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!

Baking with Whole Grains: a Jeff Hamelman workshop

...at the Baking Education Center in Norwich, Vermont.

I had been looking forward to this workshop for months and I wasn't disappointed. Jeff is not only an amazing baker and a talented writer (which I knew already from his book Bread: a Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes) but also an excellent teacher. He is soft-spoken and kind and a pleasure to study with. But beware, his passion for good bread is catching. If you don't have it when you arrive, you'll be hooked by the time the workshop ends! There were only five of us students which means that we had ample opportunities to ask questions and get answers and that we learned a lot not only from Jeff but from each other. What's more, we had a lot of fun doing it. We mixed and baked several formulas from the booklet we received upon arrival, such as...

Carrot Walnut Bread Brown Rice Bread Vollkornbrot

an all-rye bread for which we used this gorgeous starter:

(Jeff has had his rye starter for more than 26 years and during all this time, it has been fed twice a day, seven days a week. I wasn't kidding when I said he was passionate about bread-making!)

Miche Oatmeal Bread

..etc., as well as crackers and lavash (which I forgot to photograph) and Jeff gave us innumerable tips along the way such as:

• How to check whether or not one has forgotten to put in the yeast (you take a little bit of your dough and you drop it in water. If it rises to the surface, the yeast is there)
• How to calculate the friction factor for your mixer (click here for the answer)
• What value should you give to the friction factor when you plan to do an autolyse (click here to find out)
• How to determine if a preferment is ready or not (all preferments should dome and be about ready to collapse. If they are concave, then next time lower the water temperature, shorten the fermentation time, if possible, and/or use less yeast)
• Never do an autolyse with a rye or a challah-type dough (rye dough wants to ferment quickly so the dough doesn’t over-acidify, hence an autolyse is unwarranted. And challah, an enriched and sweetened dough, wouldn’t benefit—it’s pretty highly mixed intentionally, so considerations about the carotenoids don’t apply)
• How do you know when fresh yeast is really fresh (it should be crumbly and break open just as a fresh mushroom)
• It is better to fold a weak dough (whole grain doughs are weak by definition) on the bench than inside a container (it gives it more strength), etc.

All this info is very valuable and I am glad to have it at hand but what I found personally most helpful is that, on the second day, Jeff had each of us devise a formula that would be used, on the third and final day, to mix and bake a 5 kg batch of dough. We wrote out the formulas, made a list of ingredients and Michele (from the Baking Center) went shopping for us and brought back everything we needed. If you read this, Michele and Susan, thank you very much for your help as well as for the lovely meals! Sandra made a beautiful pumpkin-sage bread...

Monesa's contribution was a fragrant Roasted Red Pepper loaf...

Lori made lovely roasted butternut and onion loaves and rolls...

...and Bill contributed a scrumptious almond-cherry Celtic bread...

As for me, I baked a pear-cardamom-ginger bread...

...which I had made a few times before at home, always winging it (a pinch of this, a fistful of that) and which had always come out fine, maybe because I never made more than a 2-lb batch and knew exactly what to use and in what amount. However writing down the formula was a different proposition and I am mortified to say that this time, the bread came out awful. We didn't get to taste it at the Baking Center: since it was leavened with natural starter with no added yeast, it rose slowly and was baked last. Consequently it was still too hot to cut open when class ended and each of us just took a warm loaf home. I don't know what Jeff and the other students did with their loaves (I suspect they will be too kind to say) but I know mine went straight into the trashcan. It literally reeked of cardamom (a spice I normally love). When I make this bread at home, I use just one pinch but there, silly me, I went for 1%. I should have realized that it was way way too much but I didn't stop to think. What I like is that Jeff didn't say: are you sure you are not going over with the percentage of ground cardamom? He didn't even raise an eyebrow. He let me go on with the formula as I had written it and I am grateful that he did because now I know better than to eyeball percentages for assertive ingredients such as spices. What I should have done is throw 5 pinches of cardamom in a bowl (since one pinch is fine for 5 times less dough), weigh the result, and then calculate the percentage. Believe me, next time I will. That bread is one of our favorites. I was planning to give it to the Man to take to the office when I got home and was very disappointed to have to throw it away (so was he, poor guy). However I liked the way my miche Pointe-à-Callière came out. Small comfort, I know, but better than nothing...

And as soon as I am over the cardamom shock, I'll make the bread again and post the recipe. It is really a good bread when you remember that your brain is one of the main ingredients!

Friction factor and autolyse

• My question: How do you calculate the value to give to the friction factor when you are planning to do an autolyse?For instance here on my mixer I use a friction factor of 22 for the amount of dough I usually make (2 lbs). If I do an autolyse, since the temperature in my house is on the cool side (between 62 and 64 during the cold months), I know the dough is going to cool as it waits for the autolyse to be over. Is there a rule of thumb to apply to the calculation?
• Jeff's reply: I don’t know any firm rule of thumb about the friction factor for autolyse—of course the coolness or warmness of the environment will have a greater or lesser impact. That said, it’s something we have to work out for our own environment, and likely the friction factor will change with the seasons consequently. I generally go between 12 and 15˚F

How to calculate the friction factor for your mixer

For more info on how to obtain the desired dough temperature, please click here.

To calculate your mixer's friction factor (i.e. the amount by which mixing increases the dough temperature, an important value to take into consideration when figuring out what water temperature to use), the easiest way, according to Jeff, is as follows:

1. Write down the temperatures of the air, the water (using water at between 65 and 75 F) and the flour prior to mixing a straight dough (that is, without preferments. If using a preferment such as a poolish, you'll need to record its temperature as well)
2. Mix dough as usual
3. Take the dough temperature
4. If the dough temperature is for instance 76F, then multiply 76 by 3 (since we already know the temperatures of three of the elements to take into consideration), in this case: 228 (if using a preferment, multiply by 76 x 4)
5. Then substract the air, flour and water temperatures (as well as the preferment temperature if using)
6. What's left is the temperature increase resulting from the friction, in other words the value of the friction factor for your mixer.

It is good to remember that:

• The more dough there is in the bowl of the mixer, the lower the friction factor
• Wetter doughs (for instance ciabatta dough) generate less friction than dry doughs (such as challah dough), so for ciabatta up the water temperature by 5 F (do the opposite for challah).