Authors: William Alexander
This was insane. What would possess jeffrey Hamelman, King Arthur Flour’s head baker and one of the most respected baking
instructors in the country, who undoubtedly uses metric measurements in his bakery and his teaching, to give measurements in
tenths of an ounce,
in essence mixing the metric and imperial systems? In fact, what would possess him to give measurements in ounces at all? Probably his editor, who properly pointed out that he was publishing
Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes
in the United States, not the United Kingdom.
Memo to the United States of America:
CAN WE PLEASE, EVERYONE, JUST GO TO THE METRIC SYSTEM AND BE DONE WITH IT?
Weren’t we supposed to do this, like, forty years ago? I remember being prepared for this earth-shattering change when I was in high school, where the metric system was and still is used in science labs. Since virtually all Americans have attended at least some high school, we’ve all been exposed to kilograms by now, and we all know what a two-liter bottle of soda looks like, so what are we waiting for? The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 stated, “It is therefore declared that the policy of the United States shall be to coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system in the United States and to establish a United States Metric Board to coordinate the voluntary conversion to the metric system.” The operative word there is
voluntary.
Americans didn’t want to hear weather forecasts in degrees Celsius or buy gas by the liter. So we simply volunteered not to. President Ronald Reagan, who was probably convinced this was yet another Communist plot to destroy the American way of life, abolished the Metric Board in 1982, leaving the United States standing alone with the super-powers Liberia and Burma as the only nations in the world that haven’t adopted the metric system. Even Canada converted, letting pounds, ounces, and miles go the way of the cubit. Anne was in the country as an exchange student at the time (Why go to, say, Paris or London when you can be an exchange student in
Saskatchewan? must have been her thinking) and tells me they did it cold turkey. One day the meteorologists started giving the temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit, and then one day they simply stopped giving the Fahrenheit, at which point you stopped doing conversions in your head and just started to understand what 21 degrees Celsius felt like.
Meanwhile, here, south of the border, every time I need to tighten a nut, I have to fumble through two sets of nearly identical wrenches—the ones in fractions of an inch, and the ones in millimeters—not knowing which system the hardware was made to. Every time I want to halve or double a recipe, I struggle with fractions and conversions between pounds and ounces. Well, damn it, this week I was adapting the metric system in my own kitchen! Not only that, I was going to start measuring by weight, not volume. After watching Lindsay weigh everything that went into Bobolink’s bread, from the yeast to the firewood, I’d finally seen the light and, heeding the advice of numerous authors and bakers, purchased an inexpensive digital kitchen scale.
The “scoop and sweep” method of measuring flour is at best an estimate, affected by how tightly the flour is packed in the measuring cup and even how much it has settled in the bag. It would turn out that weighing is also easier than measuring. Rather than dipping the measuring cup repeatedly into the canister, leveling off the top with the back of a knife, and switching between different measuring cups to achieve 4⅓ cups flour, it is far quicker simply to place the mixing bowl on the scale, press the Zero (or Tare) button, and pour out flour till it reaches, say, 500 grams. This is especially true with water. Instead of waiting for the liquid to settle, then bending over and peering at the side of the measuring cup, trying to locate the meniscus—the curvature of the water surface caused by attraction of water to the container—just pour out 215 grams.
I had purchased Hamelman’s book after reading on an online bread forum, “I finally got holes!! I used jeffrey Hamelman’s technique of folding!” As for those pesky fractions of an ounce, I converted Hamelman’s peasant bread recipe to grams and was soon ready to fold some dough and make some holes. Not everyone shares my passion for these gas holes, by the way. Some prefer a more even crumb, and I’ll be the first to admit the difficulty of making a tuna fish sandwich on a slice of bread with a gas hole the size of a Buick. Still, some holes would be nice, and not just for texture; I’d read that holes play an important role in drying out the bread by giving the moisture a path out of the loaf. This was good news, for it meant that my two problems—moisture and tight crumb—were intertwined. Solving one would also fix the other.
Hamelman’s folding technique involves
gently
flattening the dough, then folding the sides into the center a couple of times during the first rise, gingerly pressing out the dough to degas it some, but not too much. This represents a departure from traditional bread making, in which we are instructed to leave the dough in a warm, draft -free area for several hours and not touch it, not jostle it, not even breathe on it (until you slam a fist into it just before forming the loaves). The rationale behind folding is that the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the dough suppresses yeast activity; folding both releases some of the gas and exposes the yeast to fresh flour. As for punching down the dough, it seems the last person who’d done that was Julia Child. Bakers today are gentle with their dough, working to redistribute the yeast but not push out all that hard-earned gas.
These explanations made sense, and I’d bounded into the kitchen this Sunday morning with new energy. Energy that it turned out I would need, for this was one exhausting loaf of bread, demanding more attention than a newborn. To follow
Hamelman’s recipe, I’d had to start the day before, letting some dough ferment for sixteen hours on the countertop. Now, on Sunday, after kneading, the folding started. Every fifty minutes. It was like changing diapers.
“Want to go grocery shopping with me?” Anne asked mid-morning.
“Sorry, can’t leave the house.”
Nor did I want to tackle that leaky faucet or start mowing the lawn. I was a prisoner of my kitchen, a hostage to my dough. Eventually I made it to forming the loaf and had a window of seventy-five to ninety minutes before it had to go into the oven, so for the first time all day I could leave the house.
Or have sex. Which is what was on my mind. Makeup sex, specifically. Anne and I had had a fight. The usual thing. I’d been moody all week and giving out the leave-me-be vibe, she was leaving me be, and I was resenting the lack of affection. So she was leaving me
more
be. And so on.
Except this time I’d added a new twist. The episode had started with my saying, “I just want you to know that if Naomi Watts ever offers to marry me, I’m leaving you.” I’d just watched
King Kong
in high def, and if there was an ape in the movie, the one drooling on the sofa didn’t notice.
Anne’s face darkened. “Why do you feel it necessary to tell me this?”
“Why are you upset? I’m joking.”
“No, you’re not.”
Hmm. Her accusation made me a touch uneasy. Had I, like Jimmy Carter, just committed adultery in my heart? Regardless, I have to be careful what I say to Anne. If I comment on something I’m reading in a magazine, say, “Wow, it says that only twenty-seven percent of married people have fantasized about being with someone other than their partner during sex—can you believe
it’s that low?”
*
this starts a wholly unintended cycle of, not exactly suspicion, but upsetting curiosity. Who is Billy thinking of? A co-worker? My sister? My mother? You’d think she’d welcome Naomi Watts in lieu of any of those alternatives.
I should’ve just apologized. I’ll be the first to admit that the comment was dopey and unnecessary (let’s face it, there was no need to forewarn Anne of an event that had no chance of happening), but instead I dug myself in a little deeper.
“Who would
you
run off with?”
“No one.”
“Come on, there must be someone.”
In retrospect, who was she going to say? She wouldn’t know a Brad Pitt from a grapefruit pit. Cary Grant? Rock Hudson? All of the real male heartthrobs of Hollywood are either dead or gay. Or both. Anyway, this was all a few days earlier. I’d since climbed out of the hole (we sensibly agreed to cross the Naomi bridge when we came to it), and Anne had called a truce: “The battle of the sexes is over,” she declared. “Sex wins.”
Sounded like it was time for makeup sex (the best kind of sex, as Seinfeld fans know),
Afternoon
makeup sex, which is the best kind of makeup sex.
As soon as Katie left the house for drama club rehearsal.
“We have forty-five minutes,” I said to Anne, checking my loaves and the kitchen timer as Katie closed the door behind her.
Plenty of time. We raced upstairs. Anne got paged and had to handle a hospital admission over the phone. Beep-beep! Another admission. Finally Anne jumped back into bed and wrapped her arms around me. I could feel her tense, then release. Something was wrong.
“Are you looking at the clock?” she asked.
It was almost time to put the loaf in the oven, to steam, and to watch. If I went downstairs, I wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon.
I looked at my wife, looking lovely on the bed.
I imagined my dough, rising in the kitchen.
Dough that had been started over twenty-four hours ago and into which I’d invested hours watching, folding, caressing. If I let it sit too long, there’d be no yeast left for the oven spring, and the bread would be dense and heavy.
Kind of like my marriage at the moment. Argghhh! What to do? Sex or bread? Bread or sex?
Who am I kidding? This was a no-brainer.
While the dough is rising, life goes on.
—
Peter Reinhart,
Brother Juniper’s Bread Book,
1991
“We make biomass,” Gary Edwards, president of the American Yeast Division of Lallemand, declared, as if no other explanation were required.
Within the hour I would learn that this was a little like Noah saying, “I’m building a rowboat,” but for the moment, as I sipped coffee in a comfortable conference room a few blocks from downtown
Montreal, I was oblivious to the hundreds of tons of biomass feeding, growing, and doubling in quantity every four hours under my seat. If I’d known, I might have been a bit nervous.
Lallemand, though not a household name like Red Star or Fleischmann’s, is one of the major yeast producers in North America, supplying the yeast for Wonder bread and other large commercial bakeries as well as countless corner bakeries and wineries and even the home baking enthusiast (a
real
enthusiast—their smallest package of dried yeast is a one-pound bag). My microscopic exploration of yeast had left me wanting to know more about this mysterious substance, so I’d come to Lallemand to see firsthand how yeast is made. Or rather, since we technically don’t
make
living things, farmed.
Hairnet and hard hat in place, I was distinctly underwhelmed by my first sight of a yeast production factory. Two young lab technicians in white coats were bent over a lab bench, scraping a trace of yeast from a “slant”—a small tube in which the pure strain of yeast is stored in agar—onto a wire loop to be transferred to a garden-variety test tube. A few previously inoculated test tubes sat nearby in a rack. On another table sat six five-gallon jugs with hoses coming out the top, filled with a wicked-looking brew that resembled Guinness stout. The place seemed eerily familiar. I’d been here before, but when? Slowly it dawned on me. This was a small (very small) version of my high school chemistry lab. “This is your research laboratory?” I asked Gary.
“Oh, no!” he said, nearly taking offense. “This is the beginning of a production batch.”
This little room? He pointed to the row of test tubes. “This is the first stage. Each batch begins in a test tube with a sterile growth medium we inoculate from the slants. That’s what we’re doing right now.” None of the techs took their eyes off their work
as we talked about them. “Now, over there”—Gary gestured toward a table of conical flasks directly behind me—“is the next stage.” As I swung around, my arm nearly struck a flask that was sitting out in the open. “After about twenty-four hours in the test tube, the yeast is transferred to Erlenmeyer flasks.”
I took a step back so as to not destroy an entire production cycle of yeast with my clumsiness. And just how much yeast would that have been?
“In six days each of these test tubes will become six hundred thousand pounds of wet yeast, if everything goes according to plan.” Disbelieving, I made him repeat the figure. “Six hundred thousand pounds,
if
all goes well,” he repeated. “You can also end up with six hundred thousand pounds of crap.”
And what can go wrong? Aside from an errant visitor knocking over a flask, there’s M. Bigo’s problem (namely, bacterial infection), improper growth of the yeast, or infection by the wild yeast that is always present in the air. But barring problems, less than a week from now, the scrapings of a few yeast cells from a slant into those six test tubes would multiply into, altogether, a mind-boggling 3.6 million pounds of yeast!
We make biomass.
Looking into the Erlenmeyer flask, that familiar conical flask with the narrow cylindrical throat,
*
commercial yeast seemed an impossibly long way off. But the distance would be covered quickly. After spending a day in the flask, the yeast is transferred into a five-gallon sterile glass bottle called a carboy. The glass car-boys resembled nothing so much as a science fair exhibit, with hoses coming out the top, air bubbling through the thick brown
molasses, and—get this—aluminum foil topping the whole assembly. The only thing missing was the poster listing your hypothesis and homeroom.
“This is the first time that oxygen is introduced,” Gary said, explaining the hoses. I was surprised to hear the reference to oxygen. Everything I’d read about yeast referred to it as anaerobic, living only in the
absence
of oxygen. “Yeast is an interesting critter,” he explained. “It can live with or without air. And it’s brilliant in its simplicity. When air and sugar are present, the yeast says, ‘Times are good. I’ve got air to breath, sugar to eat; I’m going to make some more yeast cells!’ This tendency of yeast to grow and reproduce when large amounts of oxygen is present is called the Pasteur effect.