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.

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.

Storing, freezing, re-heating

Storing

Although this bread doesn’t have the keeping qualities of sourdough bread, it does keep longer than store-bought. Loaf shapes that take longer to bake (boules, for example) have a thicker crust and last longer. Such loaves also keep better simply wrapped in a tea towel or a brown paper bag — stored in a plastic bag, the crust quickly loses its crunch.

Freezing

I have read detailed instructions for freezing bread that insist that it be wrapped tightly in plastic wrap to keep any air from the crust, and I have done that. But I have found for loaves stored less than a month that it doesn’t matter. I often put two loaves together in a large “kitchen-size” trash bag, tie a knot in the top, and throw them in the freezer. They take about 4 hours to defrost, and, especially if re-heated, are tough to tell from same-day loaves.

Re-heating

Crisp directly on oven rack, 6-8 minutes/375° for small loaves, 15 minutes/350° for large loaves.