In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey

by Fromartz, Samuel

  Ripe sourdough starter, made with white flour

  But the biota in my sourdough will probably not match yours, even if I gave you a bit of my starter to begin with and you lived down the block. So far, more than fifty-five species of Lactobacillus have been identified in sourdoughs, yet a study of nineteen Italian sourdough cultures showed that each was unique—that is, none shared the precise same mix of organisms. Another study found that cultures can even change when moved from one setting to another. Of course, this tends to undermine the romantic notion of keeping a culture alive for years, decades, even centuries, and passing it on, so that it spreads out, multiplies, but maintains its original essence. Bakers have relied on sourdough since antiquity and it’s taken on mythic status. “Here, take some of my culture that has been kept alive for 250 years,” someone might say, which is a lovely but meaningless gesture. A culture can be nurtured this way, but unless all the conditions mirror the original, it is unlikely to harbor the same combination of yeast and bacteria. Nature loves diversity, whether we like it or not.

  Several years ago, I had the chance to meet New York baker Jim Lahey (the guy behind no-knead bread). I coveted the loaves he made at Sullivan Street Bakery and their light, airy quality. I would just rip off a piece and chew it as I walked down the street. The bread had an unforgettable texture and taste. When I met him, a few years after I first discovered the bread, I brought along a loaf for him to critique. This was in the days when my own starter, I realize, was rather weak and the loaves were dense, but he complimented me. When we walked through his baking room, I asked if he would share some of his sourdough—a request I’ve made to a number of bakers over the years. Like all the rest, he didn’t hesitate. He reached into a bin and pulled out a golf-ball-size piece of sourdough, putting it into a pint container. He mentioned that it had originally come from Italy.

  I took it home on the train and dutifully kept the starter alive for a couple of years, thinking that I was tapping into some secret colony of Italian microorganisms. I found, however, that it didn’t perform any differently than other sourdough cultures I had made. I now realize that within a couple of weeks it had probably adapted to my kitchen microclimate and feeding schedule, picking up whatever wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria were already in residence because I baked frequently with sourdough. They probably beat out the original Italian relatives in the starter, or more likely, the pushy New Yorkers who had already displaced the Italians. The starter wasn’t really the point, though, when it came to the light, airy quality I coveted in his breads. As I later learned (practice, practice), his bread had more to do with fermentation (using commercial yeast), hydration (a lot of water), and fabrication (gentle handling of a very viscous dough) than it did with the starter. Or, at least, that’s what I concluded when I tried to reverse-engineer the bread.

  So let’s toss aside the myths about sourdough starters: that only San Francisco sourdough can be made in San Francisco; that you can nurture a culture from somewhere else that dates back two hundred years without changing it; that if your two-hundred-year-old starter dies, you will never get it back (there’s a good chance the organisms that repopulate the new starter will turn out to be the same as before, all else being equal). Or that all the sourdough methods I tried worked because they were good methods (they probably were, but they might also have worked because wild yeast and bacteria were probably thriving in my kitchen since I bake with sourdough regularly). Starters are actually hyperlocal, with an ecology influenced by the hand of the baker, this farmer of microorganisms, and his particular feeding regime. And isn’t that ultimately what local is? Making decisions within the confines of your bioregion, even if that happens to be a slurry of flour and water sitting on your kitchen counter?

  In the early days of baking, however, I understood none of this. I just knew that if I took a quarter cup of starter out of the refrigerator and mixed it with warm water and flour, it would rise after eight hours or so. If I hadn’t baked with the substance for a week or more, I’d feed it twice, or even three times, before I mixed the dough. By the end of that feeding schedule, I could tell the difference. The starter was more lively, it bubbled and made the difference between a lofty loaf and a dense one. I learned these lessons only by practice and observation, and in doing so, I generally veered away from what I was reading in books. In the end, the process led me to my house loaf: a mixture of white flour, whole wheat, and rye that might be called pain de campagne and has had a presence on our table for more than a decade.

  It’s not original, but it was clearly my bread, with a taste and texture that arises from those organisms that I’ve learned to cultivate so well. But this loaf had a rich lineage, a long line of influence, not only from the books of people like Nancy Silverton and Dan Leader, who have built businesses on the backs of their humble sourdough starters, but from a movement of artisan bakers. At some point, I knew I had to visit them and learn where my bread came from.

  Sourdough Starter

  (MODERATE)

  Feeding a sourdough starter with white and whole wheat flours and water

  I actually dislike the word sourdough, because it adds a note of confusion, implying that the bread will be sour, or acidic. It can be, but I’ve had many “sourdough” breads that don’t have any apparent acidity and instead exhibit rounder, deeper flavor notes of lactic acid, which I feel brings out the inherent sweetness in the grain. That’s what I aim for in my starter culture.

  To make a sourdough starter, remember, you are a farmer, not a cook! You are creating the conditions for your microscopic animals to live happily. If you keep that in mind, the process will go a little more smoothly. I use organic whole rye flour because it’s an especially active medium for fermentation. It has higher levels of sugar than wheat to feed wild yeasts; it also has more amylase enzymes to break down starch and create yet even more sources of sugar for these tiny organisms. I also use raw (unpasteurized) honey as a nod to Pliny the Elder and because it’s the most concentrated source of natural sugar found in nature. Plus the raw form contains wild yeast. One word of warning: Avoid the use of glass jars, unless you cover them loosely. If sealed, they can explode while fermenting.

  Tools

  An 8- or 16-ounce plastic or ceramic container with lid

  Table spoon

  Sourdough Starter Ingredients

  Organic whole rye flour

  Raw honey

  Filtered or spring water (so bacteria-killing chlorine is removed)

  Mix 3 tablespoons (30 grams) lukewarm water (about 80˚ to 90˚F) with 1 teaspoon raw honey. Add 3 tablespoons (20 grams) rye flour and let this sit in a covered container for 1 to 2 days. The amount of time depends on the ambient temperature. If your kitchen is cool, the organisms will be less active and you’ll need more time. Ideally keep it at around 75˚F (24˚C). An oven with the light or pilot light on works well.

  If you can maintain an ambient temperature of 75˚F (24˚C), this first phase will probably take a day, which would be the case on your kitchen counter in the summer. If you simply ferment it in a cold kitchen in winter, it will likely take two days. When you pass by the starter, give it a mix with a spoon every now and again: your animals like oxygen in the initial stages. If they are happy, you will begin to see tiny bubbles forming on the surface of the starter as the organisms belch out carbon dioxide. This should occur after 1 or 2 days.

  At this point, add 3 tablespoons of rye flour, 3 tablespoons of water around 75˚F (24˚C), and 1 teaspoon of honey. Let it sit for 24 hours. Stir occasionally.

  Discard half the starter. Add 3 tablespoons of rye, 3 tablespoons of water, and 1 teaspoon of honey.

  Repeat this last step every 24 hours until the starter is bubbly and begins to rise noticeably. Once that happens, usually by day 5 or 6, you can stop adding the honey. The starter might weaken at that point (you’ve removed its sugar fix, after all), but proceed anyway. It will come alive again. When the mixture doubles in volume within 12 hours, you can
think about making bread.

  Here’s the test to see if the starter is ready, after it has risen: carefully remove a bit of it (a tablespoon will do) and place it in a bowl of warm water. If it floats to the surface within a couple of minutes, you’ve got an active starter. If it sinks like a stone and remains under water, let the starter mature for another hour and try again.

  This whole process might take a week or more, especially in the winter. With my kitchen hovering around 65˚F (18˚C), it took me two weeks to achieve a predictable starter, with feedings every one to two days. Once the starter is bubbly and active, you can switch to whole wheat, or a mixture of equal parts white and whole wheat flour, in place of the rye. You can also increase the volume by using, say, 20 grams of the mature starter and then feeding it with 100 grams flour and 100 grams water.

  Troubleshooting

  You might start out and get bubbles, but by day 2 or 3 it just looks dead. You have a few options:

  First, keep going, and eventually the yeast and bacteria will reappear and the starter will rise. An active, robust culture is nearly impossible to kill, even if you do leave it around on the kitchen counter for a few days. So if you forget to feed it for a couple of days, don’t throw it out—just soldier on and see what happens.

  Second, you can replace the water with an equal amount of pineapple or apple juice to raise the acidity level, which creates a favorable environment for wild yeast.

  Third, start over. If you do decide to start over, try to acidify the starter by using juice in place of water or a pinch of vitamin C powder with the water for the first 3 days.

  Fourth, use a pinch of commercial yeast (really, just a pinch between your thumb and forefinger) to jump-start your sourdough. Although it might feel like “cheating,” there’s really nothing wrong with this method. Once your starter becomes sufficiently acidic over time, the wild yeast and bacteria will outcompete the commercial yeast and your starter will be much the same as if you started out without it.

  If all else fails, here is a guaranteed method: Ask for a knob of starter from a friend or local artisan baker (it helps to mention how wonderful their breads are). You might also get a few tips along the way. Feed it once or twice daily, by taking 20 grams of the starter and adding 100 grams flour and 100 grams water and leaving it, ideally at around 75˚F (24˚C) for about 6 to 8 hours. Refrigerate it an hour or two after feeding if you’re not going to use it within the next day. If it is kept in the refrigerator for a week or longer, refresh it at least once before using it to rise bread. I often refresh it twice, just to ensure it’s sufficiently strong.

  Variations

  I tend to reuse a very small portion of my existing starter when it’s feeding time. I use 20 grams existing starter, 100 grams flour, and 75 grams water. This makes a stiff starter that rises slowly, especially in the winter. After 8 hours it can be used, and will tend to have a very mild lactic acid taste. If it’s left to ferment longer, say, up to 16 hours, it will turn ever more acidic in flavor.

  CHAPTER 3

  California and the Country Loaf

  I was leaving the gym on Capitol Hill one cold, wintry afternoon early in 2010 when I checked the messages on my phone. Alice Waters’s office at Chez Panisse had called. “Yeah, right, who was this anyway?” I wondered, running through a list of potential pranksters in my head. It was improbable that one of the most influential restaurants in the country, run by a woman who had propelled the local foods movement, the trend toward school gardens, simple fresh cuisine, and more, would be calling me.

  But when I called back, I got Waters’s assistant, which was the first surprise. The second was that Waters would be hosting a charity dinner in Washington and wanted to serve my bread. Turned out the baker she’d had in mind couldn’t make the event, so they had asked a chef in Washington, Barton Seaver, whom they should get. He had suggested me.

  “We hear you bake the best baguette in D.C.,” Waters’s assistant, Sarah Weiner, said.

  “Well, yeah, I won a contest,” I stammered, “but, you know, I’m just a home baker. The most I’ve ever baked for was for Thanksgiving dinner, maybe twenty people. How many people are you talking about?”

  She said they were hosting about forty people at a $500-a-plate dinner at Bob Woodward’s house in Georgetown. The event was in a week. As she continued talking, I wondered whether I could actually bake that much bread, or whether I’d really want to. Up until that moment, a dozen years into my obsession, I’d baked only for my family and friends and my own curiosity; it was never meant to be anything more than that. Here was my chance to turn pro, and the first gig was with Alice Waters!

  “Yeah, can I get back to you on that?” I said.

  • • •

  The call was of course validating, even flattering, Alice being Alice. But it was not the kind of call I had been waiting for. All I had done was bake bread two or three times a week, and then begun to write about it. Even the baguette contest I participated in nearly a year earlier had more to do with putting my bread up against pros than turning pro myself. When cookbook author Joan Nathan said to me, “It’s great you won, but what can you do with it?” I had no answer for her. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything at all.

  But I did know of Waters’s love of good bread, which almost seemed to equal her passion for a great salad. One of her earliest bakers, Steve Sullivan, had worked at Chez Panisse and went on to found Acme Bread, a notable bread company still going strong. (It was Sullivan, incidentally, who gave Nancy Silverton the idea of using grapes in her starter at La Brea Bakery.) Waters had also championed other bakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, like Chad Robertson at Tartine.

  These bakers seemed part of a dynamic local bread ecology: they worked hard, trained apprentices, and in this way seeded more bakeries. Michel Suas, a baker who arrived from France in the mid-1980s and who started the San Francisco Baking Institute, injected another bout of energy by teaching many aspiring bakers. The Bay Area and nearby Marin and Sonoma counties might now be home to the richest concentration of artisan bread bakers in the nation, reaching a kind of culinary critical mass. But northern California wasn’t alone. I’d found aspiring hubs along the coast in Maine, in Vermont and Massachusetts; in New York City; in Asheville, North Carolina, which in my unscientific estimation might have the highest per capita concentration of artisan bread bakers in the nation; in Portland, Seattle, and the Twin Cities and many more in places that I’ve yet to visit. Sadly, I wouldn’t put Washington, D.C., on that list, though it does have a couple of standouts. I’ve found that where there is a dearth of good bread, you occasionally get a superlative baker holding up the flag, but it’s rare. Mediocrity, in other words, can nurture its own culture because there aren’t enough customers who demand a good loaf. The Bay Area, though, had great bakers in spades, in part thanks to Waters.

  I had met a few of these bakers over the years. Their breads had little to do with San Francisco sourdough, for which the area is still known, and far more to do with what I’d call a post-sourdough movement—one that eschewed that acidic taste in bread, cultured mild-tasting levain, and in many cases baked in wood-fired ovens. It’s an approach I’ve tried to master over the years—minus the wood oven. The goal is a loaf that you can rip into with your teeth, but which also has a soft, pliable interior crumb. It has a dark crust that crackles when you bite into it, and where the slashes, the grigne, burst open in an inviting way. This bread is imperfect but captivating, and I continue to view it as somewhat magical no matter how much I learn about the method.

  I know, by now you’re rolling your eyes, but the proof really is in the eating, or in the favorable comment from one of my daughter’s nine-year-old friends. Breaking away from Lego to rip off a piece of a loaf, this young girl said, “Sam, I don’t like bread. But I like your bread.” She was eating a sourdough country loaf that had been fermented overnight—a simple, rustic bread that riffed on the West Coast tradition I’d picked up from bakers. Over the course
of a couple of years, after my baguette expeditions and that unexpected call from Waters, I visited many of these bakers for the first time.

  • • •

  Della Fattoria, in Petaluma about an hour north of San Francisco, is one of these bakeries. It’s known for its dark, Italian sourdough loaves baked in two massive wood-fired ovens and then sold around the region and at the bakery’s café in town. The bakery itself sits outside of town, an open-air, shedlike building next to a ranch-style house where Kathleen Weber, who founded the business with her husband, Ed, lives. Turning up their driveway one sunny morning in mid-May, I found it hard to tell that the place was a business—it felt more like a farm with one-story buildings, a garden, and a long wooden table underneath a large oak tree, where popular ranch dinners are held. In this complex, it’s easy to spot the bake house, with its screen doors, old wood plank floors, and smoke curling out of the chimney.