The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [10]
Wednesday, June 6, bright and early. The thing is alive! I think it is trying to talk to me. In only twenty-four hours the levain has risen to the top of the bowl and is pressing up against the plastic wrap. Large bubbles proudly show themselves through the glass. There can be no doubt about it: I have created the universe in a grain of wheat!
In Step Three you build the levain into two pounds of bread dough, tripling its weight again by mixing it with 252 grams of water and working in 400 grams of flour and 15 grams of salt. The water brings together the two main types of protein in flour, glutenin and gliadin, and the result is gluten—the sticky, elastic substance that makes the mixture stringy and clotted.
With evidence of a happy fermentation, I shift to Giusto’s white organic unbleached bread flour. The kneading begins, twenty long minutes of it, stretching the dough away from my body with the heel of my hand, folding it back toward me, giving the dough a quarter turn, and doing it again and again. Besides aerating the dough, this motion unkinks the protein molecules and lines them up next to each other, where they link into a network of gluten. The dough becomes satiny and elastic; as the yeast produces carbon dioxide the dough stretches and expands around the bubbles of gas rather than falling apart and letting the gases escape.
I find twenty minutes of kneading unendurable. Mine is not the attitude of a true artisan. Hand kneading puts the baker in touch with his living dough, you read, endows him with responsibility for his bread. From now on, I will switch to my KitchenAid K5A heavy-duty home mixer equipped with a dough hook. It pummels and whirls instead of kneading, but it does produce acceptable results, especially when I take over for a few minutes at the end.
Poilâne tells you to let the dough rise for six to twelve hours, not the double or triple rise of yeasted dough, but a more modest 30 percent.
Seven o’clock that evening. Through the glass the dough looks well aerated. Though it may not have risen the requisite amount, I am determined to bake it tonight, after a final rising.
Poilâne is fuzzy on forming a round loaf, so I follow the standard procedure—flattening the dough with the smooth domed surface facedown and rolling and stretching it into a tight spherical package. I have bought a banneton, a professional linen-lined rising basket, from French Baking Machines in New Jersey, to replace my makeshift two-quart bowl lined with a kitchen towel. I flour it heavily and lower the loaf into it, smooth side down. Then, to create a moist, draftless environment, I inflate a large Baggie around the whole thing and tie it tightly. My loaf will rise until midnight.
I spend part of the evening in a state of wonder. The first miracle is that a handful of wheat flour contains everything needed to create the most satistying and fundamental of all foods. Then I marvel for a while about yeast. Why does the yeast that feeds on wheat produce a harmless leavening gas and appealing flavors rather than poisons? And why does wild yeast seem to do best at room temperature? Yeast was created long before rooms were. Is this a coincidence or part of Somebody’s master plan?
Last, I wonder at the role of salt. Nearly all recipes call for about 2 percent salt compared to the weight of the flour—much more and you kill the yeast and bacteria, much less and the yeast grow without restraint and exhaust themselves too soon. Salt also strengthens the gluten, keeping it elastic in the corrosive acid environment of pain au levain and helping the bread rise. Can it be mere chance that the chemically ideal level of salt is precisely the amount that makes bread taste best?
Midnight. The loaf has barely budged, and I am getting worried. Better give it another two hours. My wife has already gone to bed. She sees this as a dangerous precedent. But several weeks will pass before my compulsive baking threatens to