Delayed again. Hope you're not too disappointed.

The excuse this time is that we've just bought a new house and I'm planning a kitchen. You'll appreciate that this is a serious drain on the intellect.

In this edition we talk bread and eggs.

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Enjoy...

Bread of Heaven

A Culinary Alphabet:

E - Eggs Benedict

An egg is culinary perfection. The protein content of a small chicken in a natural packaging. A perfect emulsifying agent in mayonnaises, a thickener in custards and sauces. Redolent, when flanked by soldiers, of the nursery yet capable of the sophistication of soufflé or omelette Arnold Bennet.

Perhaps it is because the egg is so perfect, particularly at breakfast, that cocking it up makes me so angry. People who claim they ‘can’t boil an egg’ frustrate me, people who overcook scrambled eggs make me very ill-tempered but anyone who screws up eggs Benedict can set me into a fulminating, incoherent rage.

Why is it that every restaurant, diner, gastropub or hotel feels the need to mess about with eggs B? It is very simple.

An egg is lightly poached. Its yolk must remain runny. No, it’s not going to give me salmonella. It’s not the rawness of the yolk that’s the problem anyway, it’s the fact that you’re buying cheap eggs from mutant chickens and your kitchen is grubbier than Scutari hospital during an orderlies’ strike. Just poach the bloody egg and I promise not to sue your crummy restaurant.

Take some bacon and fry it. Not ham, be it Parma, Westphalian, country or merely a wet slab of reconstituted pig parts. Just bacon. Neither, indeed, smoked salmon, spinach, haddock or Christ help me, cheese. (Repeat after me…Arse – Elbow… Shit – Shinola… Benedict – McMuffin).

Place on a toasted English muffin. Not a ‘round of brioche’, not a scone, not a ‘Country Biscuit, not a disc of granary toast because it’s first thing in the morning and the commis is still in bed and you haven’t broken open the bakery order yet. You said you could do it - it’s on the bloody menu. Just do it and stop mucking about.

Finally top with Hollandaise. The easiest sauce in the book. Your most knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, haliotosis-ridden, lips-move-when-he-reads KP could knock it out in the gaps between emptying the swill bins and you can keep it on the steam table for a week. I don’t care. Just don’t ‘scent it with orange’, strew it with chervil or let it get a skin before it hits the table.

See. That wasn’t difficult at all. Was it?

At the back of my freezer, behind a frozen pig trotter and a couple of blocks of fish fumet, lie Sigourney and Sissy. They’re certainly not dead but they’re not exactly alive either. They exist in suspended animation and are the daughters of a sourdough ‘Mother Sponge’ which thrives at the San Francisco Bakery College.

I lived in San Francisco for four years and can’t quite shake the memory of proper sourdough so, when my partner went to the college on a course, she brought back the only souvenir that mattered… genuine San Francisco sourdough culture.
To explain why a pot of fermenting mould should mean so much, let’s have a quick recap of the science of bread.

A slice of bread is substantially flour and water. When mixed, these fundamentals create the sticky starch paste which is probably the most elemental and ancient constituent of man-made food. Just slapped on a hot rock, held on a stick over a fire or dropped into boiling water, this will cook to a solid that is more digestible than its constituent grains.

Such primitive unleavened ‘breads’ though, aren’t much fun to eat but there is, mercifully, a second, mysterious quality of the flour/water mix. If it is suitably physically tormented it becomes elastic. During the protracted kneading process a protein called gluten breaks down and reforms into long stringy molecules which change the dough texture from that of thick porridge to that of well-worked bubblegum.

Hold on to that image because I’d like you to imagine blowing into each. Blowing through a straw into porridge would result in hysterically amusing noises as the bubbles burst in flatulent chorus. Blowing into bubblegum would produce… well – bubbles.

This established, we need now only find a way of introducing bubbles of gas into our elastic dough and here we turn to yeasts. Yeast is a living organism that consumes sugars and creates gas. I will allow you to insert your own joke here. By mixing yeast in our elastic dough, providing it with enough sugar and maintaining the temperature it requires to live, we create quantities of CO2, which, trapped by the dough, form a light, spongy foam.

Finally, the dough is placed in a hot oven where the gas pockets expand further, the flour/water matrix cooks and stabilises and the outer surface tans to an appetising crust.

That, plus a little salt, is all there is to bread bakery and, given modern packaged yeasts and strong bread flours, almost any combination of mix-knead-rise-bake will produce an edible, if rather characterless, bread.

Most modern cooks know yeast as brown granules from a hygienic foil sachet. This is a manufactured and highly consistent product created in enormous fermentation vats then freeze-dried and hermetically packed. For occasional home bakers this is a sure-fire, convenient solution but it completely by-passes the excitement and character of wild yeasts.

A few weeks ago, I visited a farm in the Haut Savoie where Reblochon cheese was being made. Cut into a hillside was the characteristic high barn where the cows could winter on the ground floor beneath a seventy-foot high loft of sainfoin, the sweet hay which nourishes them. At one end of the stock floor and milking parlour lay the sterile cheese making rooms and the racks of maturing cheese, open to the air. At the other end of the floor was a twenty-foot high pile of fresh manure.

A good Reblochon is, as a notable gourmand of my acquaintance puts it, ‘redolent of the byre’. Though the cheese itself is suave to the point of creamy blandness, the rind has the not-unpleasant smell of fresh, grassy manure. Standing in the farmyard made it absolutely clear how the local organisms affect the tastes and smells of some of our finest foods.

Yeasts are everywhere, countless millions of them, with distinctive smells and flavours. They flourish on dung, rotting matter and even in the warm damp crevices of our own bodies. When a strong cheese smells of manure, feet, fish or locker rooms these same yeasts and their accompanying bacteria can take credit.

The variety of airborne wildlife present is unique to the location – a sort of micro-ecology. Our Reblochon farmer was managing of his cheese-ripening environment with judicious waste management but the air around regional breweries, wineries, affineurs, miso manufacturies and any other industry dependent on fermentation is equally vital to the flavour of their product.

Which brings us back to sourdough - a way of making bread without the addition of generic tasting, industrially produced baker’s yeast. If yeast free dough is left in a warm place for a while, local wild yeasts will settle on it and it may begin to ferment and bubble. This is certainly how the first leavened or risen bread was discovered, when a batch of fermenting dough was cooked and the results were lighter and more tasty than usual.

If this natural fermentation can be persuaded to begin, a portion of the dough can be kept back from each batch and added to the next, inoculating the fresh flour and water with a rapidly breeding yeast population. The original settlers who moved west to San Francisco kept these sourdough cultures alive as they travelled.

Some have claimed that the cultures kept in the City today are direct descendents of those brought across the continent, perhaps picking up new strains in the mountains and prairies. I prefer to think that settler bakers passed on expertise rather than actual strains and that the taste is that of San Francisco’s own micro-ecology.

When my little pot of culture arrived, it was in bad shape. It had spent a day in a hotel room and twelve hours in the hold of a 777. I immediately fed it with fresh organic bread flour and bottled spring water and split it into two to incubate, both at room temperature and in a very slow oven. After a day, the slow oven sample was beginning to show signs of weak bubbling but its sibling had perished. Split and fed again it began to rally over the next few days. Each morning, I’d rush downstairs, pour off the majority of the strengthening batter and feed the residue. After a week, I was able to use the discarded batter for sourdough pancakes and I was ready for my first loaves.

As you can see, keeping the sourdough alive is a time-consuming job. Each day, eight ounces of the batter is poured off and used to leaven a two-pound loaf. The loaf takes most of the day to rise and bake. Meanwhile, the remaining batter is made up with flour and water to ten ounces and stored carefully in the refrigerator.
You can get away with leaving a strong culture unattended for a day or two but you are entering a commitment to bake, or at least feed the beast, every other day. I know people who leave their culture with trusted friends when they go on holiday. I know happily married couples with less commitment than it takes to keep a sourdough alive.

Fortunately, the cultures can be put into suspended animation in a freezer. Once I’d split off a sample and tested its ability to freeze and come back to life I took half of my strongest batch, named it Sigourney (remember ‘Alien’?) and committed her to cryogenic deep storage. Just to be sure, I kept her sister alive and building strength for an extra two weeks before naming her Sissy (No real reason – I just loved her in ‘Badlands’) and placing her in the family vault.

The girls will be resuscitated in three months, given a couple of weeks of work and then back to sleep.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, for all this love and attention, a sourdough is an unpredictable and ungrateful jade. I’ve seen the same starter create a loaf like a Viagraed Zeppelin on one day then puddle like a superannuated Camembert the next.

You’ll be wondering why anyone would bother with all this and I find myself having to agree. I love the challenge of bringing a strong culture back to life – it’s rare I get to feel like Dr Kovac in ER – and it’s worth it for the occasional Proustian moment of original San Francisco taste but it really reinforces the main problem with home baking – volume. You’ve got to do a lot of it and be utterly consistent, to make the recipes work, to develop your own skills and, ultimately to make the effort worth it.
If you’re a full-time parent of a gigantic, bread-crazed family with self-discipline, a great oven and with forearms like floury hams, this is all fine but otherwise, consider investing in a bread-maker.

I know that sounds heretical to a real cook but they really do have their uses. The ‘sealed box’ cooking process in a bread-maker does two unique things. According to Elizabeth David’s ‘English Bread and Yeast Cookery’, both a radiant closed top and a steamy cooking environment were lost with the demise of the domestic brick bread oven. The bread-maker brings them both back. The machine also restricts you to utter consistency in temperatures and times for cooking and proving – all incredibly difficult to control off-piste – leaving you only able to make small incremental changes in ingredients to improve the results over time.

You will, without doubt, get consistently good bread, infinitely better than anything you could buy in anything other than an artisan baker and with minimal effort. On the other hand you will have lost most of the pleasure of the process.

I trained as a photographer. I still shoot with a completely manual camera, with manual focus lenses and real film. I know I can control every single variable in the process but that anything left unadjusted will remain consistent. I feel comfortable like this, in a way I never can with digital cameras that take the control away.

I want someone to build a bread-maker like a Nikon F2. A great heavy manual beast with a row of big, machined-steel knobs along the front allowing me to control rest, knead, first rise, knock back, prove, bake and cool times, then a second row of knobs controlling the temperature for each phase. I want to sling the thing round my neck and jump out of a Huey in the Delta, distributing baguettes, bloomers, baps and brioche to grateful gourmands in muddy foxholes… hmmm… maybe not, but I could play the thing like a Wurlitzer, making better and better loaves, noting arcane programming combinations and sending recipes like sheet-music to favoured friends.

Here are a few thoughts to start you off…

Breadmaker Subversion Guide:

I have a Panasonic bread-maker that comes with some of the most patronising instructions since ‘Duck and Cover’. Bear in mind that all the recipes given in the manual will be real ‘belt and braces’ jobs to ensure successful and unchallenging loaves for idiots with ten thumbs.

1. There is always too much sugar in the recipe. This is partly to make sure that the yeast has the maximum nourishment so there is no embarrassing failure to rise (“Honestly, Darling. This has never happened to me before”) and partly because regular punters never object to a little extra refined sugar in almost anything. Replace the sugar with honey for white loaves and blackstrap molasses for brown ones. Experiment with reducing quantities while retaining inflation.
   
2. There’s never enough salt. I’m sure there are millions of people in trailer parks just quietly expanding while waiting for the day they can enter a class-action suit against bread-maker manufacturers for increasing their BP with irresponsibly salty bread recipes. I’m sure this scares Panasonic half to death. I don’t care. Replace the Saxa with Maldon and double the recommended quantities as a starting point. This not only makes the bread taste of something but acts as a flour improver, strengthening the gluten mesh and improving the rise. To give you some idea of how pusillanimous the given recipe is, it recommends 5g of salt to 500g of flour. Elizabeth David recommends 15g.3. Replace the suggested butter with a decent cooking (ie not necessarily extra-virgin) olive oil.
   
3. All the recipes include a quantity of milk powder to give the loaf a longer shelf life and to ‘improve the nutritional value’. This is where I start to get really pissed off. I’m home baking for Chrissake. If I wanted a loaf that lasted a week and was packed with government recommended nutritional supplements just to compensate for all the goodness taken away in milling and processing – I’d go to the bloody supermarket and buy one.
   
4. Now I’m ranting, just don’t bother with any of the white bread recipes. It’s impossible to subvert them into anything other than a competent ‘freshbaked’ supermarket loaf. Stick to the wholemeals, granaries and ryes
   
5. Finally, if you want to go really guerrilla, try buying fresh, live yeast from a healthfood store. This looks like a block of sticky tofu, smells like a warm brewery and will live for a week if kept in the fridge and treated nicely. As it works unpredictably, the bread-maker recipe book refuses to acknowledge its existence. To use live yeast mix it into the water component of your recipe and add the sugar/molasses /honey and a big spoonful of the flour. Cover and leave in a warm place for half an hour or so until it begins to bubble. At this point I find it useful to run round the kitchen, cackling ‘It lives! My beautiful creature lives!’ before pouring it onto the remaining dry ingredients in the machine and firing it up.

 

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