Baking Heirloom Artisan Bread

94 Pages·2015·1.27 MB·English

by  Theriault

Baking Heirloom Artisan Bread
By William D. Theriault
Text copyright ©2015 William D. Theriault
All Rights Reserved
Contents
Preface
1. Things You Should Know*
2. The Ingredients
3. The Process
4. Bread Shapes
5. The Oven and the Cloche
6. Making Your Own Starter
7. The Basic Recipe
8. Baking Your First Batch at Home
9. Developing Your Own Recipes
10. Bibliography
Appendix A. Bread Recipes You Can Bake at Home
About the Author
Preface
What is Artisan Bread?
Go into a bakery or supermarket today, and you’ll probably encounter the
word “artisan" associated with some bread product. "Artisan" can have a number
of meanings, ranging from a suggestion that it is a natural food with a variety of
health benefits to a promise that it is an exact replica of the food our ancestors
ate.
From an historical perspective, artisan bread is made by hand in a way that
was traditional in Europe and Britain from the Middle Ages until the Industrial
Revolution. It was brought to America with the colonists and produced here
extensively until the 1820s. Specifically, this means that the bread is produced
using flour, water, salt, and a culture derived from wild yeast. It is mixed by
hand, allowed to rise naturally over an extended period, and baked in a wood-
fired masonry oven -- or in a fireplace using a Dutch Oven or similar container.
By implication, this type of artisan bread is free from preservatives and other
artificial ingredients that make it rise quicker, last longer, or look prettier. By the
time of the Civil War, new technology and mass production techniques had
generally replaced artisan bread with a product that looked and tasted much
different.
I use the phrase "heirloom artisan" to characterize bread baking that uses these
traditional, pre-industrial techniques. This approach has several merits. First,
for the student of history, it helps you understand our ancestors' way of life by
doing something the way they did. For the aspiring bread baker, it encourages
you to bake using all of your five senses, rather than relying heavily on
prepackaged ingredients and automated processes. For environmentalists, it
helps you create healthy food inexpensively, free from additives, using less
energy. For survivalists, it can help you make life-sustaining food when you are
off the grid.
There are other approaches to baking artisan bread that use modern equipment
and ingredients as well as time-saving processes. These changes make the
baking process more efficient and reliable, and they are widely used in
commercial bakeries that produce artisan bread. Both the traditional and modern
approaches to baking artisan bread have their merits and drawbacks.
This book helps you learn how to make heirloom artisan bread at home, with
simple, inexpensive utensils and ingredients. If you get hooked on this kind of
baking, maybe you'll want to take another step, back in history, and learn how to
bake this kind of bread in a colonial style wood-fired brick oven. But that's
another topic for those who have mastered the basics and are ready for new
challenges.
Bill Theriault
Top of the Document
1. Things You Should Know
What is Heirloom Artisan Bread?
Created with fresh starter made from a wild yeast culture (not from dry
quick-rising yeast)
Uses flour, salt, and water as its major ingredients Mixed by hand
Rises slowly over several hours
Baked in masonry oven, Dutch oven, or cloche
Characteristics of Artisan Bread Multi-colored crust ranging from tan to
dark brown Top slashed to prevent air pockets forming under crust Thick,
brown, chewy, flavorful crust
Crumb has substantial structure and irregular air pockets
Basic Classes of Wheat Grown in the United States Growing Season
Winter wheat is planted in the fall and harvested in late spring or
early summer.
Spring wheat is planted in the spring and harvested in early fall.
Color
Red wheat contains a slightly bitter tasting pigment White wheat
does not contain the pigment; it has a milder taste
Hardiness
Hard wheat contains more protein
Soft wheat contains less protein
Types of Wheat
Hard Red Winter Wheat: Moderate protein content, used for breads, rolls,
all-purpose flour.
Hard Red Spring Wheat: The highest-protein bread wheat, made into
bread flour.
Soft Red Winter Wheat: Low protein wheat, used for pastries, flatbreads,
and crackers.
Hard White Wheat: Similar to Hard Red Winter Wheat, but with pigment
production bred out. Used to make milder-tasting whole wheat products
such as bread, rolls, bulgur, and tortillas.
Durham Wheat: Very hard high-protein wheat, used to make semolina
flour for pasta.
Note: The sources noted in section 10.Bibliography have been used to
provide this information.
Top of the Document
2. The Ingredients
I teach folks how to make heirloom artisan bread, using traditional ingredients
and techniques. Students often want to know if they can substitute one
ingredient for another, use modern appliances, and speed up the process so it
will fit into their busy lifestyle.
With artisan bread, as with many things in life, what you get out of it depends
on what you put into it. My advice is simple: learn how to make it by hand,
understand the how and why, and experience the taste, smell, and feel of the
finished product. Realistically, that will take a few weeks of flying solo,
recording what you did and how you did it, and learning from your successes
and failures.
At that point, you will know what you gain or lose by modification and
whether it is worth continuing the journey. Let the journey begin.
A. The Ingredients
1. Wheat Flour
This chapter focuses exclusively on baking bread using wheat flour. Although
you can experiment with different types of flour made from different varieties of
wheat, the preparation and baking process will remain uniform throughout.
Most readers are surprised by how their choice of flours can affect the finished
product.
Understanding the anatomy of a wheat seed is the key to knowing how various
types of flour will perform.
The outer protective shell or bran, includes fiber and often pigment. Hard
Red Winter Wheat is the variety most frequently used to make bread flour, and
the bran contains a red pigment that gives its flour a distinctive "wheaty" flavor.
A variety know as Hard White Winter Wheat lacks the red pigment. Its flour
has a milder flavor but is otherwise identical to the red variety.
The inner endosperm includes carbohydrates and proteins. When some of
these proteins are combined during the mixing process, they form gluten, an
elastic ingredient that traps the carbon dioxide and alcohol produced by the yeast
as it digests the carbohydrates.
Bread flour contains more gluten-making proteins than all-purpose flour.
Without them, bread won't rise as high or have the chewy texture and open