Wild Yeast

How do you go from cursing your pâte à choux to adoring it in 60 seconds flat? Here are the steps I used (YMMV):

1. Be delighted and excited about the challenge Meeta (What’s For Lunch Honey?) and Tony (Tony Tahhan) have chosen for the August Daring Bakers challenge: Pierre Hermé’s Chocolate Éclairs.
2. Plan to make the éclairs to take to work, where you are sure to have enough chocoholics around to summarily devour them.
3. Make the chocolate pastry cream and chocolate sauce for the glaze the night before, without incident. Plan to make the éclair shells that night also, but be too exhausted to do so safely.
4. Get up at 5AM. Make coffee.
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Salt is generally considered to be one of the four basic ingredients in bread (along with flour, water, and yeast). It contributes to flavor, of course, but also reinforces the gluten structure, controls (by slowing) the rate of fermentation, inhibits the oxidation that breaks down color- and flavor-enhancing pigments, and enhances the keeping quality of the bread. A dough without salt is likely to be sticky, slack, and hard to work with, and the resulting bread lacking in flavor and shelf life.

That said, there is one bread that is typically made without salt: Tuscan bread. The reason for the saltlessness is unclear; some sources say tha centuries ago, the government levied a hefty tax on salt that the Tuscans didn’t want to pay. Whatever the reason, the strong flavors of Tuscan cuisine are well-suited to a less strongly-flavored bread. This type of bread, which stales quickly, is apparently traditional for panzanella (tomato-bread salad).

For my first attempt at saltless bread, I adapted the Tuscan Bread recipe in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. This version was interesting to me because it employs a technique in which a portion of the flour is mixed with boiling water into a paste the night before baking. This gelatinizes the starches in the flour, Renhart explains, which brings out distinct flavors that enhance the bread’s unique quality. The Tuscan Bread recipe in The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz includes a similar paste, which Oriz refers to as the bouillie (mush).

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My brilliant, talented, and beautiful niece R moved into her dorm at Berkeley this past weekend. I wanted to send her off with something as sweet as she is, yet also, like R, health-conscious and a little unconventional. (OK, these scones aren’t quite what I’d call healthy, but I tried.) I love you R!

To make sourdough scones, I consulted recipes for buttermilk scones (from Tartine and King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking), substituting sourdough starter instead of buttermilk to contribute acidity and liquid (as well as a good proportion of flour) to the dough. The result was a lighter, moister, less crumbly scone than those typically found in coffee shops around here. Not as exceptional as R herself, but still pretty good.

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I’ve been a little accident-prone lately. Which is to say, careless. In the past five days I’ve managed to smash a tailbone, a toe, and a finger (I’m fine, really). Luckily, my latest accident involved no bodily injury and resulted in a very nice bread.

My intention was to use 400 grams of whole wheat sourdough starter in this whole-grain bread, but instead of weighing it out I blithely dumped in the whole lot of it, which I’m pretty sure was about 550 grams. By the time I realized the error of my ways, it was too late and there was nothing for it except forge ahead and see what developed.

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I’m taking a little vacation this week, where the seafood is good, the family is better, the oven is questionable, and the internet access is bad. See you Friday with YeastSpotting.

See this week’s yeast spottings …

Those of you who know me know that I am given to the occasional rant opinion. I’m giving you fair warning that this is one of them, and it’s only loosely on-topic at that. Please feel free to click on by if you’re not in the mood.

I had originally planned this to be a short footnote to my Sourdough Ciabatta Rolls post, but I realized I had somewhat more than a footnote’s worth to say. And I want to make it clear up front that my little tirade has nothing to do with the merits of what we bake (or cook or do), and everything to do with how we talk about what we bake (or cook or do).

First, about those rolls: I had originally been calling them “Rustic Sourdough Rolls” because I have been told by a professional baker I admire that if it’s sourdough it’s not truly ciabatta, but is more aptly termed “pane Francese” or something like that. But I decided to call them “Sourdough Ciabatta Rolls” after all, because I thought more people would understand the type of bread I made (or meant to make) with that name than with “rustic rolls” or anything else.

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