Authors: William Alexander
“But when it has sugar but no air,” Gary continued, “the yeast says, ‘I’ve got to convert this sugar into something that will help preserve me. If I don’t, the bacteria are going to come in and crowd me out.’” So it switches over to anaerobic fermentation, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol. This is the fermentation we are interested in, the process that bakers and brewers utilize to make the bread rise and the beer brew. Anaerobic fermentation has another advantage for the yeast: if times get hard and all the sugar is used up, the yeast can dine on the very alcohol it produced. Most bacteria cannot, so this serves as yet another defense mechanism against bacteria, in addition to being a third way that this simple, one-celled organism can feed. Yeast, by the way, can only tolerate alcohol up to a point—about 14 or 15 percent. This is why wine always has an alcohol content of roughly 11 to 13 percent. You can’t make yeast produce more alcohol than that, or the yeast itself will die.
The fact that yeast has these distinct aerobic and anaerobic lifestyles explained why I hadn’t seen much budding going on in my microscopic experiment. If I was going to see budding, I’d
have to force in air with the sugar, as Lallemand was doing, to get the yeast to metabolize
aerobically
and reproduce. But even then I wouldn’t have seen all that much in a few minutes under the microscope. Gary told me that yeast reproduces only about every four hours. Leeuwenhoek and I were lucky to have seen any budding at all.
*
As for the bubbles Leeuwenhoek had seen, and the doubling of the volume of dough in a few hours that all bakers witness? Both are due primarily to the anaerobic respiration of the original yeast, not an increase in the colony size. In other words, bubbles, not budding. We moved onto the production floor to see the fermenters. This was the part I’d been looking forward to. I expected we’d step onto a long stretch of white tile floor so clean you could eat offit, with gleaming stainless steel vats lined up on either side, accompanied by the warm hum of bubbling yeast and perhaps a slight bakery smell. The reality was more like stepping onto the deck of an aircraft carrier while jets were landing and taking off. The noise was deafening, the reek of molasses overpowering. And eating off the floor? Not recommended. True, I was in a food factory, but the entire milieu suggested more “factory” than “food.”
“This is the next stage,” Gary yelled over the din as we stood in front of the first fermenter, a stainless steel tank not much larger than a bathtub, into which a technician had emptied the contents of two carboys a few hours earlier. I could barely make
out his words as he yelled over the roar of the huge blowers that force air into the fermenters. Because yeast needs oxygen, and lots of it, in order to be induced to undergo reproduction, huge quantities of air were being drawn in from the skies over Montreal. After being passed through a HEPA filter to remove, among other things, any wild yeast that might be present in it, the air is bubbled up through the yeast and molasses broth in very fine bubbles. This takes a lot of pressure—and electricity—as the volume of air in the tanks is replaced every minute.
I had envisioned yeast production as a low-energy, environmentally friendly process, but I’d had it completely wrong. It takes a tremendous amount of electricity to make lots of yeast in this short a time: power to blow in the air, heat exchangers to draw off the excess heat generated by the yeast. I mentioned to Gary that it was as energy-intensive as any other factory farm.
“We
are
farmers,” he said. “With a much shorter growing season.”
Gary took me through the next several steps of making yeast, the first- through fift h-stage fermenters, full of bubbling molasses, until we finally reached a huge rotating drum. Something that was now recognizable as yeast was coming offit as it turned. I caught some in my hand. It had a consistency remarkably similar to Play-Doh. This was fresh crumbled yeast, about 30 percent solid, ready to be packaged into fift y-pound poly-lined bags and sent out on refrigerated trucks to commercial bakeries. Or pressed into five-pound blocks of compressed yeast. Or dried further into instant dry yeast, the kind of yeast that home bakers use. This is what I wanted to see.
Next we came to an extruder, essentially a giant cookie press fitted with an extrusion die, which is a steel plate with hundreds of tiny holes. I held my hand under it as little squiggles of yeast—drier than what had come off the drum but still
pliable—collected in my palm. The yeast had a surprisingly satisfying feel in my hand, not wet, but not dry, either, and when I brushed it off my hands, it left behind a pleasant dryness and yeasty aroma, a persisting reminder that I would savor for hours afterward, like the faint, lingering memory of a woman’s perfume.
The final drying takes place in a large cylindrical tank in which the yeast flies around in a vortex of warm air for about twenty minutes, until the solid content is up to 96 percent, putting the yeast into a dormant stage, ready to be siphoned off into vacuum-sealed bags for shipping.
The yeast Lallemand was making was
instant
dry yeast, different from the
active
dry yeast that was developed during World War II (so that, according to Fleischmann’s, our boys could have fresh bread abroad). Active dry yeast quickly replaced fresh yeast in American home kitchens, where it reigned for some fifty years before instant yeast (variously labeled instant, fast-acting, bread-machine, or RapidRise) joined it on the shelves. Active and instant dried yeast look similar, but active dry has to be rehydrated before use to bring the yeast out of dormancy and make the cell walls permeable again. This is why many cookbooks call for “proofing” the yeast (not to be confused with proofing the dough, another name for the second rise), mixing it with a little warm water and a pinch of sugar before adding it to the dry ingredients.
*
The instant dried yeast I was holding was developed in the 1980s from a different strain than active dry (but the same species—all commercial yeast sold for fermentation belongs to the species
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
) and, dried at a lower temperature in the vortex, doesn’t have to be rehydrated or proofed (in fact, Gary told me it’s better
not
to rehydrate), doesn’t have
to be refrigerated, and has a room-temperature shelf life in its vacuum-packed bag of two years. Once opened, it is susceptible to oxidation and needs to be stored in an airtight container if not used within a few weeks.
I was leaving the factory floor with my one-pound bag of instant yeast, which would last me an entire year (and then some), when I noticed a wall with sacks of yeast stacked to the ceiling.
“That’s for corn,” Gary explained.
“Corn bread?” I didn’t understand.
“Ethanol. It’s becoming a big market.”
Of course—how do you turn corn into alcohol? You ferment it. I would find myself thinking of that wall of yeast six months later, as corn and wheat prices soared, sowing hunger and threatening civil unrest in Africa and the Middle East, but for now, it was just a curiosity. I was getting ready to leave for the long drive back home when I remembered why I was here: my lousy bread.
I described the problem I was having with my dense crumb and lack of holes, hoping for the little nugget, the missing link, that would give me the perfect loaf. Gary was impressed that, as a home baker, I was “running sponge and dough,” as he called my
poolish.
He confirmed my instinct that the long fermentation in the sponge produces some complex and sophisticated flavors that you don’t find in a straight dough loaf. And as a bonus, thanks to the compounds formed during a preferment, the resulting bread stales less quickly. “The other thing that does for you is it’s actually giving you a different crumb structure, a different texture and feel in your mouth.”
So the yeast, in addition to supplying the gas for rising and the compounds for flavor, has an effect on the crumb! This was something I’d not heard before; I’d thought the crumb was determined solely by the other factors I’d been playing with: the gluten and protein levels of the flour, the kneading, resting, and rising processes. There seemed to be no end to yeast’s influence
on bread, and more and more, it was becoming apparent that making the dough rise was the least of its roles.
I left with a new respect for yeast and felt I was on the right track with sponge and dough methods, but how to get rid of that dense crumb? How to make some air holes?
“You need to ask a baker,” Gary suggested. “An authority.”
Bread is relief for all kinds of grief.
—Spanish proverb
“I’m turning the heat on,” Anne said, wrapping her hands around a mug of coffee.
“But it’s May.”
“I’m freezing.”
“I’m fine,” I lied through chattering teeth. “What’s the temperature in here?”
“Sixty.” Fahrenheit, that is.
Outside, it was thirty-eight on this chilly spring morning.
“Once the sun hits the side of the house, it’ll warm up.” With a gallon of heating oil costing more than a gallon of milk, the oil bills for our rambling, nominally insulated old house were enough to support a modest Arab emirate, despite the fortune we’d spent on new, energy-efficient windows, and I was eager to end the heating season. I knew the house would be up to
sixty-eight degrees by noontime and didn’t see the point of wasting oil to simply get it up there a few hours earlier. Let the woman wear a sweater. Or three.
Anne went upstairs to put on a second sweater, get under a down comforter, or both, and I returned to my loaf. That’s when I realized that my bread wasn’t going to rise much in a sixty-degree kitchen, considerably colder even than Bobolink’s proofing room. I turned the heat up, hoping that Anne wouldn’t guess why, especially given my recent
coitus interruptus sourdoughus.
All that coddling I did with the dough that day, my incessant gentle folding and turning? There had been no discernible change in the bread whatsoever. My attentions would’ve been better spent on my wife.
In Turkey in the 18th century . . . it was common to hang a baker or two. This was common enough that it was the custom of master bakers to keep an assistant who, in return for slightly higher wages, was willing to appear before the courts in case a victim were needed.
—
Halvor Moorshead
We bakers have never had it easy. I suppose the more society depends on you, the more society is going to scrutinize you. Bakers
were so mistrusted in the Middle Ages, a time when a slice of bread could mean the difference between salvation and starvation, that thirteen years before the Magna Carta, English magistrates felt it necessary to write into law severe penalties for bakers who committed fraud by selling underweight or substandard loaves.
*
This isn’t to say that the bakers were always innocent victims. Oft entimes, if the millers weren’t adulterating the flour with sawdust, the bakers were. Bread tensions in jolly old England came to a head in the 1266 “bread trials,” which resulted in a new regulation: each baker was required to mark his loaf with a distinctive mark—perhaps the world’s first commercial trademark—to make offending loaves easier to trace.
Why do I bring all this up? To be sure, I was in no danger of being hanged (my kids belonging more to the tar-and-feather crowd), but I was starting to sense a level of discontent with the all-peasant-bread-all-the-time menu. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I’d even heard the words “Groundhog Day” whispered. And we were only in week 17, just a third of the way through the year.
Perhaps it was time for a new recipe. I’d been reading James Beard’s
Beard on Bread
and noticed he had a free-form loaf made from a
poolish,
using a long fermentation. I’ve always been a fan of James Beard’s, and not only because the dust jacket of
Beard on Bread
has my all-time-favorite author photo: here’s the old man, bald as a cue ball, dressed in his tweed jacket and bow tie, looking every bit the aging, uncomfortable, closeted gay man that he was, stiffly holding at arm’s length an enormous, misshapen loaf of bread that more resembles a giant wild mushroom than a
miche
(an imprecise word for a large, flattened loaf).
It’s absolutely marvelous. Thus I was distraught when I’d
lost it. I’d been reading outdoors on this pleasant, breezy day and had put Beard down to retrieve the mail. And predictably forgot all about him. “Predictably” because my memory lapses and confusion were becoming more frequent and disturbing. I’d been forgetting to pay bills and giving contradicting instructions at work, and most upsetting, I had recently spent a good five minutes looking for sunglasses that were perched atop my head.
Anne handed me the naked book. “Where’s the jacket?” I asked.
“I didn’t see a jacket on it.”
Didn’t see a . . . I ran out and started searching the yard, then the neighborhood, studying the wind and trying to calculate how far the jacket might have traveled, all the while wondering how the wind could’ve stripped a dust jacket off a closed book. Regardless, I had to find dear old Jim. After a fruitless search, though, I dejectedly headed back to the house. There, patiently waiting at the front door, on my welcome mat, was James Beard, offering up that huge loaf of bread to me.
Wow. Relief was followed by a deep chill that stayed with me for days. If I saw this scene in a movie,
*
I’d say, “Oh, please, that’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?” But there it was. No, there
he
was, having returned home after his tour of my neighborhood. And what did that ugly, misshapen loaf being passed to me by a dead American culinary giant represent?
I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had to bake his peasant loaf (he calls it a “white free-form loaf”) this week. There was only one small problem. It included oil and buttermilk.
Adulterated bread.
Okay, so it wasn’t sawdust (or chalk, pea,
bean, or potato flour, alum, sulfate of zinc, subcarbonate of magnesia, subcarbonate of ammonia, sulfate of copper, or plaster of paris, to name a few of the additives that have been snuck into bread to cut costs or improve poor flour), but I was a charter subscriber to the school of thought that “true” bread, the stuffof peasants, has only four ingredients—flour, water, yeast, and salt—and with the single exception of my rich Easter bread, I’d stuck to my guns. Oil and buttermilk? I’d as soon add plaster of paris.