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

by Fromartz, Samuel

  Kathleen Weber didn’t start out as a professional baker, but rather a home baker like me. She had a healthy obsession about dough and often baked loaves, bringing them to friends’ homes for dinner. Her guidebook at the time was Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, a classic that has influenced many bakers. Weber then took the short step from baking recipes out of the book to building a wood oven on her deck, with Alan Scott. At the time, he was the most influential builder of brick ovens in America and he happened to live nearby.

  You know this trajectory: she bakes bread for a chef’s olive oil tasting event, eventually gets an account, and before long is working day and night to fulfill orders. Her husband, Ed, would fire up the oven at dusk. She would mix the doughs at night, baking them the next day. “I was on fire,” Kathleen told me over a soup and sandwich at the couple’s Della Fattoria Café, also in Petaluma. “I had things just come to me. Coming home one day I had Meyer lemons and rosemary in the car and thought they would make a wonderful combination.” She mixed the two in olive oil, tucked them into a sourdough bread, which was slashed open just before baking, to reveal the oil mixture—a bit of sea salt crumbled on top. When I bit into it, I got a hit of citrus, salt, olive oil, and rosemary all at once. The bread’s still one of her best sellers. In the beginning, she was having a tough time meeting demand, but Michel Suas of the San Francisco Baking Institute told her, “It’s a good problem to have.” He sent up one of his teachers, Lionel Vatinet, another superlative French baker, now at La Farm Bakery in Durham, North Carolina, who taught her to work faster. “He would hold a stopwatch while I was shaping loaves and with each one, he would have me cut the amount of time,” Weber told me. Now the bakery’s much bigger, with a team of four bakers and numerous accounts. Ed Weber often can be found manning the bread stand at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco on Saturdays or tinkering with the two ovens in the open-air bake shed, which long ago replaced the oven on the deck outside their house.

  Monday morning wasn’t terribly busy when I arrived, and I couldn’t find anyone around the bakery. So I just opened the screen door and let myself in to look around. The fires were roaring in the two brick ovens that line an outside wall, the bread-baking baskets that would later hold the rising bread were all neatly arranged on shelves, and the butcher block tables where the loaves were shaped were clean and empty, ready for the day’s activity. Compared with other bakeries I’ve visited, this had the feel of an outdoor kitchen, though the volume of loaves would rival others I saw, from Paris to San Francisco. While I was snapping pictures of the weathered, soot-marked ovens, and the fourteen-foot-long wooden peels, Richard Hart poked his head inside. He was then the lead baker, a Brit in his mid-thirties, who had trained as a cook in three-star restaurants in London but now was tending to wood fire, dough, and handmade bread.

  We said hello and he immediately began mixing the day’s doughs, measuring out levain into plastic bins, and then adding flour and salt, talking to me as he worked. He said he had burned out on kitchens in fine dining establishments, including one of Gordon Ramsay’s in London. “So the portrait of him on TV, the abusive chef, it’s true to life?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” he replied. “If the sous chefs were not nasty to the cooks they were fired, and I just had it with that kind of atmosphere, I had to leave, it was making me evil. I started to get angry—and I’m really mild mannered.” At a friend’s recommendation, Hart first took a job at the vegetable-centric restaurant Ubuntu in Napa Valley, uprooting his family from London to northern California, and working forty hours a week instead of the seventy or eighty hours he had before. “I suddenly had all this time,” he said. So he began visiting Della Fattoria on his days off, curious about their sourdough bread and wood-fired ovens. “I mean, you’re baking bread like they did one hundred years ago, who wouldn’t be amazed?” he said. “Regardless of what it took, I had to get a job here.” Within a year, he had joined the bakery staff and soon Kathleen put him in charge.

  Hart had an easygoing manner, but after a few days I could also tell he was incredibly hardworking. In this business, bakers are always moving from one task to another, and Hart never stopped. By the time the rest of the bakers showed up that first morning, the pace noticeably picked up. Multiple doughs that Hart had mixed were being shaped, nestled into baskets, or slipped into linen couches to rise. The dying embers were swept out of the ovens, then the hearth was mopped out with a wet towel at the end of a long pole. Everyone seemed to be working at a pace just short of a jog. They plowed through hundreds of pounds of dough, shaping them quickly into round boules, torpedo-shaped bâtards, and finally baguettes. I jumped in and helped form the loaf with rosemary, lemon, and olive oil, which was spooned into a slight well in the dough. Turning it over and rounding the loaf with my hands, I stretched the skin of the dough taut with my pinkies on the underside of the loaf. The oily mixture flowed through the loaf as I continued to shape it, eventually ending up on top, visible through a translucent skin of gluten. Under Hart’s watchful eye, I kept at it. The dough felt familiar, pliable, and easy to manipulate. I made a few loaves and plopped them into cloth-lined baskets to rise. Hart wasn’t displeased with the outcome. Or, I should say, I didn’t screw up, which is what most bakers worry about when an outsider arrives to join in, an amateur no less.

  Loaves rising in a couche at Della Fattoria

  When it came time to load the loaves into the oven, a dance of the peels began—“somewhere between a rodeo and ballet,” as Kathleen Weber described it. Hart cranked up the Beatles’ White Album on the boom box. Several long-handled peels that could hold three or four loaves were arranged side by side on the wooden table. A baker flipped over the baskets holding the fully risen loaves onto the peels, then quickly slashed them with a razor. A second baker, holding the peel, twirled the fourteen-foot stick a quarter turn, and thrust it deep through the two-foot opening of the oven all the way to the back, releasing the loaves with a quick tug on the handle. The smaller loaves were set closer to the opening, since they would bake the fastest. With each few peel loads, the baker pulled down a metal rod from an overhead rack and sprayed hot steam into the oven, which was now clocking an extremely hot 550˚ to 600˚F (288˚ to 316˚C). The steam allowed the crust to remain moist and pliable, so it could spring up before it dried out and set. Once the oven was fully loaded, the spring-hinged door flopped closed and the loaves baked away in the heat.

  Not twenty minutes later, the reverse march would begin: the metal oven door was flipped open and the baker tapped each loaf to see if it was done. If it was, it made an unmistakable hollow and resonant knock. The loaves were unloaded, front to back, and slipped from the peel to the steel racks that lined the edges of the room. By now it was dusk, the sky outside the screen windows turning a dark and rich red, not unlike the embers that had burned away in the oven. The brick oven baked a thick and rich crust on the bread, almost chocolate in color, others like caramel. Even though the loaves had not yet finished cooling, I tore into a polenta bread, one Hart had discarded as too dark to sell. I wouldn’t normally advise this, because the crumb takes an hour to set and can be a bit tacky before then. But still, I plunged ahead, biting into the bread with steam billowing out from the crumb. The loaf tasted light, and I got a hit of the sweet corn and the dark toasted crust.

  Sitting in my guest cabin on the Webers’ ranch that evening, munching on samples we had baked that day, I realized that this bread was a distant echo of my hand-shaped loaves. The flavor of the loaf was very close to mine (minus the crust, that is, which benefits from the massive heat of the oven), but the production method was way beyond me. I had tried wood-fired baking a couple of times but I hadn’t really learned the method, and here at Della Fattoria I could only observe—the pace was far too rapid to just jump in and man the oven. To find something closer to a scale I was used to, I turned to another baker a half hour away in Sonoma who baked bread in his backyard.

  • • •

  I first met Mike Zakowsk
i at the hulking Las Vegas Convention Center in the fall of 2010, where, as a member of the American baking team, he was participating in the semifinals of a bread competition held on the edge of a massive industrial baking trade show. With two teammates—Harry Peemoeller and Jeremey Gadouas, who focused on artistic bread design and viennoiserie, or Viennese-style yeasted pastries, respectively—the team was jockeying to represent the United States at the 2012 World Cup of Baking, the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie. While American bakers are far less celebrated than glitzy chefs with their TV shows, they do far better in these competitions. They shocked the baking world when the U.S. team took gold for its bread in 1996, then won again in 1999 and 2005. Meanwhile, the United States has never placed better than sixth in the preeminent chefs’ competition, the Bocuse d’Or, despite a lot of support and media attention.

  Under klieg lights, with booming music, surrounded by cheering bakers and friends, Zakowski knocked out a series of rolls, baguettes, and whole grain breads with artful designs that had to meet exacting specifications—in weight, presentation, and ingredients. When it was over, the U.S. team had assured its place in Paris for March 2012.

  At the party that followed, I talked with Zakowski over a beer. His white apron and chef’s toque were gone, replaced by a clean T-shirt and porkpie hat. I asked if I might look him up the next time I was in northern California and maybe bake with him. It was then I learned that he was working in a quite spartan and simple way, a world away from the glitz and pressure of competition baking.

  The world of baking seems to attract free spirits, but Zakowski—who calls himself The Bejkr—stands out even among them. For one, there’s that unusual spelling of his business. Then there are his e-mails, announcing “fResH pAin tOdAY” (pain means bread in French). But even among the most committed artisan bakers, few mix their dough by hand, because of the demands of production. Nor do they work in shipping containers they’ve plopped in their backyards. Nor do they have massive wood-fired ovens between the shipping container and backyard vegetable patch. Zakowski had all of this—much of it hand-built without permits when I met him—on a rental property! One or two days a week, he drove to the farmers’ market in Sonoma to sell his loaves, smoke billowing out of a homemade brick pizza oven hitched to the back of his vintage delivery truck.

  He had given up the grind of the baking trade after nearly a decade and a half, quitting his last bakery management job in Sonoma several months before I met him. But before he left, he used the bakery’s facilities to make bread on his time off, so he could get his hands back in the dough and connect with people who bought his loaves at the farmers’ market. He eventually plowed his savings into the backyard bakery and went solo, pursuing competitive baking at the same time.

  • • •

  One morning the following spring, I drove up to his place in the small town of Sonoma at seven A.M. to begin baking with him. When I arrived, I could swear it wasn’t a wood fire wafting from the house but marijuana. I didn’t say anything. It was early, and we only exchanged a few words. Zakowski offered me some herbal tea in a quart-size glass mason jar. When I asked if he had any coffee, he said, “I can’t do coffee, gets me too wired.” I wish I could say the same. I hadn’t had any coffee yet, so was wondering when the predictable lethargy would kick in.

  We walked out the kitchen door and into the backyard, past an old giant steel mixer and the trailer-hitched pizza oven, and entered the screen door of the narrow shipping container–cum–bake house. He had bought the converted container from a company in Oakland, which had paneled the inside and cut windows and doorways into the frame. Plumbing and electrical systems had been put in and a friend had laid the terra-cotta tile floor. Wooden and metal tables lined one side. Just opposite across the narrow corridor stood a six-foot-high rack of wooden shelves where the loaves were left to rise, or “proof,” before they were baked. He had sinks to wash up sheet pans and tools, bags of grains and flour bins arranged neatly under the counters, and above the work area, near the window, a line of kitchen timers along the wall, each set to time the rising of a dough. A thermometer hung alongside. This way, he had the two most important variables in bread baking under control—temperature and time.

  Mike Zakowski in front of his drying rack

  I stood off to the side and watched Zakowski weigh the flours and sourdough, setting the ingredients into bins. All the doughs were different. There was a pain de campagne with blends of whole wheat and white flours, a cracked Kamut bread, again with a mix of flours and Kamut grain that he coarsely ground in a hand mill; baguettes with white flour and a bit of wheat where some of the bran from the fibrous hull of the wheat kernel had been sifted out (known as “sifted” or “bolted” flour), and a few others—all of them with a blend of flours to get the flavor and textural qualities he sought. He was following a printed-out spreadsheet as he went, a common practice among bakers who can easily calculate the weight of ingredients with the click of a mouse. When all the ingredients were in their respective bins, he added water and mixed them by hand. While this might sound like a lot of manual work for a day’s production of bread, it actually isn’t. Zakowski swirled his hand and stirred the flour, water, sourdough, and salt until they were just combined and still lumpy, a process that took maybe two to three minutes. Then he snapped the plastic lid on the bin, set the timer for twenty minutes, and moved on to the next dough, repeating the process. He was using the ingredient of time to develop the dough—just as Delmontel’s bakers had in Paris. By waiting for set intervals (cleaning up in the meantime, or checking the oven), he allowed the dough to develop on its own. If you do this by hand, you also avoid having to wash a mixer. I do all of my mixing in a large stainless steel or plastic bowl, with a $1 plastic tray from IKEA flung over the top as a lid. I simply wet and then shake the water off my hands before I begin, so my hands don’t get sticky and full of dough.

  After the first twenty-minute rest, Zakowski removed the lid and began stretching and folding the dough, which developed the gluten’s springiness—a common technique bakers use that is far gentler than mechanical mixing, or even kneading with the heel of your hand. He grabbed an edge of the dough and pulled it out, then folded it so that it landed beyond the center line of the mass. He then stretched the opposite end and folded it over the first. He repeated the process on the two sides of the dough, so four sides were folded in all, then flipped it over, so the folded edges were on the bottom. A key part of the technique is to keep the dough intact in one piece, rather than ripping the strands of gluten. The resting period was also important, because during that time, the gluten has time to relax, forming a more cohesive and plastic substance. Each time he stretched and folded, he created new and stronger bonds. At the end of the process, the dough glistened like the slightly moist surface of a balloon. Now it would rise.

  Over time, strengthening gluten feels like a stretchy rubber band that grows increasingly taut. The baking term for that is elasticity, which occurs as gluten proteins rearrange themselves in the presence of water and connect with each other, forming longer protein chains. With dough, though, you don’t want just elasticity, because then the rubber band would break apart if you pulled on it too forcefully. So bakers talk about a second quality as well, extensibility, which refers to the dough’s ability to stretch without springing back to its former shape. Dough needs a mix of both these qualities to make a superlative loaf.

  These attributes reflect the gluten proteins that reside in wheat itself, known as glutenin and gliadin. Glutenin proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids that create elasticity and strong bonds. Gliadin proteins account for the stretchiness because they link rather weakly with each other and with the stronger glutenin proteins. If you’ve ever made pizza, you can see these gluten characteristics at work. When you pound the dough and flatten it, it often contracts when you try to stretch it out. That’s elasticity, and people often make the mistake of continuing to tug at the dough to stretch it out, findi
ng that it recoils into an even tighter, smaller shape. By pulling the dough continuously, the gluten actually strengthens and heightens elasticity. At this point, the best thing to do is to let the dough sit for five or ten minutes and let the gluten relax, which allows it to become more extensible again and thus stretch out.

  Once the dough is developed, the third quality bakers look for is tolerance, or the ability of a loaf to maintain its shape. Think of the way a loaf can rise, hold its dome, and then spring up when it hits the heat of the oven. Without tolerance, the dough will simply collapse.

  While the protein level in a flour is often used as a proxy for how strong the gluten will be, it’s an imperfect measure. American artisan bakers generally seek out flours that have protein levels of 11 to 11.5 percent. Stronger “bread flour” can measure as high as 13 to 14 percent. But it’s not only the quantity of protein that matters, but the quality. (Spelt, for example, can exceed wheat in protein, but can’t hold its shape very well because it doesn’t mirror bread wheat’s mix of proteins.) Millers also blend flours to achieve a high degree of consistency, and I’ve found many brands of unbleached all-purpose flour work well in bread making. Higher-protein “bread flour” tends to create too tight of a crumb for my liking, though it’s fine for bagels, pretzels, and pizza. Ultimately, though, protein levels can’t be found unless you visit the flour company’s Web site, and even if you do get the number it’s only a rough measure, for it doesn’t tell you about the ratio of glutenin and gliadin proteins that determines the spring and stretch of the dough. For that, you need to try the flour and see how the dough feels, which is why bakers like Zakowski always have their hands in the dough. In this craft, hands become knowledgeable.