The Essential Book of Fermentation (17 page)

Globalization and mass-produced food is a top-down phenomenon. Marketing decisions are made in sealed air-conditioned offices in major cities. Ad campaigns are dreamed up in skyscrapers. Food is made from ingredients from a hundred places and loses all of its local character, to say nothing of its quality, in the processing. These foodstuffs are virtually the same in supermarkets everywhere. It’s as easy to buy Kraft singles in Seattle as it is in New York. It all has a suffocating sameness to it.

The fermented food movement, on the other hand, is bottom-up. Nobody ever imposed an organic and ferment-minded sensibility on the people of this country. It arose because people wanted pure, wholesome food, both fermented and unfermented, of rich, defined flavor produced by their neighbors in an environmentally safe manner.

A Tour of Fine Organic Bakeries North of San Francisco

I recently took a tour of some of the fine organic bakeries in Marin, Mendocino, and Sonoma counties.

The Brickery is the bakery at Café Beaujolais in the seaside town of Mendocino. It produces thirteen different breads and specialty baked goods, including one of my favorite breads, the amazing Austrian sunflower bread. This heavy, dense, and utterly delicious loaf contains white flour, sunflower seeds, cracked wheat, oats, barley, polenta, millet, buckwheat, flax seed, soy grits, sesame seeds, water, malt, sea salt, and yeast. A slice is a meal, and the flavor is like a walk in a sunny field full of ripe grains where you can pluck a seed head and chew on the fresh seeds. You need good teeth to chew it, but each chew bursts open another seed and adds to the complexity of the flavor of the bread. It’s best with nothing on it, and toasting it lightly only improves the flavor.

I spoke with Tomas Fiore, who, with Tim Bottom and Gary Zachary, bakes the Brickery’s breads in one of Alan Scott’s ovens. The breads are served in the restaurant and sold in many retail shops in the area. Fiore says the bakery was a hit from the start. “When the smell of wood oven–baked bread traveled through the town, people were led here by their noses, and we were accepted right away.

“I use organic ingredients because the flavor excels,” Fiore says. “There’s a noticeable difference in taste. Chris Kump and Margaret Fox, the previous owners, were in Austria and found the sunflower bread in a little bakery there. They brought the recipe back, but it was in German. Two years later they returned to Austria, took the recipe with them, and had it translated. Now the Austrian sunflower bread is our most popular bread by far.”

But there’s another reason Fiore is organic. “It has more to do with ethics,” he says. “I’m interested in good health and right livelihood. There’s a dominant corporate paradigm that wants to bypass locally produced ingredients, and I’m against that. All around the world, bread is made from just three ingredients: flour, water, and salt. [Yeast and bacteria come free in the air.] All the many variations in bread come from the hands-on stuff: how long it sits, the proportions of ingredients, how long it rises and relaxes, and so on.” It’s these slight variations that make for the wonderful diversity of bread, but there’s no diversity in bread mass-produced by large corporations.

From Mendocino, I drove down the coast to Point Reyes Station in Marin County, a picturesque western town perched at the head of Tomales Bay, an inlet off the Pacific known for its oysters—and as the breeding ground of the great white shark. My first stop was at the building housing Tomales Bay Foods. This establishment sells locally produced, organic items, including the cheeses of Cowgirl Creamery, as well as many of the world’s great cheeses imported from Neal’s Yard Dairy in England. Cowgirl’s cheesemaker Sue Conley and her partner, Peggy Smith, who was a chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley for seventeen years, use 100 percent organic milk from the nearby Straus dairy to make an array of fine cheeses, including the semisoft Mount Tam, possibly my favorite American cheese. Mount Tam has a triple cream’s silkiness, along with a rich, milky flavor as beautiful and fresh as the stunning scenery around Tomales Bay and the Point Reyes National Recreation Area and seashore. After buying a sack of goodies, including two rounds of Mount Tam, I drifted over to the Bovine Bakery (you may guess from the name of the cheese company and bakery that the area is one of America’s premier dairying regions), where I spoke with Shannon Stapel, the manager. She says, “There’s a trend toward organic products. They’re better—less processed. People want that.” Her fifty to seventy-five loaves a day are baked in one of Alan Scott’s brick ovens using Giusto’s flour, but she says her best-selling products are morning buns and bear claws.

Not far away, on the western shore of Tomales Bay, is Inverness Park, where Debra Ruff bakes a country white loaf using a natural starter, ciabatta, and a whole wheat seeded loaf. She sums up her decision to bake organic bread from fermenting starter succinctly: “Better quality, tastes better, customers demand it.”

AN IDYLLIC BAKERY IN AN IDYLLIC TOWN

From there I headed inland to the quaint little town of Freestone in Sonoma County—a picture-postcard village nestled in the rolling hills just east of the oceanside bluffs. There Jed Wallach runs the Wild Flour Bakery using one of Alan Scott’s brick ovens. Two young women kneaded bread in the back of the bright, airy shop while a young man chatted them up. The counterperson was a woman with a rolled-edge hat. The pace was unhurried but steady, measured by the reggae playing on the radio. Referring to this pleasant scene, Wallach says, “I didn’t want to bake alone. I wanted a party every day.” And why did he decide to make organic bread from local yeast and bacteria?

“It’s self-evident,” he says, referring to the pretty little town in which he’s located. “It’s going back in time, as if it were a hundred years ago. Most small villages then had a single baker.” This is a nice dream, but a hundred years ago Freestone was part of the rapacious destruction of the virgin redwood forests of the region. Nearby Guerneville was then called Stumptown for obvious reasons, and Occidental and Freestone were on a railroad line that hauled giant redwoods from the clear cuts as fast as the trees could be felled. Today, Freestone does look more like a Vermont village than a California logging town, and Wallach has taken advantage of that to build his dream bakery.

Wallach’s first career was as a maker of architectural stained glass. His artisanship has been transferred to baking. “I’ve always wanted to keep things as simple as possible,” he says. “The less machinery, the better. So using organic flour and natural starter is part of that. And it fits the community. So many people here are aware of the cost of nonorganic production.” By that he means that the environmentally conscious citizens of Freestone, Sebastopol, and Occidental—towns relatively close together—understand that conventional agriculture depletes the land, encourages erosion, and damages local ecologies, and that the chief purpose of mass-production bread factories is to make profit, not great bread. A few years ago, Sebastopol was the first town in the nation to declare itself a “pesticide-free city.”

“We make about eight hundred loaves a day, all sold from this shop,” Wallach says. “I love the exchange with the customers and seeing their delight in our products. I always decline to make more bread than we do now because I like having time to spend serving the customers. I’ve worked and lived in Europe, in Paris, and in the Pyrenees. I saw how people run their lives—how customers were recognized on a first-name basis and valued. So the people who work here value our customers. Customers are smiling when they leave. The experience of buying the bread is as important as selling the bread.

“The value of organic is that it’s a statement about the environment we live in. I’m not interested in making pretty food, but rather in food that will contribute to people’s health—whether they are our customers here or growers in other places,” he says.

THE ULTIMATE ARTISAN BAKERY

After Freestone, I headed south to Petaluma. On the way, I began thinking about the French Laundry over in Napa County. It’s been named the best restaurant in America, and chef Thomas Keller has been named best chef by the James Beard Foundation for both the French Laundry and for Per Se, his Manhattan restaurant. I can vouch for the fact that dining there is extraordinary in every possible way. Its focus is decidedly organic, and the French Laundry serves bread from the Della Fattoria Bakery in Petaluma, Sonoma County. And therein lies a tale of astonishing success that’s come to a strong, intelligent, warm, and wonderfully down-home woman named Kathleen Weber.

Kathleen and Ed Weber own fourteen acres in Petaluma, where Ed grew up. The land had been a chicken farm when he was young, but after his parents passed away, it was rented out to nearby farmers. “In the early 1990s, I was working in Marin County [south of Petaluma] and I was driving home in a storm,” Kathleen says. It was a difficult drive that set her to wishing that “there must be something we can do with those fourteen acres. So I talked to our agricultural commissioner and he suggested I grow red currants.” Kathleen wisely decided not to take his advice (Red currants? Sheesh!) and settled on growing organic potatoes.

“I was selling our fancy organic potatoes to fine restaurants like the Sonoma Mission Inn,” she says, “but I’d been baking bread at home forever. I thought maybe people could come here to pick their own potatoes and buy a loaf of bread. But then I went into Il Fornaio [a bakery in San Rafael] and freaked out when I saw all their beautiful breads. My body filled with adrenaline. I bought one of everything they sold! At that moment lightning struck, and I started making bread in earnest. I used the Italian method of making biga (a preferment of flour and water) and started turning out Pugliese. I remember taking a big three-pound Pugliese to a party, and people said, ‘Why don’t you go into business?’”

That was in 1995. She started selling a few loaves at her manicurist’s shop. “I kept trying new recipes,” she says. And she was still selling potatoes to the Sonoma Mission Inn. Mark Vann, a talented young chef who ran the Sonoma Mission kitchen at the time, needed some bread for bruschetta (toasted Italian bread spread with garlic, basil, and tomatoes). “So I brought him what we thought was enough for two days. By the time I got back home, he was on the phone asking for more bread—he’d already run out. Mark’s other bread supplier at the time was selling him olive bread with the pits still in the olives, and customers were complaining. He asked the supplier if the pits could be removed, and the supplier said no. So Mark asked me whether I could do production. I said sure—the way an actor says ‘Sure’ when the casting director asks if she can sing and dance. He said he wanted from eighty to one hundred loaves a day.”

Her second account was the French Laundry. On a hunch, she took some samples to that restaurant. Later, Chef Keller called and said, “I like your bread.” “I jumped for joy,” she says. With those accounts, she soon picked up more, and now keeps her two Alan Scott ovens going round the clock with hired help, and the help of her son, her daughter, and her daughter-in-law. Her eight-month-old grandson helps by cheering everyone up. “I don’t just bake bread in the ovens,” she says. “I’ve had a pig roasting in each one, too. You can’t imagine what a wonderful thing it is to have wood ovens going, ready at all times.”

She now produces ten breads: campagne is a country white made from organic wheat flour, water, starter, and salt. Her levain is a blend of wheat flours with a little rye. She makes baguettes, wheat bread with currants (tiny dried raisins, not red currants) poached in brandy, Kalamata olive bread, polenta bread, pumpkin seed bread, roasted garlic with Vella dry Jack or aged Gouda cheese bread, seeded wheat bread, and a top seller, rosemary and Meyer lemon bread. All are leavened with starter made from the ambient yeast and bacteria that float in on the breeze.

“Bread is alchemy,” she says. We walked to a table in her yard where her old dogs showed little interest in us. She brought out a bottle of good wine and a loaf of the rosemary and Meyer lemon bread. I went to the car and retrieved a round of that superb Mount Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, and we had a mini-feast of organic bread, cheese, and wine as we talked. “The Meyer lemon and rosemary bread came together when I was driving somewhere with some rosemary bread and a bag of Meyer lemons in the car, and I smelled their aromas mingling together. The inspiration for the bread struck right then.”

We cut a bit more of the Mount Tam, poured another glass of wine, and tasted that bread with its incomparable smell of herbal rosemary and bright, tangy lemon. “When all the planning and thinking is done,” she says, “you just have to let go and have faith that things will work out. That’s when inspiration can strike. If you’ve got everything all figured out, then there’s no room for something new and creative in your thinking.”

I described the bread that I’d been experimenting with, searching for the ultimate bread recipe for this book. “Sounds like you’re doing everything right,” she says. “We don’t let our starter get sour. We refresh it twice a day. We do very little mixing of the dough, just gentle pulling and folding. Overmixing makes the bread dense and you lose the holes that keep the bread airy. Our doughs are pretty wet when they go into the oven. The white doughs are now 75 percent water, the levain is 82 percent water, and the whole wheat is 90 percent water. After these doughs are mixed and risen, we shape them and let them rise again in the couche. Then into the oven.”