Iowa Dave's Blog

We U.S. Baby Boomers have become food voyeurs. Our interest in good food consists mainly of eating it, with a strong secondary interest in watching it made.

Julia Child’s French cooking TV program showed us the way. I am happy that last year’s movie, “Julie and Julia”, motivated many people to purchase Childs’s cookbook and examine its recipes. Perhaps the family dinner will taste better in America from now on, on average, so that’s a good thing.

Yet most families will still gather around what comes out of cans and boxes bought at the store.

We Boomers vowed as youths to reject all uniform outcomes of modernity as synthetic, and reassert the individual as a conscientious actor bound by sentient consent to the natural world. “Give us simple food, lovingly hand-made from pure ingredients!” we cried. (Our downfall was to emphasize mostly the “give us” part of that. We want consistently wonderful food to come on demand, without effort. Which is how we got Starbucks. But let us rant another day.)

The natural world does not reciprocate our mythological impulses toward beneficial cooperation; it would just as soon eat us, raw. Making food from scratch consumes effort, imposes schedules, and too often fails to attain its objective. It requires mastery of skills that no longer pass from parent to child in the normal course of family life. Who has time for that, anyway?

The answer, of course, is to take the time and invest it with directed effort, to move food preparation from an appetitive utility into a meaningful activity. This is what I mean by the “sourdough life.” Call it a hobby, then, or an amateur pursuit. I borrow Michael Chabon’s assertion of the French meaning: lover; enthusiast. The sourdough life seeks forgotten food skills for the love of it.

It is a learning-centered life. Not the kind of Tuesday-night dabblers’ classes where one puts the finishing touches on a pre-packaged product, however. Craft results from study and long practice. Our modern sourdough learns from teachers if he is lucky, or books if available. Paying attention to the work is another good way to learn.

What prompted this little digression was a breakthrough with a recent batch of corn hominy. I have learned to make it well enough for my own food. Now I want to make it look attractive. And easy, a la Julia. The breakthrough? Letting the corn soak overnight in its solution of pickling lime and water. This really loosens the outer coating that we want to get off. Then warm it back up, don a pair of heavy duty kitchen gloves, reach in there and mush it around pretty aggressively. After five to ten minutes or so, stop when most of the kernels are nice and clean enough for what you have in mind.  Rinse thoroughly, pick out the unattractive few bits, and there you are.

I got the idea from an oral history of a Native American named Buffalobird Woman, written down in 1910. In the book, Native American Gardening, she details the yearly agricultural cycle of an extended family. Their standard practice was letting the corn hominy soak overnight. Bing! bright idea.

The sourdough life is not about rejecting the present for some presumptively better, earlier time. It is about recognizing the joy of craft, knowing the way of materials, reaching back for the wisdom people used to own when self-sufficiency was necessary, but carrying it forward into the present day through a greater sense of personal engagement in realizing the quality of our lives.

I spent this morning playing with the gifts Andrea gave me for Christmas. Practical, needful things: a baking stone and a silicone rolling sheet.

The pre-heated stone rapidly feeds bottom heat into fresh dough placed upon it, promoting the “oven spring” by which bread blooms as it bakes. The sheet makes it possible to roll-out bread dough flat and thin. It eliminates the need to sprinkle flour on the work surface. Dough sticks to it well enough to keep from sliding around, yet releases readily when it is time to bake.

For first use, I prepared my usual, whole-wheat recipe, with two modifications.

1. Reduced the instant yeast to 1/2 teaspoon, only. Replaced three ounces each of flour and water with six ounces of sourdough starter.
2. Set the dough in the garage to raise overnight. In winter we heat our garage enough to keep it above freezing. Slow-rise fermentation at low temperatures produces a unique favor profile in bread. This batch stayed out there about 14 hours.

Light, puffy, whole-wheat, sourdough pitas are on the menu for lunch at our house, stuffed with one of Andrea’s incredible tuna salads. For dinner, I anticipate hamburger en pita.

The risk with possessions is that we would allow them to define our identity. When this happens we feel insecure no matter how much we have, because there lies always just beyond our reach… more. The path to contentment begins with what we have and leads toward what we can do with it. The trick is to balance the quest for better skill with humility to honor the results of the day as well.

So, here is what Andrea really gave me for Christmas: the pleasure of working with dough in new ways, and pleasing her when I bake with the tools she gave me.

Some of the better moments of older age involve figuring out—finally!—some vexatious detail from a younger day. For example, like every other aging hippie, I remember the “natural foods” movement of the early 1970’s. How dense and heavy were those loaves of bread made entirely with whole wheat flour!

I knew how to bake home made bread at the time. But I could never get a decent loaf using only whole-wheat flour. They usually “lost their dome” and fell flat. If I baked these disappointments, they never sprouted a dome in the oven, the way a cake would do. No, they just hardened into dense, heavy bricks. I was poor enough back then that I ate them anyway. But with every gnaw I vowed to unlock the secret and master the craft of making bread with zero white flour content.

Most home bakers I have known suffered the same problem. The most popular solution for getting a nice “lift” into so-called “whole wheat” bread has been to incorporate white flour into it. But that defeats the purpose. So I continued my quest to learn the trick of making bread with 100% whole wheat flour.

A bread machine gave me my first victory. I thought it might be that the machine handled the relatively more sticky dough better than I could by hand. More recently, I have come to believe that the machine gets its result by allowing the dough to rest following the initial mixing.

In his most recent bread books, Peter Reinhart refers to this rest period as the “autolyse”. Basically, the flour is allowed to soak up the water completely, immediately after mixing. This process permits more of the essential gluten proteins to form.

Left to rest and soak, the dough changes in important ways. It becomes less sticky to handle. And it kneads much better. I mix my dough in a stand-type mixer these days. A short minute with the paddle beater, then a 20-minute autolyse interval, followed by three minutes or less with the dough hook, and it is ready for the raising bowl. An hour later, it forms into loaves that rise to rival anything I ever created with white flour.

I learned a few other things that help in small ways. I might write later about sourdough, or reasons why to raise loaf bread inside a plastic bag. But I must say, the rest period immediately after mixing—the aytolyse—makes a big difference.

I weigh my ingredients. Most office products stores sell inexpensive postage scales that will do the job nicely. Here is the recipe I use:

   Whole Wheat Flour          15 ounces
   Water                      11 ounces
   Sugar                       1 ounce
   Olive oil                   1 ounce
   Salt                        1.5 teaspoons
   Instant yeast               1.5 teaspoons

It makes a 1 1/2 pound loaf, more or less. You probably do not even need a mixer. Stir the ingredients together in a good-sized bowl until well combined. Let sit for 20 minutes. Knead for a few minutes, until it feels strong and silky-smooth. Let it raise in a covered bowl at room temperature for about an hour, or until it doubles in volume, whichever comes last. Shape it into a loaf and allow to raise a second time until it doubles in volume or otherwise looks ready to bake. (You have to learn by experience to recognize when bread is ready for the oven.)  Bake at 350 to 400 degrees for half an hour.

If there is any compensation for all that older age takes away, surely it comes in the form of high-domed loaves of whole-wheat bread, warm and fragrant, the once-unattainable stuff of youthful yearning, cooling on a rack in one’s own kitchen.