Authors: William Alexander
That evening, Anne and I made love for the first time since my return. It felt good and warm and safe.
Fix, sell, or close.
—Former CEO of a major multinational conglomerate
Beep-beep-beep-beep
.
“What’s that?” Anne asked, coming into the kitchen. “Are you baking?”
“Not anymore.”
The oven had shut down, leaving a half-baked two-pound
miche
inside to steam and a two-hundred-pound baker outside to smolder.
A cryptic “F2” flashed on the control panel. I pressed the off button, which stopped the infernal beeping while I looked up the code in the owner’s manual.
“It’s a high-temperature warning,” I reported.
“How high did you have it?”
“I think Katie needs help with her homework.”
“How high did you have it?”
Since returning from the abbey, I’d been preheating the oven to its maximum setting of 550 degrees before steaming the hell out of it, hoping to reproduce that great Saint-Wandrille oven spring, with pretty good results. I hadn’t reproduced the perfect
boule
of my last day at the abbey, but the bread had never been better, even though I was using essentially the same recipe I’d used before going to France. There was another mystery as well: I hadn’t used parchment paper since watching it vaporize in the abbey’s oven, yet the dough never, ever stuck to my rice-flour-dusted peel,
*
as if (I like to think) it had acquired a certain respect for me.
The oven, however, afforded me no such respect.
Beep-beep-beep-beep,
it protested.
“Turn it off,” Anne pleaded.
“It
is
off ! Shut up!” I screamed.
“Hey!”
“Not you, the oven!” I hit the off button again. It quieted down, like a baby with a pacifier, but soon started up again.
Beep-beep-beep-beep.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I muttered. “I’ll fix you!”
I headed outside.
“What are you going to do?”
“Pull the plug on HAL.” I went down to the basement and threw the circuit breaker. HAL went dark. And quiet. For good.
Two days later, our appliance doctor arrived, replaced the probe, collected two hundred dollars, and
then
pronounced the patient dead. The instrument panel was fried, he said (I didn’t
dare ask if 550-degree steam could be a factor), and the manufacturer no longer made the part. This was, mind you, not some obscure Scandinavian company, but an American megacorporation (let’s call it, in deference to HAL, “FD”) whose celebrity ex-CEO’s motto (“Fix, sell, or close”) should be modified, when it comes to his ephemeral appliances, to simply “Throw away,” because apparently fixing is not an option when they break.
“What do you mean, they don’t make it anymore?” I said to the repairman. “That oven’s brand-new.”
“Well, most people wouldn’t consider twelve years old brand—”
“My mother has an oven built in the fift ies—the nineteen fift ies!—that she can still get parts for.” Which is true. Of course, on these older units, there are few parts to break. They don’t have timers, they don’t have cycles, and most importantly, they don’t have circuit boards, yet they work great. If you stop to think about it, an oven is probably the simplest appliance in your home. All it needs is a heating element and the simplest of thermostats, a strip of metal that curls when heated. An oven should last a hundred years, and could, but that’s no good for a company like FD, so they top the thing off with a wholly unnecessary digital panel whose built-in obsolescence guarantees they can sell you a replacement every decade or so. Determined to fight the system, I told the repairman I’d find the part on eBay.
“Look,” he said, trying to talk some sense into me, “even if you can, with labor it’s going to cost you as much to fix the oven as to replace it. And the door needs a new spring. Half your heat is leaking into the kitchen.” As it was, I’d already dropped two hundred dollars with nothing to show for it, so I gave in. Fortunately we had a second FD oven, a smaller convection unit, also twelve years old, that I could use in the interim. I’d made bread in it only once, using the convection mode, and wasn’t pleased
with the results. Emotionally as well, it was going to be hard leaving the other oven, whose quirks and nuances I had mastered, this oven that had been my faithful companion these forty-eight weeks. Sometimes, though, you just have to move on.
If I could convince you of just one thing about making bread, it would be how little effort it takes to cultivate a sourdough.
—Daniel Leader,
Local Breads,
2007
Charlie van Over’s
levain
was making great bread, but it was time to create my own personal, local
levain.
The wheat, after all, was local, the water was local, and if I could build a starter from local yeast, I’d literally be feeding on—becoming, in a sense—my environment.
And beginning a tradition. The notion was irresistible. But where to get local wild yeast? Actually yeast is everywhere
—
in the air we breathe, even in the flour we buy. I thought of just putting a batter of flour and water in the yard and seeing what local flora settled in, but images of spiders and fungi and pollen discouraged me. Then just before leaving for France I happened to read that the haze you see on grapes is actually wild yeast.
I didn’t have any grapes, but I had seen something strikingly similar to that haze, more commonly referred to in our household
as “that damned haze,” since it had to be wiped off each and every backyard apple with a dish towel. For years I had wondered, What on earth
is
that stuff ? Pollen? Pollution? A by-product of the apple? It reminded me of the haze that accumulates on the windshield inside a car (which is caused by outgassing from the plastics in the interior).
Thus I had my yeast source, but the problem was that every time I opened a book to learn how to make a
levain
from scratch, the directions were hopelessly confusing and intimidating: feed it every twelve hours, stir every six, discard half, put it in the refrigerator, take it out of the refrigerator, start with rye, switch to wheat, leave open, wrap tightly, watch for bubbles, mark the container so you know when the mixture doubles, and so on. Adding to the confusion was the vocabulary
—
words such as
chef, seed,
and
barm,
used to describe the various stages of
levain
development.
At the Ritz, however, Chef Didier had made a
levain
with no fuss at all, starting by letting a cut-up apple sit in a bottle of water for three days, then mixing in some flour. It seemed uncomplicated and foolproof. I cut up a nice, hazy apple from the harvest, added the peel of a second for good measure, and dropped it all into a bottle of our good Hudson Valley tap water (which I had first let sit out overnight to dechlorinate). Three days later, I measured out equal weights of apple water and my Indian-stone-ground organic wheat,
*
covered the bowl with plastic wrap, and waited.
Within twenty-four hours, small bubbles had appeared. I fed
the starter with more flour and water, and by the next morning, it was vigorously bubbling away. When I uncovered the plastic, I was greeted with the wonderfully tangy aroma of fermentation. I’d done it! It really was that easy. I fed it again and went off to work.
But what
had
I done? I felt as if I’d created life, which of course I hadn’t. I had just encouraged the life that was there to reproduce at an accelerated rate. My starter was a rich mixture of wild yeast varieties (all wild yeast belongs to the species
Saccharomyces exiguous,
a different species from commercial yeast), flour, and the by-products of fermentation: alcohol, carbon dioxide, and an assortment of organic acids. I may not have started life, but I had started a tradition, one that might even outlive me (though I hoped not anytime soon).
Well, there are traditions, and there are traditions. This one appeared fated to be short lived, for upon my return home that evening, although my
levain de la maison Alexander
had doubled in size, it contained no bubbles, a detail whose significance wouldn’t become apparent until later. I unwrapped the plastic, stuck my nose in to inhale that yeasty aroma, and was almost knocked over by a foul, evil smell. I called Anne over to confirm.
“Eeww! Throw it out!” she pleaded, not aware of the emotional attachment I’d already formed to my two-day-old creation. Instead I discarded about two-thirds of it (Anne immediately removed the garbage bag from the house, apparently fearing that the thing might overwhelm us à la friendship bread) and fed it with fresh flour and water.
What happened? How had it gone from exquisite to foul in only eight hours? It wasn’t until the next morning, in the shower (where I do some of my best thinking), that I realized something truly startling: I had M. Bigo’s problem, the very same one that led Louis Pasteur down the road to the discovery of the chemistry
of yeast! My
levain
wasn’t just wild yeast; it was wild yeast and bacteria, and it is the bacteria that give sourdough breads their characteristic sourness. But over the past few hours, the bacteria had flourished, choking out the yeast, which explained the absence of bubbles, not to mention the foul smell.
My mind moved forward a hundred or so years from Pasteur to the Lallemand yeast factory in Montreal and the lessons I’d learned there. The trick in producing commercial yeast is in creating an environment that is more conducive to yeast than to bacteria. That means plenty of oxygen. I’d kept my starter tightly covered, partly because I’d seen fruit flies hovering in the vicinity, and after all, I’d figured, yeast thrives in an anaerobic environment.
I had forgotten the most important lesson to be learned from Lallemand: yeast undergoes fermentation, the kind desirable for bread, in the absence of oxygen, but to make it thrive—that is, reproduce, which is exactly what building your
levain
is all about—it needs plenty of oxygen. How could I have forgotten the deafening roar of the blowers in the yeast factory? My tightly wrapped, oxygen-starved bowl was not conducive to yeast reproduction but, like M. Bigo’s, was quite receptive to bacteria.
Throwing on my bathrobe, I ran down to the kitchen, where I again discarded most of the sour-smelling starter, added fresh flour, and whipped vigorously, trying to introduce oxygen. Then, to allow some oxygen in, I covered it with a screen instead of plastic wrap. If a couple of fruit flies got in, well, that’s life. I wasn’t giving up yet. I owed it to Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur to see this thing through. After several more days of stirring, discarding, and refreshing, wondering if I was throwing good flour after bad, I opened the container and was greeted with the smell of ethyl alcohol. The patient had survived. And I had a
levain
of my own.
Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time.
—Stephen Wright
Beep-beep-beep-beep.
Oh, no. I couldn’t believe it. Was I having déjà vu?
Beep-beep-beep-beep.
The word “Probe” flashed on the oven’s instrument panel, although I wasn’t even using the meat probe. I turned off the oven. Still, the beeping continued.
Anne came into the kitchen and glared.
“Five hundred fifty,” I volunteered sheepishly before she could ask.
At least this time, when oven number two cooled down, it stopped beeping and was still usable—as long as I stayed under 475 degrees—which was a good thing, because not only was I down to my last oven, but it turned out that this oven was making better bread than the oven I’d destroyed. I hoped to keep this one for a very long time.
Anne was baking a meat loaf a few days later, when she noticed something odd about the glass window set into the oven door. “How long has this glass been cracked?” A thick fissure ran the entire length of the window, most likely a result of cold water from my plant mister striking very hot glass. I would never use a
mister again, switching to pouring a cup of water into a preheated cast iron frying pan set below the baking stone. As it turned out, this worked better, anyway. Still, the damage was done.
Anne asked if we could replace the window in this twelve-year-old oven.
“I doubt it.” I pointed to the brand label: FD.
*
It so happened that we had a tax meeting with Anne’s accountant the next morning, during which I was ruing the fact that my bread baking had destroyed two ovens. His jaw dropped when I mentioned I’d been preheating to 550 degrees.
“But the thermostat goes up to five hundred fift y!” I protested. “Why would they let you set the oven to five hundred fifty if it destroys it?”
“The speedometer on my wife’s Saab goes to a hundred fifty,” he shot back. “That doesn’t mean she should drive that fast!”
Good point.
All this oven carnage reminded me that, with winter fast approaching, I had a half-finished clay oven in the garden. With the gift of a rare late-autumn day in the upper sixties, it was now or never. I knew such work was risky, given my still-hurting back, but I would move carefully and take frequent rests. And schedule physical therapy for the next morning.
We had done this next part at the workshop in Maine, and it seemed fairly straightforward: Build a dome out of firmly packed wet sand, then mix up a batch of clay and sand and build up a four-inch layer—the oven wall—over the form. Let it dry overnight, cut out a door, scoop out the sand, and light a fire. According to Kiko Denzer’s book, “This can easily be completed in half a day.”
Not in my book. I started at nine thirty with five hundred pounds of purchased (I’d wised up by now) sand—more, I thought, than I needed, but I didn’t want to take the chance of running out in the middle of the project—and probably about four hundred pounds of the clayey soil that Zach and I had dug from the foundation. After completing the firebrick base, I dumped out the first seventy-pound bag of sand and started to form a dome. Soon I’d dumped out a second bag. And a third. And half the fourth, until ninety minutes and three hundred pounds of sand later, I’d finally reached the tip of the sixteen-inch stick I’d stuck in the center.