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‘cos Friday means challah…
The Dusty Apron challah is certified kosher and available at Grey’s Ave Deli (essential service).
It tastes a bit like brioche if you’re not familiar. If you are familiar, then you already love it!
This is a pre-lockdown photo obviously, but it sums up the life!
Ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar, egg (cracked under the supervision of the Rabbi or one of his assistants) and olive oil
The development of the gluten can be seen in the ‘window test’. When sourdough instructions ask you to do the window test, this is what you’re looking for. You can see a clear pane window through your dough.
Gluten is found in rye, barley, and especially wheat. It is used as an additive in many unexpected foods in the supermarket and has had a fair bit of (mostly bad) press in recent years. Pretty much everyone has heard of gluten, but do you know what gluten is and what work it does inside bread?
Basically gluten gives bread its structure. Without it, you get crackers or a brick of some sort. (Gluten is also degraded in a baked sourdough, because the fermentation process breaks it down!) Stephen Yafa explains the work of gluten:
“Gluten, which provides food storage for the germinating seed, is actually a complex comprised of two amino-acid proteins, gliadin and glutenin, that bond to form long, tangled molecules. Its stickiness - gluten comes from the Latin word for “glue” - adds elasticity and extensibility to wheat flour when mixed with water. The cohesion enables kneaded dough to stretch and hold its shape, a delicate compromise between strength and flexibility that gluten alone provides.
Bakers, for that reason, depend on gluten to create structure and resilience in their bread doughs. With the addition of water, this amino-acid bead string produces a web matrix of dough, the crumb. Carbon dioxide, the escaping gas released as a yeast by-product, fills the air pockets - named alveoli, like the lung’s balloon-like structures. That causes the crumb to swell inside the rising crust as it bakes.” (Ref: pp.10-11 Stephen Yafa (2015) Grain of Truth: The real case for and against wheat and gluten. Avery, Penguin Random House: New York
“If you do not have the type of bread you like in your house, eat crackers. If you do not have bread, eat cereal; eat oats; sardines.” - Silveria Jacobs, Prime Minister of Sint Maarten in the Caribbean (addressing her people about approaching COVID-19 restrictions) and my latest favourite quote. Ref: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-viral-caribbean-video-message-sint-maarten
Oats have featured more prominently again lately. They are no longer just a thing of boring childhood breakfasts or up-and-go-mueslies, because we’ve all been eating from the pantry. And we’ve all probably eaten oats, just as Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs suggested.
COVID-19 has changed eating around the globe in a very short time.
In terms of bread, oats are generally an added ingredient, rather than a primary source of flavour and nutrition.1 That said, they’re also a pretty awesome addition to the bakery’s flavour basics (and an essential ingredient in one of my favourite sourdoughs, the porridge bread).
Oats are rich in proteins and unsaturated fats and have a good amount of B vitamins. Oats have a high starch content and provide a generous amount of slow-release carbohydrates. They are rich in fibre, notably the soluble kind, and also rich in thiamin, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, manganese, selenium, and iron. Not bad, eh.
Porridge bread is a good way of making another delicious bread by adding cheap ingredients (that you probably have in your pantry!). Cooking out the oats causes them to gelatinise, which allows you to get more moisture into your bread, resulting in a much softer crumb, and an awesome flavour.
Basically (and here, I’m assuming you have experience making sourdough…), if you want to make porridge bread:
RATIOS: 1kg flour; 650g water; 150g starter; 250g cooked, cooled porridge; 20g salt
Add cooked, cooled porridge (oats) to your final dough. NOTE: You can also ferment the oats before cooking them; put your oats to soak overnight with a little starter, then cook them out and carry on as above.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, then don’t freak; go back to basics and learn to do a basic sourdough first. It’s all the rage under lockdown and even though it isn’t super easy, it is super addictive, super healthy, and super tasty. All you really need is wheat flour, water and salt. You can make your own starter, without worrying about how old it is, whether it’s any good or where it comes from. If it’s yours, it’s perfect. Just don’t forget to name it.
“Oats thrive in the cool, wet summers of northern and eastern Europe. Because of their high water absorbency and inability to form gluten, oats are generally used as a secondary bread grain, in combination with wheat and/or rye.” Ref: p30 Stanley Ginsberg (c2016) The Rye Baker; Classic Breads from Europe and America. WW Norton & Company: New York and London
Wheat is basically a grass that provides… 21% of food calories globally… (shocked emoji!).
It is one of the earliest plants to have been domesticated and has been cultivated for so long by mankind that it would no longer survive in the wild. It is an absolute product of nature and culture working together and one of the most prominent food crops world wide.
We eat the seeds - except that, in order to eat them, we have to process them in such a way as to make them palatable and digestible. Grinding the grain (seeds) allows us to produce flour. Different flours (white vs whole wheat etc) use more or less of the whole wheat grain, but the most important contributor to flour is the endosperm of the seed, which contains the gluten. It is the gluten that allows us to make bread and which can contribute much of the nutrition long sought after by man.
John M Warren explains that “one of the genes that was incorporated into bread wheat from its goat grass parent, codes for gluten production. This piece of genetic material enables wheat to produce large amounts of protein in its grains. This gluten protein is essential in the bread making process, because by trapping bubbles of carbon dioxide… it causes the dough to rise. …without gluten, bread would be hard and heavy.” (109 The nature of crops) Gluten intolerance has become much more of an issue in recent decades, but for many people, properly fermented wheat is no bother at all to their digestion.
In terms of bread, the other cereals (rye, barley, oats, maize, millet, rice, etc) can also be ground to make flour just like wheat, but with so much less (or no) gluten in them, they make much heavier denser breads. Structurally, most of these seeds are very similar to wheat (hence flour), but chemically, they are quite different.
There are so many breeds and varieties and types of wheat that it would probably shock you. Different wheats have different gluten yields, different flavor profiles, different climactic and seasonal preferences. Which of these wheats is currently being made into flour is determined by the grower, the miller, and (with luck!) the baker, each of whom have their own interests and preferences. So; wheat is as subject to fashions as any other product of culture, in that it changes depending on ‘who’s buying’. My point? Well, two points: 1. The wheat flour you are so used to buying is really just one option of the many that are actually out there, and 2. Things are changing; heritage wheats and different grains are becoming fashionable again. You might soon be able to taste different wheats. How cool is that?!
Of course… there is a major constraint on this; one of the reasons so few bakers actually use organic flour is this changing profile that makes it so unpredictable and inconsistent to work with. You can do it, of course; milling the wheat that’s in season and working with the gluten yield provided by that season’s growing, but few customers want to buy bread that changes so much from day to day and season to season. Also, let’s face it; the cost of organic is about three times higher, which gets to be a pretty expensive bread. Today’s flour companies blend different seasons’ grains to get a consistent quality.
Basically, think about your school biology: water the seed and it germinates, right? A plant grows? Well, each seed carries the food it needs to germinate inside its hull. While the seed is dry, it can keep for a long time: add water and things start happening! What’s so cool is that we can harvest that seed, mill it to get the ‘food’ out in the form of flour, add water and (with a bit more work) make food for ourselves.
Wheat forms an oval seed or grain. It is made up of a few basic parts; the endosperm, which is the largest bit, where the gluten and starch (the food for the embryonic plant) are found; the embryo itself (the ‘wheat germ’ that is milled out of white flour because it has enough oil in it to affect the potential shelf life of flour by making flour go rancid, but which is still sold separately because it offers plenty of nutrition); and the outer layers, which are much more fibrous and basically milled out of flour because they give it a coarse, dark character (you can still buy this as bran in the supermarkets - or wheatbix!).
FYI: if you’re into genetics and stuff, you might like to know that bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) has a “complex impressive genetic history that has seen it hybridised twice.” (107 The nature of crops). Apparently amazing stuff… my genetics is too old to share the joy but I could tell it was there in John Warren’s book. If it impresses you, then good; wheat is impressive!
Wheat came to New Zealand in the early years of the country’s colonisation by Europeans. In the early 1800s, Maori and European settlers both took to farming wheat and other grains to feed local populations. At that time, before the introduction of the railways (and the more efficient transportation possibilities of trains), there were small mills all over the country. Apparently, between 1834 and 1918, there were over 300 mills built in New Zealand. These days, in contrast, there are fewer than ten mills in New Zealand (excluding the smaller mills of artisan bakeries WATCH THIS SPACE). Basically; “As the colony’s transport infrastructure developed it gradually became more economically sensible to produce flour closer to larger centres of population, or closer to the main areas of wheat production.” (p.11 Flour Milling in New Zealand) This trend has continued and the costs of transportation (including those between Australia and NZ and South Island and North Island) now mean that much of the flour used in the North Island is imported from Australia, while the South Island is more able to use locally grown grain.
Further reading and references:
Dave McKinnon and Geoff Tempest (2015) Flour Milling in New Zealand: How today’s industry evolved. New Zealand Flour Millers Association Research Trust, Christchurch
Edward Hyams (1971) Plants in the service of man; 10,000 years of domestication. J M Dent & Sons Ltd, London
John M Warren (2015) The nature of crops: How we came to eat the plants we do. CABI. Wallingford, Oxfordshire
Carolyn Fry (2016) Seeds; A Natural History. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago (21% global calories statistic p27)
“Yeast is a microorganism that lives in the air. There are yeasts in the air all around us, and making a sourdough is a way of bottling them.” p.10 Homemade sourdough - Jane Mason
When yeast feeds on the sugars in the flour, it starts to emit carbon dioxide gas, which creates the bubbles in bread (and determines the crumb of the baked product).
The wild yeasts bakers talk about are ‘wild’ because they are in the air of the bakery and present on the grain. Commercial yeast, by contrast, is a single strain of yeast which was isolated because it proved to be a particularly excellent rising agent. There is no yeast diversity when commercial yeast is used without any fermentation process and the flavour that results has considerably less depth.
In his book, Wild Fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz explains how yeast is used to make bread and how its isolation in the 19th-century gave us a totally different type of bread… I know the logic of quoting and all that, but why try to re-word something so clearly written??? He writes:
“We generally think about the fermentation of bread primarily in terms of yeast, used in bread-making to make dough rise. In our time, yeast is available in every grocery store as an isolated microorganism, a fungus called Saccharomyces cerevisiae….
The same yeast that makes most beer makes most bread. [Bread and beer] are made from grains, just with different processes. In both, the yeast does the same thing: It consumes carbohydrates and transforms them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. In bread, the carbon dioxide is the more important product. Its bubbles are what rise the bread, giving it texture and lightness. The alcohol evaporates as the bread is cooked.
Though yeast as a particular type of organism was not isolated until the mid-19th century, the word yeast is ancient and comes from the Greek zestos, meaning “boil”…. Prior to the science of microbiology, yeast referred to the visible action of fermentation, the rising of a dough, or the frothing of a batter or a beer, and to the various clever methods that people developed to perpetuate that bubbling transformative power. Yeast is the lifting action, the bubbles, the leavening. Until Louis Pasteur isolated a particular fungus and named it yeast, neither yeast nor any microorganism ever existed in isolation. French historian Bruno Latour, in his book The Pasteurization of France, observes of Pasteur’s isolation of pure microbial strains: “For the first time - for them as well as for us - they were to form homogenous aggregates… which none of their ancestors ever knew.”
The yeasts you find in nature are never pure. They travel in motley company. They are always found with other microorganisms. They embody biodiversity. They have distinctive flavors. And they are everywhere. All earlier “yeast” consisted of biodiverse microbial communities including the type of fungus we know as yeast but also lactic acid bacteria and others. Such biodiverse microbial communities exist in abundance on our grains, as well as in (non-chlorinated) water and air, always ready to stop and feast.
In bread-making, the perceived advantage of working with pure yeast is that the huge concentration of yeast works fast and that makes the process of making bread easier and more predictable. Natural leavening with wild fermentation is slower. The bacteria in the mixed culture get a chance to break down the hard-to-digest gluten, liberate minerals, and add B vitamins. The lactic acid and other metabolic by-products of fermenting organisms contribute complex sour flavors and enable the bread to keep longer. With pure yeast breads, nutrition, digestibility, flavor, and preservation potential are sacrificed for speed and ease.
Prior to the widespread availability of commercial yeast, people used any one of a number of methods to propagate their yeasts. Most often bread makers reserve a bit of their yeasty batter or dough as a “starter”. A starter can be maintained for a lifetime and passed on for generations. It often accompanied immigrants (dried on a cloth) on their journey to new unknown lands. Starter is mostly referred to nowadays as sourdough or natural leaven.”
italics in original pp.156-157, Sandor Ellix Katz (c2016) Wild Fermentation: The flavor, nutrition, and craft of live-culture foods. Updated and Revised Edition. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT https://www.wildfermentation.com/
At its most basic, a starter is just flour and water left out to ferment. As with anything, what you feed your starter and how well you care for it determines how healthy and effective it is. Dusty’s starter is called Obi (see my earlier post on Obi) and Obi does the lion’s share of yeast work at The Dusty Apron. Hopefully, having read Katz’s explanation, you can now see behind the scenes and understand better what exactly Obi’s doing all day long.
An interesting point about starters; Figuring out their age is basically impossible:
On the one hand, Obi is reborn each day; as he’s fed and the wild yeasts gather round to feast, a new Obi is created, depending on where and what he’s fed. On the other hand, Obi’s been living this way for 20+ years…
Some people talk about using starters that come from San Fransisco, but what makes San Fransisco sourdough so amazing is the climate, the fog and the actual yeasts and bacteria that live there (as well as the good bakers, of course). So, unless you’re actually feeding your starter in San Fransisco every day (and letting the San Fransiscan yeasts and bacteria do the work), it is no longer a San Fransisco sourdough. It’s a sourdough from wherever you are. It’s completely your own and the ultimate in ‘eat local’ (not to mention ‘eat Slow’). Pretty cool really.
Quinoa, the Incan Superfood that ranges in colour from ivory to magenta, yellow, orange, red, green, brown, and black, is from the same family as spinach and beets (as in; not a grain and not related to wheat). With so much to offer in terms of nutrition, it’s just a blessing that quinoa is super pretty and delicious too.
Quinoa is rich in: vitamins E, B2 and B6, folic acid, biotin, calcium, potassium, iron, copper, magnesium, manganese and chloride. It’s easily digestible. Full of fiber. A complex carbohydrate (so you digest it gradually and stay full longer). A fantastic ‘first food’ apparently.
Also called “the mother grain.” I like that. (But it’s not a ‘grain’ per se.) Just great for mothers and babies and an awesome food all round. Why? Because: Quinoa “contains all of the essential amino acids necessary to support human growth and development.” It is “classified as a complete protein.” It is also gluten-free and hypoallergenic. (p.10 ref below)
“The quinoa seed contains a bitter coating called saponin, which is normally removed prior to consumption. Saponin has an undesirable taste, making it an effective means of protecting the plant from attack by insects and birds. The majority of saponin is removed by means of mechanical abrasion prior to distribution, but it is still recommended that quinoa be rinsed before using to wash off any remaining bitterness. The saponin byproduct has potential industrial uses, including natural insecticides, soaps and shampoos, and is being investigated for its possible pharmaceutical uses.” (p.9)
Okay so this last part really has very little to do with our bread. But it’s interesting so never mind relevance! I always wondered what the point of saponin was. So now I know. And now you do, too. We are informed together.
Thank you: Claire Burnett and Laurie Scanlin ‘The Mystery & History of Quinoa’ pp.9-10 Patricia Green & Carolyn Hemming (c2010) Quinoa 365: The everyday superfood. Whitecap. Vancouver (tons of recipes BTW)
Dusty uses quinoa in his Ancient Grain. One reason this bread is so delicious and nutritious!
eh???
fair enough - they sound similar
Wholemeal
Wholemeal is roller mill white flour that has had everything sieved from it and then some bran added back to it.
Roller mills are high speed milling machines that cause heat and friction (and starch damage as a result, which can degrade the quality of the flour). Stone ground mills (the traditional milling process) mill by a slower process that does not introduce the same heat and friction or resulting starch damage.
Whole Wheat
Whole wheat is when all of the wheat grain is retained in the flour. You therefore have the full benefits of the wheat’s nutrition (minerals, enzymes, etc) as found in the endosperm, wheatgerm, and bran.
Whole Grain
Whole grain simply means that the whole grain is retained in the flour; this could be whole grain wheat (as above) or whole grain rye or whole grain spelt etc.
…Obelix, the levain, the soul of our bakery…
A day in the life of Obi is not a 24 hour thing. It’s more like 36 hours. This guy works hard. On two square meals a day, he sleeps like a polar bear and works like a coal miner. His job is simple, though:
Just burp and fart. Eat and sleep.
Enough smack talk. Obi is the levain (or mother starter). He’s over twenty years old but no-one knows his actual birthday. Don’t talk to him about it. He gets a bit sensitive.
Dusty uses Obi to make his sours. A little bit of Obi goes into each ferment. Obi’s mood on the day affects the bread so Dusty has to take what he gets and work with it, cos really; Obi’s the boss.
A basic sourdough starts with Obi:
2.pm: feed Obi lunch
2.am: feed Obi breakfast
7.am: mix a bit of Obi into dough
7.am-8.am: Obi works on the dough (autolyse)
8.am-11.am: Obi keeps doing his job (the first rise)
11.am: each loaf is shaped with a little bit of love, then put to bed (to retard the dough in the fridge overnight)
2.am-4.am: the loaves are proved (also known as the final rise)
4.am: the loaves are baked on the hot stones of the oven
6.am: delivery (Obi says goodbye to his children)