in the pan and fill it with pie weights (you don't need to prick the dough). Bake in preheated 350°F/177°C oven for 15 minutes, remove the foil and pie weights and bake for another 5 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on a rack
While beets and crust are cooling, whip the goat cheese with the milk and the eggs, adding salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste
When crust is cool, paint bottom with Dijon mustard and sprinkle ground hazelnuts on top if desired (the hazelnuts are optional: they soak up some of the liquid, preventing the dough from getting soggy and they add a layer of taste which I like very much but it mostly came through when we ate the quiche cold the day after. Their presence was barely perceptible when the quiche was warm and freshly baked)
Arrange the sliced beets in the crust and pour filling over them. Grate nutmeg over the quiche and bake in pre-heated 350°F/177°C oven for 30 minutes. Check doneness (the filling must be set) and if necessary, bake another 5 minutes until gently golden all over.
Let cool somewhat before unmolding.
Eat hot, warm or cold.

The beet quiche keeps beautifully in the fridge and tastes even better the day after. It also makes a comforting lunch to take to work if you can make it through the snow...

Breadfarm's Winthrop Whole Wheat Bread

noreply@blogger.com (MC) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:24:00 +0000

Winthrop Whole Wheat Bread (as made and sold at the bakery)

Related post: Meet the Baker: Scott Mangold

Loosely based on a Peter Reinhart recipe, the Winthrop loaf is a fairly simple bread to make at home. You just need to plan ahead since it requires two preferments: a 24-hour soaker (which spends 12 hours in the refrigerator and 12 hours on the counter) and a whole wheat starter. Breadfarm's owner Scott Mangold uses wheat from two different parts of Washington State: white whole wheat flour from Bluebird Grain Farms in Winthrop and coarse whole wheat flour from Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill in nearby Burlington. Having neither of those, I used what I had on hand, which was white whole wheat flour from Fairhaven and hard red winter wheat berries from the coop, which I ground coarsely with my own little mill.

It is also a rather forgiving recipe if you make sure to bring both preferments to room temperature before incorporating them. I miscalculated my schedule for the day and had to slow down the starter in the fridge. It came back to life beautifully. Scott says that as an alternative to making the soaker one day ahead of time, you can also make it only 12 hours before mixing and then skip the waiting in the fridge part by just having it rest at room temperature (about 73°F/23°C).
Breadfarm maintains a whole wheat starter at 100% hydration but any wheat starter can be used provided its hydration is appropriately adjusted. I used my regular white liquid levain (100% hydration) and simply fed it twice with coarsely milled wheat flour before using in the recipe. The important part is to make sure to feed the starter about 8 hours prior to mixing (although, as I said, I had to slow mine down and it still worked). It must achieve full ripeness. If fed coarsely milled flour, the starter holds longer between feedings and the resulting bread is more chewy.

Fairhaven coarsely milled wheat flour

Ingredients (for 3 small loaves):

(Scott uses his mixer at the bakery but at home I did the mixing by hand)

For the soaker

320 g white whole wheat flour
248 g water
14.5 g salt (all the salt for the formula goes into the soaker to inhibit protease activity)

For the starter

65.5 g ripe whole wheat starter (100% hydration)
262 g coarse whole wheat flour
262 g water

For the final dough

.85 g instant yeast (about 1/4 of a teaspoon) (used in a production situation to ensure that the bread rises on schedule but optional at home)
23 g water
590 g starter (all the starter)
582 g soaker (all the soaker)
227 g white whole wheat flour

Method:

In the video below, you see Scott mixing, folding, scaling and shaping. Only two folds are shown but Scott actually did three. Also the bakers working and chatting in the background are Caryn, Gregory and Nathan. Matt was in charge of the oven that day and he did the baking as Scott had to go home take care of his kids.

Proof the yeast in the warm water for 5 minutes (even if it's instant as it makes it more active and you need to use less)
Combine all ingredients and mix until you get a good windowpane test (see video) but the dough is still loose and shaggy. Target dough temperature should be 78 to 80°F (26-27°C)
Fold three times at 25 minutes interval
Divide and shape as batards 25 minutes after the last fold (no pre-shaping)
Bake about 20 minutes after shaping in 450°F/232°C oven for 35 to 45 minutes with steam in the first few minutes.

Winthrop 100% Whole Wheat (the Farine version)

I had fun making the Winthrop loaf and I love its flavor. Scott says it has a small but devoted following among the whole grains crowd and I can understand why. It's definitely a keeper!

The Winthrop 100% Whole Wheat Bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.