Jeffrey Hamelman: Tunisian savory flatbread with 100% high-extraction flour (Grain Gathering 2015)

Related posts:

• Grain Gathering 2015: five flatbreads by Jeffrey Hamelman
• The Grain Gathering 2015

In Jeff's own words, "this is a good basic flatbread formula. It is easy to make and quite versatile, supporting a great variety of fillings.
The 85%-extraction flour gives it more color and flavor than white flour. If you don't have access to high-extraction flour, you can either mix some whole-wheat flour with your white flour or sift whole-wheat flour to remove some of the bran and use that.

Method:

1. Mix all the ingredients together to a smooth, well-kneaded ball
2. Place the dough into a bowl, cover with plastic and leave to rest at room temperature for at least 8 hours
3. Divide dough into 60 gram balls
4. Flatten with your palms, then use a rolling pin to roll the dough out into a flat thin disc
5. Lightly water the rim, and place any desired filling onto the lower half. Fold the top half over to seal
6. Bake in a very hot oven (at least 600°F) until the bottom shows brown spots (1 or 2 minutes)
7. Flip and bake for about 1 more minute
8. Cover with cloth to keep pliable. Slide the cloth into a plastic bag
9. The flatbreads can be baked ahead of time for later reheating
10. To reheat: cover in aluminum foil and bake for about 5 minutes

Tips:

• You don't have to round those quite as tight as the Lebanese flatbread. Light-rounding (just a few seconds) works fine.
• When the dough has relaxed, turn it into a nice little disc in your hands then use a rolling pin to make it a 6-inch circle (start with circle and stretch it to an oval, then turn in 90° and stretch into an oval again)
• Brush or spray bottom half of the disc lightly with water (more isn't better!)
• Fill and make sure you get a good seal. Make sure it is dry.
• If baking in a home oven, bake at 500° F and flip the flatbreads.

The possibilities for fillings are practically unlimited. Below are the two Jeff demoed during the workshop.

Spicy Tomato Filling

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• 1 or 2 jalapeño pepper, chopped
• 2 tsp cumin seeds, toasted
• 2 tsp coriander, ground
• 2 tsp fennel seeds
• ½ tsp salt
• Dried red pepper, hot (to taste)
• 1 28-oz can of plum tomatoes
• Parsley, chopped (to taste)

Method:

1. Heat the olive oil
2. Add the garlic, onion, green pepper and jalapeño pepper
3. Sauté until onion is translucent, about 6 to 8 minutes
4. Add the cumin, coriander, fennel, salt and red pepper, and mix it all together
5. Add the plum tomatoes and cook until it thickens somewhat, stirring often
6. Add the chopped parsley. Check for seasoning
7. Cool the topping (it can be made up to 3 days ahead)
8. Spread lightly on the bottom half of a disc of flatbread. Fold the top over and bake as per the instructions above

Note: Baked flatbreads can be kept in foil and reheated. Any leftover filling can be used in casseroles, eaten with pasta, etc.

Feta Filling

• 1 jalapeño pepper, chopped
• 2 scallions, chopped
• 8 oz. feta cheese
• Cilantro leaves, to taste

Jeffrey Hamelman: Lebanese flatbread with savory filling (Grain Gathering 2015)

Related posts:

• Grain Gathering 2015: five flatbreads by Jeffrey Hamelman
• The Grain Gathering 2015

Jeff drew the inspiration for this bread from Man'oushé: Inside the Street Corner Lebanese Bakery, a book by Barbara Abdeni Massaad with gorgeous photography by Raymond Yazbeck. The man'oushé is Lebanon's favorite flatbread and Massaad travelled all over the country to collect every recipe she could find. The book is an eloquent portrait of a people through its bread (and its tastebuds). Sit down with it if you can and allow yourself to be carried away to the land of milk and honey...

The dough
Yield: 30 little breads (or turnovers as Massaad calls them in the book)
(Jeffrey Hamelman used King Arthur flours: Sir Galahad all-purpose and Round Table pastry.)
Method

1. The day before the bake, mix the dough to moderate gluten development (desired dough temperature: 75°F)
2.  Bulk ferment for one hour, then divide in 75 g pieces
3. Round the rolls strongly and refrigerate overnight, covered
4. Next day, roll the dough pieces into circles about 5" in diameter
5. Place spinach filling in the center of each dough piece, being careful to leave a rim of dough about ½" wide all around
6. Lightly brush or spritz water onto the rim
7. Gather the dough into 3 equal segments, making a tight seam with each segment
8. Make sure the edges are well-pinched together
9. Let the dough relax for about 30 minutes
10. Brush each piece lightly with olive oil and bake for about 8 minutes
11. The dough should be pliable after the bake; take precautions not to overbake it.

The filling 

Ingredients (for  approximately 30 pies)

• 1035 g spinach leaves
• 45 g salt
• 260 g onion, minced
• 40 g sumac
• 70 kg lemon juice
• 207 g olive oil
• 175 g feta cheese

Method

1. Add the salt to the spinach leaves and rub thoroughly together. Let sit for 1 hour
2. Rinse well under cold water
3. Squeeze out as much water as possible (the spinach must be dry)
4. Chop it coarsely
5. Mix together all the filling ingredients
6. Put approximately 85 g into the center of each disc of Lebanese flatbread dough and finish as detailed in the recipe.

Tips:

• The dough might fight you when you try to roll it out, so do it in stages: flatten it some, let it rest 30 seconds while you flatten another one, pick it up again. It will have slackened.
• The triangle-shaping is a bit difficult to master. Once you have put some filling at the center of the dough disc and brushed the perimeter with water, the important thing to remember is to pick-up the edges of the dough at NE and NW (not E and W), so that you can bring the two northern edges together at the center then bring up the bottom part.
• Make sure the edges are well sealed.

I made the recipe yesterday here at my house and had no problem with the shaping. Of course the breads (Assaad calls them turnovers in her book and I guess they look more like turnovers than they do flatbreads) didn't turn out as pretty as Jeff's but then I didn't expect them to, especially on the first try and probably not ever! I did adapt the formula a bit. In the book Assaad says you can replace half of the flour with whole-wheat flour. I used about 70% whole-wheat flour. Here is my revised formula (for 12 turnovers):

Jeff also mentioned that the author was coming out with a new book. I looked online. The book is called Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate our Shared Humanity and it will be published in the United States in October this year. According to the website, all profits from the sales will go to non-profit organizations to help fund food-relief efforts for displaced populations.

Now you probably don't need another soup recipe (not even from contributing celebrity chefs and/or cookbook authors such as Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi, Anthony Bourdain, Alice Waters, Paula Wolfert, Claudia Roden, Chef Greg Malouf, etc.) and even less another cookbook, but this is about feeding people who have been displaced from their home by horrific events and find themselves powerless to meet their family's most basic needs just as winter is coming.
Ordering Soup for Syria for yourself and/or as a present to the cooks in your life is an easy way to extend a helping hand. A hand holding a steaming bowl of soup. Imagine thousands of bakers' hands reaching out, holding bowls of steaming soup. With flatbreads on the side of course...

Jeffrey Hamelman's Socca (Grain Gathering 2015)

Related posts:

• Grain Gathering 2015: five flatbreads by Jeffrey Hamelman
• The Grain Gathering 2015

Here is another flatbread recipe that Jeff kindly shared from his book, Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes, 2nd edition. And, in my humble opinion, one of the easiest, simplest and tastiest flatbreads you can make at home.
"Socca is a regional specialty of the area around Nice in southern France. It is also popular in Genoa, Italy, where it is known as farinata." I have never had it in Nice but we had bought some off a street vendor in Genoa five years ago when we visited Liguria. A trip I well remember as we had to cut it short: my mom -who lived in Paris- had been taken ill and hospitalized.
We hadn't gotten the call yet when we shared the smoking slice of pure bliss. I remember there was no rosemary or other topping: just salt and a fair amount of pepper and it was perfect. Sorry, no picture, which tells you how excited (and hungry) we were. Jeff's is just as good. Try it!
I know I will, first chance I get (that is as soon as the heat wave abates where we live and we can stand lighting the oven again).

Method:

1. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl
2. Add the water and the olive oil and whisk until smooth
3. Let the batter rest for at least two hours
4. Liberally oil two 14" pizza pans. Heat the pans in the oven
5. When the oil is hot, pour the batter evenly into the pans (the batter should be about ¼" thick)
6. Bake the socca in 500° F oven until it is dark and crispy, 10--15 minutes, depending upon the heat of the oven
7. Finish by broiling the the socca for 3 to 5 minutes until the surface is mottled
8. Cut into rectangles and eat while warm. The top and bottom should be crispy, and the center creamy and moist.

Variations:

. A very light sprinkling of rosemary
. Artichoke hearts that have been steamed or lightly sautéed and thinly sliced
. Niçoise olives
Note: it is best to add the artichokes or the olives a few into the bake so that they don't sink to the bottom.

Tips

• It is a very wet batter. Like water. In fact hydration may need to go up to 250% (depending on the flour)
• Heat the pans to smoking before pouring in the batter
• When done, the socca should be a little crusty on the outside and creamy inside.

The Breads a Baker Brings to Brunch: Larry Lowary's Ryes

Don't you totally love it when a baker friend comes over to eat? Chances are he or she will bring bread and when, as is the case with Larry Lowary (of Tree-Top Baking), he is in full off-season research and development mode and has just spent a couple of days feeding starters, mixing and baking, he might get a bit carried away and arrive at your house with such an array of loaves that you just want to fall at his feet and kiss them. Okay, I am getting a bit carried away myself right here but I was truly thrilled when I saw what was in the big brown paper bag he put on the counter. I knew immediately that I couldn't let him slice into any of these loaves without taking a few pictures first, so that you too can see what a baker bakes when he goes on a rye bender. My only regret is that I didn't take a picture of the bread basket Larry put on the table. It was truly a thing of beauty but by the time I was done with the photo shoot, we were so famished that I couldn't decently keep anyone waiting any longer. I guess we'll have to invite Larry back...

The breads Larry brought (in alphabetical order)

Chad Robertson's Danish Rye

Hanne Risgaard's Spelt Rye

Jeffrey Hamelman's 80% Rye

SFBI's Finnish Rye

In case you are interested in making any or all of these breads to taste them yourself, here are the websites or books where you can find the recipes or formulas:

Chad Robertson's Danish Rye Bread
http://www.foodarts.com/recipes/recipes/15988/danishstyle-rye-bread-rugbrt

Hanne Risgaard's Spelt Rye Bread
Hanne Risgaard, Home Baked: Nordic Recipes and Techniques for Organic Bread and Pastry, p. 134

Jeffrey Hamelman's 80% Sourdough Rye
Jeffrey Hamelman, Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes, p. 213

SFBI's Finnish Rye
http://sfbi.com/images/Finnish_Rye.pdf

Larry, thank you for sharing both your breads and your sources! You are not only a great baker but also (and even more importantly) a wonderful friend. We are privileged to have you in our lives.

Jeff Hamelman on maintaining a rye starter

Jeff Hamelman, author of Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes as well as Bakery Director and Certified Master Baker at the King Arthur Flour Company, to whom I had forwarded a reader's question about maintaining a rye starter, was kind enough to send the following information in reply: "We do feed our cultures twice daily at the King Arthur Bakery, seven times per week. Aren’t those cultures lucky to be in a bakery that requires them to be healthy every day? For maintaining cultures when they are not going to be used daily, each person has to decide for him/herself what approach to take. I know people who bake just on weekends who feed their cultures twice daily every day—that’s a level of commitment I don’t think I could take on! On the other extreme, there are people who proudly make bread with a culture that has been refrigerated and utterly neglected for weeks, and claim that their bread is just fine. This is mentally indigestible to me (the bread is probably pretty indigestible too). We must first and fundamentally acknowledge that our culture is a living environment, and like us, will be in best health with regular meals. That said, it’s just not practical to feed a culture 14 times per week if it is only going to be used once or twice a week. In that case, I would give at least four feeds per week, more if possible, and spread them out to fit one’s schedule. For example, one might feed the culture Monday morning before going to work and then refrigerate it in the evening. Then do the same Wednesday and Friday, and then Friday evening make levain for Saturday baking. I’m kind of making this up as I write, but some sort of regimen like that may be suitable. There are, of course, other considerations, such as time of year, ambient temperature and humidity, and so on, so some adjustments may be necessary along the way. What kinds of adjustments? Well, let’s assume we want the culture to ripen in 12 hours. In winter perhaps our build here in Vermont might be: Mature culture 100 g Flour 150 g Water 90 g After 12 hours, all looks good, the culture has domed nicely and is fully fragrant and ripe. Come summer, the kitchen is so much warmer and more humid that the culture would ripen in eight hours if we continue to use those proportions. We might therefore reduce the amount of mature culture in the build to 50 or 75 grams, or whatever is required so that the culture is mature in 12 hours. As bakers, we have to be very attentive. My good friend James MacGuire always brought his culture with him on vacation, and as he delightfully recounts, he could never stay in the same hotel twice because he had left such a floury mess, not to mention that weird smelling paste that was in the bin. He now has another method—one that I’ve not tried, but James is not just a great master, he is also completely committed to quality, and he wouldn’t do this if it didn’t work: he feeds his culture, maybe a bit stiffer than usual, and then after an hour refrigerates it. It is, of course, unripe at this stage, which means there is a nutrient supply available during the refrigeration phase. I’m sure there are other strategies for long term storage, but there is one important consideration regardless of the method used: once you’ve returned home, give the culture a couple of days at room temperature with two feedings daily to reinvigorate it." Jeff will monitor the comments to this post, so if you have any questions, please feel free to add your grain of salt as we say in French. Thank you, Jeff!