Anybody Can Bake Bad Bread (part 2)

Concerning salt and flop sweat

This seems like as good a time as any to introduce you to Stan. Since that sour old soldier plays such a central role in this, the second installment of my somewhat scattered retelling of my vague memory of the first bakery I was professionally employed in as well as reminiscence about the proprietor thereof, a gentleman and a scholar (as he might have said) who was in fact neither of those things. Don’t get me wrong, the Boss was a very smart man, probably one of the smarter I have ever worked for, but I think he was more Artful Dodger at heart than academic, had it been otherwise I might never have accepted his guidance.

Stan was not the Boss, though the symbiotic community of wild yeast and beneficial bacteria that went by that appellation did loom rather large in the little microcosm of the bakery. Stan was, as you might have guessed by now, a levain. A sourdough starter. Stan was around 80 years old, at least according to the Dodger, having originated in San Francisco (because: of course) and having since been cared for by several generations of bakers in the A. Dodger family tree. The Boss was a scion, of the black sheep variety, of a large and successful family-owned bakery/cafe chain with franchise locations across the Midwest. Again, all of this was according to the Dodger himself, in retrospect maybe some of the details would probably need to be checked out, if their veracity had any bearing on the telling of this tale, which, thankfully they do not.

Regardless of Stan’s true provenance there is no question that the Levain in question had been around for a good long while, and had been well tended during that time; the most sure-fire way to keep a healthy and productive sourdough starter is to use it regularly and Stan was a very healthy levain.

Stan was also huge, or it was right before getting mixed into the final dough. That’s because at the bakery we used our sourdough starter for all of our “French” or artisanal breads, one giant batch of dough ranging from 80 pounds (for a weekday batch) and up to around 200 pounds on a Saturday. Some of the dough would get further ingredients mixed in, depending on the production schedule for that day, some days Kalamata olive and rosemary, other days onion and Gruyère, but the bulk of it would be shaped into baguette and boule and rolled into the walk-in proofed/retarder to ferment very slowly overnight in couches or willow baskets, some lined with linen and some just floured generously.

I didn’t realize it at the time, because this was the first bakery I had every worked at, but the way we did our artisanal breads was rather revolutionary, at least for a bakery on the East Coast of America in the 90s. The “Bread Renaissance” was in full swing on the West Coast by then, of course, the big name bakeries had already published their big name books and established themselves as the patron saints of crust and crumb by the time the slower adopters in New England were just starting to catch on.

But I’m not sure even Joe Ortiz or Dan Leader would have recommended mixing and shaping naturally fermented doughs, proofing them on covered racks for 18 hours in a cool humid room and then wheeling them out and baking them cold, first thing the next morning.

Don’t get me wrong, when it worked our process produced some really incredible bread, crusty and chewy and deeply complex - it is a truism that long slow fermentation produces better bread and the Dodger’s system built about as much long and slow into the process as possible. But the potential to get it wrong was pretty high as well, especially since one of the most common flaws in natural fermentation is for the dough to get too sour; at high acidity levels gluten strands weaken and eventually break down entirely and the dough begins to lose elasticity. You can tell an overly sour dough because it flattens along the bottom, giving you corners instead of a nice curved rise, loss of gluten strength also increases the chances of cavities in the crumb, especially for higher hydration doughs like ciabatta.

We produced quite a bit of flawed bread at the bakery.

Anybody can bake bad bread.

When the “French” was good, however, it was a revelation, anyone who loves a good crusty loaf knows what I am talking about.

There were a lot of things that went into making the French breads well, not just good old Stan the Levain, we had a true wonder of a steam-injected, gas fired, stone hearth, four deck French oven for one thing. This had an ingenious canvas conveyor/depositor mounted to the front of it for loading the decks; the baker assigned to “the French” that morning would gently arrange the loaves on the canvas, slash them and then the whole thing would get shoved into the oven. Then, as the loader was yanked back out the canvas would roll out from under the loaves, leaving them behind in ordered rows on the hot stone deck. The French oven had four decks, as I mentioned, so the loader had a spring and lever system for raising or lowering the whole apparatus to match the level of the deck that was being loaded.

An angled glass door was brought down with a bang and a satisfyingly flat and fat metal button was slammed with the palm and held in place while pipes somewhere in the back of the equipment hissed, sputtered and clanged and hot steam flooded the sealed deck, emulating very nicely the extremes of temperature and humidity found in a well made masonry oven but without all the extra hassle of building a wood fire in the same place you eventually intend to bake.

Does this all sound like a lot of fun? I promise you it really was. One of the most satisfying jobs I have ever held in the culinary arts: operating that monster of a deck oven, and if you have the kind of liquid capital that can afford the cost of an Italian sports car you could spend it instead on a steam injected multi-deck French oven, making sure of course to reserve tens of thousands of dollars for installation and inevitable repair.

The Dodger told me once that it cost him twenty grand (in 90s dollars) just to move the thing from its previous home to the bakery where I got to play with it.

As amazing a tool as that oven was it could not turn poorly made lumps of goo into proper artisanal loaves, many steps had to be performed well and to exactingly high standards in order for the oven and its human attendant to have a shot at producing a quality loaf.

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

To make a really great bread you have to get everything right. Anyone who has baked bread more than a couple of times knows that the seemingly simple process and basic instructions contain a massive amount of nuance and the only true way to increase one’s likelihood of success is years and years of practice.

Anyone who tells you they have a fool-proof recipe for bread is either full of shit or delusional.

Not to be trusted.

Over the months and years I spent at that first bakery, as I immersed myself more and more in the craft of baking, I became increasingly interested in the “French” - seeing it for what it was: a link to centuries of tradition and learning and a way to make some really fantastic foodstuffs. The best of which (in my opinion) were made with only four ingredients.

Flour. Water. Yeast…

I mentioned already that Stan the Levain needed to be fed and maintained carefully, one of the secrets to a successful sourdough, and a big piece of the puzzle was how much levain we needed to mix the French on a given day, based on how busy we expected the bakery and its satellite cafes to be (the next day, we mixed and shaped the day before, you will recall) and so the first thing the (human) Mixer did was consult the formula and do some mental math to calculate the feedings for the day. Stan was kept at 100 percent hydration, meaning the feedings were always half flour and half water. The levain named Stan made up about 40 percent of the final dough so on the days we mixed a really big batch we would need between 60 and 80 pounds of frothy goo, at peak fermentation and ready to go, sometime in the late morning.

If all went according to plan, and “the French” was gently slapping at the sides of one of the two big spinning bowls of the spiral arm mixers we (human Mixers) hovered over all morning in the back room of the bakery, then the next step was to give what remained of Stan the Levain in its giant white Stera-lite bucket the first feeding of the next cycle. Yet another feeding was left, weighed out and ready, on top of Stan’s lid for the cafe staff to attend to, since that one happened after all the bakers were long gone. There was a third feeding, first thing in the morning, to build back up to the amount required for the next days dough and so on and so forth, day in and day out.

If all went according to plan…

There was this one time, early in my tenure as a Mixer at the bakery, meaning that I had paid my dues on the bench and had my fun using the big steam oven as the “French” baker and had showed a bit of promise and so was entrusted with the three ring binder full of formulas and the literal keys to the joint and put pretty much in charge of the production day.

But I really had no idea what I was doing yet, I was still at the “follow instructions very carefully and yell for help if something looks wrong” stage of my bakery journey and I definitely should not have been left alone and in charge of all of the doughs.

And yet, for whatever reason, that day I was it. The production manager had the day off and the Artful Dodger was probably sniffing around the production manager’s… never mind.

No big deal, I had done it all at least a dozen times by that time, obviously I knew the drill. It wasn’t my first rodeo after all.

Confidently I heaved the enormous bucket of sticky sourdough starter up and poured the vast majority of it into the big mixer, memory says it was a weekend batch and so very big - hundreds of pounds.

Carefully I measured the flour and added that, similarly the water after assuring that it was the right temperature.

There, now the mixer is fired up, the big metal bowl (big enough to bathe in with several close friends) spinning slowly around. The mixing “arm” itself a three foot long stainless steel corkscrew, spinning along one edge of the bowl. The mess of levain, water and flour first churning and then slowly gathering and coalescing into a mass, getting more and more elastic and shiny and generally dough-like as the minutes ticked by. There were tricks to knowing when a dough had mixed enough:

“the windowpane method”…

a certain way that the dough tore as it spun off the “hook”…

just good old gut instinct, once the process had been accomplished, successfully, often enough to engender real experience.

This particular day though something was not right. Even my inexperienced ass knew something was wrong in mixer-land, and somewhere in the vicinity of said amateur derriere something was clenching in the beginnings of abject panic as I gazed into the mixer with furrowed brow and tried to discern what the disconnect was.

I mean, this wasn’t just wrong, what I was looking at where the French was supposed to be, this was a huge fucking mess. The “dough” looked more like yellowish paste, and, paste-like, had spread its sticky self all over any and all available surfaces of mixing bowl and dough hook. This “dough” had done the exact opposite of “coming together” and had done so in the most aggressively catastrophic way imaginable, short of actually exploding I suppose.

Erm… maybe more flour? Flour makes things less sticky, right?

Yeah, no. There was not enough flour in the bakery to take care of this level of stick, and after trying to add a little at a time and seeing that the results were less than desirable I wisely quit while I was…

I was definitely not ahead, in fact I was pretty sure I was going to get fired. I had apparently single handedly ruined the entire next day’s crusty breads in one bad mix and I had no idea what I had even done wrong. I did know two things though:

1. There was no way to recover from this mess, at least not today, mixing another “French” dough was impossible that day because Stan needed to be fed up to the correct volume over the next 24 hours, even in my inexperience I knew that there was no way to rush that process, certainly not to speed it up in a way that would yield useable, bake-able, breads for the next day. And:

2. I needed to hide the evidence before the Boss came back from whatever errand he was Artfully Dodgering that day.

The next 45 minutes or so were some of the worst days of my life, several weeks and multiple contractor-grade trash bags later I had scooped and scraped the hundreds of pounds of pasty tar out of the big old mixer and lugged and sweated and heaved them into the dumpster out back. My bowels liquid with panic and a chill flop-sweat soaking my back and making me shiver at the prospect of owning my failure when the Boss got back, which he did, soon enough.

Shame faced and hunched shouldered I told him what had happened, unable to meet his eyes as I related the mystery of the impossibly sticky mess that had resulted where “the French” had been intended. If I had been able to look at him I might have noticed the glint of amusement in his regard.

“Is Stan ok though?” - the Dodger’s first question when my confession had trailed off pathetically at last.

I reassured him that Stan was fine, I had fed the levain and prepared the second feeding for the afternoon crew.

“Next time that happens, Jonathan, you can just add the salt at the end of the mix, lots of bakers add the salt late as a matter of course.” Said my mentor, calmly, even warmly.

First reaction was relief (and disbelief) that this generous and affable man wasn’t mad at me, it appeared I would live to bake another day.

My second reaction?

“The… salt?” Though I already knew he was right, looking back at the process I had obviously left out one of the four whole ingredients in the recipe.

Flour, water, yeast and SALT.

Salt isn’t just hanging around in the bread making it taste good, although flavor is certainly a crucial role. Salt is also part of the complex process of “gluten production” that is the principle goal of mixing a dough. Specifically: the salt conditions the strands of elastic protein (gluten) so that they make smoother bonds and link together, neatly, into the springy sheets that give a dough strength and hold tight the gaseous byproducts of fermentation - thereby allowing the dough to “rise”. Without salt in the mix the gluten just attaches to whatever it crashes into first, a kind of bonding free-for-all that makes something more akin to glue than anything else. Wheat is glue, of course, or at least it is used to make several popular varieties of paste.

Paste, Pasta, Pate, Pain…

Another chef/friend/mentor of mine had a favorite joke:

“Pain, it’s French for bread.”

You had to be there, and you had to be half-drunk probably, we were at least. But I digress.

I guess it kind of goes without saying that the less ingredients a thing has the more important each ingredient becomes to the proper rendering of the desired results, sourdough bread, in its purest form, has four ingredients - an incredibly simple formula that disguises an almost unknowably complex intertwining of science and art, baking is a subtle craft and true mastery is elusive, maybe even impossible, certainly proficiency requires many years of trying and failing and trying and succeeding and trying and failing again - a cycle of failure and reward that one does not undertake without a true affection for the trade.

The purest love of the loaf, residing in a heart pierced through by the staff of life: baking requires no less. At least, not baking well.

But.

Anyone can bake bad bread.

See?

It can be read in a number of different ways. Maybe tomorrow I will visit the Dodger’s favorite aphorism again, it seems there is still more to learn.

Thank you for reading this far if you did, I hope my odd reminiscences offer some entertainment!