If making by hand,
add the yeast mixture, lukewarm water, and molasses to the bowl and mix with a wooden spoon until the ingredients are combined. Transfer to a lightly floured surface and knead for at least 12 minutes, or until the dough is soft but still holds its shape.
Form the dough into a ball and place in a large oiled bowl. Turn the dough over to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel and let rise in a warm, draft-free place for 1 to 1½ hours, or until doubled in size.
Lightly spray 2 loaf pans with cooking spray. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and divide it into 2 pieces. Gently form each piece into a
loose round
and cover with a floured kitchen towel. Let rest for 10 minutes. Shape each piece into a
loaf
and place in the prepared pans. Sprinkle flour over the tops of the loaves and spread it out evenly. Cover with a floured kitchen towel and let rise in a warm place for 1½ to 1¾ hours, or until the dough has risen ¾ inch above the rim of the pan and a finger pressed into the dough leaves an impression.
Fifteen minutes before the loaves have finished rising,
slash
the tops. Remove all but the middle rack from the oven. Preheat the oven to 450°F.
Place the loaves in the oven and bake for 5 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 400°F and bake 20 minutes longer. Turn the loaf pans around front to back and switch sides left to right. Bake 15 to 20 minutes longer, for a total baking time of 40 to 45 minutes, or until the loaves are a deep brown and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Unmold the loaves onto a wire rack to cool.
I love moving bread in and out of the oven all morning long.
—ARAYAH
I like production, making lots of things, and I like feeding people. I think that a person should be fed regardless of who they are or what they do or don’t do.
—CARRIE
Making food is both an art and a craft. To me, it’s life. My mom was a good cook. She had a wok in the fifties, a nice Jewish lady with a wok. I love shopping. I love to watch food grow. I love playing with it. I love eating.
—PAM
Times are so different now from when I joined the collective twenty years ago. Most of the members didn’t have kids back then, and our social life centered around the store. Then everyone started having kids. At one time we had twelve infants and toddlers in the collective. With this change we needed so much more from the store—income, benefits, flexibility. While the loss of intimacy was difficult, we managed to transform the collective into an incredibly supportive workplace for families.
—S. S.
CHAPTER THREE
SOURDOUGH BREADS
THE CHEESE BOARD’S
sourdough-starter culture is twenty-five years old. Begun simply, with soured milk, flour, and water in a yeast-filled atmosphere, it has been fed and refed all these years. Nearly indestructible, the starter has been passed on to customers, fledgling collectives, friends, and family. It is not our store secret, but it has secrets of its own.
When we began working on the sourdough section for this book, it was tempting just to scoop up two cups of starter from the five-gallon buckets that sit in the dough room at the Cheese Board. But we had vowed to make a homemade product that we could pass on to you, so we forged ahead. The living starters created in our home kitchens launched us into a journey of sourdough bread discovery.
We were surprised that, even with our combined experience of dough making, we could still become so excited with each successful step and be baffled by the simplest failures.
For months we tinkered with starter amounts, rising times, oven temperatures, and steaming techniques, only to be constantly disappointed with gray matte finishes, unsatisfying crumbs, and incomplete flavors. Without professional ovens with powerful internal sprayers and convection fans, it seemed impossible to re-create a baguette like the ones we bake at the Cheese Board. We were disheartened but not discouraged, and kept returning to the drawing board. Since the Cheese Board baguette is one of our specialties, it didn’t seem right to offer an inferior product for this book.
After two years of experimenting—and inflicting many homely loaves of bread on friends and family—we finally perfected the recipe for making a beautiful, shiny, crusty baguette in the home kitchen.
This chapter includes the two basic doughs from which we make all our sourdough breads: the master sourdough and the Suburban dough. Although you will not need two years to learn how to make a delightful sourdough loaf, it will likely take you a few attempts to produce a truly great bread. A wild-yeast starter is a less predictable leavener than commercial yeast, but if home-baked sourdoughs are your quest, the journey is worth it.
The methods we developed for baking sourdough at home are based on our experiences using professional baking equipment. At the Cheese Board we bake sourdough loaves at high temperatures (500° to 560°F) and steam them several times. Similar results can be achieved at home with lower oven temperatures by using a baking stone and by steaming certain breads in a two-step process using a metal roasting pan filled with ice water, sometimes in tandem with a spray bottle. With the steaming technique, timing is of the utmost importance to achieve a deep, rich color on the crust; the second steaming is particularly important in producing a crunchy crust on the loaves and a beautiful glossy finish on the baguettes.
Baking stones, when thoroughly preheated for at least 45 minutes prior to baking, retain enough heat to keep the oven temperature high during a bake (especially important during a bake that requires the oven door to be opened often). A stone also mimics a wood-fired oven by providing a surface on which to bake breads directly, a wonderful way to make the bottom crust of a bread crunchy.
THE SOURDOUGH EXPERIENCE
When I joined the Cheese Board, I conveniently stepped into a well-developed routine of rotating, feeding, refeeding, and refreshing the twenty-five-year-old starter. Initially, my biggest concern as a novice dough maker was not the
condition of the starters, but rather how long to mix each dough, how much water I should use, and what the final temperature should be when the kneading was done. The frothy, bubbly, ammonia-smelling starters were the least of my concerns.
When I finally turned my attention to this ancient method of leavening bread, I began to notice that weather conditions, water temperature, and flour-to-water ratio could all contribute to the condition of the starters. I have read about the science of sourdough—gas emissions and chemical reactions—but for me it still feels like a mystery every time I make sourdough bread. You have to have that leap of faith that the starter will do what it should do.
On a less romantic note, one of the messiest jobs at the Cheese Board is mixing the starters. We make them in five-gallon buckets and have at least fifteen of them on hand. I measure out eight pounds of flour and six pounds of water into the saved starter. Next, I stick my hand—up to my elbow—into the glop and stir it up. What remains on my arm is glue that only a Tuffy scrub brush and three showers can remove.
—Cathy
Sourdough Starter
Thousands of years before commercial yeast was invented, people all over the world used sourdough starter to leaven bread. Water, flour, and wild yeasts from the air combine to create a living culture, the most basic, ancient form of bread leavening. The tradition of passing sourdough starter on to
neighbors, family, and friends links us to past and future generations of bread makers.
At any given time at the Cheese Board, we have at least fifteen buckets of sourdough starter in differing stages of fermentation. The buckets are lined up in rows and labeled with the date and the time of day they were mixed. While all the ingredients in the sourdough breads are important, the starter is crucial because it is what enables the bread to rise.
Starting your own homegrown sour culture is a simple process that takes about 12 days to complete. If it is replenished on a regular basis, your starter will last indefinitely. Starter can be left unattended in the refrigerator for up to 1 month. If you wish to bake with a starter that has been refrigerated, you will need to start feeding it (to revive it to full strength) 36 hours before you wish to make bread with it. Rye is a great host for wild yeasts, making it a good addition to a new starter recipe. We use an organic rye flour (see
Source List
), as we have found that the yeasts grow particularly well when feeding on it.
This starter is the foundation of all the sourdough recipes in this book.
MAKES ABOUT 2 CUPS
3½ cups lukewarm water, plus additional depending on baking schedule
¾ cup medium organic rye flour
4⅔ cups bread flour, plus additional depending on baking schedule
Day 1
In a medium nonreactive (stainless steel, glass, plastic, or ceramic) bowl, using a wooden spoon, stir ½ cup of the lukewarm water and the rye flour together until smooth. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and let stand at room temperature (65° to 70°F) for 48 hours, when small bubbles should begin to appear on the surface.
Day 3
Now you are ready to feed your starter: Stir ⅔ cup of the bread flour into the rye mixture until smooth; it will be the consistency of a thick pancake batter. Put the starter into a nonreactive container with high sides and cover it loosely with plastic wrap. Let stand at room temperature for 48 hours. The starter will have some large bubbles on top and begin to smell like sourdough bread.
