Of Hazy Apples and Starter

My recent mention on the Diane Rehm show that I built my sourdough starter (levain) using a couple of hazy apples (the haze being wild yeast), and the posting of my levain recipe on her website has caused some consternation among listeners who don't have local apples (and who does, this time of year?).

Here are a couple of solutions: Firstly, you can use an apple from a store - but get an unwaxed one. There will still be plenty on yeast on the skin. If you can get an organic apple, so much the better. Or, if you have something else growing that's sweet and local (e.g., someone mentioned they had strawberries; another person had grapes) you can toss that in instead. But you can even skip the local fruit. There's plenty of yeast right in flour. But the other thing the fruit provides (aside from some "local color") is sugar to help get the yeast going. Baking instructor and writer Peter Reinhart adds canned pineapple juice to make his starter (the pineapple possibly having some other beneficial properties, in addition to sugar).

So, don't sweat it -- there are lots of ways to get your starter started, and the website The Fresh Loaf has a number of them. Have fun with it, and if it doesn't work out the first time, throw it out and start over!

Full instruction are included in 52 Loaves, and the recipe can be found on my website

Pain de l'Abbaye

I'm going to let another bread blogger speak for me this week. "MC," as she goes by, who writes the blog Farine (the French word for flour) decided to try making my pain de l'abbaye this past weekend. This is the recipe I developed on the spot while trying to restore the lost tradition of baking to a 1300-year-old abbey in Normandy. It's a bit unusual in that it uses both a poolish and a levain, the reason being that, with the volume of bread they were making, keeping enough levain going for a pain au levain (with no commercial yeast) would have been difficult for the monks, so I came up with a recipe using an overnight poolish (a batter of flour, water, and just a pinch of yeast) for flavor, with a little of my levain thrown in for both flavor and texture.

The result: pain de l'Abbaye St. Wandrille. Read MC's experiences with it and see her mouth-watering photos (that's hers above) here.

52 Loaves makes NPRs top 15 books of summer list!

This might be preaching to the choir, but I'm pleased to announce that the book that inspired this blog, 52 Loaves, has just been chosen as one of NPR's 15 "soaring summer reads."

As a bonus, for those of you not yet in the choir, they've printed an excerpt of my wheat harvest adventure. Enjoy...

The state of home baking in the States

No, this blog isn't dead -- I've just been on the road touring for 52 Loaves (hey, you can't bake and travel at the same time). A side benefit was that I got to meet (and hear about) a lot of passionate bakers. There was the guy who built a kitchen around a brick bread oven (not the other way around), the doctor who quit his job to become a baker, and the woman who bakes bread for her family every single day. (And no, she wasn't overweight.) Plus just a lot of dedicated people who love baking and homemade bread. Due to my proselytizing I have a feeling that all over the country people are building starters right now. If you want to make your own, just follow these directions. It's easy and it's the first step toward making artisan bread.

Metric or Bust! (Or, bakers weigh everything, part deux)

Recently a reader wrote that, while he understood why I measured all ingredients by weight (in grams) in the recipes included in 52 Loaves, he didn't own a metric scale and suggested I post volume equivalents on this blog. It's a legitimate request, but I think I'd be doing him (and all bakers) a disservice if I did so. Here's why:

• First of all, bakers weigh everything. Even, as I've mentioned before (in this blog's initial post) the firewood that goes into the brick oven. This is because measuring by volume (especially flour) is inherently and unavoidably inaccurate and inconsistent. Someone's 2 cups of flour is someone else's 2-1/4 cups. Even water is hard to measure by volume, given the miniscus (the curvature) in the measureing cup. And just 5 grams of water (inperceptible in a measuring cup) can make a difference in your bread.
• Secondly, you're going to be investing a lot of time and a little bit of money to master artisan bread. A really nice, accurate, digital kitchen scale like the one I use can be had for just $19 -- the cost of a few of bags of flour. I don't know if people realize how cheap these things have gotten recently. I like mine so much, I even use it for weighing the water for coffee every morning. Okay, so I'm a bit anal, but...my coffee is consistent.
• Thirdly, I'm on a personal, one-man campaign to convert the United States to the metric system. Weren't we, like, supposed to do this 40 years ago? I remember being prepared for this "calamity" in high school science classes. So, bakers unite! Let's go metric!

PS: If you have a serviceable scale that only has Imperial (US) weights, use Google or Bing to do the conversions in my recipes for you. In the search window, just type, e.g., "500 g in ounces" and it will give you the equivalent.