Slow Bread Basics: Part 1

Slow Bread Basics:
Part 1 - Ingredients

Bread is a perfect slow food. A quality loaf of bread can easily take days to properly prepare, and it takes literally weeks for a wild cultivated sourdough starter to reach its full flavor. Bread is also an excellent example of slow food because there are so many elements involved in its preparation and so many different techniques to master. From the selection of ingredients, to the methods of mixing, to the differences in heating, bread is a subject that has volumes written about it. Bread-making is an ancient art that humans have practiced for millennia with nearly endless variations, and all modern breads are based on thousands of years of experimenting and observation. Bread baking is thus a true human tradition, a ritual passed down through the generations and a way to connect with our ancestors and past as well as with those around us in the present. With a bit of practice anyone can make a great bread to be enjoyed by friends and family.

In a series of posts, I'm going to discuss the main elements involved in making a slow food bread. In the first part I'll give a rundown of the basic ingredients involved in the bread making process. I'm going to focus on the essentials since they're the ones you'll be using the most and the ones that will have the greatest effect on the bread. As we talk about bread, I'll show how all of these techniques can be put together to make a delicious slow food bread, in this case a New York style pizza dough.

One of the ways we come to learn about the world is by taking things apart and looking at their pieces. Every element in the bread making process is a complex structure that deserves its own in depth analysis. But the true magic of bread is not simply in any one of the ingredients, but rather in the special relationship among them. It is by mixing things together that we can bring out their hidden properties and to this end I'll be discussing the ingredients of bread with an eye for how they'll be interacting with each other. But even with the same exact set of ingredients, every baker will produce a different bread. This is because the most important "ingredient" in the process is the baker themselves. Knowing what is happening as you make bread gives you a kind of connection with the dough itself, you will learn to listen to the dough and respond to what it tells you. Important factors such as humidity and temperature vary from day to day, and so the ultimate criteria for a dough are never simply in the recipe, but must be created ever anew by the baker who works with the living dough. The bread becomes an extension of the body of the baker, the way it is shaped reflects the rhythm, strength and disposition of its creator. The bread becomes, to paraphrase famous American pizzaiolo Chris Bianco, a metaphor for the baker's soul.

The basic ingredients of leavened bread are: flour, water, yeast and salt, and that's it. With just those simple ingredients you can make a wonderful tasting bread. Olive oil and sugar (or honey) are useful, but they're not necessities (though olive oil almost deserves to be called a necessity). Yet, within this short list there is still a great deal of complexity.

(The Basics)

Flour is the body of our bread, it's what gives the bread its characteristic level of toughness and taste. Flour comes it many different varieties, each appropriate to a different kind of bread, but there are two main kinds of flour for basic bread making. Lighter AP flours make gentle breads such as baguettes and croissants, while heartier flours such as bread-flour are used to make tougher breads such as pizza and sandwich breads. Bread flour contains large amounts of protein which in turn produce gluten, and gluten gives bread "extensibility" as the bakers say, which is a fancy way of saying you can stretch it ("extensible" = "able to extend"). It also makes bread elastic, meaning that it will snap back to its original shape once you let it go. Gluten is pretty amazing actually, and understanding it is important to making good bread, overwork a light bread and you'll end up with heavy brick rather than a tender and springy croissant. Unfortunately, I've learned this the hard way.

After you've decided what kind of flour you need, there's still a great deal to consider, as not all flours are created equal. If you can, get unbleached flour, it just tastes better. Some pizza recipes recommend using special Caputo 00 flour, a product of Italy which is an especially fine grain but also full of gluten producing protein. Since it's hard to find flours like Caputo in some parts of the world, a lot of bakers like to make their own version by blending AP and bread flour in an attempt to mimic its properties, or simply to create new textures and tastes for their culinary experience. Once you've gotten comfortable with a bread recipe you can easily adjust the proportions of the flour to get just the right crust and crumb (another bread maker's expression referring to hardness and texture of the outside and inside of the bread). If you're making something like a sourdough starter, you may even need to get rye or organic flour for the naturally occurring bacteria they contain. Different flours from different areas will have their own unique properties, and this facilitates a true slow food experience. Bread making can be as time consuming a process as the baker will allow it to be, and one can spend days alone considering different kinds of flour. I've only just begun to experiment with locally grown organic flours but as with most slow food considerations the extra time pays off if not in taste then psychologically for the bond it gives you to your society and environment.

If flour is the body of the bread, then water is the blood. While this is perhaps not the most appetizing analogy, it's apt all the same. Transubstantiations aside, food expert Alton Brown suggests using charcoal filtered water for your bread. That or mineral water, though not distilled water, because that's had all of its impurities taken out through a steam boiling process, and some of those very impurities will contribute to our bread's flavor. If your tap water tastes good then it's probably adequate, but water is an important ingredient like any other and shouldn't be overlooked. Typically the only other thing you'll have to think about with your water is the temperature, primarily because of how it effects the development of our next ingredient: yeast.

For me, yeast, and the process of leavening and fermentation are probably the most amazing parts of the bread making process. The tiny, seemingly inert, dry grains of yeast we add to our dough are actual living beings which come to life in the substrate of the dough, awoken from a kind of hibernation. The yeast springs to life and begins to consume sugars in the dough and produce carbon dioxide (air bubbles) and ethanol (alcohol which is baked off later, but leaves a tasty flavor). By adding yeast to flour and water, we are almost literally breathing life into our bread. If flour is the body, and water is the blood, then yeast is the breath; yeast is the soul of our bread.

Once these pieces are in place, the dough will come to life. It will rise up before you, it will bubble, change it's texture and appearance. Like any living organism, yeast is effected by it's environment, by the humidity and temperature, so all of these things must be taken into consideration for it's storage and use. There are 3 main kinds of yeast: active, instant and cake. For most breads, instant dry yeast (IDY) will work quite well. Why "instant" yeast in a "slow" food discussion? A few reasons really, first and foremost, it works very well. Anecdotally, I've found IDY to be more reliable than active dry yeast (ADY), occasionally when I was using ADY my dough wouldn't rise as much as I wanted, and I had occasionally ran into some issues while proofing the yeast. Proofing, or soaking yeast in water before using it, is something you only need to do with ADY, though I often do it with IDY as well, and you can always do it with no harm. When you proof yeast you've got to make sure you get the water hot enough to wake it up, but not too hot so that you kill it. With IDY the yeast is so active you can give it cool water and it's still going to react plenty for whatever your doing, especially once the dough has warmed a bit through the friction and heat transfer of mixing and kneading. As for the last kind of yeast, "cake yeast," I've never had the pleasure of using it myself, but I would like to try it just for the experience (some bakers swear by it). Unfortunately it doesn't keep as well as the other yeasts and so it's not as easy to store. In other words you might end up buying more yeast than you can use before it goes bad. There seems to be some debate as to the exact difference between "instant dry yeast" and "rapid-rise yeast" with some people saying the two are the same and others saying they are quite different. I get the feeling there are some differences, though the yeast companies don't seem to help with clarifying the matter much. If you can, get IDY, not rapid-rise.

For most slow fermenting breads you won't use a lot of yeast, and that's the case with the pizza dough I'll discuss later. We'll also be slowing our yeast's reaction quite a bit by putting it in the fridge and I think this combination of fast yeast and a slow environment produces a good, flavorful dough.

One point I want to make before we leave our discussion of those wonderful little yeasts behind, relates to "starters". I have mentioned starters a couple of times and a few more words should be said on this point because it is yet another aspect of bread-making with tremendous depth. A "starter" or "pre-ferment" is a mixture of flour, water and yeast (it's basically more dough) that is prepared before the actual bread dough and developed for flavor. While starters can simply be made with store bought yeast, they also offer the opportunity for the collection of wild regional yeasts and bacteria which can be sustained and used in bread making either in place of or in addition to commercial yeasts. This is what we call sourdough. Clearly this is a topic that deserves it's own treatment, but suffice it to say that anyone interested in a true "slow food" approach to bread making will see the value and allure of cultivating your own bacteria and yeasts.

Only one other main ingredient remains before the dough is finished, and that is salt, the "secret" ingredient to all good cooking. I generally use sea salt and find it works well, but I'm also still experimenting to find the right flavor and texture for different dishes. Many baking recipes recommend kosher salt because it's a quality salt without any additives. As with every other ingredient all the variations lead to important differences, not the least of which has to do with the coarseness of the grain which can effect the taste of the food, and also effects the weight of the salt relative to its volume. Always remember, coarse grained salt will weigh less for the same volume, but that's something we'll talk about more when we get to our equipment. Salt serves a special function in the dough, slowing down the reaction of the yeast, and this is exactly what we want in a slow-fermenting bread. The slower development cycle will enhance the overall bread flavor and still produce an airy, leavened dough (if that's what we're looking for). While I haven't got a fancy metaphor for salt (I ran out of all the good ones), it's that little something extra that helps bread achieve excellence. Salt is a metaphor for salt.


Aside from these necessary elements, there are a few other ingredients to consider and have handy, first and foremost olive oil. Olive oil is a great addition to bread, and provides a perfect complement of tastes. But mixing olive oil into dough weakens its gluten strands, softening it and changing it's structure. Since we often worked so hard to create gluten we can see how adding olive oil might be going at cross purposes. Using just a little bit of olive oil, however, can add a delicious taste as well as an aesthetically pleasing golden sheen to your breads. A good balance of gluten and oil can be achieved by coating your dough ball with a small amount of oil right before it begins to ferment in the fridge. To do this, put the otherwise finished (though not yet fermented) dough in a bowl with a little bit of olive oil and roll it around coating it pretty much completely. This will keep the dough hydrated and also help keep it from sticking to the sides of the bowl. But keep it light and remember that it effects the physical composition of the dough.

Sugar is our other ingredient and it's not uncommon to find it in bread recipes (or it's cousin, honey). But sugar isn't absolutely necessary because flour already contains all the necessary sugars for our yeast to react and grow. So, we won't be using sugar in our pizza recipe since it would simply increase the rate of the yeast's reaction, sort of the opposite to what the salt's doing. As should be expected, here, slower is better.

So that's it, the basic elements of bread have been assembled. We can see that bread is a kind of paradox, both simple and complex, easy to make and impossible to master. It is a food of no consequence at times, simply a tasteless, processed white-bread plate acting as delivery mechanism for some other food, barely considered by the hungry mouth. Yet at other times it is the very epitome of delicacy, the height of subtlety and nuance, savored for it's structural complexity.

One of my favorite things about the slow-food movement is the care and time that is put into every aspect of the food making process and the connection it gives you to your food. Once you've learned about the differences in flour grains, and how the level of gluten effects bread texture you will have that much more of a connection to your food. And connecting with the world around us, the natural world and the world of human traditions, I think that's really what slow food is about.

Next time, I will continue by looking at the equipment necessary for making bread, as well as some of the basic methods for mixing dough. We will also start our pizza dough and begin the wondrous alchemical transformations of fermentation.