Your Custom Text Here
Maybe boarding school puddings killed it for your parents, but look again! Bread and Butter Pudding is actually delicious (and more so with quality aged bread or pastries). It’s a case of “you have to try it” (with chocolate) and then decide.
Pear and Chocolate Bread and Butter Pudding; food styling and photo by Catherene Wilson @catherenewilson
The science of bread production and bread digestion makes for a fascinating political story.
It’s also a bit of a rabbit hole, if I’m honest, but throw in Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine and the “wheat war” that we may all be facing, and you’ve got a political discussion worth forming an opinion on; and that’s before we get sidetracked by fibre content and nutritional benefits… Wheat and bread are topics to be informed about in 2022.
Bacteria; nutrition; food labelling; traditional foods; modern diets; ancient civilisation; twentieth century food production; factories; grain markets; shelf lives; urban life; local foodways and international economics... It’s all in the science of bread and it’s incredibly interesting. If you want to get started on this discussion, here is a podcast. We all love a good podcast, right?! (It’s not long and it’s a good overview!)
One of Minchin’s beautiful wheat fields. Canterbury, New Zealand, 2022
The ZOE podcast blurb goes as follows: “It’s no exaggeration to say that bread shaped modern humanity - it was the cultivation of wheat for flour that transformed our ancestors from hunter-gatherers to city dwellers. Today, millions of us start the day with a slice of toast, and most lunches in the US and UK are wrapped in a slice of bread or a burger bun as a cheap, flexible, and delicious energy source. But modern industrial processes designed to reduce the time and cost of baking mean today’s bread would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. Today’s bread tastes good but has lost most of its nutritional content. With most of its fiber gone, and no time for bacteria to work its fermenting magic, bread has become a simple starch, rapidly turned into sugar in our blood and offering little to support our gut bacteria. For this reason, bread is increasingly demonized as an evil carb. In today’s episode, Jonathan speaks to two authorities on the subject to ask: Can bread can ever be healthy?”
“Vanessa Kimbell is an author, founder of the sourdough school, and a specialist in bread nutrition and digestibility.
“Tim Spector is a co-founder at ZOE and one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world.”
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
It’s all ‘back to basics’ in the world of food these days… people want to know where their food is coming from and who exactly is making it. On Instagram, there’s a #knowyourbaker following. So who is Dusty?
photos @nine10seventy
Dusty is Ngati Whatua, Ngapuhi, and Pakeha; based in Auckland, New Zealand. He was raised in in a wrecker’s yard in ‘rewa, which means he knows his car parts and can generally fix it when it breaks. If he can’t fix it, he’ll just push it. He could fill a book with funny stories about the pranks they used to play on each other in his Dad’s yard. Dusty’s dexterity, strength and ability to think outside the box come from that wrecker’s yard. Nevertheless, eight years ago, Dusty gave up cars and moved into the kitchen. He’s been baking bread every day since then and he still loves it.
Dusty’s big passion is the hand-crafted style - traditional breads; grain-to-loaf and everything in between. He loves the long fermentation and the life of the dough. He especially loves working with his hands and doing something that connects him with so many of those who have gone before him. (His Nani-Nani was also a baker and you should totally get him to make you her rewana!).
Actually, Dusty pretty much loves everything about bread except the early starts, so he’s turned that one tiny little negative into a positive and taken up listening to podcasts until Dan comes in at 5 (I’ll introduce you to Dan soon!).
If you want to meet Dusty, you are always welcome in the bakery (doors open at 2am; midnight on a busy day!)
#localfood #localgrain #knowyourfarmer #knowyourmiller #smallfoodnotbigfood
This pretty much says it all, right?! … Why do we ferment our grains? Well, that’s why! Also, because… um… delicious!
Unfortunately, how we process the grains to make them edible matters. Much has changed in the last century and wheat grains are largely unfermented these days. They are still cooked out as flour in most of the baked goods we eat, but the fermentation process is much less common. Hand in hand with this, we have seen a huge rise in incidences of gluten intolerance. There is more to it than that, of course, but for me this coincidence provokes key questions. Other considerations include the ones Jane Mason writes about…
She explains it like this:
“Eating grass or raw flour would give us an almighty tummy ache, as our tummies would struggle to know what to do and become bloated. Bread, and specifically bread made with wheat flour, has received a lot of bad press over the past few years, with articles about the dangers of consuming grains, and the rise of allergies and intolerances. …Celiacs must avoid any food with gluten, which includes bread made with wheat, rye, spelt, emmer, einkorn, kamut, barley, and oats (unless they are labeled gluten free).
Some people who are not celiacs still feel uncomfortable when they eat bread. There could be several reasons for this:
Overexposure: a daily diet of highly refined wheat-based breakfast cereal for breakfast, white bread sandwiches for lunch, and pasta for dinner is limited in the extreme. Years of following that diet will put pressure on your system and could make you sensitive to wheat, or particularly, highly refined wheat. Eat everything in moderation is the advice our grannies gave us and they were probably right.
Changes in the wheat plant: [This is a disputed point, but some people believe that modern wheat production may have also contributed to the increase in wheat sensitivities]. Today, some farmers are returning to what is now called “heritage wheat.” If you find you have a sensitivity to modern wheat, you could try heritage wheat as an alternative.
Flour: flour is not clearly labeled everywhere in the world. [There is plenty added to flour long before it’s added to bread. Always consider the source of your flour if your body reacts, even to homemade bread]
Bread ingredients: [there is an awful lot of stuff put in breads these days to make it last the journey from factory to pantry. However, the only necessary ingredients are really flour, salt and water. Read the label.]
p.148 Jane Mason, Ed wood et al. (2015) Homemade Sourdough: Mastering the art and science of baking with starters and wild yeast. Voyageur Press: Minneapolis
What’s cool is that in order to ferment the grains, all we really need to do is (make flour;) add water and watch for the yeast activity to start producing bubbles. After that, a little know-how and you can make bread!!!
“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.
One of the best ways to learn a hands-on skill is… well… by doing it hands-on with someone who knows how to show you the way, tweak your technique and guide your learning. Dusty already has an apprentice (the AMAZING WILSON), but may be on the look-out again in the future.
Dusty also hopes to offer bread courses soon.
Meanwhile, if you’re more than weekend-keen, check out the tertiary institutes for Baking courses - or look for a job and ask about Apprenticeship schemes. Bread Bakers are an in-demand skilled worker in NZ and Dusty has had job offers from all around the world, so think where you could go with this!
Not for every budget, but we also highly recommend a trip to San Fransisco:
- Do a course at the world-renowned San Fransisco Baking Institute (SFBI). You’ll learn heaps and meet amazing people https://www.sfbi.com/courses.html
- queue up for the good stuff at:
https://www.tartinebakery.com/
https://boudinbakery.com/
- and, nothing to do with bread, but bread tourism is tourism all the same, so totally totally go to the R18 evening of the Exploratorium (so so so much fun! https://www.exploratorium.edu/ ), jump on a hop-on-hop-off busride to see the city, and go to a baseball game, too. (If you’re not already American and in the know, then you should see those fans in action. Serious family fun. Get an uber and be there in time for the anthem.)
The bread world is heavily into Instagram. Check out Dusty’s account if you want to get a feel for the community (https://www.instagram.com/thedustyapron/ ).
If you can’t get out to see the world, then get to your library and get started:
A couple of good books that will help you make your own sourdough (and there are lots of these out there, because it’s a totally zen and delicious skill to develop):
Jeffrey Hamelman (2004) Bread: a baker’s book of techniques and recipes. Hoboken, MJ
Jane Mason; recipes by Ed Wood et al. (2015) Homemade sourdough: Mastering the art and science of baking with starters and wild yeast. Voyageur Press, Minneapolis, USA
Andrew Whitley (2014) Do Sourdough: Slow bread for busy lives. The Do Book Company
Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson (2006) Tartine. Chronicle Books. San Fransisco
Flour the bench and your hands not the dough.
This (and moving fast) will stop the dough sticking. Less likely to get a dry bread this way!
At The Dusty Apron, every one of our breads has undergone a ‘long fermentation’. What is this and why do we say it like it’s a good thing?
Dusty says:
“The answer is simple: time = flavour.
The longer a bread takes to ferment, the deeper the flavour that is produced. Also on the plus side is that while the dough ferments, all those sugars and carbohydrates and starches are broken down, making it easier to digest. Basically, all the wild yeasties are doing the digestive work for you.”
Thus, long fermented breads have a lower Glycaemic Index than fast-rise breads. They are also a ‘fermented food’ and if you haven’t seen that these are all the rage for good health reasons, then where have you been living???
Note: “yeasties” is cool trade-speak for ‘yeasts’. Don’t ask me to explain that one.
And as for 100% sourdough vs 24 hour fermentation; what’s the difference really?
Basically a 100% sourdough is fully reliant on using the wild yeasts (found on the grain and in the air of the bakery) and is thus ‘naturally leavened’.
In contrast to sourdoughs, breads described as having undergone ‘24 hour fermentation’ will have some commercial yeast added. Such breads still rely on fermentation for their flavour and texture, but the commercial yeast helps the baker by guaranteeing more consistent leavening.
Interestingly, one of the secrets to making good bread when using commercial yeast (as with, for example, traditional baguettes or brioches) is to just use the smallest amount and let time do the work for you (via fermentation). To give you some idea of the ratios we’re talking about; if Dusty makes baguettes, he puts 5g of fresh yeast per 1kg of flour. They take 24 hours.
