Ciabatta - getting a rise

After the previous week's descent into darker, earthier breads, this weekend it was all about the light. Specifically the lightness caused by air, and the challenges of building air into bread with just ordinary ingredients and ordinary hands. If one half of the challenge involves the creation of gluten (see previous entry), then the other half of the magic is the rising agent itself: yeast.

Like most amateur bakers, I use dried instant yeast for its consistency and convenience, and try to extract the maximum lift with the tools at my disposal, so it's interesting to look at the factors that impact upon yeast's effectiveness. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Baker's yeast, is truly a thing of wonder. One of our oldest living relatives, having thrown in its evolutionary lot with the fungi half a billion or so years ago, it continues to live all around us if you know where to look. Our anaerobic cousin feasts on the sugars in starch and produces the lovely CO2 that stops our bread from collapsing. So far, so Paul Hollywood.

But It's more complicated than that, because yeast is a fussy fungi. Quite a lot of things will inhibit its growth, such as salt and fats (this is why you keep yeast and salt separate in the bowl). Not to mention sugar itself - too much of the glucose it lives off actually slows down its functions. In fact, pretty much everything that makes a bread taste interesting also can potentially stop it becoming bread. So when we come to create our daily loaves, we are in a constant trade off with our capricious cerevisiae, caught between creating a recipe that will grow into something edible and one that will actually be worth eating. No one wants to eat the world's blandest loaf, no matter how light and airy.

Squelch. 4 parts water to 5 flour.

So we come to ciabatta, an Italian loaf with the internal architecture of Swiss cheese. It is, effectively, a collection of holes baked in very close proximity, which requires the effective cooperation between our two baking symbionts: yeast and gluten, maximising the conditions for both and eliminating anything superfluous. Just flour, yeast, olive oil, water and a little salt.

Essentially this means two things. One, wetness. Lots of it. About 25% more water than typical loaf ratios, because water is the key to flour releasing the gluten (see left). Two, hard work, because there is a lot of pounding required. I hesitate to call it kneading, it's forgoing the use of one your hands for 20 minutes as you stick it into a glob, pulling and stretching until it comes away clean from the bowl as a single piece of ectoplasm.

Eventually the dough will lift clean away

This elasticity gives the bread its unique character, and you can't cut corners at this point. The kneading not only works the gluten into its stretchy condition, thanks to the abundance of water, but breaks down the starch into sugars for the yeast to feed on. More pounding means more food for the yeast, more CO2 to be trapped by more gluten. It's a virtuous cycle.

Having done your hard work, it's time to add my favourite ingredient: time. Mother nature now needs to do the heavy lifting to create the honeycomb structure. Place your dough into a square plastic (or glass) container, sealed with clingfilm, and leave somewhere warm for 2 hours. I've found out the hard way that this must be glass or plastic - you can't leave it in the metal mixing bowl. I'm sure there is a scientific explanation why the material matters, but I don't know why. You are providing the dough a surface to climb up and metal's cold, sheer smoothness offers no grip.

Before

After

Using a square box also helps give a shape to the bread or as much of a shape to the oozing mass. It's still very wet at this stage, though by now more stringy - like mozzarella on a hot pizza - and needs to be coaxed into thin rectangular-ish shapes to create that classic 'slipper' shape (which is what ciabatta means in Italian). Another 10 minutes or so resting on the baking trays to let some bubbles surface and it's good for the oven, 25 mins at 220 degrees.

The result of surprisingly little effort should be visible in the cross section: crusty exterior, springy inside, with cavernous bubble holes and an olive oil sheen. The perfect bread, and a noticeable improvement on the rubbery things passing themselves off  as ciabatta in supermarket aisles.

I've said previously that, for me, the end product of breadmaking is almost irrelevant, in that whether it succeeds or fails as something to eat is less important than what I learn. With ciabatta, the end point is affirmation of the approach and philosophy: to be able to produce that genuinely tastes better than store bought bread, unmasked by additional flavours or fancy ingredients, is enormously satisfying. It's food for the soul.

Gluteus maximus

Like Abu Hamza's shirts, gluten has had something of a bad press lately.Once just the enemy of coeliacs, it has, in recent years, become something of a bete noir for the Diet Industry, charged with causing everything from trapped wind, bloating and stomach cramps to more extreme claims of cancer, schizophrenia and diabetes, if you were to believe the gluten-free fruitcake end of the Professional Healthscare IndustryTM

Coeliacs stubbornly remain a distinct minority, at 1% of the population, so what accounts for the mass avoidance of gluten, and its sinister carrier, wheat? Is this a mass psychosomatic episode of sluggish feelings and heavy guts? Man has, after all, farmed and eaten glutenised wheat for 10,000 years. It is literally the foundation of civilisation - the ability to plant crops instead of just gathering the windfall is the single breakthrough from which all societies descend. I don't doubt those people who avoid wheat and its byproducts are genuinely feeling something, even if its only discomfort instead of serious illness. But why now and is it indigestion or just indulgence?

To answer this we need to understand gluten's role in the breadmaking process. Wheat itself contains no actual gluten but, rather, two storage proteins, Gliadin and Glutenin. When mixed with water they create gluten, a sub-microscopic network. For breadmakers the great advantage of this network is it traps the carbon dioxide released when yeast reacts with sugars, giving air to bread. But something all home bakers know is this process takes time, probably the most precious commodity of all to commercial producers of bread.


For a clue to why gluten intolerance/dislike/faddishness is so prevalent, look at the side of your supermarket loaf. Here's mine in the picture to your left. Note the key ingredients they have helpfully notated with the emboldened word 'wheat': Wholemeal flour, Soya Flour, Fermented wheat flour, Wheat protein. Or to put it another way: gluten, gluten, gluten and gluten. The stuff is packed with gluten. Why? Because of greater elasticity, and greater carbon dioxide trapping properties. Which means faster bread. The whole point about supermarket bread is its fast turnaround, the Ryanair of wheat products. If you are eating a leavened loaf that was flour less than two hours before, I struggle to describe it properly as 'bread'. Rather, it's an emulsified gluten delivery system.

And this is just your daily loaf. Let's not forget its active role in foodstuffs such as ketchup, soy sauce, beer and ice cream. Not to mention a handy substitute for meat in vegetarian supermarket food and to bulk out low fat diet foods. Yes, the very tendencies toward healthy eating may unwittingly be driving up the average gluten intake, driving health food followers into the arms of the anti-gluten lobby.

Bread is usually the gluten scapegoat for people seeking to ease their abdominal bloating. It's easy to see why, as the single biggest source of gluten we can identify in our diets. But in throwing this particular bathwater away, our loss is the amazing pleasures of the beautiful baby inside it, to stretch a slightly disturbing metaphor. If people would discover the pleasure of making their own bread, they'd be amazed to find they could still enjoy one of the finest, not to say oldest, pleasures known to man. A freshly baked loaf of bread.

The Art of Darkness

In life, I like to embrace new technology. In bread, the opposite is true.

Take breadmakers. Please. I understand their purpose and advantage to some people - fresh bread, no effort, at your beck and call. But for me they negate the very purpose of why I make bread. Like people who spend thousands of pounds on stereo equipment to recreate the exact sound of a band playing in their living room. To paraphrase Michael Flanders, I can't think of anything worse than a band actually playing in your living room. Think of the mess they'd make.

Making bread is about the inexactitude, the roughness. It's not even about making something you can eat, though it's definitely a bonus if it's edible. It's about the hand craft, the physical work, the getting to grips with your raw materials to make something. And the fact it is something you can't buy at Tesco is the whole point. It's Bootleg Bread.

But I realise this also limits my ability to get the most out of my ingredients. When I'm pounding a dough into first prove, I often wish I had the space and money for a Stand Mixer with dough hook - I'd probably get better starch breakdown, create more gluten, get more air in, get a bigger, more professional loaf. In particular this is true when I'm operating on the margins of easy breadmaking in the interests of trying something new. Something...darker.

Last weekend I had an urge to step away from the light and into the dark. I wanted to try my first non-wheat flour, a rye flour, and create an earthy, dark, low bread. To turn the authentic up to eleven, I swapped black treacle for sugar and added a trace of Irish whiskey.

By relying on just my hands and not a machine, I have several things against me: rye flour is very low in gluten, so has little stretch when kneading. Imagine making a bread out of dog turd - this is what it feels to handle rye flour dough. It's also more hygroscopic than white flour, so judging the water requirement is hard - in the end, I think I under-watered it, trying to avoid creating a whiskey foccacia, as it's easier to put water in than take it out. Black treacle is denser and slower-working than a simple sugar accelerant, and makes the flour sticky. Given the lack of natural gluten available to my prove, there is little point in kneading very much anyway. So I have to use the tool I do have: time.

I tried an overnight prove for the first time - 8 hours under wraps in an airing cupboard. After which time it had crept about two inches up the sides of my proving basket. A 30 minute bake in the morning and I had something rustic, dense, chewy and not altogether untasty.




On the other hand not exactly something the kids would look kindly upon if it turned up in their sandwich box either. So maybe not the bread to make my fortune. But then that's not the point, is it?

Mike's American Pie Bread:
500g rye flour
350 ml water
a measure of whiskey
20ml black treacle
20g salt
10g yeast

First prove

I started this blog for several reasons.

First, because I had gotten out of the habit of blogging. I would faithfully post up to twice a week at my peak, at www.hofflimits.co.uk, though the stream of posts has dried up to a trickle of late. I missed that regularity of mental stretching, though my brain sometimes lacks the gluten to give it the necessary spring. 

There is one key reason for the drop off in the number of my blog posts: twitter. Over the last 4 or so years, I've tweeted about 18,000 times and thoughts that would previously gestate throughout the working week, slowly taking shape, forming gradually into an argument instead would get pumped out as 140-character brain farts as soon as they had been semi-formed.

But not only does twitter encourage you to expel your thoughts as soon as you conceive them, it also exposes you to a world of other minds, thoughts, and blogs. The speed of comment, joke and thought now moves with such pace that blogging seems almost too slow. What had started as a way for me to try to play with original thoughts around current affairs seemed somehow out of place. By the time I'd formed my government-breaking piece about MPs expenses, everyone had moved onto the 50p Tax Rate, or 50 Shades of Grey and had already had the same thoughts as you.

The other reason was because I regularly tweet my adventures in baking using the #breadtalk hashtag and I wanted a way of documenting it without resorting to storify. The main reason for baking is not so much to create something worth eating but to see what I learn. If my Hofflimits blog had the operating principle of "original thoughts only", then the point about my baking was 'don't try to make something you could more easily buy in Tesco'. Otherwise what is the point?

I bake bread because I like the process: of thinking, trying, experimenting, failing, trying again, waiting, watching and learning. And if, at the end of it, there is something worth eating, then so much the better.