Hi Everyone,
Again, I've been remiss about regularly posting but there's so much going on here, including the graduation last week of our first four year students from the Charlotte campus of Johnson & Wales (has it been four years already? Seems like we just got here and just opened the school, but Susan and I have been living in Charlotte for nearly five years!!).
In addition, some big news: I'm working with a local restaurateur to open a new pizza restaurant in September. Our modest goal: to bring Pizzeria Bianco and Pizzeria Mozza quality pizzas to Charlotte. Our test bakes give me hope--now we just have to find the right staff to execute the menu and the method (part of the deal is that I will train them, but won't be in day-to-day operations myself--that would just be too insane). So between that and the upcoming trips to NYC for the James Beard Awards, Providence (I'm shooting an episode on whole wheat ciabatta for Mary Ann Esposito's PBS series), Cleveland, Napa and Sonoma, Norwich, VT (King Arthur), and Chapel Hill (A Southern Season)--well it looks like a pretty full summer.
And yes, I still have to report on my last trip, a promise I keep breaking but hope to soon honor. Meanwhile, here's an interesting letter from a correspondent, Steve Maxson, who gave me permission to reprint this letter with the caveat that these are just his musings but he will not vouch for the science. I think they're worthy and intriguing. I'm so glad to see he's taken the basic instructions from the new whole grain book and explored them in his own way, with a lot of thoughtfulness. See what you think. If you want to keep the conversation going you can write to me at recipetesters@yahoo.com or to Steve directly, at smaxson@mac.com If you haven't seen the method to which he's referring, taken from my new book on whole grain breads, this may seem somewhat abstact. But his letter is still worth reading, especially his comments on "folding" the dough, or what I've referred to in my books as the "stretch and fold method." Finally, his info on Struan, my all-time favorite bread, is fascinating (he's referring to an ancient invocation called The Blessing of the Struan, which I reprinted in a couple of my books. It lists a number of unusual and mysterious ingredients). Thanks, Steve, for all your thoughts:
...I have sensed that the authors of the more serious cookbooks on
whole grains tend to be a bit hostile to home milling, and this is
understandable since in a way their reputations are on the line and
the lack of controls, especially over starch, can make results hard to
control at the professional baking level. I did my bit to support the
failing economy by buying a home grain mill, a Nutramill impact mill.
There is no way I am going to turn the crank for 3 - 4 minutes for a
cup of flour very often, so I went electric. I have gotten the
impression all the home impact mills have a bad reputation for broken
starch grains, yet there are commercial mills which use what is
essentially an impact process and produce flour of a quality
acceptable to professional bakers. One of the lessons I just learned
(4th or 5th batch of bread flour) is that you can enormously reduce
the broken starch problem to commercial flour levels simply by
adjusting the coarseness of the grind slightly: the Nutramill can make
anything from cake flour (fine dust) to corn meal, and with the finest
grind you get more water from the fermented mash than you get with a
flour more like the fineness of store bought all purpose. (High speed,
fineness setting in the middle rather. Next time I will try the finest
setting on low speed, for a cooler grind. There are two speeds and a
fineness dial to control grit size.) You will always get a bit of
water from the enzyme action on starch, but with broken starch you get
additonal water from the water of hydration being released from the
starch as the starch is digested. I interpret the noticeably less
water coming from the enzyme ferment as less water of hydration
released due to broken starch in the less fine grind.
One of the things I have noticed with both high extraction flour
(readily available locally as organic) and home milled flour is that
the longer times spent "wet" in the mash results in a loss of wheat
flavor. I have learned to start the mash after I finish the biga
(current useage - I haven't moved on to levain yet), and 7 - 8 hours
later mix the cooled mash and biga and start making bread. Bread
finished in less than 12 hours from grinding has more wheat flavor
(using hard winter white). My oven has a lowest setting of 170
degrees, and I turn it on with the stone in when I grind, and turn it
off when I start heating the water to scald the flour for the mash,
perhaps 45 minutes later. Pop in the oven and it will still be over
145 an hour later. The mash may overheat a bit on the outside the
first 15 minutes or so, but a quick stir at 30 minutes will fix the
loss of enzymes in part of the mash if any loss does occur. Let it
chill in the oven. (You can play heat and cool games too since there
is the stone to insulate the mash from the bottom element.) Anyway, my
early opinion is that 50/50 biga/soaker (mash) is about right. Plastic
wrap close over the top of the mash and minimal mixing to avoid oxygen
seems to help noticeably.
I have also discovered that folding is enormous help in getting
push in the oven. I have an Electrolux DLX mixer which does a gentle
mix and knead, and the long period hydrated in the soaker or biga
lends to gluten formation but not development. I like to fold rather
than knead in order to control oxygenation while promoting
development, and it may actually help. I know I was shocked the first
time I used folding on a high extraction bread and went overboard and
got a hockey puck the beautiful Poilane orange color! At least the
oven was right. Another tool, like time, temperature, acidity and
salt... I think conventional kneading may be part of the culprit in
the bad reputation whole grain has for the bran cutting the gluten
fibers, and that folding may be a gentler process that does not push
the bran across the gluten in the same way.
Struan: I share your fascination with the whole grain struan
breads, and enjoy that sort of bread. I don't think, however, that
anybody who knew the ancient recipe for struan would have been talking
to a British preacher in the 1830's while the witchcraft laws were
still in full force. Also, the foxglove is a North American plant and
not an ancient Scottish plant (the marigold is from Africa too, but
that is less of a problem). Most of the ingredients are medicinal: the
carly doddies are flowers and succulents growing near rocks. For them,
think bitters (as in Angostura or Peynaud's bitters), stomach medicine
in an era when even half the English kings died of tummy troubles. The
Irish still use the same sort of thing as bittering agent for beer -
Coors Kileans Red is made according to an Irish recipe and much
appreciated by someone like myself who is mildly allergic to some
bitters. Peach refers to the fuzzy skin - American peaches got their
name from the Scots - and is probably a medicinal water plant. I knew
people who made blue dye (think blue jeans blue and blue tattoo ink)
from woad, and it is one of the vilest, foulest smelling ferments you
ever imagined (so bad that the olde tyme woad dyers had to intermarry
as nobody from the community would see them). After the autumnal
equinox the gales set in anticipating the storms of winter, and my
thought is that as the air chilled all the household ferments for beer
and medicine went sluggish and the last batches were simply dumped
together for a last bit of activity. I know that a lot of ferments can
produce totally different effects, depending on how you do it: a
friend made some of his granny's dandelion wine years ago, and the old
family recipe had a short lasting and mild transcendental kick, unlike
other dandelion wine I've had. Anyway, my thought is they cleaned out
all the pots and potions brewing around the house before these died of
the cold anyway, made a last batch of "green beer" and then they used
the weakly leavened spent mash for bannock bread (dough twisted on a
stick and fire roasted), and sat around the peat fire drinking their
(possibly transcendental) green beer and eating their bitter bread and
communing with the Old Gods. The pagan ancestor of cakes and ale.
I hope the comments on home milling with impact mills is useful to you
in the future, and also the suggestion that folding may be more
beneficial to gluten development in high fiber breads than
conventional kneading may lead to some benefit after trial.
Best regards,
Steve Maxson
