The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [7]
Pain au levain was the first leavened bread, probably discovered in Egypt six thousand years ago. Professor Raymond Calvel, in his definitive La boulangerie moderne, places this breakthrough “chez les Hébreux au temps de Moïse,” which is when les Hébreux were enslaved by les Égyptiens. I would love to believe this account but find it improbable. My own pain au levain adventure began much more recently.
Saturday, October 7, 1989. I have collected a three-foot pile of books and articles, popular and scientific, in English, French, and translations from the German, including thirty recipes for creating a starter or, as the French call it, le chef. This is a piece of dough in which wild yeast and lactic-acid bacteria live happily in symbiosis, generating the gases, alcohols, and acids that give this bread its complex taste and chewy texture.
Commercial yeast is bred to produce clouds of carbon dioxide for a speedy rise, at the expense of aromatic compounds. Your first loaf of pain au levain can take six days to make from start to finish. Then each new batch of bread is leavened with a piece of risen dough saved from the previous baking. Compared with bread using commercial yeast, pain au levain is unpredictable, slow, and prey to variations in weather, flour, temperature, and the seasons. “Playing with wild yeast is like playing with dynamite,” I was warned by the technical manager of a giant U.S. milling company.
Chez Panisse Cooking (Random House) has a lucid and detailed recipe contributed by Steve Sullivan, owner of the Acme Bread Company in Berkeley and a stupendous baker; he uses organic wine grapes to activate the starter. I am in luck: the New York State grape harvest is under way. I order a variety of excellent flours from Giusto’s Specialty Foods in San Francisco, which supplies flour to Acme, and when they arrive I walk around the corner to the Union Square Greenmarket, buy several bunches of unsprayed Concord grapes, tie them in cheesecloth, lower the cheesecloth into a batter of flour and water, squeeze the grapes to break their skins, put the bowl near a pilot light on the stove, and go away for the weekend.
Two days later. What a mess! My mixture of flour and grapes has overflowed, sizzling and seething over the stove and running into those little holes in the gas burners from which flames used to emerge. I start again. There is something terrifying about the violent life hiding in an innocent-looking bowl of flour and grapes, and I lie awake at night wondering where it comes from. Have I mentioned my long-held belief that if the planet Earth is ever invaded by aliens, they will arrive in the form of microscopic beings?
Depending on whom you believe, the wild yeast and bacteria on my stove originated either on the grapes themselves, on the organic wheat flour I put them in, or in the air around me where microbes of every race are ubiquitous. My computer has collected 236 scientific abstracts on naturally leavened bread, but none has a definitive answer—as many as 59 distinct species of wild yeast and 238 strains of bacteria have been spotted in sourdough cultures. The truth is vital to me. Wild yeasts living on the wheat berry would create Montana-Idaho country bread, because that’s where Al Giusto says his wheat is grown. If they live on the grapes, it would be upstate New York country bread. But my goal is to bake Manhattan country bread with a colony of wild bacteria and yeasts that can grow and flourish only here. I apply to Vogue for the funds to run DNA traces and gas