Meet the Bakers: Dado and Jacqueline Colussi

Photo credit: Nate Delage (thank you, Nate!)

Despite having lived and worked in the Northeast for more than thirty years, I was caught by surprise when I disembarked from the plane in Chicago by a blustery April morning: after a few years in the temperate Seattle area, I seemed to have completely forgotten what real cold felt like. When I mentioned it to Jacqueline - who had come by train to meet me at Midway Airport - she laughed: "Cold? This isn't cold. To me this feels like spring already." Really? She was wearing a woolen coat and hat and a thick scarf was wrapped several times around her neck. I guess all is relative, including weather. I fished my own hat, scarf and gloves out of my backpack (Jacqueline had kindly forewarned me to come prepared) and proceeded to follow her to her and Dado's cozy home. Dado was baking pitas for lunch. It smelled delicious. I took out my camera and my notebook and we got to work, feasting as we talked. Such was the start of a glorious few days spent in this extraordinary couple's company...

As you may already know if you have been following this blog, Dado and Jacqueline Colussi are the creators and developers of BreadStorm, the bread formulation software which delivers bakers from spending much time on calculations (for more on why I am a huge fan of the program, please refer to my original BreadStorm post). We bakers are a astonishingly diverse crowd: some of us seem to have fallen into a mixing bowl before we even took their first steps, others become professional bakers after a career in business, academia, music, healthcare, the law, education, journalism, etc., others yet become passionate bread-bakers but keep their full-time other jobs. Jacqueline and Dado don't exactly fit into any of these categories: yes, they are passionate home bakers and yes, they have full-time jobs that, technically speaking, do not involve baking. Yet they make a living thinking about bread, more often than not twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, and they bake as often and as much as they can.

Despite the fact that writing code doesn't come naturally to most people, Dado and Jacqueline clearly love doing the hard stuff. They also exhibit an obvious delight in working with ingredients and observing changes in their doughs. The pitas are a case in point. Watching them pop up in the oven, Dado says he feels like a five-year old all over again. "No computer screen can match that. We create bread so that we can get off the computer and spend time in the physical world. Our goal in creating BreadStorm was to reduce to a minimum the baker's need to use the computer so that he/she can go back to the dough as fast as possible and watch the pitas popping."

Dado was born to a Finnish mom and an Italian dad. He grew up in Finland but spent lots of time in Italy and the food in his home was a rich blend of two cultures. Dado recounts: "The seed of my interest in bread-baking was planted back in year 2000 in Italy. At a family friend's home, eating home-made pizza baked in an old wood-fired oven made a permanent impression on me. Then in 2004, when I was in graduate school in Germany, the sourdough made by a local baker knocked my socks off, I can still taste it today. A few years later at a friend's forest cottage in Finland, without really knowing what we were doing, Jacqueline and I had a chance to try to bake bread in a wood-fired oven together. It was a massive oven, built in the center of the cottage, to provide warmth throughout, and it had a hearth. The pizza we made came out well, but the bread was a doorstop. A total failure." In other words, a challenge...

Jacqueline and Dado had both been living in Stockholm for two years when they met. Cooking was a shared passion from the very beginning. Baking soon followed. But after several "doorstops," they realized that they had no understanding of what was going on and that guessing and improvising would only take them so far. They needed to get to the point where they could make informed decisions. They turned to books: Jacqueline felt especially inspired by Emily Buehler's Bread Science while Dado first discovered "bakers' math" in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. A curtain lifted: there was a system there and not only the wizardry of a prodigy baker.

Jacqueline and Dado come from different professional background but there is a palpable synergy between the two of them. Dado holds a master's degree in computer science, with a minor in math. He's been creating software professionally for the past seventeen years. One of his favorite past projects involved writing weather forecast broadcasting software for a television studio. He says: "I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make software easy for people to use. Many programmers work on systems which never talk to humans, but only to other programs, and that's what I did at the beginning. Then I became much more interested in humans actually using the computer." Around that time he met Jacqueline who had made it her profession to try and understand human/computer interaction. Talk about serendipity...

Jacqueline's background is mathematics, visual arts and dance. "Pure math was my major in college. After college I was looking for a way to blend my interests in math and visual arts. I was actively trying to find my way, when I met a vision scientist through one of my undergrad math professors. 'Vision scientist' -- that was a path I didn't know existed, and it intrigued me. After volunteering in a vision lab for some months, I decided to go for a Ph.D. in vision. And in the years I spent working on my Ph.D., I began to find my own intellectual places: designing experiments to collect data about how we humans process what we see, whether leisurely gazing at the scene in front of us, or reacting in high-risk situations (such as the air traffic controller guiding airplanes to prepare for landing safely at a busy airport); developing mathematical models to describe this behavior; and then exploring how we can apply this knowledge to build more intuitive, easy-to-use computer interfaces for tasks in our daily lives."
Like Dado, Jacqueline was exposed early to adventurous cross-cultural taste experiences : "I grew up in New Jersey baking bread for the family with my maternal grandma whose parents were from Croatia. But what with grad school and a postdoc job, all of which involved a lot of traveling for research purposes, I remained without regular access to a full kitchen for ten years. Looking back, I am not sure how I put up with that. I always hoped to get back to bread-baking..."

To offer a tool to bread-bakers is a joint effort propelled by Dado's and Jacqueline's urge to give back. "When I was in ninth grade," says Dado, "a neighbor of ours started a programming club. I joined it. It was very casual. We met every weekend. In retrospect that neighbor transformed my life. He helped him discover a passion for mastering the computer." As Jacqueline puts it, "were it not for other bakers in other parts of the world using BreadStorm and becoming part of the story, our job wouldn’t be nearly as compelling. We work in the context of a community."

BreadStorm's main idea is to let the human do what he or she does well, which is taking sensory input (temperature, consistency, texture, aromas, feel, look, response) and basing action on that, and to delegate to the computer what no human does with ease, which is computation. "Our brains have developed to respond to sensory stimuli in a way that no computer can (yet). So let’s use our brains for what they are good at and our computers for what they are good at."
The Colussis have been baking their own bread since the summer of 2008. "Dado and I have developed our own respective styles of amateur bread baking, which are complementary to one another, perhaps even symbiotic." Dado has come to love the rhythm of sourdough baking over the years: he makes two loaves of Chicago sourdough every week.

In addition he regularly experiments with other breads, for fun and to expand his repertoire: pitas, panettone, laminated doughs, rieska (a Finnish potato flatbread), etc. During my stay, he experimented making his signature Chicago Sourdough with two different flours (all-purpose and bread) and baked lovely and tasty Karelian pies (with a mostly rye crust and either a rice or a mashed potato filling).

Jacqueline's bread-baking is for the most part driven by her interest in formula development: "I come at a bread in an analytical way, question myself about the role of each ingredient and its percentage, and then develop-bake-develop-bake-develop-etc, sometimes a dozen times or more, until a formula becomes stable (some would say "well balanced") in my hands. I like to bake breads that challenge me to hone my formula-development skills. In this vein, I like to work with soakers and enriched doughs." She bakes bagels once a week.

For my benefit, she went all out and also made beautiful egg breads...

...farro fruit and nut pull-apart rolls...

...and a walnut bread.

To say I was extraordinarily lucky to be spending time with Dado and Jacqueline is to put it mildly. Not only they are terrific hosts but they are lots of fun. We took long walks, went to the Art Institute...

...attended a meeting of the Chicago Amateur Bread Bakers, a group they founded in January 2011,  rode the elevated train...

(The tracks and buildings were not really tilting. I was just having fun with double exposures).

...had breakfast at La Fournette...

...roamed the streets...

But mostly we talked, I watched them cook and bake and we ate. They gave me tasks to perform with BreadStorm, both on my laptop and on the iPad, and documented my thought processes and actions. The experience was an eye-opener both for them and for me: I could see they were intrigued (maybe dismayed but if so, they hid it well!) by the way my brain worked and I was awed both by their methodical and rigorous approach and by the way their minds seemed to complement one another. "“Hey, Dado, I’d like to borrow your brain for a second!" Jacqueline makes a point, Dado listens attentively, thinks for a while and off they go, debating the best way to resolve an issue or answer a question. In a way, Dado is the chief engineer and she is the CEO. "There are levels of abstraction: down deep it is highly geeky. At the top there is a human being with his or her desires, aspirations, limitations, etc. Dado is firmly on the low level. I am more on top. We meet in the middle."

Dado and Jacqueline generously allowed me to publish the formulas for all the breads they made during my stay with them. For ease of reference each of them is posted in a separate post:

Dado's Chicago Sourdough (all-purpose and bread flour versions)
Dado's Pita
Dado's Dough for Karelian Pies
Jacqueline's Egg Bread
Jacqueline's Bagels
Jacqueline's NYC Deli-Style Farro, Fruit and Nut Pull-Apart Rolls
Jacqueline's Walnut Flax Seed Boule

What with the move and other obstacles life has thrown my way, I haven't had much time to bake lately but when I do, I'll be sure to go down the list and recreate these breads for our own enjoyment. I had such a good time eating them the first time around. Thank you, Dado and Jacqueline! And if the breads don't come out of my oven as lovely and tasty as yours, I will definitely keep your observation in mind: "A failure is an opportunity to learn. A wonderful aspect of bread-baking is that there is always more to learn and that is true for all of us. There are so many unanswered questions and so many questions yet to be asked."

Sprouted Spelt Flour Bread with Montrachet Wine Yeast (and a terrific BreadStorm update)

As you may recall, a few months ago I switched all my formulas to BreadStorm format. BreadStorm is a bread formulation software that takes all the boring (to me) work out of baking bread (well, short of washing bowls and pans, for which I wish there were a program too).
It is the brainchild of two passionate home bakers and software programmers, Dado and Jacqueline Colussi, who like nothing better than making bakers' lives a bit easier. No more calculations, no more head-scratching over Excel formulas, and now, thanks to a stunning new update, a much more convenient way to bake from the web. If you go back to one of my recent posts, for instance The Prairie Loaf, and scroll down, you'll see that I posted the formula in the usual static form and made it available in BreadStorm proprietary format for BreadStorm users, including users of the free version. Those of you who didn't use a Mac or weren't interested in downloading BreadStorm were out of luck: they still had to do all the calculations themselves in case they wanted to scale the formula up or down. Not so anymore! From now on you will be able to toggle a formula between percentages and weights AND to scale it directly without any further calculation or downloading on your part. If you are a BreadStorm user,  of course you can still import it. Please note that this update is still in beta, which means that at the moment, only beta testers can create interactive formulas and only on Mac.
The picture above shows a 50% sprouted spelt flour bread I have been working on, using a Montrachet wine yeast instead of a bread yeast. I was curious to see if it would rise properly because from what I had read on the web, wine yeast can behave very differently from bread yeast. That wasn't my experience.

In the first iteration of the formula I only used .1% yeast and put it all in the poolish. The bread raised well but the taste was curiously bland.

In the second version, I used a total of 1.17 % yeast, split between the poolish and the final dough, and the taste was surprisingly complex. I only had a little bit of yeast and have now run out, and since wine yeast is quite expensive compared to regular yeast, there is a good chance I won't be making this bread again but if you do have access to wine yeast and want to give it a shot, I would encourage you to try using sprouted spelt or another wholegrain flour depending on what you have on hand. You may be pleasantly surprised. The sprouted spelt flour I used was a lovely present from my friend breadsong who brought it to me from British Columbia. Thanks, breadsong!

Here is the formula in the new interactive BreadStorm format:
Please let me know how you like this new feature. Dado and Jacqueline will be following the comments and they are keenly interested in your feedback as I am.

Baking notes

• The poolish fermented for 12 hours at 74°F/23°C
• The dough was autolysed for 30 minutes and hand-mixed
• Dough temperature: 75°F/24°C
• Bulk fermentation: 3 hours at room temperature (74°F/23°C) then 12 hours in refrigerator
• Shaped cold
• Proofed for 2:30 hours
• Baked for 40 minutes with steam the first five minutes
• Total time: 15 minutes at 450°F/232°C, 25 minutes at 400°F/204°C (tented with foil to prevent burning since sprouted grain flour breads tend to burn easily)
• If I made the bread again, I would try using more yeast to open up the crumb some.

Prairie Loaf (adapted from Jeffrey Hamelman's Pain au levain)

Believe it or not, I recently flew from Chicago to Seattle with a pocketful of starter and nothing happened! Granted, the starter was firm to start with (60% hydration) and it had been fed within an inch of its life just before I left for the airport, so it was sluggish and sated. Still, it sat tucked snugly against me in my vest pocket for two flights and what seemed like the longest layover ever (I was flying on a free ticket, so I can't really complain) and I was worried that it might get so warm it would decide to peek out and/or maybe let its presence known with a cheerful bang. I guess I still have painful memories of the long-ago day my apple levain exploded and had to be scraped off the ceiling and the windows of our enclosed porch. Now that must have been one nasty blow-up. Not that anybody was home to witness it but when we came back, we found the lid of the dough bucket on the floor near the door... Anyway, as I said, nothing happened this time. First thing I did upon getting home was unwrap the starter. Far from being active, it appeared stunned. I fed it and when I woke up the next morning, it had inflated to three times its original size. One day later, it looked like it never fled the coop.

It smelled so wonderfully lactic I couldn't bear to throw away the surplus. So I decided to bake with it.

I picked a very simple formula, Jeffrey Hamelman's Pain au levain (Sourdough bread) from the second edition of his book Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes and adapted it a bit. I don't usually bake or eat mostly white breads but I just had to taste my Chicago levain and by using no other flour than all-purpose (except for a smidgen of rye), I was hoping we would be able to savor it in all its glory. I am glad to say it worked (thank you, Jeffrey!). The bread has zero acidity and a delicate lactic aroma. It smells like the first breeze of spring over the prairie. Not that I ever saw the prairie or what's left of it but I am blessed -or cursed, depending on the occasion- with a vivid sensory imagination and the starter is from the Midwest after all. Since the prairie is what I saw with my mind's eyes when I inhaled the breath of the proofed dough, I couldn't resist stenciling one of the loaves with flowers and calling it the Prairie Loaf. And when that loaf came out of the oven in full bloom, I knew I had to bring it to my favorite plant whisperer, the friend who helps make our CSA such a happy place (thank you, Rita!). I shaped the other loaf as a bâtard in memory of the long rustic loaves my eighty-year old grandfather used to go get from the nearest village on his Solex motorized bicycle.

Baking on an impulse is fun but it has its drawbacks, one of which being that you have to adapt to what you have on hand. After feeding the starter, all I had left was about 160 g of mature levain. You know me, I am hopeless at math. With a calculator, I could have figured out the relative weights of the other ingredients but it would have taken a while and I knew I didn't have to because I could count on BreadStorm (the software I am using for my bread formulas) to do it for me.
Using the drop-down scaling menu, I entered the amount of flour in the levain (which I calculated by dividing 160 g by 175 then multiplying by 100) and in a flash, the weights of the other ingredients were recalculated and I was ready to mix. Sweet! Thank you, Jacqueline and Dado Colussi for having thought up this amazing software, and, Dado, a thousand thanks for this beautiful starter! And as you probably guessed, dear readers, there is a Meet the Bakers Dado and Jacqueline Colussi in this blog's near future. Thank you for your patience!

Ingredients

Method (this bread is made over two days and yields two smallish loaves)

1. Build the levain the night before
2. On the day of the bake, mix levain, water and flours until incorporated and all the flour is hydrated (I mixed by hand)
3. Let this shaggy dough stand, covered, for 30 to 60 minutes
4. Add the salt and mix until the dough is cohesive and supple, adding water if necessary to obtain a medium consistency
5. Transfer to oiled container and cover
6. Do two folds at 50-minute intervals
7. Let ferment for another hour and place in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours (it might become acidic if you wait any longer)
8. Pull the dough out when ready to shape and proof
9. Divide in two and shape as desired
10. Proof until ready (the length of the proofing depends largely on the room temperature. A loaf is ready to go in the oven when a small indentation lingers when you palpate it gently with one finger)
11. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes in pre-heated 450°F/232°C oven, applying steam at the beginning
12. Cool on a wire rack
13. Enjoy!

BreadStorm: a quick update on the free version

When I first wrote about BreadStorm (see my post here), the free version only allowed the user to scale formulas downloaded from the BreadStorm formula page or received as a .bun file (BreadStorm format) from another baker. With the new free version, you can experiment creating a formula. That should make it easier to decide whether or not the software is right for you.
To find out more, you might want to check BreadStorm's FAQ page.

BreadStorm

Related post: BreadStorm, a quick update on the free version

You can't escape your childhood. Ain't that the sad truth! The fact came back to bite me when I got introduced to baker's math back in January 2009 during my first Artisan bread class at the San Francisco Baking Institute (SFBI). Oh, don't get me wrong, I loved the class and completely understood the point of sharing formulas (what we home bakers call recipes) in percentages instead of weights. Baker's math makes it easier, among other things, to adjust dough size according to the amount of bread desired, to compare different breads and to troubleshoot problems. But even though baker's math could be more aptly described as a common language for bakers rather than real math, mastering it is still an uphill battle for someone who is number-challenged. And that's where childhood comes in: I have been number-challenged all my life. In my days, it wasn't called a disability. At least not in France. But that's what it was.
Don't you go thinking I was slouching during math classes, however! No, sirree! Never one to waste time, I took the opportunity offered by these otherwise excruciatingly boring hours to practice writing with my left hand. (To this day I can write with both hands - not as fast or as legibly with the left as with the right but still, well enough - or at least I could before I broke my wrist. Not sure I'll still be able to do it when I get my wrist back...)
As an aside and just in case you are wondering, homework was never a problem: my mom had been a math teacher and being a sweet and trusting soul, she always "explained" my math homework to me until it was entirely done and done right. My teachers never really understood how I could be such an assiduous student (appearing to write down their every word in class and always handing in perfectly completed homework on time) and still do so poorly on tests. How could I have ever guessed that one day I'd be a baker and that I'd bitterly regret not possessing the most basic math skills?
Of course you don't have to use formulas to be a baker. There are bakers out there (and I know quite a few of them) who wouldn't touch a formula with a ten-foot pole. They come up with their own recipes, do their own math and they are perfectly fine, especially if they mostly stick to the same breads and don't have to redo their calculations every day to adjust to a fluctuating market.
But the fact is that more and more, bakers are exchanging formulas, not recipes. If you take artisan bread classes, chance are you'll go home with a handful of formulas. You see formulas on the Web (there are some on The Fresh Loaf, on this tentalizing and instructive blog for instance ), on the Bread Baker's Guild of America's website or in industry publications. Knowing how do the math is really convenient if you are looking to diversify your production, whether you are a home baker or a professional.
Granted, the whole baker's math concept is simple and even I grasp it: flour is always 100% and the proportion of every other ingredient is indicated relative to flour as in the formula below:

If the baker decides to use two different kinds of flour, the same formula looks like this:

See how the total flour percentage remains 100 even when two different flours are used? Truth be told, the word "percentage" is a misnomer. It'd be way less confusing to say "unit". In both these simple formulas, for 100 units of flour, you need to use 65 units of water, 2 units of salt and 1 unit of yeast. But still the convention is to use the word "percentage" and since we are trying to speak a common language, we better adopt a common vocabulary as well.  (Sigh...)
Should you actually want to bake from either of these formulas, you first need to decide how much dough you want. If your goal is to make two 500g-loaves, your calculations need to yield one kilogram (1,000 g) of dough. Using this number as a basis, the same two formulas look like this expressed in weights:

For people who are not number-challenged, the calculation is pretty straightforward. A simple rule of three does the trick. Indeed, at each baking class or event I attend, I see fingers flying on calculators and I hear numbers called out as fast as I can jot them down. I get there too but it takes me a while and when the formula gets more complex (when a pre-ferment such as a levain or a poolish or both and/or a soaker needs to be factored in), the process becomes painfully slow. The possibility of a mistake rises exponentially and I often get discouraged.
Friends and family members have tried to teach me how to use a spreadsheet instead of a calculator but to no avail: as soon as the program opens up on the screen, my eyes glaze over and as much as I will myself to listen carefully, my mind invariably logs out.
Enter BreadStorm, a superb tool for bakers developed by Jacqueline and Dado Colussi (more on them in an upcoming Meet the Bakers post). I have been a BreadStorm tester for months and I bought it as soon as it came out of beta, a few weeks ago. Why? Because BreadStorm does all the calculations for me, and in a split second too.  For the first time in my baking life, I can tackle any formula that comes my way and that, my friends, is pretty sweet. It goes a long way towards assuaging any regrets I might still harbor regarding math classes!
Jacqueline and Dado are passionate bread bakers and they love people. In fact they welcome dialogue. They have been very helpful during the testing months and just as supportive after I bought the program. I felt they were there for me and didn't let go of my hand until I was on firm ground. Because, needless to say, the first time I opened the software (still in beta, with no tutorial available yet), my brain froze instantly and the familiar glazing sensation came over my eyes. BreadStorm looked like it might morph into a spreadsheet any minute. I was paralyzed. All I managed to figure out was how to enter ingredients. But it got better. With the developers' help my mind gradually thawed and things started to make sense.
Now that I have more or less mastered BreadStorm, I use it all the time to enter favorite recipes, including from bread books I have had for years or to create my own, starting with the percentages of flour, water, levain and other ingredients I am planning to use. I can adjust any number at any time and weights and percentages are immediately recalculated for me. For someone who had trouble figuring out hydration before (unless it was 100%), believe me, it is a dream come true. A learning disability made irrelevant... Wow!

Apple-Buckwheat Boule - a bread I baked last week from a BBGA formula entered in BreadStorm

If you are still with me at this point, you are probably curious to see how BreadStorm works. Jacqueline kindly agreed to put together a tutorial for Farine readers. It is copiously illustrated and self-explanatory. On the technical side, please note that BreadStorm has been designed for Mac users (OS X.10.6+). An iPhone version is currently being beta-tested. It makes it possible to scale formulas on the fly if you are away from your computer. It looks pretty neat.
In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I purchased the software at the full price and with my own money. I am not being paid for this review and I will not make a penny off future sales. BreadStorm belongs to Jacqueline and Dado Colussi and to them alone. I just happen to love it!
If you like it, you can either buy the full version as I did or download the free one which enables you to read and scale any BreadStorm formula but not to edit it nor to create your own.