MoonBaker – Terra Manna Bread School

March 19, 2020March 23, 2020

Bread in the time of Corona – Part 1

Normally I would say that paying attention to your bread at every stage, and being present when it’s time to take action, are two of the most important qualities in a baker. Bread dough is a living thing and, if you are listening, it will tell you how it’s doing and what it needs. The key is to be able to pay attention, to listen (metaphorically), to what the bread needs, and then to do that thing.

To say that I was distracted and not paying attention, and not present when I needed to be during my last bake is a fantastic understatement. As seems to be clear at the moment, the world has been turned upside down and everything is not the way we thought it was a couple of months ago, and as a result of my being completely distracted and not present when things needed to happen, I made one of the best loaves I’ve ever made.

Counterintuitive, but true.

I’ve been doing some recipe testing for Fougasse, a wonderful French flatbread. First day I made a loaf using a Paté Fermenté (a kind of pre-ferment). Day two, yesterday, was going to be another test using a sourdough as a pre-ferment (as opposed to sourdough as the leavening agent). I had prepared the levain the night before so I would be ready to go in the morning.

Enter reality…

Because of the spread of the novel coronavirus, most of the Bay Area counties had been given “Shelter In Place” orders the previous day, and rumor had it that it was going to happen to us here in Sonoma County soon, so I wanted to get all of my “out in public” things done before the lockdown. My 84 year old mother needed some food and medicine picked up, and since they are recommending people over 65 stay in as much as possible, I was clearly going to spend the day errand running (which I was happy to do, mom).

My levain – which was looking perfect and ready to go – sadly had to hold on until later. I popped it into the fridge as I headed out the door. This is something I never do; I never retard a levain. When the levain is at that perfect moment it wants to be used (as do we all). But retarding in the fridge slows fermentation down, and since I don’t like throwing things out, I figured I’d just see where the levain was when I got home and figure out what I was going to do then.

Off I went into battle with seemingly all of Sonoma county, trying to buy whatever they could before the world came to an end. At least that’s what it felt like.

Six hours later I was home again and after a thorough decontamination, I pulled my levain out of the fridge to finish what I’d started the night before. Sad face. It was definitely a bit over-fermented – a little too acidic and starting to collapse a bit – but not to be deterred, I decided to proceed.

Bread prep — Image © 2020 David Rubinstein

I put the dough together, put it in it’s tub for bulk fermentation, and sat down to obsessively read about coronavirus. The bulk fermentation was supposed to be around two hours, so I set a timer for 90 minutes (I always set the timer early so I don’t miss The Moment).

I don’t know what happened, either I hadn’t actually set the timer, or it went off and I was just too distracted to notice (wouldn’t be the first time). Two-and-a-half hours later I looked up and let out an expletive when I realized that I had forgotten all about my dough and it had over-fermented, once again.

Again, like the levain, it wasn’t too bad, and I figured I’d continue on. I wasn’t expecting much out of this loaf, but even bad fresh bread is better than no fresh bread.

As I put the bread in the oven, it was clearly over proofed, wet and slack and flattening out before my eyes. “Crackers are good too”, I said to myself.

But in the oven it transformed into something beautiful and unexpected. The parts that completely degassed got crunchy while some of thicker bits, while they didn’t get a lot of oven bounce, were certainly soft and delicious. The cheese, which I had cut into cubes rather than grate, pushed to the surface and crisped up like fried cheese (something I’m particularly fond of).

These loaves were a lovely gift at the end of a long day, and a reminder that sometimes not being in control gives you something beautiful and unexpected. I find this a useful reminder in difficult times when I am particularly aware that we don’t have much control over anything.

Now I have to figure out how to make them again intentionally.

Be safe everyone.

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March 12, 2020March 23, 2020

Desert Bread Is Magic!

I’ve always said that I love baking bread because it’s like magic. You add a bunch of ingredients together in a particular order, mixing or folding it in a particular way and at a particular temperature, you let it rise for just the right length of time, then you put it in the oven and…

Desert sourdough just out of the wood burning oven. Image © 2020 David Rubinstein

…you get something amazing, beautiful and delicious to eat.

It’s not like making soup, where if it’s not quite right you can dabble with it, adding this and that, until you have it just right. Bread baking is all about preparation and performance.

But baking bread in the desert has an extra added ingredient, but you have to spend some time in the desert to get it.

The desert is the place where life and death are separated by a hair’s-breadth. It’s a place where you feel the primal pressure of day and night, sun and moon, and your rhythms of sleep and wakefulness quickly fall in line. It’s a place where the night sky seems alive with stars. It’s a place where the quiet can be deafening.

When you first look out across the desert landscape you may see nothing but sand and more sand. But if you are patient, and give it some time for your attention to sharpen and shift, you get your desert eyes (and ears, and nose). And once you get your desert eyes, you realize that the desert – which at first appears completely dead – is teeming with life of all kinds.

A similar thing happens as you get your bakers’ eyes. Bread dough, especially when you are working with wild yeast and a long, slow rise, can seem like a dead lump of flour. But your baker’s senses know otherwise. The subtle signs of life appear like the first desert growth after the rains. It’s almost imperceptible, but there is a subtle lift, a slight change in the smell, a certain quality almost below perception that tells you that your bread is alive.

And with patience and the right conditions that little hint of life bursts forth into a beautiful finished loaf.

To experience the magic of coaxing flour, salt, water, mixed with wild yeast and bacteria into a beautiful loaf of bread, while looking out over the exquisite desert landscape, is to experience the wonder of life as a miracle.

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February 21, 2020March 23, 2020

What’s In A Name – My starter, my pet

You know how sometimes you set out looking for one thing, and what you end up finding is something completely different? Well, that’s been my morning. Fortunately, what I found was much more interesting (and entertaining) than what I was looking for.

Rye Starter — My nameless Rye starter. Image © 2020 David Rubinstein

I’ve been working on a series of posts about making and keeping a sourdough starter. If you’ve ever noticed, when trying to find information about starters, they are called by different names, and it can be kind of confusing. Sometimes these are just different names for the same thing, and sometimes the names refer to different things. As with much information when researching online, it can be confusing, mostly because many people have no idea what they are talking about.

Chef, Sourdough, Starter, Mother – these are all terms that are used to refer to the same thing. Levain is also sometimes in that list, though it really shouldn’t be. It can be a little confusing, but it really doesn’t need to be. That was going to be todays’ post – how they are the same, and how they are different – but then I fell down a rabbit hole.

I discovered lists and lists of names that people give to their individual starters. It seems to common that I can’t believe I’ve never run across it in the past. I’m so happy I saved it for today ’cause I just spent the last 15 minutes laughing my ass off.

Here are some of my favorites:
Clint Yeastwood
Rye Bradburry
Joan of Starch
The Yeasty Boys
Yeastus (inspired by Kanye)

There are lot of names that I won’t print here, but that are highly amusing. There are a couple of interesting articles at Food52 and BonAppetit on the topic, and lots of others you can find with a web search.

New starter — Starting a new starter: The sourdough is dead – Long live the sourdough. Image © 2020 David Rubinstein

It’s not surprising that people give their starters pet names, people get very attached to their starters. The stories of people bringing their starters with them on trips, and getting “pet” sitters to mind there starters while they are on vacation are ubiquitous. I’m not particularly starter-attached, though my wife jokes that when we get home I feed the starter before I feed her or the dogs. (For the record, that’s not always true).

I’m delighted that people are very invested in the lives of their starters, so much so that they give them names. It gives me hope for the future of home bread baking.

However, I will never be one of those people who names their starter, for I am a well known starter-killer. I’m just not attached to the pedigree of my starter, and they are easy to make, so I’m just not super worried about it. If I’m heading out of town, I sometimes just let it die and start another one when I get back. (Obviously, this doesn’t work when working as a production baker, but I’m not at the moment).

So, I will never be a starter-namer. It would make it so much harder to kill my starters. But I’m sure glad that other people are, it’s gotten this day off to a good start with a good laugh.

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February 17, 2020March 23, 2020

A New Formula

It’s 2020 and I’m thinking about how to start something new. It’s a new year, and a new decade (or not, depending on who you ask) and I’m thinking not only about how to start this particular new year/decade, but how to approach starting new things in general. Not only am I, and everyone else who follows the Gregorian calendar, starting a new year, but I’m also starting this blog.

Starting this blog was one of my intentions for 2020. It’s been very exciting thinking about the blog: what will I write about? What voice will I use? Will it be primarily technical, or primarily philosophical? But now that it’s time to start…WTF do I actually DO now?!

As with most things in life, I think bread baking has a lot to teach us how to start something new.

I’ve been baking for a long time, and there are many types of breads that I have baked over the years. Sourdoughs, Rye, Pizza, Pita…more than I can list. But there are even more breads, I’m guessing, that I have not baked. Most of the worlds cultures have had some kind of bread as the heart of their cuisine for hundreds of years, and each of those cultures probably has multiple variants based on their resources and cuisine. There are so many breads that I have not baked that it’s sometimes overwhelming. (I have the same feeling when I think of all of the music I’ll never get to listen to).

Nan-e Barbari Image © 2020 David Rubinstein

One of my favorite things is to learn about a new bread that I’ve never baked, and then, of course, to bake it.

So how do I approach making a new bread formula? Do I just follow some recipe to the letter and get what I get? Or do I use the skills and knowledge I have from decades of bread baking and just create a recipe that I think will be the bread that I’m trying to create?

The answer for me is usually somewhere in the middle. It’s part just set out on the road and see where it takes me, and it’s part deciding where I want to go and making plans on how to get there.

I think it’s super important, when starting a new recipe (or a new year) not to assume you know where you are going, or that you have any idea how to get there. This is a new (to me) recipe, that other people – people who may technically be much less good bakers than I am – can make much better than I can. So the first thing I do is to just set out on the journey, and for me that means trying to learn as much about that particular bread as possible. I read multiple recipes, learn about the cultural context and uses of the particular bread, and try to get an idea of how people have made this in the past. Then I either take a recipe that looks likely to be good and authentic, and I just bake it that way.

And then we see what happened. (’cause if you don’t know where you are starting, how can you figure out how to get where you’re going).

But the truth is that I am an experienced baker, and I do have strong opinions about how a bread “should” be. So, I look at the loaf I’ve just baked, and I compare that with the vision in my head of the qualities I want my version of this bread to have. And then I take all of my knowledge and experience and apply it to the problem. I create a new recipe (or modify the one I have) and bake it. Is it closer to my vision? If it is, am I right in my vision about what will make this bread better?

And then I try again…and again…and again, until it is close to my vision (being a perfectionist, the absolute perfect loaf almost never happens – it can always be a little better). And when it’s right, I add it to my quiver and move on to the next loaf.

And that how I hope to approach the coming year, and the coming decade. One part just putting one foot in front of the other and see where I end up, and one part having a vision and intention about exactly where I want to end up, and making a recipe of how to get there.

I hope you all have a great new year, and that your recipes for life and bread are successful (or at least they fail better and better).

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