Notes from my kitchen, in which I bake bread and raise a few other matters
After way too much fretting that the corners of the firebricks for my oven hearth aren’t perfectly square (and how many things in life are perfectly square?), there was only one thing to do: get over it and get on with it. So task number one yesterday was to lay the hearth no matter what. It’s a little gappy at those pesky corners, but it will do.
I can’t figure myself out sometimes.
The smallest of tasks, such as hanging pictures, can get me so bogged down in analysis paralysis that they often languish for months or even years on my to-do list, while I try to decide the position of everything to the last sixteenth of an inch, and just what size nail would be perfect for each one.
And yet I’m apt to dive into more involved projects with only the barest hint of an idea of what the hell I am doing. For example, I now find myself muddling through in a fairly clueless sort of way, here at my home-away-from-home, the construction of a wood-fired mud oven.
Not that I’m flying completely blind here. I do have both inspiration and direction from the definitive book on the subject, Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer, and from very helpful photos and advice from several oven builders around the internet.
But have I ever built anything? Not unless you count my toothpick model of Plymouth Plantation in fifth grade. Am I strong enough to be hauling 50-pound buckets of dirt around? Barely. Have I ever even baked bread in a wood-fired oven? Well, now that you mention it, that would be a no. Am I completely stupid? Quite possibly.
Flour is flour is flour. Ground up wheat. And wheat is wheat is wheat. Right?
No! While using the right flour will not guarantee perfect bread (no one thing can guarantee that, after all), a very wrong flour might all but guarantee a flop. When choosing a basic white flour suitable for most bread baking, there are a few things to look for.
What’s not helpful are the labels “Bread Flour” and “All-Purpose Flour.” There is no standardization for these terms, and some flours designated “all-purpose” may be preferable to some “bread flours” for most bread baking (especially “artisan” hearth breads). On the other hand, some so-called “all-purpose” flours are definitely not. You’re much better off looking at the characteristics of a flour rather than its name.
But in case you just want to cut to the chase, I’ll give you the bottom line up front. Here’s a list of flours that I have known and loved:
What makes these flours wonderful?
Do you know what this is?
Here’s a closer look; now do you know?
I’m prepared to catch a lot of flak with this post, because I’m going to challenge some of the most cherished and prevalent beliefs about my favorite type of bread and that mysterious microbial ecosystem that makes it possible: sourdough.
I’m not saying these Sourdough Stories are False with a capital F or Myths with a capital M, nor am I proclaiming myself the grand arbiter of high sourdough truth. But there are credible sources that refute or question a good amount of the prevailing lore. If you don’t want to give these Sourdough Stories up, that’s fine. But if it would make your life easier or more interesting to let a few of them go, then feel free to do that, and know that you’re in good, if perhaps not abundant, company.
Sourdough Story #1: San Francisco sourdough bread can only be made in San Francisco. OK, I suppose you could say this one is actually true by definition. But the lactic-acid-producing bacterium (Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis) that supposedly makes SF sourdough unique is found in sourdough starters all over the world, and is in fact the predominant bacterial species in many of those starters. So if you’re not lucky enough to live in San Francisco, or to have a “geniune” SF sourdough starter, don’t despair; a fine sourdough is still attainable. Conversely, some sourdough breads made in SF are positively mediocre. A good sourdough bread has as much, if not more, to do with the skill of the baker than with the specific organism species in the starter. Read this Discover Magazine article to see why sourdough researcher Frank Sugihara said, “I think you can make San Francisco sourdough pretty much anywhere.”
If you’ve made or read through any of my recipes, maybe you’ve noticed that when they call for commercial yeast, it’s the unfortunately-named “instant” kind. Unfortunately-named because doesn’t “instant,” when it comes to food, connote inferior and inauthentic? Can instant hot chocolate, instant onion soup, or instant rice ever measure up to the real stuff?
But instant yeast isn’t like that. It’s the very same organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as fresh compressed (cake) and active dry, the other two forms of commercial yeast commonly available to home bakers. And plenty of professional artisan bakers use instant yeast too.