Imperfect Bread

Bread has been on my mind lately, as regular readers may have gathered from recent posts. Baking my own is of course part of that preoccupation but so is the social context of bread, along with its emotional hold on…well…all of us. Bread is a universal food. Every culture on the planet makes some version of it from flatbreads such as Indian roti to hefty beauties like a French boule to Chinese manitou.*

The fact that I have time to ponder bread and mess around with homemade artisan recipes says something about the role of social class in the contemporary economics of bread: only the leisured can make it one loaf at a time from just water, flour, salt, yeast and sometimes olive oil. That means high quality artisanal leavened bread that is actually good for you is only available to the well off who can afford to buy it from a bakery or a grocery store at a cost of five to seven dollars per loaf or have the time to make it themselves. 

No one tied to an employer’s clock or the demands of a small business can reasonably be expected to make their own leavened bread except on days off. And who wants to do that after a hard week at work? Bread nerds, maybe. People who are fascinated by the art of bread and love it as much as others might love painting or decoupage. Folks like me. But that’s it.

Making leavened bread at home requires the kind of intelligence that can only be developed with experience. Which brings me to this week’s post in which I attempted to make a 75% whole wheat levain loaf based on a recipe in Ken Forkish’s book, Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza. 

It was not an entirely successful effort. We ate it though. It tasted fine, but it didn’t rise while baking as much as it should have. I think it was over proofed. 

When I jammed my finger into the dough to check if proofing was complete, a test recommended by Ken, the dent I left stayed for quite a while. Apparently there is a magical point at which one’s finger divot remains, puffing out slowly.

I also had to make some adaptations to his method since I don’t have the huge tubs for dough mixing that he recommends for making 2 loaves at a time. Nor did I feel the need to make his levain. I used my fed sourdough starter in the same ratios his recipe called for. 

So maybe my version of levain (that’s the fed starter) had more moisture than his finished levain. Which then could have caused my dough to behave differently. My kitchen is warmer, too. So that would certainly have been a factor, except that this bread proofs in the fridge overnight. The warmth of my Florida house contributed to a faster bulk rise for sure, but I moved on to the shaping and proofing stage before his recommended rise time was up because the dough had doubled. 

Perhaps the alchemy of a faster bulk rise had an effect requiring less proofing time than the 8 hours I gave it. I don’t really know for sure.

The only thing to do is to try again and see what happens.

Here’s my recipe and technique using Forkish’s book as a guide. I’ll update this post when I make it again.

If any bread nerds have advice on getting this recipe to work better, please contribute a comment.

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*  But none is as controversial as that uniquely American invention: mass produced, plastic-wrapped white sandwich bread. I’m currently reading a book about it called White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. This is a topic for another day.