Ode To The Bread
Making bread is a dreamy craft. Taking such simple, fundamental elements, flour and water, and building them into sustenance that is foundational, hearty and beloved is pretty cool. In my homesteading daydreams I often imagined myself baking late into the night, my family waking to fresh warm sourdough on a cozy Sunday morning, a tangible way to provide and say I love you.
When I first arrived in Norway I didn’t know the era of my bread making was about to begin, that my friend Astrid would share her knowledge of sourdough with me and eventually making bread would be a part of my job. On the island I became the bread maker for guests and staff, free to experiment with different flours, additions of seeds and sometimes spices.
Again and again, I find myself attracted to crafts threaded together by their ancient place in the human experience: bread making, fermentation, knitting, midwifery, trades that take time, require great patience and offer a delicious sense of accomplishment in the end.
The Sourdough at Manshausen
Bread making can be very complex, very technical, very involved. The bread I made in Norway was not any of those things for one reason: the sourdough culture I was using everyday resided in a traditionally Scandinavian bread trough.
The trough is made from a hard, raw wood, not one like maple or pine which produce a lot of sap and syrup. With hard untreated wood the sourdough culture can take up residency, living within the wood and even lying dormant for generations.
Each night when I built a starter, mixing flour and water in the trough to a pancake-batter-like consistency, the sourdough microbes would come out of the wood to feed on the ingredients and create the starter. In the morning, evidence of the microbe’s activity would leave bubbles. Sometimes the bubbles were spaced out and of medium size, sometimes they were tiny and frothy. Either way, good bubbles signaled that the that the starter was ripe for using, that I could begin building a dough.
During the shoulder seasons, of the hotel that employed me, when the need for bread decreased significantly, the trough would lay empty for a few days. After these dry spells I would often include a splash of local beer or dribble of honey into the initial water and flour, as an offering to the wee microbes who I imagined were quite hungry after three days without sustenance. Sometimes I added beer or honey at other stages to encourage a more enthusiastic dough.
I was producing five to seven loaves of bread each day.
So my ratios were much larger than you would do for a personal loaf.
My Ratio:
4000 grams of flour to 4 L of liquid + 4 big pinches of salt
Flour = 3/4 white + 1/4 rye or emmer
Liquid = 3/4 warm water + 1/4 draft beer
With a dough made the process continued all by itself. I would check on the dough throughout the day to see how it was rising, sometimes whispering sweet nothings to encourage the process, but usually it did not require my hands for several hours. Once it had risen significantly, doubling in volume and with large bubbles suggesting lots of activity, I would then give the dough a massage, knocking the air out of it so that it would rise for a second time, developing another level of gluten. This second rise often happened in half the time. In roughly 2 hours the dough would be ready to move into bread tins.
Tins continued to simplify the process for two reasons: the consistence of the dough can vary and no shaping is required, shaping is another layer of technique in bread making. I would oil the tins with a neutral, high temperature stable oil like sunflower and then scoop dough up with my hands and place it into the tins. I did not weigh the dough or take any kind of measurement to ensure each loaf was identical. We were happy with a more rustic approach.
One final rest in the tins for half and hour and then into the oven they went. At 210˚C the perfect bake lies somewhere between 40-50 minutes for our temperamental oven that is, every oven is different.
This is a very hands off method with lots of room for error. Some bakes were much better than others in terms of texture, shape, crust. Sometimes a loaf or two would get stuck in a tin and be completely mauled in the process of trying to remove it, these loaves went to staff. In my six months of bread making I ruined only one batch. It was a fennel seed dough, an experiment based on a bread I had bought years before in Buenos Aires. I’m still not sure how or why but in the afternoon the dough went flat, over proofed. It was a sad loss, but into the compost went the six flat, bricks of bread, and the next day, the next batch was a fresh start.
Building The Dough:
add warm liquid to starter and whisk
add the flour, freshly milled is ideal
don’t forget the salt!!
add something interesting: seeds + spices
combine everything very well, using hands is best
leave alone for many hours, approximately 4 hrs
knock air out of dough, again using your hands is best
leave alone again, approximately 2 hrs
oil bread tins or molds
move bread from trough to tins
let the bread rest for 30 mins
bake @ 210 ˚C for 40-50 mins
remove from tins, if stuck let them sit a moment and try again. be sure to remove within five minutes or the bread’s steam will make the bread soggy
place on a drying rack
cover with a tea towel for a softer crust
Cut yourself a slice and enjoy with salted butter, maybe a drizzle of honey for a bedtime snack :)
Sourdough is alive and as a part of the natural world it is influenced by season, temperature, light, tides, the moon, and probably sixth senses: energies, forces, threads of the natural world we know little about. I think sometimes my mood affected the dough, maybe my cycle. Like a relationship, sometimes I felt incredibly synced with the dough, we were one and together created a batch with the most beautiful, light texture. Other days we were off. At first when this happened I would overcompensate, but eventually I relaxed and made peace with the fact that this would be just a good batch, not excellent.
I think it was Astrid who mentioned some bread makers up there, in Northern Norway, build their dough as the tide comes in, when there is more energy in the air. As someone who is not just keen but kinda desperate to live in tune with the natural world and her rhythms, I was delighted to time my bread making to the tides. I cannot prove it made for a better loaf, but I believe it made all the difference.
Making flat bread
During the fall I entered into a phase obsessed with flatbread, first practiced at our epic lighthouse dinner. Using a few cups of my typical dough, I would add more flour to create something more sturdy. My daily sourdough was baked in tins and therefore was a very wet dough. This everyday dough could not be shaped or baked in free form, so adding extra flour gave the flatbread dough the integrity to be shaped and hold shape.
After extra flour and a few minutes of kneading the dough would rest until dinner time, very likely a grilled dinner. Keeping everything relaxed and rustic, I ripped off chunks of dough of varying sizes and rolled them out in a little flour, stacked them into a tower separated by squares of parchment paper, and carried them outside to the grill.
One by one I threw the dough onto the hot coals. Some breads puffed up perfectly like pita bread, others stayed flat and others burnt, left a little too long while their keeper was lost in conversation around the grill. All together they were perfect, delicious and as Francis Mallmann taught us all in the first episode of Chef’s Table, all foods cooked on open fire and charred is wildly sexy.
These are especially good paired with grilled fish.
Ingrid’s Bread
At the end of my stay in Norway I went to visit my friends Ingrid and Phillip on Engeløya, an island slightly farther than Manshausen, the next ferry stop. In a beautiful farm house we enjoyed cozy days as winter’s arctic darkness began. The sun, blocked by mountains, seemed not to rise until 10am and by 2pm was setting. Our days were short yes, but beautiful with blue skies almost everyday and pink sunsets each afternoon.
We spent daylight hiking up the local mountains, ice skating, reading, baking, walking the dog, and of course, making bread. Ingrid, the beautiful Dane that she is, made Danish rye bread most of the time though loaf photographed above was an experiment and I cannot remember what it was exactly. I do remember that between the three of us and fresh salted butter, it only lasted a few hours.