Chewing the Fat: The Covert Baker
Bread has become a big topic recently. According to health codes, retail sales cannot be made from foods produced in a home kitchen unless that kitchen is on a farm. So it makes sense that there are covert home businesses, such as that of my friend, Joe (not his real name) who runs an underground artisanal bread baking business.
Joe received a diploma in the Art of International Bread Baking at the French Culinary Institute in New York. When he began graduate school (not in cooking), he decided to supplement his income with a secret bakery. I sat down with him to get some perspective on bread and the business. In a second installment, I'll work with him to make croissants, which he notes is an easy thing to do well at home.
Your focus is on artisanal bread baking. What makes it artisanal?
I don't really like to use the word artisanal but it is appropriate. Making bread is a craft and much more closely related to building furniture than to what a line cook does at a restaurant. Bread is a mass produced product, even at small scales. With furniture you can buy tables made from cheap materials produced mostly by machines or you can get ones made by individual people from fine materials. The same is true with bread.
The two most important components to making the kind of bread I like to eat are:
- TIME -- complex flavors take time to develop because of the relationship between yeast, bacteria, enzymes, starch, temperature, and moisture -- this is where EVERY bakery tries to cut corners to save money.
- Simple ingredients with no artificial additives -- great bread needs only four things: flour, water, salt, and yeast (commercial or wild) and for some specialty breads you will add simple things like butter or dried fruit, but that's all you need. Take a look at the ingredient list on your supermarket bag of "whole wheat" bread. There's all kinds of things added to (1) make the bread faster and (2) appeal to the sugar-shocked palates of most Americans.
What is your procedure for taking orders and deliveries?
On weeks that I'm baking (I bake once a week, three weeks per month these days) I send out an email announcing what I'm making that week with brief descriptions of the breads (usually four types or croissants). People have until a given deadline to send me their orders. Bread is available first come first serve up to my baking capacity for that bread. I deliver within a limited area, basically making a circular route. Some people also pick up directly from me. My advertising is strictly word of mouth, so the delivery system is pretty efficient.
How do you choose which breads you are going to make each week?
When I first started I just made whatever I felt like making. Some were breads I had learned in culinary school, others were my own inventions or modifications of classics. I gradually developed a small repertoire of breads that proved themselves popular with my customers and that were very much my own. I now rotate those breads on a fixed schedule while occasionally throwing in a seasonal, holiday, or other special bread. I also base the decision of what to make on the practical considerations of my small operation based on my limited equipment and having no assistants.
I do make some killer brownies as part of my regular rotation (it's so hard to find a good brownie, so I came up with my own) and every third week I made croissants, which are my most popular item. The key to the croissants is that I roll them entirely by hand and use expensive European-style butter in them. Nobody else does this because it's hard and expensive, but it's worth it!
In the Washington City Paper, one of the bakers noted that he would make bread more in the classic style, except that his customers wanted something different. What do you think accounts for this? Have you had to adjust what you make because of customer tastes?
There are definitely people who appreciate old world-style breads. I've occasionally made some heavy German ryes. These are as far from "deli rye" as a baguette is from Wonder Bread. Not many people ordered them but some people LOVED them, and those dense ryes are some of my personal favorites. The problem is that for every one person who likes that kind of bread, there are five or ten who would spit it out. Most people don't want strong or sour flavors in their bread. They don't want their bread baked dark because it looks burned even though it has more flavor and better texture that way. They buy bread at the grocery store loaded with so much sweetener that you can't taste anything real. They want something they can make sandwiches or toast out of.
I do keep the sandwiches/toast thing in mind and often suggest uses for my breads in their descriptions. I try to make some breads to fit those desires without compromising on the quality or the principles of good bread I mentioned earlier.
You can have great, flavorful, natural bread that makes wonderful sandwiches or toast and that that's a great way to enjoy it. For instance, I make an "oatmeal molasses" bread that's a little sweet but it's sweetened with local wildflower honey and earthy blackstrap molasses. It's also packed with oats and whole wheat. So you end up with this hearty bread that's a little sweet but has a very complex flavor -- it's not one dimensional -- and it's great for sandwiches, and great for toast, and great just to eat on its own.
If I can get people to eat bread like that and realize how good it tastes (and how much more nutritious it is), then it's not a huge leap to get them to try a German rye with flax seeds. But if you have a bakery and you've got your "weird" bread down in the corner looking horribly out of place next to your big white loaves and baguettes and ciabatta, are you surprised that no one is buying it?
What characteristics should someone look for when looking for a good baguette?
Externally, a dark crust. Darker than you probably think it should be, a deep toasted color. That alone will probably tell you everything you need to know about the baker. The other thing to look for are the "ears." A properly made baguette will form little ears that you can grab onto at the edge of each score. I have yet to see such a baguette in the DC area, however. The baguette should also feel crisp.
Internally you want a big open, irregular structure. The irregular structure of the dough is an indicator that a few things have happened. (1) The dough has high moisture content -- this makes it harder to work with but ultimately contributes to a nicer texture in the finished product. (2) The dough has been fermented for a long time leading to more flavor. (3) The dough has been handled gently, preferably by hand and not machine. Most bakeries, even so-called "artisan" bakeries shape their dough at least partly by machine.
And, of course, it should taste good.
Since most people won't be able to get your bread, are there any bakeries you would recommend? Or is it better to learn how to make bread at home?
I've had a good loaf here and there but there is no place I can consistently recommend. Eatzis [a now closed specialty foods store] actually made some excellent breads, but they're no longer in business. With a little practice, the bread you make at home will be much better than most of what you can buy. The one thing that's really hard to do in a home oven is a really good baguette.
What makes it difficult to make a good baguette at home?
It's hard to make a baguette in a home oven because you absolutely need a hearth steam-injected oven to make a proper baguette. Baguettes did not even exist before they had steam-injected ovens! You can simulate the hearth deck with a baking stone, but all the methods to simulate steam by dropping water or ice cubes or whatever in the oven are a waste of time because all home ovens are vented and the steam just goes right out. When baking a baguette in a deck oven, you steam at the beginning of the bake and keep the vents closed until the last ten minutes.
The good solution to this problem is baking inside of cast iron pots. By starting with the lid on, you create a closed environment and the steam coming off the bread itself is trapped inside. You then open the pots part way through to vent that steam and let the crust brown. What steam does is keeps the starch on the surface of the bread from gelatinizing before the full volume of the bread is achieved. Without steam you end up with dense baguettes with thick crusts rather than airy ones with thin, crisp crusts.
The whole point of a baguette is that there's a very high ratio of delicious crust to crumb (crumb is the inside of the bread). Shaping proper baguettes is also very difficult. I have made thousands of them and they still do not come out perfect every time (most bakeries use machines to shape them -- part of why most of them are not very good). You can make really great French bread in a round boule shape at home, and that's what I recommend doing.
So what general advice do you have for home bakers?
Bake your bread a little darker than you think you should. Buy a cheap kitchen scale; it's the only way to measure flour accurately. Try the "no knead" bread recipe from the popular New York Times article, and experiment with it.
Learn how to bake, not recipes. Buy Jeffrey Hamelman's book (far and away the best) and learn. Or take a short class at King Arthur in Vermont or the French Culinary Institute in New York City.
Use instant or "rapid rise" yeast. There is nothing magic about fresh yeast, it's the same organism. Instant yeast will keep for a year or two in the fridge, fresh goes bad in two weeks. Do not, however, use the amounts they recommend on the package, use something like 40% of what they call for. Instant yeast requires no "proofing," you simply mix it into the dough like fresh yeast.
A typical dough starts the night before by mixing a small portion of the flour and water together with a very small amount of yeast or sourdough culture. The next day I combine all the flour and (cool!) water and gently mix until just combined. I then let the dough sit for about 20-30 minutes. This is called the autolyse (literally, "self mix"), during this time the gluten structure hydrates and develops (this is the key to the "no knead" dough recipes) and the enzymes in the flour begin breaking down the starch into sugar for the yeast to eat. At this point I add the yeast and finish mixing the dough. The dough then rises for about an hour and then I fold it (never "punching down" -- this destroys the airy structure). It rises for another hour, then I divide, preshape, rest, and shape. The final rise takes about an hour and then I bake. Different types of bread will take different times, of course.
What's the benefit of the long rises?
During all those long rises, enzymes and friendly bacteria (similar to those in yogurt) are working on the dough developing flavor. The bacteria are also producing acid, even in bread that isn't "sourdough." This acts as a natural preservative. Most of my larger loaves will actually keep for a week or more with zero preservatives because of the methods I use. By using cooler temperatures, less yeast, and the appropriate flour, we can slow down the yeast and give these enzymes and bacteria time to do their thing.
Be patient. Good bread does not take a lot of work, but it takes time.