The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [36]
Baldwin Hill Bakery
We first learned about desem bread in a tantalizing article in a copy of the Saturday Evening Post (January/February 1979), lent to us by a friend who had heard we were setting out to write this book. We had just started working on sourdoughs, and this one sounded really special, but the recipe given in the magazine was disappointingly ordinary. In an adventurous mood, we dialed the Boston information operator, and before long found ourselves talking to baker Hy Lerner himself. He was awfully nice and very generous and patient with help and advice, but more than a little skeptical about our being able to get a real desem starter going.
Hy is a medical doctor with a deep and long-standing interest in the importance of nutrition—not just the “feed ’em and weigh ’em” kind of nutrition, but a respectful understanding of the relevance of people’s attitudes toward food and nourishment to their health in the largest sense. He has worked with such diverse lights in the field as Jeremiah Stamler and Michio Kushi, and his pioneering is far from over. The bread is one chapter in the story, and one he gladly shares.
The loaves that come out of the oven at Baldwin Hill Bakery represent the happy culmination of a long odyssey that began over a decade ago when Hy and his wife, Lora, tasted their first slices of a loaf brought to them by a friend. This was real bread, not the health food sort at all, but healthful nonetheless, as well as delicious, and satisfying—the kind of nourishment that ought to be available to everyone. When they could not duplicate the bread in their own kitchens however they tried, Hy and his friend, architect Paul Petrofsky, pooled their savings and went like pilgrims to the Lima Bakery in Belgium, the source of that original marvelous loaf. The Lima Bakery is reputed to be a fortress of closely guarded secrets, but the young Americans were welcomed and housed and taught, and came home determined to produce a similarly perfect product on this side of the Atlantic.
They established the Baldwin Hill Bakery in a beautiful woodland outside Boston where there is plenty of pure water and hard wood to fire the big brick ovens. Now, a decade later, they bake nearly 10,000 loaves a week, distributing them in the area around Boston. Here on the Pacific Coast we have, we think, perfected a home-style version; but we cherish the hope that someday every community will have a Baldwin Hill Bakery so that all those who are unable to bake this bread in their own homes will be able to partake of it.
The Desem
The secret of the chewy-light texture, the full, mellow, tangy flavor, and the extraordinary keeping quality of this bread lie with the desem, its unique starter dough. (Desem (day’-zum) is Flemish for “starter.”) Microscopic organisms live in the desem, and they leaven and flavor the bread. We would call the bread a sourdough, but in Europe it is called a leavened bread—leavened as opposed to yeasted. The flavor is not all that sour when the bread is properly made: it is much more sophisticated and universal than any rustic sourdough.
Hy speculates that the desem organisms live on organic wheat in the same way that organisms that make wine live naturally on grapes. By providing them with conditions that favor their growth, you can help them to prevail and prosper: that is the object of the method outlined in the following pages.
We have tried many other sourdough starters, but none can hold a candle to either the flavor or leavening power of the desem. The instructions we give here work. Following them, we have made many successful desems using different flours and wheats; and friends have proved the formula for us, too. Problems come only when the simple requirements of the desem organisms