THE SOURDOUGH SECRET Don’t tell anyone, but baking bread — one of the biggest lockdown pastimes — is easy
Doesn’t it feel like everyone is baking bread right now? And not just staid, white loaves in aging bread machines, but gorgeous sourdough with crackly brown crusts. My social media feeds look like every other person had secretly interned at the most prestigious Parisian boulangerie before they had to self isolate.
As someone who has regularly baked bread for the past two years, I must admit something. Baking bread is easy — even sourdough or bread made with natural yeast. How else do you think most of humanity ate bread for thousands of years without instant dry yeast? Some people refer to this natural leavening agent as a levain, a starter or even a mother, but it’s nothing more than flour and water that’s transformed into a bubbling mass thanks to naturally occurring yeast.
I know those loaves look like someone toiled for years to perfect, but you too can inspire jealousy on Facebook or your social media network of choice with minimal effort. All you need is one book. (I’d reprint the full recipe here, but the directions go on for several pages. I believe there’s a difference between a recipe that’s simple and one that’s easy to follow.) You’ll also need some very basic equipment and a whole lot of time. Don’t most of us have an excess of the latter right now?
The only drawback is that you’ll have to turn into a bread person, the kind who cares passionately for a container of uncommunicative, multiplying yeast. You’ll find that your kitchen will always be covered in a dusting of flour, even after wiping down all the counters for the third time. Dried-out dough will permanently cling to your fingernails, but you won’t even care. You bake bread, and whatever the dough wants, it gets.
Mostly that means keeping a strict levain feeding schedule. This dedication may set you apart from other members of society. That’s OK! Though marked as an eccentric outcast among regular folk, soon you’ll be able to suss out all the other bread bakers in the wild just by their crazed stare. Together you’ll be able to discuss the finer points of life, like what brand of flour to use and your preferred dough hydration level.
I wasn’t always this way. I became a bread baker by accident. I initially got into making pizza at home, before realizing that I should probably learn about bread first. After some simple overnight loaves, I decided to try one made with a levain. Each loaf looked like I swiped it from an adorable French bakery, with a gorgeous crackly crust and a tender, almost custardlike interior. Yet, nothing about the cooking process took much effort.
And the compliments didn’t hurt. I’ve been cornered at parties and admired online. (You have to Instagram every loaf, right?) A French couple sampled a slice at a dinner party and declared that they haven’t tasted bread this good since moving to the States. Sometimes I feel momentarily invincible.
But whenever I get too full of myself, I just remember that I’m only following the exact directions laid out in Ken Forkish’s incredible cookbook, “Flour Water Salt Yeast.” Seriously, it’s all there. I don’t really care about the specifics of what is happening in the dough. I just know that if I follow the simple directions, I’ll have some drool-worthy bread. As I mentioned above, while the recipe is easy to follow, it’s also extremely long. That’s why I’m not including it here.
But trust me, the book is worth the purchase.
You’ll need some basic kitchen gear. The most important is a Dutch oven. The best European bakeries have steam-injected ovens, a luxury most home kitchens don’t have. But start your loaf in a closed Dutch oven, and the steam trapped inside helps the bread rise.
But mostly, you just need time. Don’t have a levain? You don’t have to politely ask for some from a superstar baker. Forkish explains how you can make your own in five days from flour and water. That’s all it takes. While this may have sounded like an absurdly long time to wait before, now that we are stuck in a purgatory of self-isolation, a week doesn’t seem that bad.
What about keeping the levain alive? To do that you’ll need to feed it. If that word brings back nightmares of trying to coax your toddler to eat vegetables, the process is nothing more than discarding some of the levain, and then adding in more flour and water. It takes about a minute each day. And if you’re not planning to bake bread for a few days, you can stash it in the fridge for a week.
When I want to bake bread on a Sunday, I remove the levain from the fridge on a Friday and feed it. I feed it again on Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon, I mix together a bit of the levain with flour, water, salt and the tiniest bit of instant yeast. Now I have dough. I leave this to rise for a few hours, before shaping it and then stashing it in the fridge overnight. On Sunday, all I must do is plop some dough in a preheated Dutch oven and bake.
There are a number of recipes to follow in “Flour Water Salt Yeast,” but I’m partial to the pain de campagne. I realize it sounds fancy because the name is French, but Forkish writes that it’s really just a “rustic country bread that has a golden color to its crumb, subtle round flavors from fermentation, and a chewy delicious crust.” Doesn’t that sound great?
I was amazed at the first loaf of pain de campagne I pulled from the oven. Sure, that one loaf had taken more than a week of planning, but with little more than flour, water salt and time, I’d created something truly exceptional.