Authors: William Alexander
“Niacin prevents something called, I think, pellagra.”
“Pellagra? What’s that?”
“You’re right. I’m really not the person to ask.”
I apologized yet again, thanked her for her help, and hung up, almost satisfied. Something bothered me. Rickets, beriberi, anemia—I had heard of these diseases, but not pellagra. Why was there a vitamin in my flour and in every slice of commercial bread sold in America in the past sixty years to prevent a disease I’d never heard of? Maybe there was some other, more familiar name for it (like “polio” or something). I scribbled “pellagra” on a piece of paper and shoved it into my desk drawer along with receipts, rubber bands, pens new and old, and the other detritus of the home Office.
Then I went downstairs to read the
Times.
“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said, “Is what we chiefly need.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass,
1871
“It sure looks dead,” I said to Anne, examining the stubble of wheat that poked through the snow.
“But so does the lawn this time of year.”
Good point. And to be expected. After all, both were grasses; one just had an edible seed head. I had a greater reason to be concerned, however. I’d just come across the following quotation from a baker: “I use wheat flour from spring wheat in all my traditional country breads.”
Spring
wheat? I was growing
winter
wheat, which I thought was the preferred variety! Hard spring wheat, which is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, has more protein (13 to 16 percent before milling), and therefore gluten, than hard winter wheat (10 to 13 percent), planted in the fall. Gluten is what makes the dough elastic, allowing it to trap gases released from the yeast, which in turn allows the dough to rise. Although you can have too much of a good thing. An excess of gluten can make the dough too tight. I suppose gluten is like rubber bands: A single thin one will break easily if stretched too far, but a handful together, while stronger, may provide too much resistance to stretching. The trick is in finding the right number of bands to do the job.
I’d thought the right number was to be found in the King Arthur all-purpose flour I’d been baking with. All-purpose flour has a moderate protein (or gluten) level, between cake flour and bread flour. King Arthur’s all-purpose is high in protein for an all-purpose flour, but not nearly as high as its bread flour, which is recommended for use in bread machines. Yet reading that this artisan baker used harder wheat, I wondered if I needed more gluten. The next morning, I made a loaf of peasant bread using King Arthur bread flour, made from the hardest of hard spring wheat. After a
poolish,
followed by kneading in the stand mixer and a two-hour rise, the dough had nearly “doubled in bulk,” as just about every bread cookbook in the world describes it. I gave it a vigorous whomp down the center, as I’d seen Julia Child do
on TV decades ago, watched the dough sadly deflate onto the counter, flattened it out, and pulled the sides together to form a ball, or
boule,
the characteristic shape of rustic breads.
The round
boule
is the original peasant loaf, so original that it lent itself to the French word for baker,
boulanger.
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You wouldn’t know it, walking past a Parisian bakery window today, but it wasn’t until 1750 that elongated loaves surpassed round loaves in popularity. Because the fantastic bread I’d eaten that fateful morning in New York City years ago was a
boule,
it was the only loaf I was interested in making. To me, it wasn’t peasant bread if it wasn’t a
boule.
Plus, I loved the look of a
boule,
with the bold, decorative slashes on top that sometimes open up like a flower, revealing the crumb within. In bakeries, you can see
boules
that have lovely concentric ridges rimmed in flour, the result of the bread’s having risen in the basket the French call a
banneton,
whose circular rings leave their imprint on the dough. Lacking such a classy (and expensive) container, I simply lined a colander with an old, well-floured linen napkin and placed the
boule
in-side, seam side up. After covering with plastic wrap again, I put the loaf aside for the second rise, also called the proofing. This would take another ninety minutes.
It was all quite easy and calming. Until it came time to load the oven, when too oft en the easy rhythm of bread making yields to chaos, and all sorts of objects start flying around the kitchen as I try to flip the loaf from the colander onto the wooden baker’s peel, dust the top (with flour) for that country
boule
look, quickly make a few slashes (with a razor), slide the loaf into the oven (with a peel), and give the oven walls a shot of mist (with
a plant sprayer), all with a minimum of time and jostling, so as not to lose any of the precious gas I’ve spent hours building up in the dough.
More oft en than not, I end up forgetting one of the steps, or realize I don’t have my razor or mister handy, or do something out of sequence, or something else goes wrong, and I panic. Today was no different. The bread would not release from the peel, which I thought I’d dusted well with cornmeal, the loaf clinging from one end as if hanging on for dear life—“No, not the hot stone, I won’t go!” A few more vigorous shakes and it plopped off, but by then my loaf, which had risen so beautifully, was totally deflated, and it baked into a brick.
There was no way I could serve this to my family. What to do? I remembered a recipe I’d seen recently that called for a piece of cod to be supported by a thick, dense slice of country bread in a bowl of light broth. Perfect! No one would notice how terrible the bread was in the bottom of a bowl of soup. This also gave me an opportunity to show off at dinner.
“Did you know that the Gallic word
soupe
originally referred to the slice of bread placed in the bottom of the bowl of broth?”
“Mmm. Good fish.” Katie is wonderful to cook for, always appreciative of my efforts.
“And eventually the bread moved outside the bowl—”
“Um, Dad?”
“—but the name stayed with the thickened broth—now ‘soup.’”
“Where’d my broth go?”
The dense bread on the bottom was a preternatural sponge, soaking up a hundred times its own weight in broth. I swear, you could almost hear a whooshing sound as the bowls dried up before our eyes.
We all put down our spoons and watched, mesmerized. The show over, everyone looked to me for an explanation. “It’s fast food,” I said. No one seemed amused.
“Can we go out for dessert?”
Water is a particular thing. You cannot pick it up with a pitchfork.
—George Eliot,
The Mill on the Floss,
1860
Water?
Stunned, I stared at the letters on the page. W-a-t-e-r. In a baker’s version of “The Purloined Letter,” the source of my despair had apparently been in plain sight all along, flowing out of the faucet. The reason my bread wasn’t rising properly, wasn’t developing gas holes, was simply that I’d been using tap water!
It’s true; I’d just read that bread must be made with spring water, for chlorine and other impurities found in municipal water inhibit yeast activity. Furthermore, the author stated it in such a matter-of-fact way that she made me feel I must be the only creature on the planet not to have realized this.
Naturally, chlorine isn’t good for microorganisms! That’s precisely why I dump it into my swimming pool every day. This suddenly seemed so obvious that I wondered how I could have
overlooked it. But could it really be that simple? Was my quest for perfect bread about to end almost before it had begun?
While I waited for the weekend and my next opportunity to bake, the mailman delivered my ninety-nine-dollar, two-volume, fourteen-hundred-page set of E. J. Pyler’s
Baking Science and Technology,
a book more suited for a graduate student than a home baker, but I devoured it like a good novel. Chlorine, it turned out, wasn’t even the half of it. I learned from Pyler that hard water will produce a firmer dough, and acidic water—say, the kind of water found in our northeastern reservoirs, which are filled with acid rain—weakens the gluten structure, diminishing the ability of the dough to rise.
I grabbed some swimming pool testing strips to analyze my tap water. The pH was so low (that is, acidic) as to be off the scale! But then I realized that the scale on these strips ended at 6.8, just a little under the neutral 7.0. But how much lower was it? I expressed my concern to Anne. Being married to a doctor is a mixed bag. Once again, she arrived home late—very late—for dinner, but at least armed tonight with a handful of urinalysis dip strips.
“Try these,” she said. The bad news was that the water’s pH was about 6.2 or 6.3, quite acidic. The good news was, it wasn’t pregnant.
Chlorine, low pH—the evidence pointing to water as the culprit was mounting. And there was more: Not long before, someone had told me she’d heard that the secret to authentic French bread is authentic French spring water. At the time I was dubious, but considering that bread is (by weight) about 40 percent water, it didn’t seem at all unreasonable that water might affect not only the texture of the bread but the taste. Thus I figured if I was going to use spring water for my French
boule,
it might as well be French.
I picked up a bottle of Evian, delivered straight from the French Alps, fully expecting that my bread, once liberated from its chlorinated, acidic manacles, would rise in the oven like a soufflé, tasting of the Alps, evoking the character of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the eroticism of Brigitte Bardot.
Yet as I measured out the Evian, the very act of watching this stream of water flow from France into my bread bowl depressed me. I always feel guilty about drinking bottled water, particularly water that has made a transatlantic journey. Or worse, a transpacific journey. (Why this is worse, I don’t exactly know, but it feels worse.) How much energy was expended to transport it here, how much carbon emitted into the atmosphere? In my writing, I’ve urged people to buy locally grown farm products, and here I was, using water shipped four thousand miles.
When did drinking water become such a burden? My father didn’t spend one moment of his life worrying about the ethics (or the purity) of the water he drank, I guarantee it. He was just happy to have indoor plumbing. Every trip to the faucet was a small miracle, and he thankfully drank whatever came out.
In fact, my parents’ generation didn’t have to deal with half the decisions, ethical or otherwise, we have to make today. Forget paper or plastic. They didn’t have to select from a dozen cable TV packages or choose between a PC and a Macintosh; they didn’t have to decide between free-range and mass-produced chicken, between well-traveled organic and local conventional carrots; and they certainly never had to pick their own flights (and seats) from a zillion listings on the Internet. Sometimes I feel as if my head is going to explode. Fortunately I have a usually reliable antidote to this neuron overload: I retreat to the kitchen to do what men and women have been doing for six thousand years—bake bread on a stone.
As I watched the loaf rise in the oven (and truthfully, it did seem to be rising a bit more than usual), I had mixed feelings. As badly as I wanted this loaf to be
the one,
what was I to do if it indeed was the perfect loaf, if when I sliced into it, Belmondo and Bardot phantasmata came streaming out, swirling around my kitchen, anointing me the god—or devil—of bread? Make bread for the rest of my life from imported water? Environmental issues aside, I wanted my bread to have that
terroir,
the taste of the land, and when the Hudson Valley wheat growing in my garden matured, I wanted to bake it with Hudson Valley water.
Calm down, I said to myself. It’s only bread.
It’s only bread.
“Nothing in Christianity is original.”
—Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code,
2003
I always know when it’s Passover because a box of matzo invariably materializes in the Office kitchen. I don’t know who brings it; I never see anyone eating from it; and a week later the box is empty. Very strange. This season of celebrating miracle and mysticism, of Passover and Easter, is also a season of bread,
unleavened and rich, so I couldn’t help noticing how in one work of art, the mystery and the bread coincided.
Contrary to popular opinion, the biggest mystery to be found among Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings isn’t Mona Lisa’s smile. Nor is it a thin yarn about secret codes that reveal the existence of Jesus’s descendants or some such nonsense. This true-life puzzle is in plain sight, in arguably Leonardo’s greatest painting,
The Last Supper.
Look at a reproduction, the larger the better. Notice the dinner rolls. The world’s most famous representation of the final meal Jesus shared with his disciples shows a table strewn with plump, unmistakably leavened dinner rolls to die for. So what’s wrong with this picture? It was
Passover.
Jesus was a Jew. What’s he doing eating leavened bread? There’s nary a matzo in sight!
Matzo, of course, is a variety of unleavened bread. You might say
strenuously
unleavened bread. Not only is it made without yeast, but it must go from mixing to oven in no more than eighteen minutes, Jewish tradition specifying eighteen minutes as the time it takes for the leavening process to begin, even without the addition of yeast.
Christianity in effect co-opted bread as an important religious symbol when Jesus uttered the famous words at the Last Supper, speaking of bread as his body, an event Christians continue to commemorate in the form of Holy Communion. In the Catholic Church and some Protestant denominations, the bread that is eaten at Communion is unleavened; more accurately, it’s an ultrathin wafer with the consistency of blotting paper that has the annoying knack of sticking to the roof of your mouth. Yet it wasn’t always this way. The bread used to be leavened bread, as it still is today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Around the year 1000, the pope, reasoning that the bread at the Last Supper must have been unleavened, given that it was Passover (and certainly
Jesus was already in enough trouble with the temple priests that he would not have been eating leavened bread at Passover), transformed the Eucharist bread into the unleavened wafer.
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