Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (36 page)

It was during the years in Point Reyes that
Chad perfected his country loaf, the flavor first, and then the structure. He took from
Richard Bourdon the idea of a very wet dough, but he left behind, at least for the time
being, Richard’s devotion to whole-grain flours and to nutrition as the
baker’s foremost concern. Compared with Richard (or for that matter Dave Miller),
Chad was very much the aesthete, chasing after flavor and beauty rather than nourishment
and health. The “loaf with an old soul” that Chad was after was definitely a
white bread—he had glimpsed it not just in his mind’s eye, but in a specific
painting by Émile Friant, the late-nineteenth-century French painter.

The painting, which is reproduced in
Chad’s book, depicts a group of weekend boaters sitting down to a summertime lunch
al fresco. One of them is pouring wine while another is holding a gigantic, thickly
crusted wheel of bread, from which he’s sawing off big white chunks for his
friends. At the time, Chad explained, each worker in France was allotted two pounds of
bread every day. Bread was elemental food, yet it was also the stuff of ceremony and
community—the giant loaves were made for sharing. And for enjoying: In Friant’s
tender, scrupulous depiction, this looked like a bread you very much wanted to eat.

Chad worked night and day to get the flavor
he imagined that bread had. With such a tiny number of ingredients in play, this becomes
mostly a matter of manipulating time and temperature. But, as with so much in baking, an
iron law of compensation is at work. Any move the baker makes in one direction is liable
to produce an undesirable effect in another direction, making trade-offs difficult to
avoid. So a longer fermentation might give you deeper flavors, for example, but if the
extra time tires out the yeasts, oven spring will suffer. Chad
found
that if he “retarded” fermentation, by cooling the loaves while they
proofed, he could slow down the yeasts while encouraging the bacteria that contribute
most to the flavor. He couldn’t afford a retarder, however, so most nights he
stacked his two hundred baskets of shaped dough into the back of his delivery van, a
yellow 1953 Chevrolet, and opened all the windows. But though this move gave him the
flavor he was after, the loaves came out of the oven flatter than he wanted. A warmer
final proof would add air and volume, yet that risked souring the flavor.

The breakthrough came when Chad turned his
attention to his starter. “I realized that I needed a younger culture. So I began
using smaller and smaller amounts of starter in my leaven, and then less leaven in my
dough.” He experimented with his feeding schedule, using less starter to inoculate
more flour more frequently, so that at each step in the process—starter, leaven,
dough—he managed to build a fresher, sweeter, younger culture. In effect, he was
resetting the fermentation clock, and the results were immediately apparent.

“I could smell the difference: Instead
of being vinegary, like most leavens, mine became fruity, sweet, and floral.”
These qualities carried over into the flavor of the bread, and the vibrant young yeasts
ensured a terrific oven spring. Chad had figured out a way to maximize both flavor and
air in his bread, defying, or at least outwitting, the iron law of sourdough
compensation.

After the globes of dough had their rest,
Chad invited me to try my hand at shaping. My eye-hand coordination is challenged, and I
struggled to follow, much less mimic, Chad’s lightning-quick manipulations of the
dough. I felt like I did the first few times I attempted to diaper Isaac as an
infant—clumsy. But Chad was patient, kept feeding me new rounds of dough, and eventually
I managed to shape what I, at least, deemed to be some respectable-looking papooses. I
did notice, however, that Chad, ever the perfectionist,
carefully
segregated my loaves from his batch, putting mine into round, rather than rectangular,
baskets. I got the feeling that, when and if my loaves were baked, they would not go on
sale with the rest.

My time in the bakery had a salutary effect
on my baking at home. I felt more fluent in the ways of dough, more comfortable not just
manipulating it, but judging its development—and that of my starter—by smell and touch
and appearance. Shaping was no longer slapstick. My starter was livelier than ever, some
days even exuberant, probably because I fed it more frequently, or perhaps because it
had picked up some good bugs from Chad’s bakery. My time in the bakery also helped
me see that baking by the book—
any
book—can take you only so far toward a
decent loaf, and that that’s okay. As I’ve often heard bakers (and also
cooks) put it,
the recipe is not the recipe
. It never is. It would take a great
many more pages than Chad’s twenty-seven to capture everything that goes into
making a great loaf of bread.

While at lunch, I had shown Chad a crumb
shot of my first Tartinian loaf on my phone, the loaf with the sorry case of cavitation.
It may not be possible to judge a loaf of bread by its crust, but Chad believes he
can
judge it by its crumb shot.

“I can see how a bread will
taste,” he explained matter-of-factly, as if this were normal. But apparently, to
the expert eye, the pattern of alveolation and the sheen of its cells tell of the extent
of its fermentation and, by extension, its flavor. In my case, the cavitation indicated
that my gluten was probably too weak to contain the gases in their cells as they
expanded in the heat. The bread was rising faster than the gluten could stretch, so the
gas was busting out, then pooling beneath the hard roof of crust. A few more folds might
help to strengthen the gluten, he suggested, as would a longer, slower fermentation.
Chad
thought I should try overnighting my dough in the refrigerator
before baking.

This gave me my breakthrough. The very first
loaf I retarded overnight in the refrigerator emerged from the oven a thing of beauty.
The loaf had achieved an oven spring just this side of spectacular, and its crust, which
in all my previous efforts had been a tentative, wan shade of brown, was now deeply
colored, forming a dark, weather-beaten hide rent across the top by a sharply turned and
blackened ear. This crust had conviction. As for the crumb, I had to wait an hour for it
to cool, but when I finally sawed off a slice, I exposed a cross section of evenly
distributed holes in various sizes, their stretched walls glistening just slightly.
True, my crumb was somewhat tighter than Tartine’s, the alveolation not nearly so
shiny or wild, but this looked like a fine loaf of bread, and I felt an upwelling of
pride the force of which took me by surprise. This was immediately followed by the
sagging realization that my proud achievement, the product of so many weeks of work and
study, would soon get eaten and be forever lost to history.

So I took its picture. I briefly considered
posting it to
TheFreshloaf.com
, thinking I
could impress the bread geeks with it, but the impulse soon passed. Too peacocky. I did
text it to Chad, however. “Nice loaf,” he texted back, a little more
laconically than I had perhaps hoped—I felt like I had been patted on the head—but I
didn’t mind. The bread was delicious: sweet, a little nutty, with just the
slightest acid tang. Judith and Isaac, at least, were suitably impressed, and together
we worked through the great white loaf, first at dinner that night, then at breakfast
the following morning, when it made some exemplary toast.

I have spent some time trying to parse the
almost absurd pride I felt about this loaf and various others I’ve baked since. I
mean, a loaf of bread, big deal. And yet it did feel big. I couldn’t imagine
feeling
quite this way about a great stew or braise, much less taking
its picture and texting it to someone or posting it online.

The only thing I’ve cooked that
prompted the same impulse to show off is a whole barbecued hog, whose appeal, especially
to the male ego (large beast killed; food enough to feed a village), is all too obvious.
But what is it about a loaf of bread, something that is much smaller and yet in some
ways even more impressive?

Part of it is aesthetic—the satisfaction of
making something, something beautiful that didn’t exist before. A good-looking
loaf of bread declares itself as an artifact, an original, man-made, freestanding
object, something that cannot be said of too many other foods. Most foods, even the
whole hog, are altered versions of nature’s already existing animals and plants,
which more or less retain their form after cooking. But a loaf of bread is something new
added to the world, an edged object wrested from the flux of nature—and specifically
from the living, shifting, Dionysian swamp that is dough. Bread is
the
Apollonian food. Which might explain some of its appeal to the male ego, as might the
miraculous fact that it rises.

Yet the pride I felt wasn’t only
aesthetic or, for that matter, necessarily masculine. It had more to do, I think, with
the sense of personal competence my success conferred. Or at least that’s how it
felt to me. Bread is such a fundamental necessity and comfort of everyday life, as it
has been in the West for at least six thousand years. And yet in our time the ability to
make this necessary thing has passed out of our hands and into those of specialists.
Whether artisans or corporations, it makes little difference: The only way for most of
us to obtain it is to trade our professional labor for theirs. I doubt baking bread is
something I am ever going to do more than every once in a while. Yet the fact that doing
so is now solidly within the orbit of my competence, that my hands now know how to
transform a pile of cheap
flour and free water (free microbes, too!)
into something that will not only nourish but also give so much pleasure to my family,
changes everything. Or at least changes me. I am a little less dependent, and a little
more self-reliant, than I used to be.

And then there is the matter of the air
itself. (Or is it the antimatter?)

To compare a loaf of bread with a bowl of
porridge is to realize how much of bread’s power, sensory as well as symbolic,
resides precisely in those empty cells of spaces. Some 80 percent of a loaf of bread
consists of nothing more than air. But air is not nothing.

In bread, it is where much of the flavor
resides, and is the reason bread is so much more aromatic than porridge. The air trapped
in the alveoli conducts bread’s aromas—the two hundred or so volatile compounds
that have been identified in a well-baked sourdough—to the back of the mouth, where they
then drift up into the nasal passages and, by means of retronasal olfaction, reach the
brain.

“Retronasal olfaction” is the
technical term for our ability to smell food that is already in our mouth. Whereas the
nose’s olfactory sense—“orthonasal olfaction”—identifies smells when
we sniff in, retronasal olfaction identifies smells when we breathe out, as the
molecules released from our food rise from the back of the mouth up into our nasal
passages. Orthonasal olfaction allows us to identify smells from the outside world,
including smells from foods we are deciding whether to ingest. The purpose of retronasal
olfaction is different, as is the range of compounds it detects and the regions of the
brain to which it reports. The signals from retronasal smell are interpreted at the
highest cognitive levels of our cerebral cortex as well as in regions involved in memory
and emotion. This has led some scientists to
hypothesize that the
function of retronasal smell may be primarily analytical, helping us to archive the vast
catalog of food flavors and record them in memory for future use.

Perhaps this helps explain the keen pleasure
we seem to take in all kinds of aerated foods and beverages: the sparkling wines and
sodas, the soufflés and whipped cream, the lofted breads and ethereal croissants and
weightless meringues, and the laminated pastries with their 128 layers of air. Bakers
and chefs labor mightily to work sweet nothings into their creations, striving to
deliver the most flavorful airs deep into our mouths. The palate of taste is limited to
the five or six primary colors that the tongue can recognize; olfaction, by comparison,
is seemingly limitless in the shadings and combinations it can register and archive—and
retronasal olfaction can perceive aromas to which even the nose is blind.