Bread Adventures

For V-Day, Alia got me this really cool cookbook Tartine Bread.  Tartine is a bakery in San Francisco, and its one of my absolute favorite places for food of any kind.  There is another cookbook from Tartine, which is one of my favorite cookbooks.  Combined with my recent foray into the world of bread baking (outlined in the previous post), this was a triple whammy of a present.

On the left, my birthday present from the Folks.  Yay Alton Brown!
On the right, the Tartine Bread book.

Tartine Bread is an interesting read.  Part recipe book, part memoir, part instruction manual, part gorgeous photography book.  Tartine is owned an operated by a husband and wife team, the husband being in charge of the bread baking (he's the author of Tartine Bread), and the wife being the pastry chef.  The first third of the book contains a short autobiography of how he came to be baking in San Francisco, as well as an extensive description of a TECHNIQUE for baking bread, really more than just a recipe.  Now, in true San Francisco Foodie style, Mr. Chad Robertson does not hold to any new fangled bread techniques like commercial yeast.  No, he bakes bread like they did in France before the industrial revolution, ie the hard way.  Still, I'm a sucker for a challenge so I'm going to see if I can't follow these instructions.  It must be easier than making single nanowire solar cells.

Lem, the proto-starter

Lem's Lair

Meet Lem, the leaven.  Well technically, Lem is not yet a leaven, nor even a starter, but soon, with time, he'll grow up to be big and yeasty.  At which point he can be used instead of commercial active/dry yeast.  So, one might feel that naming a baking ingredient is a little strange, and I have to agree; however, there is a purpose to the silliness.

Making a leaven is pretty easy.  You mix equal parts water and flour into a thick batter, then let it sit out at room temperature.  Naturally occurring yeasts which live in the flour as well as on your hands and in the air will then begin to grow inside this batter, eating the flour and generating CO2.  As the batter develops it will slowly be transformed into a living breathing micro-ecology full of yeast and bacteria.  In order for the starter to become a leaven, its necessary to obtain a steady state mixture of yeast and bacteria which, when added to a raw dough, will generate CO2 as well as the various acids which produce a deep and satisfying flavor in the bread.  The details of how this is accomplished can generate a huge variety of breads, from country bread to baguettes to full-on sourdough.  Building this little ecology requires regular 'feeding', which is accomplished by discarding most of it, and then replacing the discarded material with more flour/water batter.  (For biologists in the audience, I think this is essentially the same as splitting cell cultures.  Correct me if I'm wrong).  Since it needs regular care and feeding, this little biomass is sort of like a strange, foul smelling, yeasty, pet.  Hence the name.

I gather from my book that a real foodie would keep the starter at room temperature forever, which requires daily feeding (like any cell culture).  However, given that I've started with 200 grams of flour, and the book recommends discarding 80% of the starter at feeding time, it would take nearly 10 pounds of flour a month just to feed the starter!  That seems kind of wasteful, so I'm going to take the easy way out and refrigerate the starter once its good and yeasty.  Then it only needs to be fed the day before bread baking.  Apparently my ultimate mixture of lactic vs. acetic acid may be a bit on the sour side, but I'm willing to take that risk.

So in any case, Lem is growing as I write.  He may take up to a week to be ready for bread.  So soon hopefully I will post the outcome of my first Tartine Bread session.  Stay tuned!  Next post: Pickles!