Authors: William Alexander
“I guess I’d feel pretty foolish.” But the odds of that happening were about nil. I eyed the loaf, so sorry-looking I had seriously considered “forgetting” it to save face. But, I reasoned, if you’re going to the proctologist, you’d better be prepared to drop your pants, so, loaf and overnighter in hand, Anne and I headed out to van Over’s home overlooking the Connecticut River.
Charlie greeted us warmly and went right for the bread knife.
“This is very good bread,” he said, chewing on a lopsided slice. “Better than what you’ll get in most bakeries.”
Huh?
“But there are no air holes,” I protested.
He held it up to the window to better see the texture. “Nice. You don’t want air holes in bread like this. A peasant loaf is sandwich bread.”
Oh. I hadn’t known that.
“But it’s too moist inside,” I protested again.
“Leave it in the oven a half hour after baking. It’ll dry out. Bill, I’m serious, this is really good bread.”
I could see Katie smirking in our kitchen a hundred miles away.
“I’m not happy with the spongy texture. I want a much more open, webbed crumb, an
alveolar
crumb,” I argued, using the wonderfully evocative word I’d swiped from Steven Kaplan—“the Professor” (as Charlie called him)—who’d hooked us up.
“You’re not going to get that with this bread. You’ve gone about as far with this bread as you can go, but now you need to go to the next level. Have you ever used a starter?”
Oh, jeez, a starter. No way.
A starter is a batter or dough of flour, water, wild yeast, and bacteria (in other words, a sourdough, or in French a
levain
*
) that you maintain with regular “feedings” of flour and water for years or even generations. It can be used either in place of or with commercial yeast. I had thought about it a couple of times but had been frightened off by the demands of caring for it. The celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain described his baker’s
levain
this way:
A massive, foaming, barely contained heap . . . which even now was pushing up the weighted-down lid of a 35-gallon Lexan container and spilling over the work table where it was stored.
Then there were worried posts like this to a professional bakers’ Internet forum:
I am wondering what one does during holidays to feed their
levain—besides the obvious going in to feed it. We feed ours 2 times a day. The levain is going to miss 2 feedings. I will be sleeping and it can die before I go in to feed it.
Feed it twice a day, every day, or it
dies
? I don’t always manage to feed my kids twice a day! Who needed this hassle?
“I don’t know, Charlie. It seems like a lot of work.”
“Not if you keep it in the refrigerator.” He pulled a one-gallon recycled plastic container marked “Crème Fraîche” out of his fridge.
“You only have to feed it once a week. I got this from a friend in Alaska who asked me to take care of it while he did some traveling.”
He opened it up. It had an acrid, but not particularly unpleasant or sour, smell.
“How long ago was that?”
“Twelve years.”
I gulped. My neighbors wouldn’t trust me to water their house-plants for a week while they’re away. “I don’t know . . .”
“I’ll give you some to take home. It’s the only way you’re going to bake the kind of bread you’re after.” We had a delicious lunch on Charlie’s patio and returned to the kitchen to make bread (using Charlie’s twelve-year-old
levain,
of course) in, of all things, a food processor.
“You ever make bread in a food processor?” Charlie asked.
I was tempted to answer in my W. C. Fields voice, “No, and if I did, I wouldn’t admit it.” Food processor? What kind of baker was this?
——————————————
“What exactly does he do?” I asked Charlie’s baker, Skip, at five o’clock the next morning while he formed baguettes in the
kitchen of the Copper Beech Inn in Ivoryton. In the early mornings the inn’s kitchen became, under Charlie’s auspices, a small commercial bakery, doing one thing but doing it extremely well, baking a single type of bread (baguettes) for a single client (the inn). Having spent a full day with Charlie, I still couldn’t quite figure out exactly who he was or what he did. Former restaurateur and baker, occasional food industry consultant, author, inventor of the folding bread knife and the HearthKit oven insert (a three-sided baking stone meant to simulate baking in a brick oven), proselytizer, bon vivant, chef, bread authority, tinkerer, Jacques Pépin’s
boules
partner—none of these really captured the essence of this youthful seventy-year-old who, above all, was passionate about bread.
“Charlie’s a concept person,” Skip said, a smile crossing his face. “He likes ideas. Big ideas.”
His biggest idea to date is that the best way to knead bread, whether at home or in a bakery, is in a food processor, a method he discovered practically by accident when asked to prepare bread for a party honoring the president of Cuisinart. Van Over was so impressed with the result—and the ease of preparation—that he patented the process for commercial bakeries. One would not expect dough subjected to a razor-sharp metal blade whirring at over 1,300 rpm to make good bread or anything else, but I had sampled a baguette the previous night at dinner and thought it among the best I’d ever eaten.
Charlie attributes the technique’s success partly to the fact that the kneading time is short—forty-five seconds—and does not whip air into the dough the way a commercial dough hook does as it lifts and stretches—and aerates—the dough over a ten- or fift een-minute kneading.
“I thought flour needed oxygen,” I’d asked in his kitchen. “Isn’t that why it has to age for several weeks after milling?”
True, but once the flour is mixed with water and becomes dough, oxygenation destroys the beta-carotenes in flour and can cause the flour to break down, Charlie had said. His explanation echoed the words of the French bread authority Raymond Calvel, the scientist who’d come up with the technique he dubbed
auto-lyse,
letting the dough rest and condition before kneading.
In the kitchen, Skip now added instant yeast, water, and salt to the flour and processed it for just forty-five seconds, then went home to have breakfast while the dough fermented. He’d return at eight to make the bread. Later that morning, the baking finished, Charlie came in with a tub of starter for me. He mentioned that he and his wife, Priscilla, were on their way to France in a few weeks.
“Oh, really?” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know of any ancient monasteries over there that still bake bread, would you?” Brother Boniface, the ancient baker at Mepkin Abbey, might be deceased, but the appeal of his ancientness had stayed with me. “I like old things,” I explained as we stood in the inn’s gleaming, modern stainless steel kitchen. “I think it’d be neat to make bread in a place where they’ve been baking for a really long time, you know, to get in touch with the tradition.”
“I suspect you’ll have a hard time finding one,” Charlie said, adding that, as an atheist, he wasn’t really in touch with that world. “That’s a dying tradition. But I’ll ask around. Do you know Peter Reinhart? He’s written a couple of books on bread, and he’s a former monk or something. He might know.”
Charlie handed over the
levain.
“Just feed it at least once a week with equal parts flour and water.” By weight, he meant. “Leave it out for a few hours after each feeding, then keep it in the fridge. It’s like having an undemanding pet.”
During the long drive home, Anne kept glancing nervously into the backseat at the starter. I asked her what she was so jittery
about.
“Remember friendship bread?”
I almost drove off the road.
Friendship is not so simple.
—
Albert Camus
“Eeek!” Anne had screamed that fateful day as she opened the refrigerator door. She jumped clear across the room, fulfilling the foreboding I always have upon returning home after a vacation. As I approach our street, I oft en think I smell smoke, confirming the vague dread I’ve had all week that the electrical wiring I did without a permit in 1992 has shorted and the house is now a charred wreck. Or the water pipes have burst. Or I left the back door wide open and a family of deer has taken possession of our living room. Not that my neurosis is totally unfounded. We have in fact returned after a week away to find the unreliable front door blown wide open (but no deer or burglars present—the house was apparently too cold for either) and water dripping from the light fixtures. But none of my worries had ever included the refrigerator.
“Calm down,” I said, assuming that the milk jug had leaked again. I have an amazing skill for buying the one jug out of sixty
that has a pinhole leak in the bottom. I opened the refrigerator.
“Yow!” I cried, jumping backward and slamming the door. “What is that?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said, “but we’re going to need a bigger boat.”
“Or Steve McQueen. It looks like the Blob.”
Having exhausted our Hollywood analogies, we cautiously approached the refrigerator like a couple of timid explorers entering a cave.
“You go first,” Anne said.
I cracked open the door. Slime rolled out onto the floor. What a mess. A glutinous, beige gook was draped over everything on the top two shelves and the inside of the door. Some of it had hardened onto the walls of the refrigerator, creeping into every crevice, coating every surface. In other places it was still fresh and very much alive. Anne spotted the culprit—a one-quart plastic container with the words “Friendship Bread” written on it. The lid had blown off and was nowhere in sight. Anne gingerly picked up the container even as ooze continued to flow over the top, like an active volcano, and dropped it into the garbage.
“Martha’s friendship bread,” she muttered with disgust as we started mopping up the mess. Several weeks earlier, our babysitter had given us this mysterious container of friendship bread starter, onto which was taped an index card with the recipe for baking friendship bread, plus instructions on passing the starter along.
Apparently it was a well-established tradition in town. Of Amish origin (so the story goes), the idea is to pass this container of bread starter from neighbor to neighbor. If you’re lucky enough to have it find you, the instructions call for letting this yeast culture ferment at room temperature for four days before adding equal parts flour, sugar(!), and milk(!!). After letting it sit another five days at room temperature(!!!), you use one-third of
it to make your “bread” and pass on the other two-thirds, along with feeding instructions and the bread recipe, to not one but two unsuspecting neighbors.
Rather than being appreciative of this gift, we found ourselves faced with an unplanned project that we had to deal with, ready or not. “My people,” Anne noted dryly—meaning the Irish—“bake the bread before giving it away.”
“Sounds like a gastronomic chain letter,” I mused, rather wary of ingesting this substance that had been sitting on countless countertops around town for who knows how many weeks, months, or even years. What really caught my attention was the warning, “
DO NOT USE METAL SPOON OR BOWL
!” Why? Was it corrosive?
“We’re terrible people, aren’t we?” Anne said. “It
is
a nice way for a community to bond.”
“That’s what Jim Jones said as he was serving up the Kool-Aid. Look at this recipe. A cup of oil, a cup of sugar, and . . . vanilla pudding? This isn’t bread, it’s a Twinkie.” Still, we couldn’t very well just throw it out. So until we could figure out exactly what to do with it, we stuck it in the fridge. And promptly forgot about it and went on vacation. But it didn’t forget about us. While we were lounging on a North Carolina beach, growing fat on Carbon’s Golden Malted waffles, the Blob was growing fat on sugar and spoiled milk, growing and growing and growing and finally bursting from the confines of its plastic Chinese-soup-container prison.
“I’m never going to get this refrigerator clean,” Anne muttered as we mopped, wiped, scraped, and rinsed for the next hour. This wasn’t mere hyperbole. The hardened slime was more difficult to remove than old paint, and we would ultimately end up throwing out the refrigerator. It was due to be replaced soon, anyway.
In truth, friendship bread did sound like a nice tradition, and
this is how bread had been sustained for thousands of years. The Egyptians, you’ll recall, didn’t use yeast from a foil packet in the refrigerator; they saved a bit of the dough as a starter from each day’s kneading to kick off the next day’s bread. And I’m sure they passed a little starter along to family members and neighbors, though probably absent the warning about metal utensils.
——————————————
Now, with Charlie’s twelve-year-old starter from Alaska in the refrigerator, I had joined that tradition, and I was secretly rather happy and proud about it. Twelve years old. But would it give me the alveolar, netted crumb that Charlie had promised? I just hoped that I could keep the beast alive long enough to find out.
The next weekend I baked my first loaf of peasant bread using Charlie’s
levain.
I was hooked. The naturally leavened dough rose slowly (even with the dash of instant yeast Charlie recommended to give the
levain
a little boost) and not as high as a commercial-yeast-risen dough—in fact, it hardly rose at all—but making bread this way felt pure and was immensely satisfying. The question was, how would it taste, and, more to the point, would the
levain
give me my gas holes?
At dinner, I sliced off the end piece and held it up for everyone to see.
“Holes!” Katie cried.
“Holes!” Anne yelled.
“Holy sh . . .,” I started to yell.
Charlie had been right. Switching to a
levain
was the key—but not to
every
door. The second slice had fewer holes than the first, and the one after that had none. In fact, the middle 80 percent of the
boule
was too dense and too moist. Still, it was the best loaf of bread I’d ever baked, and I was elated.