The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [35]
COVERED CASSEROLE
Give the bread its final rise in a covered casserole dish—glass or pottery—which has a tightly fitting domed lid. It should be big enough to allow the dough to do all the rising it wants to, including a good spring in the hot oven: depending on the dough, triple the original size of the dough would not be too much.
Ordinary Pyrex covered glass ovenware in the deep 2 ½-quart size works perfectly for one regular-size (round) loaf. Some of the clay casseroles that can be soaked in water are splendid. The snug domed lid is the crucial thing in whatever you use. Some Corningware lids don’t fit tightly enough to hold the steam in, but the casseroles are a good size; if you have one and want to use it, seal around the lid with foil where there are big gaps. Corningware tends to stick, so be sure to grease the dish extra well, and dust it generously with cornmeal.
If you have a heavy metal baking pan, you can bake the bread (on grease and cornmeal) in that, covering it with another similar pan inverted over it. Seal with foil—or just cover it with foil! (Be sure to leave plenty of rising room by ballooning the foil.) We have had splendid French loaves from this method, unorthodox (and easy) as it is.
Let the dough rise in the casserole or pan according to the directions in the recipe. Preheat the oven in plenty of time so that the temperature is at 450°F when the dough has risen. If the casserole is thick clay, there will be a delay while the dish heats up, so put it in the oven a little earlier than you would normally.
Just before you put the bread in the oven, pour 2 to 4 tablespoons of warm water over the loaf. Use the smaller amount with lighter breads, more with the substantial types. This is all absorbed into the top crust, so don’t mind that the bread seems to swim at first. Slash, cover, and bake. When the crust is nicely browned, after 20 minutes or so, reduce the oven temperature and finish baking as suggested in the recipe.
Whatever method you use for steaming, please be careful. The temperatures are high and the presence of steam makes the heat intense. Plan ahead, so that you have the oven racks in place before heating the oven, and so that you know where you are going to put each pan or dish when the time comes.
This simple, safe, and effective method is our favorite by far. Its only limitation is the shape and size of the pans you can figure out how to cover.
Flemish Desem Bread
Those of us who enjoy it daily think that this is the very best of breads. Its subtle, sophisticated flavor never bores or wearies, but rather draws ever more enthusiastic appreciation; the bread keeps well and digests comfortably. Composed of just a few ingredients—wheat, water, salt—the loaves are light and delicious without sweetener, milk, fat or yeast. Nothing makes better toast, sandwiches or crumbs. To us, this is the perfect Staff of Life.
Making the bread, once you get set up, is easy; getting set up can be fairly challenging. It isn’t so much that the procedure is difficult (it isn’t), but that the desem, the starter, is a natural (maybe I should say an old-timey) creature, who favors rhythms that are slower, ingredients necessarily purer, than we twentieth-century breadbakers are accustomed to provide. The challenge is more to your credulity than to your ingenuity, though both of them may well be tested.
This set of instructions certainly can’t be called a recipe in any normal sense, and if you follow it through, you will create much more than a loaf of bread. For us, the desem is a living partner in the twice-weekly adventure of its baking; our affection for it, and our respect, do not easily fall into any normal category; some others who have made desem are less reverent, and refer to their starter as a favorite pet that needs care and attention—but one that has a good deal to give, too. Whatever it means to you, once you succeed in establishing a desem starter, and begin baking the bread, your life will