I have to admit I find it hard to believe that there is anything new to discover about bread, at least on this level. In 6000 years nobody ever left some dough out without kneading and discovered the next day that it was ready to bake? I bet there are any number of traditional breads made this way, somewhere.
I also find it a bit depressing because I've been making traditional sourdough lately, and it just is no fun to learn there might be shortcuts.
I worked and suffered, you should have to too!
Actually, though, the problem I have with this, after making my own bread with a sourdough starter, is the use of commercial yeast. There's no question that bread made with commercial fast-rising yeast has a certain flavor-- walk by a commercial bakery and you'll get an intense dose of it, kind of chloriney or paint thinnery in that quantity. Now, I have no problem with it per se, it produces a certain sort of soft, spongey bread which works well for lots of things, and if you want that taste and texture quickly, well, you can use a bread machine, you can knead it in your Kitchenaid mixer, there's lots of ways to get decent bread with relatively little work, all of which I do from time to time.
Contrary to that was the Art of Eating article (which I can't find, dammit) mentioned
here (but I'll quote the relevant part):
an issue or two back there was a review of several bread books by some guy who clearly knew his stuff and then some... but he made the process of making bread sound basically impossible, his sense of the appropriate temperature ranges, rest times, etc. was so precise and narrow. It sort of discouraged me from ever trying anything ever again...
To which G Wiv replied, "People have been making bread for 6000 years without knowing any of that shit." Which is not exactly true (they know it intuitively, not scientifically) but I saw his point about not getting freaked out by one of humanity's basic skills. So I dove into making traditional bread recently kind of just to see if it could be done pretty well, using traditional, slower-acting yeast, without becoming as fanatically expert as the Art of Eating writer (or the guys at the bread board I know BillSFNM is part of, and I admire that fanaticism immensely, but part of the point was seeing if you could make pretty good bread without it taking over your life). And the answer is, hell yes, with a little help from books and technology. Everyone should try it.
* * *
The first thing I did was order a French sourdough starter from
Ed Wood, the man who wrote the book and, more to the point, has intrepidly searched the world for interesting starters and often literally smuggled them back. I cannot praise Wood for this highly enough; I tried to buy a dry starter somewhere years ago and it was flavorless and uninteresting, little more than conventional yeast I suspect. Only Wood, so far as I know, actually makes traditional sourdough yeasts available to the general public, at least in this many varieties (quite fascinating reading, by the way, be sure to visit his site).
A week or so of mixing and pouring out and remixing goop to bring the starter to active strength followed, keeping it warm like a baby chick in a styrofoam cooler with a 25-watt bulb dangling inside. The first thing I made with some of my discarded starter was sourdough pancakes-- a little strong for pancakes, but an intriguing preview.
Next up I tried making bread dough. Not surprisingly, I pretty much overdid everything-- the dough was too warm so I tried to cool it down by sticking it in the freezer for two minutes, then suddenly it was way too cold (oops, that might have worked better if it weren't still in a metal bowl that immediately dropped to 20 below), it was too thick so I had trouble adding the salt, I don't remember what all I screwed up. I actually finally aborted this batch as sure to dissapoint as bread, and used it for pizza dough-- which it was quite good for, actually. Not that it matters, since I'll never be able to repeat this set of errors exactly.
Second batch, my first real bread dough, was a much smoother process. However, by now I had hand-kneaded two large balls of dough and though it was undoubtedly educational in terms of learning how to judge by texture... I was
sore. Reluctantly, I knew that from here on out the Kitchenaid would do the main mixing and,
per Nancy Silverton's advice, I would do a little finish-kneading which would help me stay in contact with the dough and hone my sense of what was right in terms of texture.
That's actually a later loaf but I thought it was time to actually look at what we were talking about. Working with traditional starter is on a whole different time scale than using fast-acting commercial yeast; once you've mixed and kneaded it you give it about four hours for its first rise, then refrigerate it about 12 hours to let it rest, ferment, something. Then you let it rise again for about 4 hours, and bake. This actually is not a bad schedule-- you make the dough one afternoon or evening, let it rest overnight, let it rise and bake it the next afternoon. But it's slower than traditional yeast and, ironically, sort of like the timescale of the no-knead method.
I had ordered one of those La Cloche things Mark Bittmann mentions in the article at the beginning of this thread (dismissively), basically a kind of terracotta dutch oven for simulating a brick oven and trapping steam inside during the first part of the baking process, but Amazon shipped it badly and it arrived broken, so I had to wait for a replacement. (Ironically, the company turns out to be
here in Chicago, not that far from my house.) So for my first pair of loaves I did the spritz-water-in-the-oven method for a crispy crust, which despite Bittmann's comments is perfectly easy and effective.
Unless you overdo it so much, like I did, that you wind up with an armor-plated shell. You also see, from the fact that my cut in the top barely separated, that this loaf was too dense to expand in the baking process.
Yes, it was (the family said as, grimacing, they tried heroically to chew it). Crumbly inside, not full of different-sized bubbles and stretchy glutens. An okay first try but it was obvious where improvement was needed.
This was the second batch and the first done in the La Cloche. As you can see I was still learning something about how much to let the outside brown-- in the end I arrived at a point of taking the La Cloche hood off to end steaming and start browning about 10 minutes earlier than they suggest-- but the texture and crumb of the bread was much better by just this second time:
Three or four more tries have followed, and by now I feel reasonably competent at what I'm doing and no longer pore over the books talmudically, trying to divine the precise meaning of words like "firm" or "sticky." (In relation to bread, I mean.) Interestingly, it seems like the flavor of the sourdough starter has deepened over time, it's never particularly sour but it does have an old world earthiness and heartiness that is very different from commercial yeast. It's a very satisfying flavor. Here's one of the most recent loaves, just the right color, the right bubbly exterior texture, getting closer to the right degree of denseness/airiness as indicated by fairly good separation of the cuts:
So where am I on the scale of breadmaking? Well, not even the best breadmaker on my street, I admit, but as a homemade product, I'm very happy with my bread and the family is always pleased to smell it baking. The LaCloche is a nice product but if you're not interested in spending $50 on a thing just to make bread a $2 squirt gun, applied to the oven wall a couple of times early in the process, plus a pizza stone, will work very similarly. I think G Wiv's instincts were right: you could spend a lifetime learning to make truly great crusty European bread, but anybody with a little care and a few basic implements (like a Kitchenaid) can make pretty darn good crusty European bread-- with only a little more work than the no-work, no-knead method described in that article.