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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
There are many challenges in life. When you’re friends with Dan Cruden, mastering the Double Down (double boule shaping) technique is one of them. If you can only use one hand in the bakery, you only get paid half the wage.
I’d joke and say ‘don’t try this at home’, but when it comes to bread, you should try everything. Bakers are a give-it-a-go bunch of folk. Put some enthusiasm in your bread and see what happens.
A sneak peak into the bakery: