Barley & Wine Crackers

Dawn Woodward, owner of Evelyn's Crackers in Toronto, Canada, and the author of this recipe baked at the Kneading Conference West 2012: inspired by the flavors of Greek biscotti and Baco Noir, an Ontario wine, they are are among her favorites although she no longer offers them for sale.

They can be baked as sheets and broken off in odd pieces after baking or they can be pre-cut with a pizza cutter and separated neatly afterwards. Your choice... I tried both and I thought the triangles were prettier and really not much more work but it is a matter of personal preference. Either way, they come out crispy and flavorful. The fragrance of the red wine is clearly discernable, boosted by the hint of exotic spices and the heat of the black pepper: I can understand getting addicted.
Probably written with a crowd in mind, the recipe printout distributed at the Conference would have yielded way too many crackers, so I simply halved everything and still got plenty. Also it may have contained a typo: when I added up the weights of all the liquids, I found that it called for more liquids than solids which doesn't seem the way to go for crackers. So I added in more flour. I used white whole wheat instead of regular whole wheat. I decreased by one third the amount of spice but you can add it back if you like really bold flavors. What follows is my adaptation of Dawn's recipe.

Ingredients:

• 700 g white whole wheat flour (I used Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill's)* 
• 165 g barley flour (I used Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill's)
• 20 g fine sea salt
• 10 g quatre-épice blend (or you can mix and match cinnamon, black pepper and clove according to your taste)
• 75 g red wine (all I had left) + 50 g water (or 125 g red wine, if you have it)
• 125 g extra-virgin olive oil
• 20 g wildflower honey
• 450 g water, at room temperature

Method:

1. Mix together all the dry ingredients in a large bowl
2. Combine all the liquids
3. Create a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the liquids while continuously stirring
4. When the mixture gets too thick to stir, turn out onto the table and knead until smooth and soft (Dawn notes that the dough will be pliable but slightly clay-like due to the barley flour)
5. Let rest 10 minutes then divide in 50 g balls and roll out into long ovals (Dawn suggests 75 g but when I rolled out the bigger balls, I got ovals that were too long for my half-sheet baking pans). Another option is to divide the dough in 150g balls and roll it out directly onto parchment paper 
6. Optional: dock or prick all over with a fork (I found the crackers baked more evenly that way) and pre-cut in desired shape with a pizza cutter
7. Place on parchment or bake directly on tiles in pre-heated 375°F/191°C oven
8. Bake until crisp (start checking after 10 minutes)
9. Cool on a rack
10. Enjoy!

* I used to bake a lot more with white whole wheat flour when I first introduced whole grain breads to my family but I had pretty much stopped doing so a couple of years ago: I found it too bland and by then everyone had gotten used to the fact that I would put in some whole grain in most breads and had actually learned to enjoy the taste.
But then I discovered Fairhaven's white whole wheat flour: it is still very mild (certainly not as flavorful as some of the red wheats I love so much) but it is speckled with bran which makes it both beautiful and fiber-rich and I find it a good substitute for all-purpose flour in many recipes where wheat doesn't play a starring role.
I realize many of you live too far away to have access to this particular flour but there may be a mill in your neighborhood or a natural food store selling bulk artisanal flours and it might be worth a look in case in case you'd like to try your hand at baking with stone-milled white whole wheat.
As for me, I like supporting my local mill, mostly because the miller, Kevin Christensen, is committed to organic grain: he is a firm believer in sustainable agriculture and by sustainable agriculture, he means organic farming. Living right on the Washington Coast as he does, he witnesses first-hand the damages chemical run-offs cause to fragile marine and river ecosystems: it happens regularly that beaches are closed and shellfish harvesting prohibited because of toxic algae blooms. So he works hand in hand with farmers and bakers to promote the demand for organic grains as a way to support healthy farmlands. That is a goal I can relate to.

These barley & wine crackers are being sent to Susan for Yeastspotting.

Finnish Barley Bread (Ohrarieska)

This barley bread is one of the flatbreads Naomi Duguid baked at the Kneading Conference West last month and possibly my favorite (although the Pugliese sponge bread* is a close contestant). The recipe is adapted from the inspiring book she wrote with Jeffrey Alford, Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker's Atlas.
Naomi first tasted this bread one summer night in the far north of Finland as an after-sauna snack and in her introduction to the recipe, she says it is delicious, chewy and very versatile. It contains no wheat flour, only pearl barley and whole barley flour and it is enriched with buttermilk.
Like Naomi, we had it with butter and jam accompanied by strong black coffee but at lunch, the day after, it proved perfect with leftover baked tomatoes (the tomatoes had been roasted with garlic, herbs, Parmesan cheese and panko crumbs with a drizzle of olive oil).

I too have cherished memories of white summer nights by lakesides in Finland, a long long time ago. I remember rye bread though, not barley, maybe because we didn't travel as far north as Naomi: she says that spring barley can be grown in even colder climates than winter ryes and on the evening she discovered ohrarieska, she was beyond the Artic Circle. 
So to me barley is more evocative of Scotland (where I have yet to go) but where I traveled extensively in my imagination (not to mention through the centuries) via the Outlander series of novels by Diane Gabaldon. Chick lit it may be but oh so gripping! For the record I don't love all the books in the series equally and I have especially strong negative feelings about the last one (An Echo in the Bone) in which I thought the plot and characters were way out of kilter (I disliked the title too). But the novels still offer a fantastic reading experience for those of us who are willing to (seriously) suspend disbelief and they do feature barley! One of these days, I'll have to try my hand at Jocasta's auld-country bannocks.
I must say that I have yet to meet a male reader who likes the series but I can tell you from reading the books in airports, in trains or in buses (in a pre-e-reader era) that many women feel very strongly about it: it happened several times that perfect strangers leaned towards me and shared the love. What fun!
So yes, barley, books, Scotland and now Finland: this baker's atlas is slowly filling in... Thank you, Naomi and Diana!

Ingredients:  (for one loaf, about 8 inches in diameter)

• 430 g pearl barley
• 482 g buttermilk (I used cultured)
• 226 g water
• 270 g barley flour (I used Fairhaven's)
• 4 g baking soda
• 10 g salt (could be bumped up to 14 g, depending on taste)

Method:

1. Combine pearl barley and buttermilk in a bowl and let soak overnight
2. Pre-heat the oven to 350°F/177°C
3. Lightly oil and flour an 8-inch cast-iron skillet
4. Add water to the buttermilk-barley mixture, then transfer to a blender and blend until the barley is well pulverized
5. Return the batter to the bowl, add the barley flour, soda and salt, and mix well
6. Turn the batter out into the skillet
7. Bake in the center of the oven for 50 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to cool before slicing

The Finnish Barley Bread is going to Susan for this week's issue of YeastSpotting.

* The recipe for the Pugliese sponge bread is to be found in Homebaking (another of the books Naomi wrote with Jeffrey Alford).

Naomi Duguid: Bread Over Time

Meeting Naomi Duguid in person at the Kneading Conference West 2012 was a moving moment: she has been an iconic presence in my life since I bought Flatbread and Flavors: A Baker's Atlas when it first came out many many years ago: here was a woman who dared. She dared to travel to the most remote corners of the world and observe cooks and bakers at work, collecting recipes. She did what most of us tied to a regular day job could only dream of and dream I did, a true armchair traveler, savoring each of her books as they came out.
Well, it turned out that she was just as moved to meet us, her readers and bread fellows. When she reached the podium to deliver the keynote address, there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them and whispered in the mike: "Don't mind me, emotion always comes first! It'll be over in a minute" and it was. But however quickly brought under control, her emotion added a deep resonance to what she had to tell us.
We have established that we all care about bread, she said. Now how do we translate that into action? Well, a time-proven way of looking forward is to look back.
We are standing on the shoulders of hunters, gatherers, growers, people who have looked for ways to transform grain into food that would sustain themselves and their communities. Solving the problem meant survival. Eventually they may have thought of using a rock (or a mortar and pestle) to make flour, so that they could make bread. They brewed beer, they rolled couscous, they made leavened or unleavened flatbreads. Perhaps they built an oven.
All of these people were deeply involved in and committed to the local production of grain.
Today as well finding ways to use grain to sustain life in our communities may make the difference between surviving or not. But how do you give "bread" (loosely defined) its value again? When you have no respect for the process, you have no respect for the product. How do we get back the sense of the special that we lost in the commodification of grain? 
As soon as you scale up production to a large scale, you dumb down the product. Predictability becomes the goal and the unpredictability of nature the problem to solve. Commercial bakers want their flour to be consistent, so we produce the lowest extraction flour where nothing alive remains. We lose flavors and varietals. We don't know the taste of the grain grown across the road.
Let's reverse the trend. Let's go back to our homes and bakeries and add at least two products that contain whole grains to our repertoires and at least one item largely made with another grain than wheat. A world of flavors is waiting...
In Tibet, whole grain hulless barley is roasted, then ground into tsampa, a very fine flour. This flour is then mixed with hot tea. With butter and salt added, it becomes a kind of instant bread. The story of tsampa is a tribute to human creativity, ingenuity and survival instinct in an unyielding environment.

Let's bring back respect in our relationship to grain: respect for the farmer, the miller, the baker; respect for our customers (be they our families or the people who actually buy our breads). Let's move forward with that relationship by incorporating whole grains into our baking and using other grains than wheat whenever we have a chance. 

***

The above is a synopsis of Naomi's address based on the notes I took as she was speaking. If any of you readers were there listening to her and think I forgot something important, please let me know (mc.farine@gmail.com) and I'll add it in.
Meanwhile I would like to share a story: when I was in elementary school in Paris, I had no access to a library. My school had no books to lend that I can remember. If our arrondissement had a public library (and I am pretty sure it did), we were never taken there. At my grandparents' house (where we spent most weekends), I had all of my father's and uncle's childhood books at my disposal and read and re-read them avidly but they were mostly boy books. At home I had girl books which were given to me for my birthdays or at Christmas. Those too, I read and re-read avidly. Among those, Daughter of the Mountains by Louise Rankin, a book about a young Tibetan girl which I obviously read in French (I had no English at all then). I remember my brothers teasing me mercilessly about the title (Momo, Fille des Montagnes) which, I admit, sounded a bit silly, even to my ten-year old ears.
But mostly I remember loving the book with a passion and reading it dozens of times over from cover to cover. To this day, I can taste the tsampa that Momo carried in a little pouch around her neck and survived on during her long and arduous search for her stolen puppy: it was so vividly described that I literally yearned for it.
As Naomi was talking, I had the feeling that some lose threads in the tapestry of life were weaving themselves together for me. I may never follow in Naomi's actual footsteps to far reaches of the world but I can certainly answer her call and spurred on by the taste and smell of the tsampa I remember eating vicariously in a beloved childhood book, open my baking to new flavors. I owe it to the little Parisian girl who grew up dreaming of life in the high mountains of Tibet...

Related posts:

• Kneading Conference West 2012
• Finnish Barley Bread (ohrarieska)

Barley Bread

For as long as I can remember, I have been a barley girl. Of course it helped that in France when I was a kid,  a sucre d'orge (literally candy made with barley sugar) was a treat. Tubular and fashionably skinny, always tightly wrapped, most often in cellophane but occasionally in shiny silver paper which gave no clue to the flavor inside, known for having soothed many of life's minor woes and pains for generations of children, it held a mysterious appeal. By contrast, the plump sucette (lollipop), always clad in revealing colors and coiffed with a bouffant paper twist, seemed resolutely modern. Probably thanks to its down-to-earth chubbiness, it was often a kid's first choice at the boulangerie-confiserie (bakery-candy store) but not mine.
Since I spent a large part of my childhood reading and re-reading the books which had belonged to my dad and my uncle in their youth (they had won them at school for being top students), I kept solid footing in an enchanted other world (of which the black and white illustrations offered tantalizing glimpses) and, in my own, I looked for and cherished surviving signs of a vanishing past. Sucres d'orge (thus called because barley water -soon to be replaced by glucose- was the original sweetener) were therefore my favorites and I spent many a drizzly or blustery Sunday afternoon with my nose in one of the characteristic red books and a sucre d'orge in my pocket (my parents were not liberal with candy but since I never had a sweet tooth,  looking at it afforded me more pleasure than eating it and a single one went a long way).

Many years and a move across the ocean later, I discovered that orge (barley) could actually appear on the table in a soup or a barlotto (a risotto made with barley instead of rice) or simply as a grain and when I did, I fell in love all over again.  So when a Baking With Barley class was offered last year at Kneading Conference West, I knew I wanted to attend.
The class was taught jointly by Leslie Mackie (owner of Macrina Bakery in Seattle) and Andrew Ross, a cereal chemist at Oregon State University (OSU). Leslie has been experimenting with barley from the time she first started Macrina:  she liked using locally grown grain and, at the time, that meant mostly barley. She now puts it in monkey bread (for an added touch of sweetness), in Francese bread and in Pugliese bread (an exceptionally tasty miche for which she was in the process of developing a formula).
As for Andrew - who is not only a scientist but also a passionate baker - he has developed formulas for various barley breads within the framework of the barley project: he brought barley baguettes and barley miches to the class and demonstrated barley pitas and bretzels. I was hooked (especially when I discovered that my local mill made a beautiful whole grain barley flour).
I was hoping to be able to go and observe Andrew at work at OSU in Corvalis and to do a full Meet the Baker post on him afterwards. But it didn't work out according to plan. He was unexpectedly swamped with work when we showed up at the agreed-upon date last month and there was no way he could fit baking into his schedule on that particular day. As for us, we were traveling through Corvalis on our way back home from the coast and we couldn't possibly come back later in the week. He very kindly showed me his beautiful lab/bakery and answered the questions I had prepared but I made it quick as I knew he had to go back to work.  I would still love to see him bake and also to hear more about the relationship between the University and the local farmer though but it will have to wait. Maybe the stars will align better on another visit to Oregon!
Meanwhile Andrew gave me a few useful infos and pointers on baking with barley:

• The preferred barley is a hulless variety, also called naked barley (the hull falls off when the grain is harvested): it has the best nutritional profile
• Barley contains a soluble fiber called beta-glucan which has been shown to slow glucose absorption and is thought to help lower blood cholesterol
• People with celiac disease or high sensitivity to gluten should not eat barley: it contains protases which are very close to gluten
• A 100% barley starter yields a very acidic bread. Not pleasant
• The higher the percentage of barley in relation to wheat, the less extensible the dough
• For a better crumb, it is best to use barley flour in conjunction with high-gluten flour
• Using a stiff starter also helps compensate for the lesser amount of gluten in the dough
• To keep the dough from sticking, use more water or flour than you normally would 
• Increase dough hydration by 5 to 10% if making a 50% barley-50% wheat bread
• If using a high tpercentage of barley, it is best to underproof a little
• A good rule of thumb for flavor, nutrition and extensibility is to use a total of 20 to 30% of barley in the  dough
• Barley flat breads and tortillas are much easier to make than raised breads.

For this barley bread, I used the Whey Sourdough recipe from Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's How to Make Bread, a book I already blogged about here and here. At Emmanuel's suggestion (when we talked on the phone back in April after I found an error in one of the recipes), I substituted half Greek yogurt and half milk for the whey (which I didn't have) and, mindful of Andrew's recommendation, I replaced 20% of the white flour by whole grain barley flour (hulless variety).  The resulting bread was delicate and flavorful with a slightly fermented taste (very different from regular sourdough) which I find utterly seductive. Not a memory-trigger like the old-fashioned sucre d'orge but definitely a keeper and maybe a memory-maker for the kids and grand-kids in our life! What could be sweeter than that?

Ingredients:

• 160 g white sourdough starter
• 150 g milk (I used 2% milkfat)
• 150 g plain Greek yogurt (mine was 0% fat but regular fullfat Greek yogurt would work fine)
• 200 g all-purpose unbleached flour (Hadjiandreou uses bread flour with a higher gluten percentage but I had none on hand. I might have gotten a more open crumb if I had used that)
• 120 g  all-purpose unbleached flour (again he uses bread flour)
• 100 g barley flour
• 10 g salt (Hadjiandreou uses 8 g)

Method: (adapted from the book)

1. In a large mixing bowl, mix starter, yogurt and milk with a wooden spoon until well combined
2. Add 200 g of all-purpose flour and mix well. Cover and let ferment overnight in a cool place (it should show tiny bubbles 12 hours later when ready)
3. In a smaller bowl, mix 120 g of all-purpose flour, the barley flour and the salt
4. Add to fermented mix and mix by hand until it comes together
5. Cover and let stand for 10 minutes
6. After 10 minutes, stretch and fold the dough inside the bowl by going twice around the bowl with four stretches and foldings at each 90° turn (8 stretches/foldings in all)
7. Let rest 10 minutes again, covered. Repeat twice
8. Complete a fourth stretch and fold cycle and let the dough rest one hour, covered
9. Ligthly flour a work surgace and put the dough on it
10. Shape into a smooth, rounded disc
11. Dust a proofing basket with flour and lay the dough inside
12. Let it rise until double the size (which will take between 3 and 6 hours)
13. When ready, transfer dough to a non-preheated Dutch oven (using a large piece of parchment paper as a sling to carry the dough) and replace the lid on the Dutch oven
14. Bake in non-preheated oven set at 475°F/246°C for 35 minutes
15. Remove Dutch oven from oven and bread from Dutch oven (exercising caution as both will be very hot)
16. Replace bread in oven, turn oven temperature down to 435°F/224°C and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the boule is golden and makes a satisfying hollow sound when thumped on the bottom
17. Enjoy!

The Barley Bread can also be baked the usual way in a hot oven. I just find the unheated Dutch oven/oven method works wonders with boules and it saves having to preheat the oven for an extended length of time.

The Barley Bread is going to Susan for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Local Loaf (Hazelnut Cider Barley Bread)

Do you sometimes wish you could eat the landscape? I do. Like babies, I need to taste the world to apprehend it. If that means I am stuck at a pretty archaic stage of personality development, well, so be it! I will readily grant you that I am the oral type. My grandfather probably had a lot to do with it: he had had two sons, one of whom, my uncle, had tragically died of tuberculosis at age 19. My father gave him three grandsons and one granddaughter. My grandfather had never had a little girl in his life before. He fell hard for me.

To be closer to us (we lived in Paris), he and my grandmother moved from Southwestern France (where they were born and had lived all their lives) to Normandy. We went and visited them every weekend, all year-round and in all kinds of weather. Which means that they saw a great deal of us and often while my brothers were playing war games in the wonderfully half-tamed garden, he took me walking. He had made a little wooden basket for me and when we were not looking for eggs in the chicken coop, we wandered the nearby woods and meadows. But we never walked just for exercise or leisure.

Our neighbor, the farmer, had given us access to the land across the road where he pastured his cows and there was a wood at the end of the bramble-hedged lane that went up the hill: I learned to gather baby dandelions (so utterly delicious in a salad that I still yearn for them almost six decades later) and button-mushrooms in the fields, chanterelles and boleti in the forest, blackberries, wild apples, hazelnuts and walnuts on the way back. I can still recall the puckering taste of sloes and the black stain the walnuts left on my hands. And then of course, there were the fruit and vegetables my grandfather grew, the chickens and the rabbits that he raised and the ducks we bought from the farmer, not to mention the milk we went to get every evening in metal milk pans.

The only thing I didn't really care for was the bread which we bought from a baker who made his rounds in an old van. On the baker's days off, my grandfather (who by then was already over 80) rode his Solex (a motorized bicycle) three miles away to another village to get it. It wasn't good either (I guess I was born and raised at the time bread in France took a precipitous turn for the worse).

Well, these days are long gone but for the past couple of months, they were somehow brought back as I wandered the lanes around our new home enjoying the sun (yes, summer can be gorgeous in the Northwest) and picking blackberries. The blackberries were nothing like the ones I remembered from my childhood though. For a start they were generally sweeter (maybe because August had been so sunny) but also, of course, this being America, they were twice the size. But I filled buckets after buckets. I also ate a lot of them.

Walking, eating and picking and fighting my way out of countless thorny grips, I was listening to a French recorded book on my iPod. That book is one of my favorites. I have read it (in print) over and over to the point that I can often guess what is coming at any given moment. It was written in the early years of the 20th century and the action (such as it is) takes place mostly in and around Paris. The writing is gorgeously descriptive and listening to its music along these brambly lanes in the Pacific Northwest had the strange effect of knitting together the past and the present for me. The cadences of the language and the fragrance of the blackberries slowly wove themselves into a new whole and that's when I knew with absolute certainty that moving here had been the right call.

Just as I can recall with uncanny precision the exact taste of my childhood, I started to yearn for the taste of the landscape around our new home. We joined a CSA where, wonderfully, part and parcel of the weekly share is the freedom to go to the fields and pick the greens, herbs and flowers we want (out came the little wooden basket which I had cherished but not used all these years). We visit farmers' markets around our home and recently, as you know if you read my previous post, I went to the Kneading Conference West 2011 where I met local bakers, farmers and millers. I bought local organic all-purpose flour from Fairhaven Mill. Having attended Leslie Mackie and Andrew Ross' inspiring presentation on baking with barley, I also purchased local organic barley flour.

I was at the farmers' market the other day when the sight of gorgeous hazelnuts gave me the idea of baking the flavors of the surrounding landscape into what I love best, bread. I purchased some hazelnuts as well as a quart of honeycrisp unpasteurized cider and I went home. I had previously bought delicately flavored blackberry honey from a local beekeeper who sells through the CSA but I decided against caramelizing the hazelnuts with it. I didn't want a sweet bread. I wanted a clean-tasting loaf where the soul of the levain would soar to the accompanying music of the roasted hazelnuts and the tang of the cider. I wanted a bread, not a dessert. And that's what I got.

The fermented taste is mysterious and almost inebriating in its complexity. The flavors of the barley and the cider do not really shine through but they definitely contribute to the whole as by themselves, wheat and hazelnuts would never have yielded such aromas.

I imagine there are endless variations on the theme of the local loaf and I might look for others as the seasons change. I'd love to know which ones you would come up with to define your own landscape if you felt so inclined and didn't mind sharing.

Meanwhile I am sitting by the fire staring at the rain which has finally come and thinking of the many ways in which my corner of the Pacific Northwest reminds me of Normandy. As for the blackberry honey, it is incomparably delicious on a slice of the landscape...

Ingredients (for 2 loaves):

• 585 g all-purpose flour
• 60 g barley flour
• 387 g water
• 97 g unpasteurized honeycrisp cider (*see note below)
• 194 g liquid levain (at 100% hydration)
• 100 g hazelnuts (roasted for 10 minutes, rubbed together to remove skins and roughly chopped)
• 13 g sea salt
• * Note: what this farmer calls cider is basically apple juice. It has no alcoholic contents whatsoever. What I did though was to keep it unopened in the refrigerator for a week before using it. By then it had reached the stage where, with the boost of the levain fermentation during the slow rising of the dough, it started fermenting in earnest. At least that's how I explain the slightly boozy taste of this bread. Maybe a scientist would see it differently...

Method:

1. Mix flours and water until combined and let rest for 45 minutes (autolyse)
2. Add levain and salt and mix until medium soft consistency is achieved
3. Add cider and mix until absorbed (I had to put the dough into the mixer at that stage and mix on high for a couple of minutes until the dough came off the sides of the bowl)
4. Add the hazelnuts and mix on slow for a few minutes until combined
5. Set the dough to ferment for as long as it takes for it to stop springing back quickly when poked with a finger
6. Divide the dough in two, pre-shape as boules, shape and score as desired (I did one boule, one batard)
7. Pre-heat oven to 470°F/243°C
8. When loaves are fully proofed (the dough no longer springs back quickly when poked), bake at 470°F/243°C with steam for 10 minutes, lower temperature to 450°F/232°C, bake another 10 minutes, turn the loaves around if necessary and bake another 12 to 15 minutes or until their internal temperature reaches about 210°F/99°C
9. Cool on a rack.

Printable recipe

The Local Loaf is going to Susan's Wild Yeast for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Crackers

Barley & Wine Crackers
Buckwheat Crackers