Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (34 page)

The two rounds of dough now got another
twenty or so minutes of rest, covered with a dish towel to keep the air from crusting
them. I peeked under a few times and could see that the dough was continuing to
percolate and expand even as it relaxed and subsided.

Now it was time to execute the set of
shaping maneuvers I’d been dreading since I first studied the instructions and
accompanying sequence of how-to photographs in the book. Unless you’re the kind of
person who can learn a dance step from a diagram or figure out how to diaper a baby from
a book, printed instructions for properly shaping a loaf of Tartine bread are nearly
impossible to follow.

Why bother shaping at all? you might
legitimately wonder at this point. Because a dough as wet and flabby as this one will
not achieve a good oven spring unless the baker endows it with some internal tension and
structure. This is achieved as follows: With your fingers, take hold of each quadrant of
the dough in turn, stretch it outward, and then fold it back over the center, until it
forms a neat rectangular package, a bit like a papoose. Do this again with each of the
four corners. Then roll the package of dough away from you until the seams come around
to the bottom and the surface has grown smooth and tight. Each fold builds structural
tension in the gluten at a different point within the loaf, while the rolling creates
surface tension in the crust. At least that’s the idea.

It took me several aborted attempts and
another kitchenwide
blizzard of flour, but eventually I was able to
form the dough into taut rounds of powdery-white flesh. The impulse to cup the soft
globes in my hands was irresistible. I have to say, not one of the bakers I had read or
talked to had adequately prepared me for the erotics of leavened, shaped dough.

I carefully slipped the shaped loaves, seam
side up, into bowls lined with kitchen towels that I had rubbed with flour to keep them
from sticking. I wrapped the corners of the towel over the top to keep the loaves from
exposure to drafts, which might dry out their skins and so impede their rise. Now came
the second fermentation. Called “proofing,” this final step takes between
two and four hours, depending on the temperature and the degree of sourness the baker
desires. The dough is ready for the oven when its volume has expanded by a third or so
but looks like it still has some life left in it. An overproofed loaf is liable to be
sour and sticky, and, its yeasts having exhausted their supply of sugars, incapable of
much oven spring.

Toward the end of the proofing process, I
preheated the oven to 500°F with a cast-iron Dutch oven in it. Baking in a covered pot
represents something of a breakthrough in home bread making. A steamy oven is the key to
achieving a good oven spring as well as a chewy crust. The steam delays the moment when
the bread forms a crust, allowing the dough to expand as long as possible before
solidifying. Professional bakers inject steam into their ovens for precisely this
reason, but home ovens have been designed to vent steam. By baking bread in the sealed
environment of a Dutch oven or covered casserole, the home baker can closely approximate
the steamy interior of a bakery oven without having to add any water: The moisture from
the dough creates all the steam needed for a good spring.

When the oven temperature reached 500˚F, I
removed the Dutch oven with oven mitts and rested it on top of the stove. Now came
Moment of Truth Number One: I flipped the bowl over the open pot,
dropping the ball of dough onto its blazingly hot bottom. My aim was a few degrees
off, however, because the dough caught the edge of the pot and landed lopsidedly,
wrecking its perfect symmetry and no doubt disturbing its hard-won internal structure.
My poor loaf suffered a second insult when it came time to score it with a razor
blade—Moment of Truth Number Two. The idea here is that slashing the loaf’s skin
will release some of its surface tension and by doing so facilitate a greater spring.
The slash also serves as a kind of baker’s signature, especially when, in
Robertson’s words, it “opens elegantly.”

One mark of a good loaf is a pronounced
“ear”—a crisp edge of crust thrust up, like a tectonic plate, by the
bread’s sudden expansion in the oven. Two problems here: Since my Dutch oven is
much deeper than the ball of dough is tall, it was tricky to reach in there for the
scoring without burning the meat of my hand on its 500-degree edge. Second, I failed to
be as “decisive” in my scoring as Robertson had advised. I’m sorry,
but after all the time spent coddling this gorgeous round of dough, slashing it with a
razor blade was just hard to do. It seemed reckless, violent even. I hesitated—fatally,
as it turned out: Some dough snagged on the corner of the blade, and tore as I tried to
draw my line. The result was a sloppy signature.

Having thus mangled my gorgeous dough, I had
little hope for the finished bread. But when the third and biggest Moment of Truth
arrived, twenty minutes after the loaf went into the oven, I was pleasantly surprised. I
lifted the lid to find that the loaf had mostly self-corrected for its lopsidedness, and
had sprung up—not spectacularly but respectably. Here was a round, puffy, fawn-colored
pillow easily twice as large as the flop of dough I’d dropped in the pot only
twenty minutes before.

I closed the oven door gently to make sure I
didn’t deflate the risen loaf while it finished baking. I needn’t have
worried: By now, the starches in the dough had “gelatinized”—stiffened
enough to
formalize the matrix of gluten, which had itself stiffened.
During the early moments of baking, the cells in that matrix had ballooned under the
pressure of gases expanding in the heat. At least for the first six to eight minutes of
oven time, new alveoli continue to form, since the yeasts keep working until the
temperature reaches a lethal 130°F. During this period, provided there remain enough
sugars to feed them, the rapid flush of heat inspires one last, climactic burst of
fermentation.

When I took the bread out of the oven
twenty-five minutes later, it smelled better than it looked, but it didn’t look
too bad. It had thrown no ear to speak of: My too-tentative slash had merely opened a
pale scar in the crust. The crust was smoother and more tentatively colored than a
Tartine loaf, but it was handsome even so, marred only slightly by these two curious
blackened humps. A roasty aroma filled the kitchen. Still wearing oven mitts, I tapped
on the bottom of the loaf and listened for the hollow, woody timbre indicating the bread
was cooked through. It was. I held the loaf up to my cheek to feel its radiating warmth.
The bread gave off a pleasing low static as it cooled.

The sense of accomplishment surprised me. I
hadn’t done much, after all, except mix together some flour, water, and a little
sourdough starter, and then babied it for several hours. And yet—here was this
substantial
thing
that hadn’t existed before, this fragrant risen form. I
might as well have pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and indeed my family, whose
expectations for this latest project of mine were modest, reacted as if I had.
Something from nothing
: You can see why the prescientific mind (and the
skeptics in Jesus’s audience) might have been impressed. Bread science would
eventually offer a material explanation for this apparent miracle, but even now that we
have it, the fresh-baked loaf still feels like a creation ex nihilo, its
from-mud-wrested form a refutation of cosmic entropy, its sheer plusness a tasty proof
of the non-zero sum or, to put it in more homely terms, the free lunch.

But before I get carried away congratulating
myself … there were, let’s not forget, those two unsightly black
protuberances, rising like volcanic islands from the smooth, tan sea of crust. It
wasn’t until the loaf had cooled that I could slice it open and find out what lay
beneath them: two yawning caverns of air that reached deep into the center of the loaf.
Cavitation! A really bad case, too. Chubby pockets of air are part of the charm of a
country loaf, but these were far too big and far too close to the surface to be
charming. “The room where the baker sleeps” is what bakers call such
cells—in derision.

PBF: Any professional baker would toss this
loaf on the reject pile, a case of partial bread failure. But it smelled absolutely
delicious, and when I tasted a slice, I was once again pleasantly surprised. The crust
was thin and chewy, and the moist crumb had plenty of flavor—wheaty, sweet, and
fragrant. This was not a half bad loaf of bread, I decided, especially if you ate it
with your eyes closed.

I had a ways to go, certainly, but I
didn’t feel discouraged in the least. To the contrary: I felt determined to make
another, better loaf, and soon. The final product might be no triumph, but something
about the process had captivated me—the mysteries of fermentation, the sweetly sweaty
smell of my sourdough culture, the feel of the dough in my hands, the suspense
surrounding the climactic oven spring. But before I ventured another loaf, I decided it
would probably be a good idea to spend some time in the company of someone who actually
knew what he was doing. So I got in touch with Robertson and asked if I could come by
the bakery, talk to him about how he had learned to bake bread, and maybe work a shift
or two at his side.

Chad Robertson looks less a baker than the
surfer he also is. He has a swimmer’s long, sleek torso and a certain litheness
about him. Chad
is equally economical with his words, his movements,
and his smiles. On my first visit to the bakery, I spent an hour watching him shape
bâtards. He wore a white apron tied tightly around his waist; a visor over his brown
hair shaded his brown eyes. The process is mesmerizing to watch but impossible to
follow—to break down into discrete, comprehensible, imitable steps. All I could make out
was a blur of dexterous fingers that looked as if they were swaddling an endless
succession of infants at warp speed.

While he shaped loaves, we talked. I asked
Chad about his starter. I had brought along mine in a Tupperware container, hoping to
pick up some pointers on care and feeding—and, secretly, perhaps some good microbes as
well, since I figured the bakery must be crawling with them.

“When I was starting out I was
superstitious about my starter,” Chad told me, as he swiftly cut and weighed lumps
of dough. “I would take it on vacation because I didn’t trust anyone with
it. Once, I took it to the movies with me, so I could feed it exactly on time. But now
that I’ve lost the culture and had to start it over a few times, I’m more
relaxed about it. I now tend to think it’s less about nature than nurture.”
Meaning, roughly, that the requisite bugs are everywhere, but can be selected and
trained by the baker to perform as he wants them to.

Chad showed me his culture, taking down from
a high, warm shelf a metal bowl half filled with an animated white soup. It was wetter
and warmer than mine, and smelled less sour. He told a story about the night one of his
apprentices, cleaning the bakery at the end of her shift, accidentally threw out the
bowl of starter.

“I cried. I thought I was finished as
a baker. But then I found I was able to start a new culture that within a couple of days
smelled exactly like the old one.” Chad judges a starter by its aroma, which in
his view should be more fruity than vinegary; in fact, he doesn’t like his
sourdough to be very sour at all. (“Sour is easy to achieve: Just don’t
feed the starter as often. But it’s one dimensional.”)
Chad figures that by now the “right” yeasts and bacteria are all over his
bakery and easy enough to capture. Though he also recently had experiences starting new
cultures while in France and Mexico that soon came to smell and perform much like his
culture in San Francisco. This has led him to the conclusion that the feeding schedule
and the ambient temperature are the most important factors determining the character of
a sourdough culture. But it could also be that by now Chad Robertson carries some really
good bugs on his person. Which is why, before I left the bakery that evening, I opened
my Tupperware to the Tartine air and asked him to pronounce on the quality of my
culture. Chad raised the container to his nose, sniffed, and nodded in mild
approval.