Treasure from my Bookshelf: The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book

Have you ever noticed, in eating whole wheat bread from the grocery store, that there is a bitter taste underlying the other flavors? Yeah? I think most of us have.

But did you know that bitter flavor doesn't have to be there? It is not just part of the flavor of whole wheat -- it comes from the oily part of the seed, the wheat germ.  As soon as grain is ground into flour and the oils are exposed to the air, it begins to oxidize. That bitter taste is there because the bakery was using rancid flour.

That's one of the many tid-bits of bread science I learned from Laurel Robertson.

White flour, in fact, began to be mass-produced during the Industrial Revolution as a method of preservation! (I learned that tid-bit from Wikepedia.)

I am now more firmly than ever on the side of the omnivores in the Great Food Divide -- and I avoid any soy products that aren't fermented -- but while I was in college I started learning about natural foods, and I learned a lot from the original Laurel's Kitchen. She was the first person to ever tell me, for instance, that butter is good for you and margarine isn't.

So when I came across The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking, first published in 1984, I bought it eagerly. I  have owned it so long and used it so much that the spine is broken and it fall open by itself to the section on desem bread. It has flour on the pages. I have loaned it out, and been grateful to get it back.

I was living with my parents at the time, after college and before marriage, and I sat down with it and started reading. It's one of those books with lots of narrative (with helpful illustrations), so it is possible to actually sit and read it.

Then I went out and bought whole-wheat flour -- all the recipes are for whole grain -- and started baking.

I wasn't a total novice. I had learned a lot from my mother.

My mother started baking bread for the family when I was in my early teens. She experimented with whole wheat but wasn't happy with the results. After lots of trial and error, she settled on a basic bread recipe that she kept taped inside one of her counter doors. It was usually white bread, but sometimes she would make substitute whole wheat for a portion of her flour.

Laurel experimented in her kitchen too. She learned from her mistakes. She asked other bakers, and professional bakers, for their secrets. She became convinced that it wasn't necessary to incorporate white flour, which is stripped of its fiber and nutrients, fortified with chemical versions of a few nutrients, and then bleached.

In my mother's kitchen, I worked my way painstakingly through the Loaf For Learning recipe, reading all the directions and studying all the pictures.  The first loaf came out pretty good. The second, third and fourth loaves got even better.

The Loaf For Learning Recipe started on page 33 and ended on page 58. It gave detailed, illustrated instructions for every step, including how to knead a wet dough without adding flour, and how to tell when the dough was ready to move on from that step to the next step. The final two pages of the recipe advised me on how to evaluate my results -- the rise, the color, the texture, the crumb. Finally, it referred me to the Troubleshooting section at the back of the book!

This might sound intimidating, but it wasn't. I felt like someone was holding my hand and explaining everything to me all along the way.

I learned how to protcct the gluten film at every stage. I learned that putting my bread into a cold glass pan to rise will make a big hollow near the bottom crust (the secret is to warm the pan with hot water first). I learned why pans should be greased with solid fats instead of oils. I learned different methods for getting a "baker's oven" crust on French breads. I learned that while pure French bread has nothing but flour, water, yeast and salt, there are different additions and glazes to bread (oil, milk, eggs, sweeteners, oatmeal) that can make it more tender, more moist, and longer lasting. I learned that bread will "spring" in the oven if you get the proofing just right and wait until the last minute to cut in any slashes in the top crust.

I coveted brick ovens, pizza stones, grain grinders and baker's peels. (I still covet the brick oven and the pizza peel, but I have a stoneware cookie sheet that stands in nicely for the pizza stone, and a Vitamix serving as a grinder.

After I got married I got brave enough to start ordering fresh flour from King Arthur's for the Desem Bread recipe (a European-style sourdough in which the starter feeds on the gluten instead of on the starches). That recipe is even more extensive than the loaf for learning -- it begins with burying a hard ball of flour and pure water in the middle of a five-pound bag of freshly milled flour and leaving it in a cool place (she specifies an exact temperature range) for three days. I never managed to be organized enough to keep a desem going, but I loved its delicate, complex flavor.

The back of the book is a Bread Handbook, with the first aid section ("Aaak, is it too late to add salt?"), the trouble-shooting section ("Why does my crust crack and split all around the top?"), and all of the information Laurel and her co-authors had gathered about bread baking but couldn't cram into individual recipes.

What I'm saying here is: Even if you are an experienced baker, you can probably learn from this book. Even if you are committed to baking sourdough and never using commercial yeast, you can learn a lot about kneading, shaping and proofing from the Loaf for Learning, about getting a good crust from the sections on French bread and desem, and an alternative sourdough starter from the desem section. There's also a good section on traditional rye breads.

I've been taking the 23-week Sourdough Course at GNOWFGLINS.  I'm up to week 8. Even though he was out of town for three weeks at the beginning and occasionally sleeps over with a friend, my son already is deathly tired of sourdough. So I pulled this book out last night and went through the Loaf for Learning again, doubling the recipe and making one pan of sandwich bread and one pan of dinner rolls. He and his girlfriend both liked it.

I suppose this is progress. Instead of begging for white bread, he begs for "not sourdough."

Once I finish the Sourdough Course at GNOWFGLINS (or maybe sooner) I'm going to start choosing some old favorites from this book and start reworking the recipes to accomodate the Weston A. Price Nourishing Traditions approach to bread-making -- which means either using sprouted flours, or finding a way to give the flour an eight-hour soaking--both techniques reduce phytic acid and increase the available nutrition. For the Loaf for Learning, which calls for two rises plus proofing in the loaf, I think just slowing down the first rise in a cooler place would do the trick.

I think I'll start by looking over the book's detailed schedules for ways to fit baking into your life...

This post is entered in Simple Lives Thursday at GNOWFGLINS

and Fight Back Friday at Food Renegade.