Sourdough Bread

This is a photo of some sourdough bread that I made a few days ago that I posted on Facebook.  It received more comments than most of my status posts do.  My friend Anne asked me why I was making sourdough bread.  Was I seeking a way to reproduce the delicious sourdough bread that I had enjoyed when I lived in the Bay Area of California in the 1970's?

I admit, I have become somewhat obsessed this summer by what I'm thinking of as my Sourdough Project.  So, how did it all begin?  What am I up to now?  What am I learning?

I don't know exactly how far back into my life to look for a beginning.  There are roots all the way back to some of my earliest childhood memories.  We traveled most summers to visit my dad's brothers who farmed in Norquay, Saskatchewan.   Uncle Halvard and Aunt Eveleen had five daughters.  Uncil Phil and Aunt Ioleen had eight children.  I had my first experience of "brown bread" at their tables.  It was very different from the 1950's supermarket soft white balloon bread we had at home.  Bread had a high profile at the tables of my Norquay cousins.  Bread took a lot of my aunties' time.  Their big wood stoves kept their baking bread and the whole kitchen hot.  Bread tied my aunts to the kitchen in ways that my Montreal-raised urban mother didn't quite understand or appreciate.  She kept suggesting that my aunts save labor by buying their bread from the local baker, whose product was actually very tasty and fresh.  My aunties somehow managed not to act offended by my mom's suggestion.  Maybe they didn't romanticize bread production the way I think I would have in their place.

My aunties' Norquay brown bread had a unique smell.  Those smells perfumed the kitchen as it rose in a big enamel pan the size of a washtub.  The smells became more intense as the loaves went into the oven.

It tasted different and had a different, more substantial texture than the bread I was used to.  It functioned as a ubiquitous accompaniment to the many meals and snacks we ate together around the tables crowded with cousins. At our house we had toast for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch, but never the stacks of this fragrant brown treasure that disappeared during the course of every meal.  And this brown bread usually came with butter and homemade raspberry or, more rarely, strawberry or chokecherry jam.  I will always cherish a memory of my Uncle Phil, a generation later, holding his year-old grandson on his lap during a break for "morning lunch."  Kurtis was happily licking the jam off a slice of his grandmother's buttered bread, and Uncle Phil cheerfully replenished the jam when Kurtis was down to the butter. 

It is no wonder that my father always praised and encouraged my mother's attempts at baking bread, especially Limpa, the round, sweet Swedish rye loaf she would make at Christmas time.  But making bread was a big-deal production in my mother's eyes, a special occasion.  I got the sense from her that it was a lot of work, but worth it to put something festive on the table, something that would make my father grin from ear to ear. 

While my mother encouraged me to bake cakes and cookies, and to try out all kinds of recipes, she somehow led me to believe that working with yeast was a challenge, something not for beginners.

I first baked my own bread a couple of years after Wayne and I married, when a dear friend gave me a copy of Laurel's Kitchen (Laurel Robertson and Carol Lee Flinders.  Nilgiri Press, 1976--and still available in a later edition from Amazon), a cookbook that I still think has the most gentle, accurate, and literary introduction to the art of bread making that I've encountered anywhere.   With some trepidation I followed those directions and discovered that it was a tremendous joy to make bread.  I felt like I was connecting with women across time and space who had ground grain, moistened it, formed it into dough, worked it rhythmically and lovingly,  allowed it to rise, and, as it baked, prepared a table to welcome and feed family and friends.

We moved a few years later to Princeton Seminary.  We were a little short on money.  Our married student housing was comprised of two physically non-contiguous rooms connected by a public hallway.  There was a bedroom with a bathroom.  Wayne built a platform for our bed.  Underneath was a desk and his piano.  If you faced one way on the bench, you could play the piano.  If you faced the other way, you could work at the desk.  Down the hall was a kitchen.  It had two big closets.  One became our pantry.  The other held my theological books.  I had a table and a rocking chair with wide, flat arms.  It was my study den.  We had a teeny tiny apartment size oven that served as a dormitory for dozens of cockroaches when it wasn't being used.  Princeton had a wonderful health food store where, every day, hard winter wheat was freshly ground into flour.  I kneaded that flour into dough that rose while I studied.  I baked that bread regularly in four coffee cans that produced loaves that looked like silos.  When you cut it up, the slices looked like English muffins.   I also made my own yogurt in mayonnaise jars that I would set in a bath of warm water inside a cooler designed for a six-pack of beer.  Sometimes I put yogurt into my bread, and it gave it a mildly sour taste and a softer crumb.  But most often I would use the basic Laurel's Kitchen recipe that had nothing but a tablespoon of yeast, a teaspoon or two of sugar to "proof" the yeast, six cups of flour, a tablespoon of salt,  and water.  Laurel recommended Crisco for greasing the coffee cans.  I followed her instructions, having found for the first time in my life a decent use for Crisco.

Somehow I got away from regular bread baking when children and full time jobs came along.  My forays into baking with yeast were limited to almost-weekly pizza bakings on Friday nights.  Five kids and their friends could inhale 3 or 4 big pies in about fifteen minutes.

Sometime during those years of intensive parenting, the bread machine came along.  My mother, always a kitchen gadgeteer, first in her neighborhood to own a blender, then, decades later, singing the praises of her new discovery, the immersion blender, found bread machines on sale somewhere and bought three: one for herself, one for my sister, one for me.  So we began baking bread again.  My mother loved her bread machine.  I think my sister did, too.  My kids expected me to make a loaf each day for their sandwiches.  But I hated it.

The bread machine was noisy with the kinds of mechanical buzzes, alarm bells, rumblings and vibrations that I did not want in my environment.  It took up precious counter space and even more precious storage space.  It was a pain to get the paddle out of the freshly-baked loaf.  (And that was another problem: you could only bake one loaf at a time, hardly enough to satisfy seven people.) The texture wasn't right.  The end product did not please me; and I missed the soothing rhythms of kneading, the feel of the dough becoming satin and elastic under the heel of my hand.  I was thrilled when, one time too many, the bread machine precessed off our kitchen counter, and broke irreparably.

Fast forward another decade or so.  I had moved to Florida.  I was between jobs.  My dear friend, Tom, from Georgia, also unemployed at the time, had been experimenting with amazing home-baked bread.  His onion rye sourdough with a dense, moist crumb was intense, perfect for slicing thinly and toasting, especially delicious with goat cheese spread over it.   I was getting the urge to bake bread again.

We have a wonderful "downtown" lifestyle.  We live in an eminently walkable urban neighborhood in Orlando.  Almost everything (with the exception of a hardware store) is handily accessible on foot.  Apart from my Sunday drive to the little mission I serve, Wayne and I did not need to get into our car, sometimes for weeks at a time.  There is a Publix grocery store on the ground floor of our building.  It has a pretty decent selection.  I love shopping there.  It is the single biggest reason that we chose to live in the building we do. But there was nothing downstairs at Publix that could compete with the kick-ass organic Pain au Levain at Whole Foods.  Whenever we would make a trip to Whole Foods for meat and poultry, we would buy a couple of loaves.  However, getting to Whole Foods meant getting into our car, which, on principle, we like to do as infrequently as possible.  And that Kick-Ass Pain au Levain comes at a price that is something of a kick in the ass of our bank account. 

I consider myself a baker of delicious bread with an intuitive sense of how yeast and grain perform together, more of a Bread Poet than a Scientific Baker.  But I had never tackled sourdough.  I didn't quite see how it would work to order San Francisco sourdough starter from an online retail source.   I didn't want to be outdone by my friend Tom.  If Tom could make sourdough, maybe I could, too.

One of the walk-to amenities in our neighborhood is the main branch of the Orange County Public Library.  I especially like trying out cookbooks from the library.  Several weeks ago I was intrigued by Mark Bittman's masterful (and weighty) tome, How to Cook Everything.  I lugged it home, settled into my reading chair, and fell in love, so much so that I've renewed the book twice and I held on to it until I determined that my children took my extremely broad hints and give it to me for my birthday.   Bittman's chapter on the theory and practice of making bread with yeast is as masterful in its own way as Laurel Robertson's and Carol Flinders'.

At that same time Wayne was in North Dakota for seven weeks, helping out his cousin and her husband on their farm.  That meant I could experiment and, if my results ended up with a texture as weighty as Bittman's cookbook, I wouldn't have to endure the teasing about "substantial" bread.  Bittman has a recipe called "Jim Lahey's No Work Bread."  I haven't been able to try it because my Dutch oven is in storage, and it would be perfect for this recipe.  But what I took from this recipe was the almost scandalous idea that you can let time do the work of developing the gluten in the bread dough instead of helping that to happen by kneading. 

I've always been in love with kneading bread, and usually gave my bread two ten-minute kneadings.  The rhythm of kneading is truly beautiful.  It is a near cousin to the meditation and contemplative prayer that have become such a big part of my life in recent years.  I wasn't sure that one could obtain good results without kneading--after all, bread machines surely didn't produce a result that I liked.

I kept on reading, and saw Bittman's instructions for creating a sourdough starter from scratch.  I also did a little bit of exploring on the web.   Sourdough bakers must be a special breed.  There are dozens of websites devoted to the pursuit of the perfect Pain au Levain or San Francisco Sourdough or Eastern European Rye, or German Rye loaf.  You can pay $50 for special baskets to cradle the dough in while it rises.  You can buy equally expensive bread pans, and spend hundreds of dollars on home-size flour mills.  Some people take a very scientific approach to their bread making.  They argue about the difference between wet and dry measure, between measuring by weight  and by volume.  They do analyses of what kinds of yeast ultimately prevail as the levels of lactobacilli rise and kill off some of the less desirable denizens of the sourdough culture.  They discuss the moisture content in the ideal wheat flour.   But however fancy they got in their analysis, they all agreed that it was possible to start a culture from the wild yeast in the atmosphere and, more importantly, living symbiotically with the grain crops themselves--and that it was important to remember that bleaching and brominating flour could have the effect of killing off that yeast.

It was time to plunge in.  And it didn't take much to get started.  I combined equal parts flour (half rye, half whole wheat) and water.  The flour was unbleached, organic, whole grain; and the water was filtered.  (I don't know if that takes the chlorine out or not.)  I stirred them up in a glass bowl, and I covered the bowl with a dish towel and popped it into my electric oven with the oven light on.  I took it on faith that there was wild yeast on the surface of the grain and perhaps in the air in my apartment.  And, sure enough, after several hours the mixture was a little bit bubbly and smelled like fermentation might be starting.  

For several days, I felt like I had a new pet in the house.  (Does anybody name their sourdough cultures? One of the two sourdough cultures living in my fridge answers to "Mabel," I believe.)  I had to feed and stir the culture, and throw part of it out, twice a day.  I chose to add 1/4 cup of rye flour and 1/4 cup of water in the morning; and 1/4 cup of wheat flour and 1/4 cup of water in the evening.  The odors coming off the culture were more and more interesting: increasingly sour, but with lovely, fruity, winey overtones.

Finally it was time to try a baking.  I measured a cup of my culture into a bowl and added salt, water, and flour.   The dough acquired a consistency I was familiar with from baking bread with active dry yeast.  I kneaded it lovingly and left it to rise for a couple of hours.  I kneaded it again and formed a round loaf.  The dough spread more than it rose as it doubled in size.  I baked it, and the result was a delicious, if somewhat flat loaf.

I took half the starter with me when I went camping with my daughter, and baked a loaf at her apartment before heading to the campground.  The starter just sat in the cooler bubbling along, and when I got home, I had two starters, with two distinct personalities.  One makes a more sour loaf, and seems to have a little less leavening power.  The other makes a more conventional-looking loaf and is not quite so sour.  It takes a little bit of imagination and maybe some generosity to keep that first culture around, because the second culture really is better.  Both sit in labeled jars in my refrigerator, and I mark when I pull them out to feed them or bake with them.

Here's a loaf from my "lighter" culture.

I'm discovering that, while the science of sourdough cultures interests me, I am not at all scientific about my baking.  And every batch turns out a little different from the last.

My latest effort relied much more on techniques borrowed from the Jim Lahey recipe in Bittman's book.  It was so tasty that I don't have a picture to share.  I hardly kneaded it at all.  I let the ball of dough sit in the oven with the light on all day and evening, covered with a piece of saran wrap.  Just before bed, I shaped it into a loaf, adding as little flour as I could and still handle the dough; put it back in the oven.  The next morning I took it out of the oven, set a cake pan of water on the bottom shelf, preheated the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, and baked the loaf, dropping the oven temp to 375 about ten minutes after it went in.  The texture was grand; the sour flavor was not overpowering; it smelled like heaven.  It tasted great, both with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and basil; and with raspberry jam and butter.

The only problem is that I really don't need to be eating quite so much bread.  In spite of spending an hour on the elliptical trainer and/or jogging 5 or 6 days a week, plus walking to any destination less than about 4 miles away, I'm putting on weight.   But that may be a topic for another blog entry.