My first experience baking bread was in college in the 70's. Appropriately given the time frame my muse and spiritual guide, my bread bible was the The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown. This was the wholesome, flavorful and sturdy bread created and consumed by the Zen monks and students when they are not meditating at the Zen Mountain Center in Tassajara Springs, Carmel Valley , California. And incidentally an important source of income in that the bread was very popular with visitors.
This is for the most part bread pan bread. I made a lot of loaves, did a lot of experimenting (very much encouraged in the Tassajara ethos) and learned a lot about baking bread, well, sandwich bread anyway. No matter what you put in it: raisins, cheese, nuts, olives, fruit, no matter how much you blend and mix flours it still got baked in bread pans and came out with uniform, soft crumb and no crust to speak of, and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with it...over the years i realized that it did not satisfy my instinctive, basic, ingrained food memory of what bread should be...and I just didn't want to eat it.
So fast forward 25 years to 2005. The bread revolution is well under way in America, you don't knead to be in NY, LA or San Francisco to be able to buy excellent crusty European style hearth baked baguettes, boules and batards. Even at supermarkets, OK-- the high end ones anyway, one can get a decent baguette.
But what about me, the home baker? Was I sentenced to a life of relatively bland sandwich bread? Or, as I began to read some of the excellent artisanal bread gurus and leaders of the bread revolution, people like Nancy Silverton and Peter Rheinhart, must I jump through all these very complex hoops in order to make a decent European hearth bread at home?. I did, I tried, I succeeded, sometimes...it did not always seem worth it -- I mean with all the hoop jumping.
So the dilemma: How do I make fantastic European Style Hearth bread -- with a multi-textured crumb, big holes ,small holes, a blistered and caramelized crust where the sugars have have darkened and made the crust brittle, explosive, where chips of crust literally explode around the bread knife as it cuts the bread. A loaf that has blossomed in the oven and the expanding gasses have made it craggy and monumental and dramatic. Finally a complexity of flavor extracted just from flour, water, salt and yeast, a complexity of flavor that only comes from a long slow development, a complexity that is not easily described that changes from bite to bite, loaf to loaf, day to day. In short, the kind of bread you can't wait to eat, but you feel you really should take a picture first. How do I do it without giving up my day job?
The answer my friends is blowin' in the wind, well part of it anyway.
Around this time, 2005 I read John Thorne's excellent essay "An Artisanal Loaf" that can be found in his book Outlaw Cook. I got 2 very important things from this essay: first a description, outline, encapsulation from a far better writer than I of a philosophy of bread making that so closely mirrors my own that it was kind of eerie. especially since I hadn't really thought about it until that reading. The second thing is my treasured Maple, the natural leaven culture that I fostered on my kitchen counter inspired by him. Notice that I call it a "natural Leaven Culture", not a sour dough starter. My bread is not sour, i don't want sour dough bread, I want naturally leavened bread, bread leavened with the natural yeast that lives in the air and lies dormant in most dry milled unbleached flour. I named Maple after the street I live on: Maple Ave. because maple was fostered on my counter top on Maple Ave. Born in 2005, maple is going strong in 2011.
Back to the philosophy of bread: it should be worth doing. It should satisfy on more levels than just taste and appearance, it should feel right right down to your bones. It should be easy, and not command an excess of your busy day! If it takes three days to make and requires a whole bunch of equipment, techniques and mail order flour and etc etc it ceases being the staff of life and becomes something else all together. It should stand alone! White flour, yeast (in this case natural leaven), salt and water. It should be sweet and nourishing and complex. It should be delicious, it should feel like home. I'm not saying you can't add a cup of whole wheat flour or raisins or cheese or walnuts or whatever your imagination and your larder will allow, I do all the time. So, yes, experiment, tweak, and play with the bread, but if your basic loaf doesn't stand alone, and exceed your expectations...Why bother? Guess I've always been a one-loaf-kind-of-guy.
So I had a natural leaven - Maple - bubbling away on my counter top or lying dormant in my fridge. I had a philosophy that seemed so perfect and natural I could swear I thought it up myself. what I didn't have was a methodology or results that matched that simple yet to date unattainable ideal.
Enter Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan and Mark Bittman food writer of the New York Times, Wednesday, November 8, 2006, Bittman's article "The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do The Work" featuring Lahey and the No-Knead Bread recipe. Talk about an AHA moment. I found my methodology. At first I followed the recipe and made good/great loaves with commercial yeast. It wasn't until I thought: "why don't I try it with Maple, instead of commercial yeast?" that I actually began to think that I could attain the unattainable and make excellent bread that exceeds my expectations every time. Believe it or not, it took months before I thought of incorporating Maple into the no-knead method - DUH.
A few refinements, some trial and error and today 5 years later whenever I want, with a minimum of muss and fuss I make a boule/batard of european hearth bread that is better than anything I can buy at an artisanal bakery. A loaf that delights, surprises, satisfies at the deepest levels, is almost orgasmic when fresh, develops character with age, makes great sandwiches, toasts beautifully and freezes well. Things being relative, what else can one ask for in life?
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