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

by Fromartz, Samuel

  By stretching and folding the dough by hand and letting time do its work, Zakowski arrived at a mix of both strong and weaker bonds, and so his breads contained the uneven holes that bakers so often crave. In a high-speed mixer, the weaker gluten chains break apart and stronger ones form, resulting in a more uniform crumb. Industrial operations might also use flour containing bleaching agents or ascorbic acid to forge stronger gluten bonds. This is why artisan bread makers for the most part eschew highly intensive mixers and avoid the additives that are the bane of industrially produced breads. By stretching and folding, Zakowski gradually built up the elastic gluten bonds, but only to a certain point. And, of course, that point—the moment to stop—is a judgment call. It comes only by feeling the dough and, in my case, making a lot of bad bread.

  When I asked to join him and shape a few baguettes, I felt a bit of tension, but he let me have a go at it. Two of my loaves made it into the mix, barely; the third came out a bit too long, so he smiled and set it aside after it was baked. In competition baking, baguettes must weigh exactly 250 grams (8.8 ounces) and measure between 55 and 60 centimeters (21.6 to 23.6 inches). The judges don’t compromise on these requirements, and neither does Zakowski. He once made sixty baguettes by hand each day for a few months trying to perfect them. He got good, he told me, but his technique has since gotten better. “The biggest challenge is speed,” Zakowski said, speaking of the competition. “In training, you’re constantly refining the process to make the bread as quickly and as efficiently as possible with the highest quality. And it’s tough because it’s a lot—a lot of product.”

  The fire roared in Zakowski’s oven, located outside the shipping container, but then gradually died down. He wrapped a bandana around his face and swept out the ashes, filling the air with dust. Then he mopped out the hearth. Once that was done, the baking was straightforward. He placed the loaves on a canvas loader, and delivered them into the oven. Then he misted the inside with a garden sprayer to create steam, which helped the loaves to spring up. Each successive batch was baked in this way, and within a couple of hours all were done. The bread cooled on gorgeous racks made from the oak wood of recycled wine barrels, then he packed them into birch plywood boxes, which like everything else in his bakery had also been handmade.

  From there it was a short one-mile trip in the vintage delivery truck to the farmers’ market, where Zakowski set up his bread stand and pizza oven, complete with an awning. But we had one drawback that day: it rained incessantly, keeping customers away and sales sparse. Luckily for me, it meant I got to bake several schiacciata—flatbreads topped with a local hard cheese and seasonal greens—in the mobile pizza oven. They were delicious, especially in the chilly wet weather, but it was still a shame that the foot traffic was so light. “I usually sell out,” Zakowski told me, but not that day. With the rain still pounding, we loaded the unsold loaves back into the truck and drove home.

  • • •

  It was a full year later when the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie was finally held at the global baking trade show EuroPain outside Paris in 2012. I made a point to show up, taking the RER commuter rail line from Paris to just outside the airport. The competition itself was held at the far end of the convention center, so I walked by booth after booth of millers, baking equipment manufacturers, bakeries, ingredient makers, and the like, each trying to grab your attention with a baguette, sweet pastry, or blaring music. I kept walking through the vast hall until I reached the back, where a thick crowd of onlookers milled about in front of the competing bread teams. Though bread making isn’t exactly a soccer match, an announcer was on hand, droning on endlessly. Meanwhile, the baking teams worked furiously to produce their breads and pastries, which were paraded in front of the spectators and dissected and tasted by an eminent team of master bakers, clad in white coats and toques, from around the world. I caught Zakowski’s eye and waved, though he barely acknowledged it as he moved at a fast pace, arranging his just-baked loaves in a beautiful display in front of the team’s workspace. I didn’t stick around for the entire competition, since it was difficult to make out just what was going on from a distance, but at the end of the multiday affair, the judges came up with their decision: The U.S. team placed second, just after Japan, and only losing by a few points. Taiwan came in third. It was the first time that a European team failed to win a place on the podium, signaling perhaps that French bread is no longer very French. Some of the breads were available to taste, though I couldn’t manage to squeeze through the throngs to try the U.S. team’s. I did snag a piece of a Japanese brioche made with green tea and citrus that was sweet, and oddly green. It stood out just like some other jaw-dropping displays at the trade show. I took a couple of modest bites. It tasted kind of weird.

  Mike Zakowski displays his breads at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie

  A couple of years later, Zakowski was still baking on his own but he did lose his backyard bakery. The lack of permits finally did him in. He’s now baking at a friend’s place in Petaluma and scouting other locations for his oven and shipping container, both of which, luckily, are portable. But he’s still competing, keeping one foot in the farmers’ market and the other in the Paris baking competitions.

  • • •

  As for my northern California sojourn, my last stop was Tartine, located in San Francisco’s Mission District and widely known for its bread, pastries, and lines out the door. I visited several times over a couple of years, making a point to stop in whenever my work took me out to the city. Chad Robertson, who bakes the bread, and his wife, Elisabeth Prueitt, who oversees the pastries, worked in France early in their careers and then set up shop in Point Reyes Station, a small town about ninety minutes north of the Bay Area, and baked out of a wood-fired oven. Robertson joined the ranks of similar-minded artisans—but he distinguished himself by baking alone in a tiny place with an oven built by the legendary Alan Scott, who had also made the Webers’ first oven. Robertson’s bread quickly gained notice locally. I actually tried it, in the late 1990s, when a friend drove me out to the small town; we stopped and picked up one of his dark, crusty loaves and a log of cheese from Cow Girl Creamery, then continued on to Tomales Bay. Around the same time, Robertson appeared on the cover of The Bread Builders, a classic book about bread making and wood ovens (and a must-read for bread nerds). But he still wasn’t known outside the region.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY CHAD ROBERTSON

  Tartine country loaf

  Eventually, the couple moved to San Francisco, helping propel the renaissance on Eighteenth Street in the Mission District, which has become a food-centric corridor in the city, with the locavore Bi-Rite Supermarket a couple of doors down, a handmade ice cream store across the street, and the Italian restaurant Delfina just next door. They grew into a more mature operation, with a full staff and a strong emphasis on prepared food served in a storefront café. Robertson also traded the wood-fired oven for a full-scale professional baking oven, with several decks, which was more practical in the city and, he argued, baked bread that was just as good.

  Once the doors opened, however, demand for the bread soon got out of hand. Robertson had to resort to preorder reservations because the loaves sold out so quickly. “People would line up and then we’d run out of bread even before they got to the counter, so we had to do something,” he told me. One obvious solution would have been to bake more bread. But Robertson was limited by the oven, because pastries were baking during the day. He also wanted to avoid working at night. (The bakers began rolling in around eight A.M., which is when many other bread bakeries are nearly finished for the day.) To solve the problem of unhappy customers and lack of supply, Robertson rationed the bread rather than alter the schedule and boost output. When the loaves start coming out of the oven at five P.M., those with “reservations” are found in an orderly queue waiting for their loaf.

  When I went to Tartine to meet him for the first time, I, too, lined up like all the rest to buy one of the sandwiches. I
chose sliced ham and melted Gruyère on their thick-sliced country bread, which is the signature loaf made with levain. Luckily, the line did not take long and I also found a seat in the crowded café. My meal was delicious, the cheese melting around the crunchy and slightly assertive bread, the ham pleasantly salty, but I couldn’t finish it, because it was huge. Plus, I had a tart for dessert. It was a lunchtime indulgence out of proportion to what I needed, but, hey, this was work, and I had to investigate. As I ate my meal, I kept looking to the back of the shop, where I could see the oven and the bread bakers, a few feet behind the cash register. I soon spotted Robertson, wearing a T-shirt, and with a visor on his head. When I finished eating, I went over to say hello.

  We shook hands and he showed me into the back where the bread was being made—the dough laid out like circular paving stones on a wooden table, resting before it would be shaped. I realized my timing was good: I might be able to jump in and shape these loaves, too, if Robertson let me. As we snaked from one part of the bakery to another, he asked me about the bakeries I had visited and the breads I was making. We soon pulled out our phones and were showing each other pictures of our loaves. This kind of camaraderie is quite common among bakers. Although many bakers I met were introverted, and interviews at times painfully spartan, Robertson wasn’t withdrawn. But he wasn’t blustery either. He was friendly, curious, willing to share. He also seemed entirely relaxed, though the place was hopping.

  Then again, I was a writer who had come to visit with him—not a baker looking for a job. Richard Hart, the baker at Della Fattoria, who, it turned out, was itching to move on when I met him, told me later that he began pursuing Robertson at Tartine. “I sent him numerous e-mails,” he told me, “and I didn’t get one reply. So I baked him a bread, but didn’t hear anything. So I baked him another bread, and another, until finally I got a reply saying he liked it.” That was enough. Hart was soon working at Tartine on his day off, determined to get a job at the place the same way he had at Della Fattoria. Eventually he joined the staff. Nathan Yanko, a distance runner who was Robertson’s lead baker and a master of dough, told me he simply showed up at the shop after culinary school and got a job. It was his first baking gig, which might have been part of the attraction for Robertson: Yanko didn’t have anything to unlearn. There were many paths into this place.

  Now, why all the fuss about Tartine bread? Well, it’s very good. It has a mild levain flavor with a hint of acidity, open holes in the crumb, and a magnificently crackling dark crust. All of these qualities reflect the long fermentation that’s central to the Tartine method. While the ovens are tied up with cakes, tarts, and pastries during the day, the bread bakers are busy mixing and shaping their loaves. Then, when the ovens finally free up late in the afternoon, the bakers remove the loaves that have been rising in the walk-in refrigerator since the day before. They spill the loaves from their bannetons, or baskets, onto the canvas loading belt, swiftly slash them with a series of cuts and then load them into the oven. Then with the push of a button, they inject a blast of steam, and, in a highly unusual maneuver, turn off the oven, so that the falling heat approximates the wood-fired hearth on which Robertson was weaned. When the crackling torpedo-shaped loaves start coming out, they fill the bakery with toasty, chestnut aromas that are incredibly enticing.

  Like so many methods that bakers adopt, Robertson began this two-day baking regime out of necessity. Years earlier, in Point Reyes, he couldn’t handle mixing and shaping the dough, chopping the wood for his masonry brick oven, and baking all in one day—if he and Liz were going to have a life. So he stretched the process over two days. To make this extended fermentation work, he relies on a relatively small amount of what he calls “young” starter in the dough. This sourdough has risen only for a few hours so smells rather sweet, favoring lactic acids, rather than the sharper acetic acids that come in a more mature levain. When he first described this approach in Tartine Bread, I was surprised because most sourdough recipes call for far larger amounts of leaven. But there’s no hard and fast rule about how much starter to add to a dough, though the differing amounts, along with their hydration and temperature, can dramatically affect the way the final loaf turns out. If he had used a greater amount of leaven in the dough, for example, and kept it at a warm temperature of 78˚F (26˚C), the bread would be ready to go into the oven in five to six hours after it was mixed—not twenty-eight or thirty hours. But it wouldn’t have the complexity of taste, the dark crust, and porous crumb that makes the loaf a Tartine loaf. The relatively small amount of sourdough and the cool overnight rise means this dough needs a long, languorous fermentation, which is perfect if you’re planning on mixing one day, baking the next, and yes, sleeping at night, as he was, in the cool climate of Point Reyes.

  I found this method tricky to achieve in the summer swamp of Washington when blasting air conditioning lowers the temperature to only 80˚F (27˚C). Starters, especially liquid ones, can overferment in those conditions and develop too much of the acetic acid that Robertson’s trying to avoid. My fix is to use a stiff leaven in the summer. All else being equal, this takes longer to ferment than a liquid sourdough starter and gives me a longer overnight window to achieve a mildly acidic flavor profile. Another way to slow down the leaven in the summer is to mix it with cold water and to add salt (but don’t forget to reduce the salt in the final dough by the same amount). When it’s really warm, I use that approach. The way to maintain your sourdough arises from your particular needs, desired flavor profile, and careful observation of the starter ecology. It really is like farming because you’re nurturing these microlivestock in a way that reflects the local climate—and mine wasn’t northern California. To get a similar taste, I had to do things differently.

  Like that of most bakers I’ve encountered, Robertson’s method influenced some of the things I did, but the real eye-opener came at the bakery itself, where, it might be said, the exacting guidelines went out the window. “All this stuff is done by feel, every step of the way,” Yanko told me. “I mean the calculations guide us, but how the dough feels, how it rests on the bench, all of that determines what we do.” Even the flour changes with the seasons. Just a couple of weeks before I’d arrived on one of my several visits, they had altered the blend of white flours from Central Milling in Utah that they use in the Tartine country loaf. “We’re constantly changing things,” Yanko said.

  This flexibility is especially applicable to the amount of water you add to the dough, which increases as the dough is progressively developed. It echoes something that Pichard in Paris told me: “Add as much water as the dough can handle.” What’s too much? I saw that years ago when I was mixing a ciabatta loaf, that extremely moist Italian dough that creates huge airy holes. I had added so much water at the outset that the gluten never came together. I was stirring a soup in my KitchenAid mixer, and the gluten was just swimming around, not hooking up. I had added too much water, and all at once. Had I added the water gradually, the gluten would have had a chance to form its connecting bonds, and then absorb the additions of water.

  “We hold back maybe 10 to 15 percent of the water,” Hart told me one day at Tartine, “and then just keep adding it, because we mix by feel.” As the dough mass is stretched and folded, they hydrate the dough even more, until it’s a highly elastic substance that has sucked up as much water as a sponge. While this method is often called “double hydration,” it’s more like triple hydration or perhaps constant hydration at Tartine, since they add the water until the dough looks sufficiently gloppy, but still strongly elastic. What’s enough? Well, again, that’s a judgment call by the baker and in part depends on the flour one uses. In my case, I just keep sprinkling on a couple of tablespoons at a time, after each rest, and fold and pinch the dough until the water’s absorbed.

  Another surprise in their technique was in the final shaping of the loaf, which I got to try on my first visit to Tartine. It mimics nothing so much as origami. Usually, when shaping a loaf, you cut and
weigh the dough for the size loaves you want, then gently fold it into a rough shape. This preshaping builds up a slight bit of tension in the skin of the dough, making it easier to manipulate into the final shape after a brief rest. Since Tartine’s loaves are so fully hydrated, though, the preshaped loaf kind of collapses into a one-inch-thick pancake on the wooden counter during its resting period. Then, when it comes time to shape the bread, they do a series of folds, and folds upon folds. Their hands work quickly and automatically as they wrap the dough into an airy, taut package. It was far more intricate that any technique I saw in Paris—or anywhere else for that matter. Now, I could try to describe this folding technique, but there are so many pulls and folds, each stretching the skin of the dough around a loose and pliable interior, that a verbal description wouldn’t do it justice. Robertson doesn’t even bother mentioning it in his bread book.

  Nathan Yanko (left) and Chad Robertson at Tartine

  But after watching him shape a few loaves at Tartine, I tried it on the butcher block counter. Robertson was standing beside me. The counter was nearly devoid of any flour, so you have to live with potential stickiness. (Beginning bakers make the mistake of throwing down flour, when the loaf starts to stick, but when you do so, the loaf can’t “grab” the counter and achieve a taut skin. It kind of flops around instead.) I went to work, folding this way and that, trying to be quick about it. When my somewhat mangled loaf was done, he said it was “okay.” He was kind. It was clear it would take a lot of time and practice to get this shaping technique down. “I’ve been doing it eight months and I still haven’t got the hang of it,” Hart told me during one of my visits. I could tell that he hadn’t, because he didn’t look particularly relaxed and fluid when he shaped the bread. It was the same with a visiting baker from Sweden. But at least they could accomplish the task. I couldn’t. I even took a video of the technique to try to remember what they were doing, but even then, watching it repeatedly, it was still hard to figure everything out. You can’t slow down or stop during the shaping process. If you do, your hands will be stuck to a gloppy mass. Every time I tried the technique, the wet, delicate dough stuck to my fingers or the skin of the dough ripped. It’s an impossibly precise but relaxed technique in which your fingers—not your brain or eyes—figure how to manipulate the dough.