As Good as Bread

As Good as Bread

Kathleen Spaltro

(c) Copyright 2017.  All Rights Reserved.

   

One of the funniest episodes of I Love Lucy depicts Lucy Ricardo baking bread dough mixed with a monstrous amount of yeast. When Lucy opens the oven door, a yard-long loaf slams her into the opposite wall of her apartment kitchen. My own adventures in bread baking don't rise to this Ricardian standard. Nevertheless, my many adventures with ingredients and recipes have entertained me, instructed me, and fed me usually good and occasionally great bread.

Sometimes the ingredients intrigue me; sometimes the recipes; sometimes the bread pans or clay pots. A relic of the 1970s that I began using only in the 21st century, the Romertopf clay pot, introduced in Germany in 1967, is wonderful for braising or stewing and for baking yeast breads. Soaking the clay halves for 15 minutes before putting the pot in a cold oven and then cooking the ingredients at a very high temperature develops a beautiful bread crust.

For years, I had wanted to try baking a Pullman loaf in the requisite lidded bread pan. Pullman luxury train cars used to serve Pullman loaves; the perfectly rectangular shape of the bread meant that a small train kitchen could store more loaves of bread. So I finally bought 2 Pullman pans--9 inches and 13 inches long, and I started looking for recipes for whole-grain Pullman loaves. 

Both of my Pullman bread pans make beautiful, perfectly rectangular loaves. I used my shorter Pullman pan to bake whole-wheat raisin bread and the longer pan to bake whole-wheat bread--both made with 100% "white-whole-wheat" flour ground from a variety of white wheat that does not have the bitterness associated with traditional red wheat.

I started baking yeast bread almost 40 years ago precisely because I wanted more whole-grain breads in my daily diet. Many store-bought loaves were not very tasty, or the loaves were marketed as whole-grain, but their labels libeled the concept. I went in search of whole-grain bread recipes. Older cookbooks often contained only "quick bread" recipes, but yeast bread was coming back into favor then.

My first pumpernickel sat like a fat black rock and never rose to the occasion. Like many other baking virgins, I either killed my yeast or failed to activate the yeast at all by adding other ingredients that were either too cold or too hot. 

Now, instead of using "active dry yeast," "fresh yeast" that looks like a rectangular eraser in a foil wrapper, or "rapid-rise yeast," I use "instant yeast."  Manufactured with a different process that leaves alive many more yeast cells, "instant yeast" does not require pampering beyond being mixed with room-temperature ingredients. I simply mix the other dry ingredients with the yeast and then add all of the wet ingredients. 

Because raisins, candied fruit, and chopped nuts retard the rise of bread dough, I hold off on adding them until after the dough has risen once. I soak raisins in water or even hard liquor while the dough is rising to keep the raisins from turning into black bullets during baking.

To feed the yeast during rising, I always add potato flour (1 tablespoon per cup of wheat flour); this also extends the shelf life of the baked bread. Another trick adds diastatic malt powder (1 tablespoon per recipe) to encourage the yeast.

Very curious about ingredients, I enjoy trying out unfamiliar breads that incorporate them. From what I understand, wild rice is not a rice at all but a grass. Like saffron, it is expensive because it is difficult to harvest. I cooked some wild rice to use as an ingredient in wild rice and pumpkin seed bread. This excellent yeast bread uses molasses as its sweetener, and its grain is white-whole-wheat flour. It was the last of several recipes that I had selected from a whole-grain bread baking book. All of the recipes were good; some were excellent. 

Another excellent recipe from this book uses cooked brown rice as well as brown rice flour. Most of the flour called for by the recipe is "bread flour," but I substituted "white-whole-wheat flour." This "harvest bread" was a good match for leftover Thanksgiving turkey and some Edam or gouda cheese.

I like pearl barley and have baked with barley flour, but barley flakes were a new ingredient to me. I was interested to see that they look like rolled oats, so I assume that they are produced via a similar manufacturing process. I bought some barley flakes because I wanted to bake a cinnamon-raisin-barley bread with whole-wheat flour and honey, and I was very pleased with the bread's great flavor.

I finally used up my rye flour by baking 2 loaves of limpa. A previous recipe for limpa had disappointed me, but this one produced delicious rye bread. So now I have three good recipes for sweet rye bread: one made with molasses and mashed potatoes; one made with espresso powder, orange oil, and honey; and this one, made with molasses and brown sugar, as well as orange oil and dark beer/porter. All are excellent with cheese.

Besides being interested in ingredients and pans, I become curious about a recipe's novel (to me) technique. Many years ago, I first tried steaming breads and puddings. Steaming bread is a very interesting alternative to baking bread. Recently, I tried a variation of steamed Boston Brown Bread that uses maple syrup instead of molasses and soaks the raisins in rum. In the case of steamed harvest bread (cooking apples or pumpkin) and Boston Brown Bread, steaming adds moisture to a low-fat or fat-free recipe.

My recipes often come from James Beard's Beard on Bread, one of my two favorite bread baking books. My other favorite is The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones. King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking is very good, too. 

Baking yeast bread truly is a pursuit of happiness. No other aroma evokes feelings of well-being as much as the odor of baking bread does. No other form of human happiness surpasses the satisfaction felt after baking or eating a good loaf of bread. The Italians have a phrase for it--buono come il pane--as good as bread. In the end, we come back to simple, reliable pleasures: to our bread and butter.

first published in The Woodstock Independent