GBBO: Baker, prove thyself.

I love The Great British Bake Off, as you might expect, given my penchant for baking foolish amounts of bread of a weekend. And recently I was interested to re-watch the very first series on some satellite food channel, somewhere between the travel and the porn channels. In that series, the famous cooking tent moved location each week, and tried to take in a regional cuisine - an innovation I had completely forgotten. Possibly the Beeb dropped that on grounds of cost, but just as likely it was a 'tweak' once they realised what a hit they had on their hands. Because it shows the exact moment when Great British Bake Off stopped being a programme about food and started being about soap opera.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Bread Week, the third show of every series. Because of the way the show is structured - and that need for conflict and drama that drives a TV show - it means the bread is always the poor relation of the other baking weeks. Across three tasks, the maximum time allowed for any challenge is four hours - and mostly it is between two and three hours. And if there's one thing that good bread needs, it's time.

Bread comes about because of the creation of gluten and the action of yeast. Neither of these things actually taste of anything you'd want to eat. The flavour and quality of a bread comes from the flour and its interaction with these two catalysts. For long periods of time, baking bread doesn't actually involve doing anything, except facilitating this process. Something that doesn't make for good television.

So in the world of Bake Off, we have short proves and catalysts to speed up the process. To drive the drama and create the footage of bakers anxiously staring into ovens that link the set-pieces. But the one thing you can't use to create flavour is less time. So you're forced to import flavour using ever-more crazy ingredients - chilli, chocolate, chihuahua - whatever. It's basically pretending bread is just a cake with yeast in it.

I understand how telly works, and long proves and autolyses do not make interesting viewing. But they could apply a bit of imagination to accommodate the fact that bread is different. Instead of two three-hour tasks, give them a range of things to do in eight hours. Better still, just after the gongs are given out, and the departing baker sent packing in week two, give 'em each a Kilner jar and say: come back in a week with a sourdough culture, we're baking a 48-hour loaf. That would test their mettle.

The tools of the trade-off

As someone who regularly practises both wado ryu karate and bread-making, I often find myself drawing comparisons between the two disciplines. Both are about the application of simple physical techniques toward mastery of a skill that is both practical and aesthetically satisfying. Both require patience, practice and instinctive application of repeated techniques. And, if done badly, both can make a mess of your kitchen.

A staple of learning karate is the discipline of kata, a sequence of moves to demonstrate classical style of techniques. It is the basic test of technical competence. The simplest kata is kihon kata ('basic form' in Japanese). A beginner can learn it in a couple of hours, but Black Belts still perform it because it is testing in its simplicity: You can't hide behind fancy techniques or moves. If your basics are not sound, it will find you out. Similarly, when baking bread, if you only have flour and water (plus a pinch of salt) to work with, no amount of malted barley or pitted olives will stop a poorly proved bread turning into a draft excluder.

And yet within the simplicity of form there is room for individuality, and the secret is striking a balance between following the rules so as to make the end product recognisable, whether kata or loaf, while expressing your individuality through the delivery. While the recipe may be the same for us all, the tools we have to create them are not.

For karate, people are tall, short, fat, lithe, one legged, slow or old. Some are confident performers and some are awkward in their own skin. But all have the ability to make the kata their own, and they have to, because those are the only tools they have.

And in baking, some have big kitchens with all the kit, some have a bowl and oven. Some have hot kitchens, some cold - some are drafty and some are damp. Seasonal and climactic conditions will change things completely. The skill of the baker is having the awareness of your own unique circumstances and how it impacts on a few fundamentally simple ingredients.

You understand the limitations you have to work within and how you make the best of them; I fantasise about the buxom, lighter-than-air loaves bursting with honeycombed moistness that I could bake if I had an industrial oven, and a mixer. Learning how to make a decent loaf of bread is not so much a matter of learning a kneading technique as understanding your kitchen. Your oven may not be as hot as it claims to be and may have uneven temperature distribution. Your room temperature may not be room temperature. Things may take longer or shorter to prove, rest or bake. No one has written the recipe that is just right for your kitchen, at that exact moment.

Except you, every time you bake. And that is the beauty of the challenge.

Yeast Injection

After my first steps into the world of Sourdough, it was time to analyse the output. Although what I had baked was definitely bread, in the legal definition of the word, it was not exactly going to worry the bakers of Pier 39. Sourdough is serious business - not for the boulanger who is faint of heart. There is a lot of pride at stake, and your own sense of identity as a baker, instead of someone who once bought a bread machine.

Though edible, in the cold light of day, Sourdough Mk 1 was not a thing to be very proud of. Dense, crumbly and bitter, it was too much sour and not enough dough. Time to get back to basics, which in the case of Sourdough, means the yeast. Time to take a good long look at Eric.

The problem with relying on the caprice of airborne particles to grow your yeast is it is difficult to control what you get. As noted last time, the sourdough culture you can grow in flour and water is made up of two main ingredients: airborne yeasts and lactobacilli. The latter is the building block of lactic acid, which gives sourdough its characteristic, eponymous taste. The micro climate of San Francisco has created a unique strain of this bacteria that is sweeter than most other varieties, which gave its bakers a unique taste advantage, and created a geo-specific industry. For those of us unfortunate enough not to live in San Francisco, we have to resort to other methods.

Sir Alex - no hairdryer required.

My sourdough starter needed one fundamental change: more yeast as a proportion of the levain. This would, at a stroke, increase the potency of the rising agent, creating the classic springy texture and at the same time reduce the bitter aftertaste into a thing to savour, not to screw your eyes up at. But how do you stack the odds in your favour in what is supposedly a random process?

Naturally occurring yeasts such as Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, though found in small quantities in the atmosphere, are found in greater concentrations on things like fruit skins. So I started a new white levain in the usual way - flour, water - but on day two I added some raisins and a spoon of natural yoghurt to drive up the yeast content, then continued to feed flour and water for the rest of the week. After 7 days, I had a mix so powerful, it had already exploded across the counter twice, so in honour of my recently-established yeast naming convention, it has been christened Sir Alex.

Apart from his explosive temperament, another quality he shares with his more famous namesake is his ability to get results. By following the same method as last week - except baking using a casserole instead of flat on a tray, to give the loaf shape - the contrast in outcomes could not have been greater. Big, light, chewy, tasty, with a subtle sour note, instead of a bitter aftertaste. That elusive taste I had remembered from all those years ago, recreated in my kitchen. Memories of San Francisco, captured in a few slices.

Levain on a prayer

I first ate sourdough bread at Pier 39, San Francisco in 1992, used as an edible bowl for fresh clam chowder. The memory of this wonderful taste stayed with me for a long time: a shattering crust around a densely crumbed bread and the beautifully bitter aftertaste. Having spent the previous 6 months eating highly sugared American store-bought loaves, it was like tasting bread for the first time.

So when I started making bread, I naturally looked for a sourdough recipe to make my own. And then I realised the important point about sourdough: it's a baker's rites of passage. Sourdough is the difference between a home baker and someone who owns a bread machine. You can't just bash it out - it's a thing of time and passion. Especially time. A glance at the chat forums and websites of amateur bakers gives you an insight into the extraordinary, slightly scary lengths people go to in creating their own sourdough that, at times, seem to resemble a religious cult.

The secret (and, I suspect, part of the reason for its fetish status) is the unique creation of its yeast - a living culture you must nurture, to create a leavening agent, or Levain. By simply mixing water and flour, and leaving it in a sealed jar, you create yeast literally out of thin air: naturally occurring lactobacilli and yeasts in the air feed on the starches in your liquid, and create a living crucible for your loaf. It takes at least 5 days before a yeast 'takes' but longer before it is strong enough to use. If you keep it in the fridge, give it a feed (flour and water) and a stir at least once a month, it can keep for years.  It becomes another member of the family and will develop its own quirks and personality over time, so it's important to give it a name. So, meet Eric, the Hoffmans' sourdough.

The beauty of this method (apart from its simplicity) is its uniqueness. The yeasts and lactobacilli found in your kitchen are unique to you - and so the levain you create will be unique to your house, your kitchen, your street. Each sourdough bread create bears the unique stamp of its creator through its yeast - though I'm not sure there are yet bakers who can identify the terroir of a sourdough's provenance like a sommelier with claret. This is, of course, entirely logical, given that every beer's unique character is defined mostly by its yeast, as it's the only unique ingredient in a brewery's recipe.

So already you are looking at a few weeks before you can start. And once you have your levain residing in the fridge, you then need to take it our 24 hours before you bake for a feed to reawaken it. And when you come to actually use it to make bread you come up against the oldest problem - how do you make a 'natural' yeast rise as well as an industrially created yeast? The short answer is physical work and lots of time.

Second prove - still wibbly wobbly

To get a bit Zen about this for a minute, the first part of the physical work is to do nothing. Technically speaking, this is called the Autolyse - when you mix your flours, water and levain and just let it rest on the bench. This lets the newly combined flour and water start to form its gutenoids without the disruption of kneading. Purists would do this before even adding the levain - just flour and water - then add the yeast for further autolysing, and THEN the salt (very important, as salt slightly inhibits the growth of yeast).

After the doing nothing, the doing something is quite vigorous: at least 20-30 mins of kneading, about twice that for your average tin loaf, to maximise the starch breakdown and creation of sugars for Eric. But at first prove there's more than just letting it sit and relax; many people like to stretch it every 30 minutes for the first 3 hours of a prove, to ensure the gluten strings are forming and create surface tension for a stronger dough despite its wet core. The first three hours? Oh yes. This is going to take at least 6 hours first time round the track, preferably overnight.

For the second prove, you place your dough in the usual proving basket for another 12-hour spell, this time avoiding the stretching. This is just as well because it became clear how much the first prove had 'relaxed' my dough, turning a reasonably stiff ball into a soft, near-liquid state. With gravity operating at its normal way in my kitchen, this was going to make shaping a loaf difficult. And so, despite my best efforts, and nearly 24 hours of preparation, my first sourdough was a focaccia. Or, more accurately, a slightly bitter, edible paving slab. Back to the drawing board.

Flour and water. Plus, blood, sweat and tears

The reason sourdough recipes are so wet - most using a 1:1 flour:liquid ratio - is to create more gluten to maximise the lift. Whatever CO2 Eric is producing needs to be trapped. I've since learned people manage to create those beautiful football shaped sourdoughs that burst through their upper crusts in such stunning patterns through either another 12 hours in the fridge (to create the rigidity) or baking them in a casserole dish to prevent the liquid from finding its own level. Or else through such convoluted combinations of kneading, folding, autolysing and reproving that they start to resemble less a baking process and more a religious ritual. Like I say, the Cult of Sourdough does strange things to people.

But without resorting to such artifice, the obvious solution was to put less water in. Being an obvious person, this is what I tried, with reasonable success. At least it meant I could create a second loaf within 24 hours, but this time I could use a bread knife to slice it instead of a jackhammer. But I also realise that I am grubbing around in the foothills of Sourdoughs - there are dense crumbed crusty mountains to climb. And to get there, I will have to climb higher into the mysteries of these rituals. Along the well-trodden path to madness...

Impure thoughts

Just when I was worried that after last week's ciabatta success this would turn into a simple recipe blog, a baking disaster came along just to stop me getting carried away.

I was trying a new flour, called Khorasan. As well as being the name of a flour, it is also the name of a region of Iran and a Shi-ite Islamist group, so in Googling recipes, I've probably now gotten myself onto a security list at GCHQ,

Golden brown, texture like sun

I say new, but it is actually a very old tetraploid strain of wheat, originating in the cradle of civilization itself, and sometimes known as the Wheat of the Pharoahs, probably mostly by marketers, or less enigmatically as King Tut's Wheat. It gradually fell into disuse as hexaploid wheat variants superseded it, and had no commercial producers until the 1970s when a couple of Montana farmers cultivated a variety that they could trademark. Today all Khorasan wheat is produced under this trademark, Kamut (from the ancient Egyptian meaning wheaten bread), and through their breeding programme they have a monopoly on its use. And they control it strictly: no interbreeding, it must be certified organic, and when used in baking cannot be sold as Khorasan if it is less than 50% of the bread's contents.

8 hour prove - before baking

It's all the things hippy bakers love: low in gluten, higher in selenium, protein, antioxidants and vitamins than ordinary wheat. If you're familiar with other posts on my blog, by now you'll know this should be ringing alarm bells. An ancient in-bred wheat, low in gluten - always a handy thing for a knuckle-powered baker. It has the colour and consistency of fine sand, and in many ways was rather like baking with it too. Sticky, hygroscopic and as flexible as Netanyahu at the negotiating table. About the only thing left in my armoury is time, so I left it on an overnight prove and went for a safe tinned loaf option.

 And the result? Despite generous oiling, a stuck loaf. And the bread I was able to evict had the nutty, golden taste of...sand. As a wise sage once said: "the stone age didn't end because they ran out of stone." And so with wheat: there was a reason we started to cultivate modern wheat varieties.

After baking - surgery required

So what did we learn today? As with the partial success of the rye loaf, the total lack of success here was baking using the pure, specialised, idiosyncratic flours to strive for a unique taste based upon a misplace sense of 'purity'. Purity as a general concept is something I instinctively avoid - purity is barren, narrow, limited. Purity is a dead end - in art, in genetics, in life in general. I should follow my instincts and not follow the cul-de-sac of purity, but look to blend and mix combinations of the fussy Ryes and Khorasans with the reliable bedrock of modern wheat varieties to achieve new tastes, unique and interesting breads. It's the grit that forms the pearl.

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.