The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [37]
What’s Going On Here?
Sometimes people (and cookbooks) can make the simplest things seem the most complicated. Surely that is true with Desem Bread—our longest “recipe,” and our simplest bread! In a nutshell, here is what the following pages describe.
The bread’s unique character and its rise come from the starter—the spirit or soul if you will, that gives life to the dough. The desem looks like a little wad of dough—but oh my.
It takes about two weeks to get a desem starter going. The first five days—the desem’s infancy, if you like—is spent in a special sort of incubator: a big bag of flour. On the sixth day the desem is moved to the covered crock or jar. You feed it flour and water every day this week and keep it carefully cool.
After two weeks the desem is nearly mature, but not quite. It still needs watching and nurturing until it achieves full vigor.
Once you have a functioning desem you will want to bake with it every week and also to feed it twice a week.
That’s the whole idea. The directions that follow are only to explain each part of this process.
What You Need to Have to Start
Starting the desem is so simple that providing for it would have been second nature before the Industrial Revolution: pure water, organic stone-ground wheat, and some time in a cool cellar to bring it to vigorous life. Today, to find unchlorinated pure water is not so easy, and most wheat is treated with chemicals. Not every house has a cellar, and even in the winter it isn’t easy to find a place that you can keep at 50° to 65°F. Finally, many of us lead lives sufficiently hectic that making a commitment to the regular care of a starter dough seems like a luxury. But even considering all this, there is no reason to be intimidated; it can be done, it is not all that difficult, and once you get set up, making the bread is simplicity itself.
WATER
Pure spring water is best (not distilled: bread dough does better when its water contains minerals). If your tap water is otherwise good, you can dechlorinate it by boiling and leaving it uncovered overnight. Use this water at room temperature or cooler, to feed your desem and make up your dough. If you will be using a dough hook, the water should be cold.
FLOUR
Coarsely ground and fresh, preferably not more than five days from the milling—that’s the ideal. The flour you choose should be milled from hard red winter or hard red spring wheat. (see this page for details on selecting flours.) It must not have been treated with pesticides, and it must have been milled cool in a clean mill. Because of these requirements, making a desem can tell you a lot about your flour.
You’ll need at least 10 pounds of flour for the desem’s incubator, to surround it while it is developing. The desem itself requires about 7 cups of flour in the first five days. Because its freshness is so important, it is well worth the trouble to grind this amount yourself. You can buy wheat berries in your natural food store.
If you find it impossible to find good flour or wheat in your locale, write to one of the suppliers listed.
If you use a mill, be sure that it is absolutely clean, or you may share the experience of one friend who had been assured that cleaning a mill wasn’t necessary. His fledgling desem grew a “cover crop” of green mold. Another attempt from a dirty mill smelled like rotten meat. (Incidentally, you’ll be glad to know that as long as your starter dough maintains its bright, fresh smell, you can be confident that it isn’t growing anything harmful.) If you do grind your own flour, when you measure it, tap the sides of the measuring cup to compact the flour because it will be lighter and fluffier than bagged flour.
TEMPERATURE
Find a place that is between