Authors: William Alexander
Mix flour, water, salt, and yeast. Let rise, then form a loaf and bake.
This recipe (or something close to it) was found scratched on the inside of a pyramid. It turns out that Egypt, in addition to its more widely known contributions to civilization—the Sphinx, hieroglyphics, Omar Sharif—also gave us bread. Plus something to wash it down with (more about that in a moment). Yet the ancient Egyptians weren’t the first to eat wheat. Early forms of wheat, including emmer and einkorn, had been domesticated in the Fertile Crescent since Neolithic times. Most commonly, these grains were cooked with water and eaten as gruel. Eventually it occurred to someone to press the gruel into a disk shape and grill it on a hot stone, and flatbread was born (if the inventor had realized that said innovation would culminate in the McDonald’s Snack Wrap, he might have buried it with Tutankhamen).
That might have been the end of it, were it not for another culinary invention of the Egyptians. They liked to tip a cold one back now and then (or, more likely, a warm one) and had numerous small breweries where they cultivated brewer’s yeast. Now, maybe it happened this way and maybe it didn’t, but it seems quite likely that one day a tipsy cook spilled a little beer into the dough, and the inevitable happened: yeast and dough were accidentally mixed, and leavened bread was born.
*
It didn’t take long for bread—an obvious improvement over
gruel—to become a staple of the Middle Eastern diet. Bread makes a pretty complete food. The wheat kernel, or seed, provides protein, starch, fat, and fiber and is rich in a number of important vitamins. Bread became such a major part of life in Egypt, with laborers paid in loaves, that this food would come to be known, in Egyptian Arabic, as
aish,
literally “life.”
I rather fancied the notion that I was trying to perfect life and that my method for doing so wasn’t appreciably different from that of Pharaoh’s baker. My life would have no more than four simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt. I would make my life free-form, without a pan, directly on a stone in the oven.
Of course, to make a loaf, I needed a little more to go on than a hieroglyphic scrawl. The day after my bread epiphany in that upper-crust restaurant, I’d called my younger brother, Rob, and told him I wanted to learn to bake bread. He was a pretty fair baker himself, and my request might have triggered some sibling rivalry—if it were me, I’d have been tempted to borrow a page from our grandmother’s book and leave out one crucial ingredient (like salt)—but Rob welcomed me into the fraternity of home bakers, giving me his complete recipe (as far as I know), his encouragement, and, shortly after, my first artisan bread cookbook.
I had been tinkering on and off with Rob’s recipe, keeping track of the variations and results in a log, but it looked to be an evolutionary dead end: the bread had changed, but it was never as good as Rob’s, let alone the sublime object of my desire. I’ve mentioned the rock-hard crust, but the crumb—the term bakers use to describe the texture of the bread’s interior, not the little bits that fall to the table—was just as bad. No matter how much or how little yeast I added, how long or how short the rising time, or how long I left the bread in the oven, the loaves invariably had a dense, undercooked crumb most notable for its complete lack
of gas pockets. Frustrated, I’d stopped baking bread altogether over a year earlier.
“All right,” I finally announced on this morning of renaissance. “The last shall be first.” Meaning I’d begin this touchstone loaf by using the same recipe I’d used for the last loaf I’d baked. Following this latest variation of Rob’s recipe, I began by mixing the flours, mostly all-purpose white flour, with a little whole wheat and rye for flavor. I took about a third of this flour mixture and added it to all the water, along with a mere teaspoon of active dry yeast, making a batter called a sponge or
poolish
(the word most likely refers to the Polish bakers who introduced this method to France in the nineteenth century). I then let the
poolish
—with the consistency of thin pancake batter—sit. After four or five hours, it would be aromatic and bubbly, full of complex compounds that would contribute flavor and aroma to the finished bread. Only then would I mix in the rest of the flour and salt and knead the dough.
Use of a preferment, as the
poolish
and other methods (such as a
biga
or a
pâte fermentée
) are called, is a technique you won’t find in your mother’s copy of Fannie Farmer or likely even at your local bakery, where a “straight dough”—in which everything is mixed at once, kneaded, and set aside to rise—is generally the rule. A straight dough is a much faster way to make bread and lends itself well to automation.
The Egyptians didn’t have to worry about preferments, as their bread was leavened by saving a little of today’s dough to use in tomorrow’s bread—the original preferment. Most modern bakers start from scratch with fresh commercial yeast for each new batch, but this just doesn’t provide the kind of flavor that old yeast brings to the table. The
poolish,
even though it is started with fresh yeast, is one way to recapture some of that lost flavor, to bake more like an Egyptian.
Thanks to the custom of decorating their tombs with paintings
of everyday life and their penchant for record keeping, we actually know more about how Egyptians baked four thousand years ago than we do about baking in, say, medieval England. We know, for example, that during the thirty-year reign of Ramses III, his royal bakery distributed 7 million loaves of bread to the temples. We know how the bread was made; a detailed tomb painting of the bakery illustrates every phase of the process, including a detail of a large trough of dough being kneaded by foot. We know that Egyptian bakers had a repertoire of over fift een varieties of bread. They had round breads, braided breads, even breads shaped like pyramids; breads with poppy seeds and sesame seeds; and bread with camphor.
And yet here I was, thousands of years later, restricting myself for the next year to a single type of loaf, with just four ingredients. I was baking like an Egyptian, but less so. There’s nothing like progress.
Wildlife experts in Scotland have urged the public to help save swans by feeding them brown loaves instead of white. A lack of nutrients in white bread is leaving the birds crippled with a condition similar to rickets in humans.
—
The Scotsman,
February 15, 2008
It’s a sad state of affairs when the only thing you have to read over breakfast is a bag of flour.
Thanks to Anne, I’ve become so accustomed to having the
New York Times
delivered early every morning—home delivery was a de facto condition of our marriage—that when I beat the person we used to call “the paper boy” to the kitchen and have nothing to read over breakfast, I go a little stir crazy and will read anything: I’ll peruse the back of the cereal box for the tenth time (just in case it’s changed or they have a new mail-in offer); I’ll study the junk mail to see what the local Chinese food buffet place is offering for their special, romantic Valentine’s Day buffet (all-youcan-eat king crab legs, in case you’re wondering what turns a girl on—just try to keep those specks of crab off your cheek); I will in fact even read a flour bag to stave off
Times
withdrawal.
Thanks, as I say, to Anne. I’ll admit that I was attracted to Anne some twenty-five years ago by her looks, but I became intrigued when I saw her reading the
Times
over lunch one day at the Office where we both worked. Suffice it to say, I hadn’t dated a lot of women who read anything more challenging than
TV Guide,
much less the
Times.
Thus Anne’s reading this paper in front of me so blatantly was the erotic equivalent of an ovulating baboon displaying her swollen red rump, and I eventually worked up the courage to ask her to lunch, figuring that at the least we’d have something to talk about. Which we did.
Not long after, Anne left the research institute where I still work today to begin medical school, and we subsequently married, had two kids, yada yada, and as Anne was finishing up her residency in internal medicine in the Bronx, we were eager (well, I was eager) to move to a more rural area. Anne was willing to indulge me, to follow me anywhere—almost. She had merely one nonnegotiable demand. One evening after the kids were in bed, she came over to the regional map I was studying at the kitchen table and drew a rough circle, indicating the approximate home-delivery limit of the
Times.
“Anywhere inside the circle is fine,” she said, smiling.
Fair enough. I found a small town in the Mid-Hudson Valley, just inside the northern edge of the circle, and indeed, before closing on the house, Anne called the paper to make sure the address was in their delivery area. Seventeen years later, Bobbie Davis still tosses the paper onto (or close to) our patio, 365 days a year.
So what does this have to do with the price of bread, as they say? Well, I was downstairs at five thirty to start the
poolish
and I was going a little nuts because the paper hadn’t come yet, giving me nothing to read over breakfast. Nothing but a bag of King Arthur flour. It turns out there’s a lot to read on a bag of King Arthur, a northeastern brand highly regarded by both commercial and serious home bakers. I learned from the bag that the company is 100 percent employee-owned. There was a glowing testimonial from “I. M.” (hmm . . . sounds like an inside gag: “I. M. really the CEO”) plus a greeting from the president, and a recipe. I read the slogan “Naturally Pure and Wholesome” and saw that King Arthur flour was “Never Bleached. Never Bromated.” That was reassuring. Much of the flour sold in America is still treated with peroxides and/or bromides at the mill—practices outlawed in the European Union owing to overwhelming evidence of the carcinogenic properties of these chemicals, used to both whiten the flour (pure, fresh flour has a creamy color) and “age” it (artificial aging is cheaper than storing the flour for several weeks while it undergoes natural oxidation), which improves the baking properties.
Finally I turned the bag to its side and read the small print near the bottom.
Ingredients: Unbleached hard wheat flour, malted barley flour (a natural yeast food), niacin (a B vitamin), reduced iron, thiamin
mononitrate (vitamin B
1
), riboflavin (vitamin B
2
), folic acid (a B vitamin).
Odd. If it was so “naturally pure and wholesome,” why was it loaded up with all those B vitamins?
I thought about other enriched foods we eat. Some breakfast cereals contain the equivalent of a multivitamin for marketing purposes, but among the staple foods, milk (with added vitamin D) and salt (with iodine) were the only others that came to mind. And they have only a single additive. Was this just King Arthur’s thing? I pulled another bag of flour, a generic brand, from our cupboard. Same ingredients.
I wasn’t sure I was crazy about this. Why did I have to take a supplement with my bread?
A good question, and one that deserved an answer. But first I had to start some bread. Last week’s touchstone loaf was well named: hard as rock and nearly as heavy, even though the dough had risen quite nicely. To an outsider—say, my wife—it may have looked as if I was making the exact same loaf this week, but not so! Today I was omitting the second quarter teaspoon of yeast from the dough, relying only on the yeast in the
poolish,
on the theory that the heaviness might be the result of too much, not too little, yeast, causing the bread to overrise, then collapse in the oven.
A mere quarter teaspoon seems like an awfully small amount of yeast. Most recipes call for between one and two teaspoons of yeast, but those recipes make bread in a few hours. Mine would take eight or nine hours, giving a smaller amount of yeast more time to do the job, especially while in the
poolish,
which is a breeding ground for yeast.
Four hours later, the surface of the
poolish,
dotted with small bubbles, was already smelling vaguely of bread. After adding the remaining flour and two teaspoons of salt, I attached the dough
hook to the mixer and set the timer for twelve minutes. This should’ve been twelve minutes I had available to do something else, but as the mixer flung the dough around the bowel with the dough hook, it started dancing across the countertop with an unerring instinct for the edge, keeping me standing at the counter with one hand on the mixer the entire time. The kneaded dough was slightly elastic and just a bit sticky, which I’d read is exactly what you’re after. It should provide some “tack” to a hard surface but pull away nearly cleanly when you apply a little force. I misted some plastic wrap with vegetable-oil spray and covered the dough, leaving it to rise for two hours.
While the dough was rising, I went up to my Office to call the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Hotline to find out why their “naturally wholesome” flour had an ingredient list that read like a medicine chest inventory. A pleasant woman with just a snow-flake of New England in her voice answered on the second ring. “For flours that are used to make staple products like bread, it’s federally mandated that we add vitamins and minerals to flour,” she explained. This had been true since the 1940s, “when refined flour was becoming popular and Americans were becoming vitamin-deficient.”
Wait a second—the “Greatest Generation” was vitamindeficient? Tom Brokaw had left that part out. Interesting.
“You’re probably not the person to ask,” I said apologetically, “but do you know why these particular vitamins were chosen?”
“Well, actually, I am,” she said, a little put off.
“Sorry.” I found myself apologizing again.
“These are vitamins that are known to prevent certain nutritional diseases—diseases of nutritional deficiency—like rickets.” That would be the riboflavin. Thiamin was to prevent beriberi, which had disabled almost as many Japanese soldiers as the Russians had in the Russo-Japanese War, and iron, of course, prevents
anemia. Folic acid was to prevent birth defects like spina bifida. I asked her about the fourth B vitamin in the flour, niacin.