The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [30]
Two Great Classics
An artist—poet, sculptor, or cook—may often reach the greatest heights of creativity by not just working within the limitations of the chosen medium but by using the limits themselves as a prod to find new reserves of imagination. In the kitchen, to take the nearest example, turning vegetarian has made great cooks out of middling ones, partly because the challenge casts a new light on everything. The same thing happens sometimes when you have to learn to cook for an allergic family member, or someone who needs to omit fat or sugar: what seems like an obstacle can turn out to be a stepping-stone to something much better, happier, more important, even, than you had suspected.
Medieval village bakers in Europe could not, like modern bakers, load their everyday loaves with milk and butter, sugar and chemical “improvers.” They did not have electronically controlled ovens, kneading machines, or even active dry yeast. Their flour was locally grown, and not very high in gluten even in the best years. And so over centuries, limited as they were, these bakers developed a method that makes the simplest wheat-flour dough into truly superb bread. Later, when white flour and commercial yeast came on the scene, the method was adapted to produce what we know today as French bread. It draws much artistry from its ancestry, and makes good use of some modern advantages, too.
In the following pages are two presentations of this classic tradition. The first is our whole wheat version of modern French bread, using active dry yeast along with the traditional timing pattern to make a flavorful, familiar-looking light loaf with the requisite crispy-chewy crust. The second is, to us, the pride of this book: Flemish Desem Bread, the kind of food only a centuries-old tradition can produce. This is, we feel sure, the ancestor of modern French breads, both sweet and sour. The loaves can be as light as yeasted ones, but the leavening comes not from baker’s yeast but from a starter born of the wheat itself, and the bread’s flavor and keeping quality are unexcelled.
Both breads are delicious and satisfying in spite of the fact that they are made without fat, sugar, or dairy products. They draw their excellence from the marriage of the baker’s skill and the natural goodness of the grain.
FRENCH BREAD Perhaps no other nation’s people are as serious about bread as the French, and French bread is a triumph of art over circumstance. Even today in France, the law says that daily bread must contain only French flour, plus yeast, water, salt—no additives or adulterants, no imports. French flour is not very high in gluten, but it has excellent flavor. American bakers make their “French” bread from high-gluten American flour, producing quite a different, but also outstanding, bread.
In France daily bread is baked in small shops rather than in the home; it is seldom made in large factories. Bakers in different parts of the country have developed breads with distinct individuality. For example, in some areas, wheat and rye were traditionally sown, grown, and harvested together: in a good year there was plenty of wheat, in a bad year, plenty of rye, always in combination—so the bread is hearty and moist with the flavor and heft of rye.
The recipe we present here translates traditional French techniques into whole grain and home style. The bread is awfully good. The flavor and texture are close to real French French bread (or so we imagine!)—very light, with a velvety crumb and a crispy-crunchy-chewy crust. The bright flavor comes from the wheat itself: the combination of bread flour and a little pastry flour makes a reduced-gluten flour with extra sweetness. The best French bread we ever made came from a gift of winter wheat organically grown in Carissa Plains, California. We used it without pastry flour because its gluten content was