One piece of equipment?

I said on the home page that you only need one piece of equipment, a good food processor, to make this bread. And then I refer to all sorts of other tools that I use all the time. How is this so?

• No bannetons? Stack up books about 4 inches apart, drape a kitchen towel over them, and indent a valley between. Flour the towel and proof the bread there. This is essentially a low-grade couche, the traditional French use of floured canvas corrugated to hold the loaves. A good description and picture is available at Farmgirl Fare.
• No scale? Use the dry measurements in the pdf. If you have a good sense of the consistency of the dough, you can do it.
• No baking stone? Use a cookie sheet. Your oven spring will not be as robust, but you’ll get a decent loaf.
• No bread thermometer? Bakers traditionally have learned to rap a baked loaf with a knuckle, listening for a hollow sound they learn to recognize as signaling the bread is done.
• No peel? Cookie sheet.
• No cast-iron tray full of rocks? Set a metal lasagna pan on the over floor and slurp boiling water into it. Beware the steam…
• No pastry mat? Use the counter (and then a good soapy sponge).

“Artisan” bread

These days, this kind of bread, hand-shaped and baked on a stone, is called “artisan” bread. Which then would make anyone who makes it an “artisan.” And which quickly leads to the absolutely unacceptable adjective “artisanal” — was there ever a more effete-sounding word for something so roughhewn and basic as handmade bread?

I refuse to speak the word. (I’m actually not sure how to pronounce it; “ar-TIS-an-al”?) But I need a post here that uses it so that people searching Google for “artisan bread” or “artisanal bread” might land here, and 1) discover the joys of Van Over’s bread, and 2) be straightened out about the unacceptability of the term they used to find it.

Wow. All of a sudden I feel like a real blogger. Isn’t this what real bloggers do? Rant and chastise and generally set themselves up as Last Ditch Defenders of Civilization? Steve Prescott (homebuilder, cabinetmaker, music promoter, outraged progressive libertarian) is a friend and neighbor who does this very well at Maine Musings. Between the two of us, perhaps America can be saved.

Olive bread

Olive bread, made with pitted kalamata olives, is good with any full-flavored meal. It’s good with a fish stew. It’s good with roast lamb. It’s good for steak sandwiches. It’s good as toast with bacon and eggs. It’s good.

Use about 30 whole olives (picture 1, above). Drain, then dust with flour to help the olives adhere to the dough (2). Press out dough as if making pizza, then set the olives. Roll the dough into a log (3). To bake as a boule, bring the ends of the log together, pinch into a rough ball, and proof in a round floured basket. Bake 15 minutes at 475°, then about 35 minutes more at 425°. Enjoy (4).

Some people add fresh rosemary to olive bread. For me, I want one flavor at a time: in this case, olive flavor. For years it was impossible to find pitted kalamata olives. If that’s still true in your area, you can pit them yourself with a cherry pitter.

Clean up

I thought of calling this site something like “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Making Good Bread” because, back when I started to learn how to bake, easy was a prime objective. (Recently, I was pleased to see van Over agrees: “Laziness, not necessity, is the mother of invention,” he says — NYTimes, “Lessons from the Founding Fireplace,” February 10, 2008).

I came of age in Berkeley, California, in the 70s, when it seemed every woman I knew made bread. And they made it look like work, and like some kind of hippie Puritans, they seemed perversely proud of it. I have a mental image of a friend in Oshkosh overalls, bent over a rickity kitchen table, kneading dough and sweating. “Twenty minutes,” she insisted, “you have to do twenty minutes.”

I knew if I were to make bread, it would have be easy and quick or I just wouldn’t do it.

What does this have to do with “clean up?” That I’ve tried to refine Van Over’s method in the direction of even more easy than it is (thank you, Robot Coupe, for inventing the food processor), and part of that is easy clean up:

• Because the dough is fermented and retarded in gallon bags, there are no bowls to wash. Van Over says to use an ungreased bowl, but bags are easier.
• Because the bread is baked on stones, there are no bread pans to wash.
• Because the dough is turned out and later shaped on a pastry mat, there is no dusting of work surfaces. Flour has a tendency to get everywhere, so we corral it in one place: the food processor bowl.*

But I admit you still have to wash the food processor parts and there are more nooks and crannies therein than I would like to have to clean. What helps? Use cold water and dish detergent to wash anything that’s been doughy — some people say hot water sets up the dough into a kind of glue.

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* How to get flour out of the bag without getting it all over the place? I think you can see in the video that the flour is in a Rubbermaid tub that’s wider than a 5-pound bag of flour. To add flour to the tub, I hold the bag horizontally over the tub, slice it in half with a bread knife, and empty both halves into the tub. It works much better than opening the top of the bag. The flour slides out cleanly and the two halves hold their shape to knock out the last bit of flour.

 

And I certainly don’t wash the flour scoop. It lives in the tub.

Water

Many of my favorite things in life are heavily dependent on the quality of the water. Scotch, beer, tea, and swimming in lakes all come to mind. But hearth bread probably leads the list.

Our well produces a good-tasting water, once it’s passed through a whole-house filter that takes out most of the iron and then through a Brita that seems to do something good to it, too.

So we’re lucky. I don’t know what I’d use if we lived in town (Brunswick, Maine). The bouquet of the water Brunswickians get from their municipal water supply is redolent of The Decline of Western Civilization. With an impudent hint of Eau de Swimming Pool. And some lingering notes of “my God, what did I just drink?” I suppose I’d use Poland Spring bottled water.

The best bread I’ve ever made used water that came from a sand point driven into a dune about 300 feet from the Gulf of Maine. Great bread. But now that I think of it, it might have been the salt air, too.

Pastry mat

Wonderful! This thing is worth it.Two reasons:

1. You can work the dough — to hand-knead a little, to form loaves, to roll out when making olive bread or cinnamon bread — with no added flour to dust your work surface. It makes handling the sticky, high-hydration dough possible. You can see in the video that I hardly have to touch the dough when I form the “log,” and I can just lift the edge of the Roul’Pat and flop the log into the banneton. Wonderful.
2. Because you don’t need to flour a work surface, it reduces clean up. You don’t end up with flour everywhere. Wonderful.

Have I said this thing is wonderful? Click the image to go check it out at Amazon.

Flour

Van Over recommends using bread flour. It has a higher protein content than all-purpose and so is able to develop more gluten. Higher rising and chewier. King Arthur Unbleached has been good to use, but I don’t know anything about other brands.Many bread books are concerned about how stored flour can absorb moisture and so change in weight, throwing off measurements. I have found, though, that buying King Arthur 5-pound bags (which are cheaper per pound at the new Whole Foods in Portland than the same flour in their bulk section) solves this issue.

I have been working on a 50% whole wheat version of this recipe, using King Arthur White Whole Wheat, but it’s not yet ready for prime time. Even with added gluten, it still is too heavy and not as chewy.

Scale

Any bread-baking book you look at emphasizes that weighing the flour is much more accurate than measuring it, and that, in bread-baking, accuracy matters.

So you need a scale. What the books don’t emphasize for the home baker is that scales can be off by 5% and that glass/plastic measuring cups are not so accurate, either.

Van Over’s bread uses 70% “hydration,” which for 500 g of flour means using 350 g of water. It took me a while to learn that my measuring cup did not match my scale: 350 ml of water in my measuring cup weighs 340 g on my scale, which makes a surprising difference in the bread. (I know, it probably means my scale is off, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is that there’s exactly twice as much flour by weight as water.)

Moral: Weigh your water in your measuring cup to see if it and the scale agree.

What kind of scale should you get? Not mine…

Recipe

Recipe Charles Van Over’s “Best Bread Ever”

bread flour: 500 g salt: 2 t instant yeast: 1 t water: 350 ml

1. Put flour, salt, yeast in processor bowl with the metal blade installed; take the temperature of the flour, subtract this number from 130° and adjust water temperature to result in 130° total.*
2. Turn on food processor. Drizzle in water slowly; when a ball, process 45 seconds.
3. Dough should be 75 – 80° — process 5 seconds more to raise temperature, if needed.
4. Ferment 1 1/2 – 2 hours in a gallon food bag at room temperature, then retard in fridge overnight, or up to 4 days.
5. 2 – 3 hours before baking remove the dough from fridge and make loaf. Proof at room temperature 2 hours (or long enough to raise dough temperature to 60 – 62°). Don’t worry if dough doesn’t rise much.
6. Preheat oven with baking stone to 475° for 30 minutes.
7. Slash the loaf and then bake at 475° for 15 minutes, reduce to 425° to finish, with steam every 5 minutes 3 times. If baking more than one loaf, rotate loaves 180° after 15 minutes. Bread is ready when the interior is between 205° – 210°. Cool on wire rack.

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* This is the official Van Over formula. I used to follow it scrupulously. But I use flour stored in the basement at about 60° and water that is at room temperature. This roughs out to 130° and I now haven’t measured flour, water, or dough temperature in years. But temperatures matter. The dough rises in temperature from the kneading which results in a dough temperature that sets up the yeast to handle the fermenting and retarding well. If the dough is too cool or warm at the beginning, you won’t get consistent results. 

Cast-iron rock pan for steam

Sliding ice cubes into a cast-iron pan full of rocks is the safest and easiest way I have come up with to add the essential steam to the beginning of the baking cycle. There’s no boiling water or scalding steam other methods involve.(There is a better way, which I rigged up in an older stove in a house we had 15 years ago: I ran an automobile brake line down the back of the stove that terminated three inches above the oven floor. I put a cast-iron pan full of rocks underneath it and then squirted water down the tube every five minutes. It worked very well, partly because the oven temperature stayed more constant since the door wasn’t being opened to throw in water or ice. But in our new house, I’m reluctant to mess with the stove, and the ice method is working just fine.)