Friday Bread Basket 3/21/25
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.
Bread for dessert!
Cake Zine co-founder Tanya Bush recently wrote for the Times about how pastry chefs are rediscovering the joys of 'old bread' in their creations, which of course I am all for:
For as long as humans have been making bread, we’ve been looking for ways to use up the leftovers. In medieval Europe, thrifty cooks began softening stale ends with boiling water, adding sugar and spices and baking the mixture into bread pudding. In the time since, nearly every culinary culture has developed its own spin on the recipe: In France, dried-out slices are transformed into pain perdu via a custard soak and a pan fry; in the Middle East, toughened scraps are revived with rosewater syrup to make the treat known as aish el saraya; in Vietnam, day-old loaves are blended with bananas and coconut milk to form the batter of a succulent cake called banh chuoi nuong; and in India and Pakistan, there’s shahi tukra, a decadent sweet made by bathing sizzled slices in saffron-infused milk.
Their disparate flavors notwithstanding, all of these dishes rely on essentially the same method: using desiccated bread as a sponge to soak up flavorful liquid. Now, however, pastry chefs are devising other strategies for transforming yesterday’s loaf into tonight’s dessert. Perhaps the most popular is making ice cream. At Brio, an Italian restaurant in Amsterdam, the chef Maddy Caldwell, 24, toasts leftover focaccia and grinds it into crumbs, blending them into milk and sugar to form a soft serve base. At Lyle’s in London, where she was the head pastry chef until late last year, Clodagh Manning, 28, started her version with sourdough, infusing the crusts into milk and cream, which she froze, churned and topped with marmalade, wheat berries, burnt vanilla Chantilly and wafer-thin bread wisps toasted in olive oil.
As it turns out, I've been working on a bread ice cream of my own, which at this point is likely going to end up an outtake from Breaducation, since I'm running out of room.
A certain ratio
A company called First Build is about to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the Sourdough Sidekick, a tabletop device that can feed your starter for you:
The Sourdough Sidekick feeds your starter—so you don't have to! Just tell it how much starter you need and when, and it handles the rest! Forget the constant feeding, the guilt of discarding, and the stress of keeping your starter alive. Instead, get happy, healthy starter that's ready when you are.
The idea is that you fill its hopper with flour and its reservoir with water, and it will build a starter for you over a series of days (up to a week, total), controlling dosing schedule and temperatures along the way. I get that there are probably a fair number of people who might like the idea of a device that can build an active starter over the course of a week or so without having to attend to it, and without generating much if any discard, so I don't mind the idea of this, in theory. But I'm at a loss on how well it could work, at least compared to manual feedings, because I just don't get the math.
If I needed 200g levain for use 5 days from now, using a minimum of flour, and I was refreshing it twice-daily leading up to that, I'd use a ~20g scale with each refreshment, at a 10:10:2 ratio (10g flour, 10g water, and 2g starter). The night before I needed to bake, I'd scale up, using 100g flour, 100g water, and 20g starter. All told this would require 190g flour (10g x 9 + 100g) and yield 160g of discard. The reason this works is because it creates discard; by ditching 95% of the starter at each refreshment (until the last one), the scale can stay constant throughout.
But any "no-discard" approach requires each refreshment to be larger than the previous one, since all of the starter gets used to build it (remember, the device just adds fresh flour and water at each stage). To put it another way, each n-1 refreshment has to be a fraction of the current one, and it doesn't take long before you work backwards into teensy, tiny amounts of flour and water, even if you use a high feeding ratio, something I wouldn't do myself, because the starter would overproof long before the next refreshment.
And even then you run into the same issue. Here's a much-too-high 1:1:1 starter feeding schedule, working backwards over ten refreshments:
As you can see, the first refreshment would call for 3 milligrams of flour and water, and 3 tenths of a milligram of starter, something no device (or human, for that matter) could scale out accurately. And at a more reasonable 10:10:2 ratio? You'd need to start with 4 nanograms of starter (or 0.000000004 grams)!
Given this impossible math, the Sourdough Sidekick must work some other way—adding a constant, modest amount of flour and water to the starter at each stage, I guess. If so, while the ratio of flour, water, and starter might start out somewhere reasonable, the amount of "seed" will quickly grow exponentially larger than the amount of fresh flour and water added at each stage, which is...not ideal for a healthy starter. So color me deeply skeptical for the time being; unless it works in some way I cannot fathom, while it might do the work for you, it'll be pretty half-assed, at best.
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful, restful weekend. See you next week.
—Andrew
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