Friday Bread Basket 6/14/24
Fresh yeast hell
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a (mostly) weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. The image above—the only instance of AI-generated anything I’m likely to share here—is one I found when doing a search for “how to freeze fresh yeast” the other day. Your guess is as good as mine.
My Old School
Bellegarde Bakery owner and miller
wrote a beautiful piece on returning to the San Francisco Baking Institute—where he first learned to bake—to teach a workshop of his own:If I wanted to be a good baker, I had to know what the dough was saying. And the only way to know what the dough was saying was to be honest with myself: if I was going to understand bread, I had to be vulnerable. Slowly, grudgingly, I began to notice the grace and tenderness of bread through all my five senses. But it was the touch which got me most.
For ten hours a day my hands touched and shaped and kneaded bread: the gentle curve of a taut boule, the gassy slackness of a resting baguette, the strong, angled edges of a batard, the yielding body of a fully-proofed fougasse, the dry firmness of a couronne. On them all I had to use my body, its presence, and its gestures–the torque in my wrist, the twisting of my torso, the firm planting of my feet, the nerve endings in my fingertips–to know when and how to form the dough into bread. And in all this touching of bread, I was touched back.
Rice Dreams
Wordloaf contributor Rhianna Morris—who previously wrote here about scaling her sourdough recipes for solo consumption—moved to Saigon awhile back, into an apartment without an oven. She dried her starter and figured it would have to stay that way until she moved to new digs. But the sourdough itch demands scratching, and she found a workaround:
I have always known that you can successfully “bake” cakes in rice cookers, and many of the latest models have an actual cake function. But bread is not cake. If you search Google or YouTube for rice cooker bread recipes, you will see heaps for how you can use the magical countertop appliance to yield something that is akin to bread. Some bakers, cooks!, produce an astonishing array of leavened items that make an oven seem totally irrelevant. Not surprisingly, many of them are located in Asia where having a proper oven is much more rare than in places like North America or Europe. While oodles of folks on my Instagram feed had all the great equipment to bake all the beautiful things, I was relieved to find a niche group of folks elsewhere I could admire for their alternabakes.
Rice-cooker bread baking is mostly an unexplored frontier, and Rhianna has had to do a lot of experimentation to sort out a reliable method.
Bostock options
This tour featured presentations on the dairy industry’s approach to controlling methane emissions, conversations about the limitations of one farm’s insurance to adequately remit their expenses when they lost their fruit trees to a wildfire, and the complicated math of crop storage when you produce and process millions of bulbs of garlic a year. We learned about grafting, crop rotation, sustainable wine, and the water needs of blueberries…
People often think that tiny farming operations and farmer’s markets are the key to a sustainable food system, but I often wonder if these folks have really grasped the scope of what it takes to feed the world. It would not be possible to produce enough food without a mix of larger and smaller farms, and a robust governmental commitment to making operations of all sizes sustainable is crucial.
She also shared an I-need-to-make-this recipe using two of the states’ crops, a rhubarb-pistachio bostock:
Last week, I set to brainstorming a recipe for rhubarb that would highlight its tart, fleeting glory. My only caveat is that I don’t want to have to pick up a rolling pin - we’re in the first of many heat waves, and my official summer laziness has set in. Enter the bostock: an underrated french pastry featuring a thick slab of brioche topped with almond cream and sugar. A bostock has all the charm of a twice-baked almond croissant, without having to commit the crime of allowing croissants to go stale. It comes together quickly, and unlike a rhubarb frangipane tart, does not require me to fuss about with making pastry or pressing a crust into a finicky mold. I’m continuing my recent love affair with pistachios by subbing them for almonds in the frangipane - the pink and green combo of rhubarb and pistachio is irresistible to me.
Wait, what?
So this happened recently:
It seems that my Serious Eats outdoor-oven pizza dough now has the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me seal-of-approval.
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful weekend everyone, see you all next week.
—Andrew
Wait, Wait!
Thanks so much for including me, Andrew!