Bread Flour

What makes this version of rye different from the more popular German and deli ryes is the use of licorice-flavored aniseeds and fennel seeds, along with orange peel and a touch of cardamom. Nutritionists are now quantifying the therapeutic benefits of orange peel, licorice-flavored spices, and bitters as digestive aids that various traditional cultures have espoused for centuries. By making the bread with a combination of wild-yeast starter and commercial yeast, this formula creates an even more complexly flavored version of the bread than the more customary versions leavened only by commercial yeast. The lactic acid not only conditions the flour, predigesting it to an extent, but it also gives it a longer shelf life and better flavor. Think of this bread as a baked version of anisette.

With all the emphasis on French and Italian rustic breads these days, it is easy to overlook the fact that the real center of the bread and pastry universe for hundreds of years was Vienna. Most of the great French breads that we love today, including baguettes, croissants, and even puff pastry, came to France a couple hundred years ago via the Austro-Hungarian empire, where they found a hungry audience willing to support these Austrian (which included Polish) bakers. Nowadays, the main distinction in American (and even European) bakeries between French, Italian, and Vienna breads, is the presence of a few enrichments in the latter. A little added sugar and malt causes the crust to brown faster, and a small amount of butter or shortening tenderizes the dough by coating and “shortening” the gluten strands. The shape, as with all culturally based bread, is determined by the baker based on function, but we usually think of Vienna bread as typically twelve inches long and weighing one pound. It is often scored down the middle to make a nice “ear,” but does not have quite as hard a crust nor as open a crumb as French bread. This dough makes exceptional pistolets (torpedo rolls), similar to the hoagie rolls made from the Italian bread on page 172, and it can be baked in loaf pans for excellent sandwich loaves. One of the best applications for this dough is to make Dutch crunch bread, as discussed on page 264.

A technique that is unique to this bread is the use of a cooked flour paste, made the day before. The gelatinized starches release flavors, giving this bread a distinct quality.

Pugliese refers to the southeastern Italian region of Apulia (Puglia in Italian), but the variations on loaves with this name are endless. Many of the versions I’ve seen in the United States are similar to ciabatta—sometimes they actually are ciabatta, but are called pugliese just to differentiate them from the competition. What is the same is that both of these breads, along with many others, fall into the category of rustic breads, which we define as hydration in excess of 65 percent, usually approaching 80 percent. In Italy, where the flour is naturally more extensible than the very elastic North American flour that we use, there is no need to overhydrate. But here we need to pump more water into the dough in order to stretch the gluten strands, giving the loaves their distinctive big-hole structure and delicious nutlike flavor. One distinction between ciabatta, which originated in the Lake Como region of Lombardy (northern Italy), and pugliese is that pugliese breads are usually baked in rounds rather than in the slipper shape of ciabatta. The French version of a rustic bread, pain rustique, is also slightly elongated, but more of a bâtard than a slipper shape. Those, along with the pain à l’ancienne baguette (page 191) and the very elongated stirato and stubby pain rustique (pictured on page 135, made from the ciabatta dough), are all rustic breads, each with its own shape and ingredient makeup. An important distinction of the true pugliese bread, and one not often seen in American versions, is the use of golden durum flour, finely milled and packaged as fancy or extra fancy durum flour. Fancy durum is milled from the same strain of durum wheat as the sandy semolina flour that is sprinkled underneath hearth loaves and used in pane siciliano (page 198), but it is milled more finely. There are bakeries in Apulia that make this bread with 100 percent fancy durum flour and some that use a blend of durum and regular bread flours. In the following formula, I suggest a blend, but feel free to play around with the proportions, moving even into a 100 percent durum version when you feel adventurous. The challenge for anyone tackling this bread is getting comfortable with wet dough. Once you do, you will find it difficult to resist the desire to make rustic bread all the time; the softness and pliability of the dough give it a wonderful feeling in the hand. Combined with the flavor enhancement of long fermentation, this formula brings forth a loaf that is so dramatic, so delicious, and so much fun to make that it will forever change your standard of what constitutes great bread.

Rosemary has become a popular herb as culinary interest has grown and many of us have discovered how easy it is to cultivate it in our kitchen or backyard. It also has been overused, or used with a heavy hand in some instances, so I always advise restraint with rosemary: a little goes a long way. The Italians call this bread panmarino, and it is to them that we owe thanks for this interesting concept. This bread is a good one for answering the question, What do I do with these leftover mashed potatoes? The potato starch softens the dough and gives the bread a pleasing tenderness, while the dough delivers other bold flavors from the biga and rosemary infusion.

Bernard Ganachaud, in the early 1960s, made the poolish baguette the first legitimate alternative to the 60-2-2 baguette of the Parisian masses. When he retired thirty years later, his la flûte Gana was a licensed commodity, and bakers who paid for the right to make it were allowed to charge an extra franc above the government-controlled price. In the Coupe du Monde bread competition, the poolish baguette is now the standard that all countries must replicate. In my visits to the boulangeries of Paris, the poolish baguette made at the original Ganachaud Boulangerie was the second best baguette I ever had (the first being the pain à l’ancienne of Philippe Gosselin). Ganachaud has a special medium-extraction flour (with his name prominently displayed on the bags, naturally) from which he makes his baguettes, and there isn’t any flour quite like it in America. It is slightly higher in ash content and bran than regular bread flour, more like clear flour (whole-wheat flour that has been sifted only once instead of the usual twice to remove the bran and germ). The closest I’ve come to replicating that flour is described below and it makes a wonderful baguette, perhaps as good as can be done outside of the magical environment of Paris and without true Ganachaud-endorsed flour. Some people prefer it to the Gosselin baguette. See what you think.

Now that I’m living on the East Coast, I am in the center of Portuguese sweet bread universe. When I lived in California, I knew it as Hawaiian bread, but upon closer reading of the label, I learned that even the Hawaiians give credit to the Portuguese for this big, soft, sweet, round pillow of a loaf. One man I know from Los Angeles who summers on Nantucket told me he was in love with the sandwiches made on this bread from a small shop on the island. He was the first person I met with the same passion for this bread that many people feel toward rustic and wild-yeast breads of the artisan movement. When I began teaching at Johnson & Wales University, I found that each of my classes included at least one student who shared my friend’s passion for the sweet bread. Each of these students vows to improve upon the general formula, and this version is a result of the many tweakings the students who grew up with the real deal gave to the original version in an effort to make it conform to their childhood memories. The most distinctive aspect of this bread, besides the softness and the shape, is the flavor imparted by the powdered milk. I have tried making versions with whole milk and buttermilk, but once you get the taste of the powdered-milk version in your mind, no other taste will do.

Pizza is the perfect food, or so I’m so often told. When I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, I’d heard that there was great pizza to be had, so I asked everyone I met to recommend his or her favorite place. They all seemed to have a different style that they preferred, not unlike the diversity I’ve found in similar explorations into barbecue and chili. There is Sicilian thick-crusted pizza and thin New York style (the kind where the nose of the slice has to be flipped back into the center of the slice to keep all the cheese from running off). At least two-dozen franchise pizza shops exist within a three-mile radius of my home, some with prebaked shells, others with house-made crust. There are double-decker pizzas, cheese-in-the-crust pizzas, and a very popular twice-baked crust, recently dubbed Argentinian pizza in some regions, but here it is mysteriously and incorrectly referred to as Neapolitan. The best pizza I’ve had in recent years was in Phoenix at Pizzeria Bianco, a small restaurant run by Chris Bianco and his friends and family. Chris grows his own basil and lettuce behind the restaurant, makes his own mozzarella cheese, and hand-mixes his pizza dough in large batches (I mean really hand-mixes, on a bench and by hand). It is wet dough, like ciabatta, and sits for hours slowly fermenting. His is the closest I’ve had to pizza made in the style of Naples: simple, thin crusted, and baked fast and crisp. Pizzeria Bianco serves only about six kinds of pizza, a house salad, house-made Italian bread (from the pizza dough), and three or so desserts made by Chris’s mom. They can’t keep up with the business, and getting a seat in the pizzeria is like winning the lottery. Naples is the birthplace of what we today call pizza. Genoa has its focaccia, Tuscany its schiacciata, and Sicily its sfincione, but true Neapolitan pizza is the perfect expression of the perfect food. Every other style may also be crust and topping, but life would be better if only this superior version were allowed to call itself pizza. More to the point, it is possible to make a great pizza at home even if your oven cannot reach the heat levels used by the very best pizzerias that burn hardwood or bituminous coal and reach between 800° and 1200°F! Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a wonderful piece in the August 2000 issue of Vogue in which he told of trying dozens of ways to generate enough heat to replicate a pizza oven in his home. He nearly burned down his house in the process. Unfortunately, most home ovens will not go beyond 550°F, if that, but the following dough will produce an amazing pizza even at that relatively low heat. It has long been my contention that it is the crust, not the toppings, that make a pizza memorable. I’ve seen some expensive, wonderful ingredients wasted on bad crust, or, even more often, a decent dough ruined in an oven that was not hot enough to bake it properly. For many years, cookbook instructions have been to bake at about 350°F or maybe at 425°F. Rarely do you see instructions that suggest cranking the oven to its fullest capacity, but that’s what you have to do to make a great pizza at home. The single biggest flaw in most pizza dough recipes is the failure to instruct the maker to allow the dough to rest overnight in the refrigerator (or at least for a long time). This gives the enzymes time to go to work, pulling out subtle flavor trapped in the starch. The long rest also relaxes the gluten, allowing you to shape the dough easily, minimizing the elastic springiness that so often forces you to squeeze out all the gas. Lately, there’s been a controversy regarding what type of flour to use. Unbleached is a given. It simply delivers more flavor and aroma. For the past few years the trend has been toward high-gluten or bread flour because it promotes oven spring and holds together better during handling (this is called dough “tolerance”)...

This is one of the breakthrough breads that taught me the value of combining large portions of pre-ferment with overnight cold fermentation. Semolina is the gritty, sandy flour milled from durum wheat. (Durum is the strain of wheat most closely identified with pasta.) It is a hard, high-protein wheat, but it is not high in gluten. The golden color is mainly due to a high proportion of beta-carotene, which contributes both aroma and flavor as well as the appealing hue. You may substitute a finer grind of this flour, called fancy durum (sometimes labeled “extra fancy durum”). When it is labeled “fancy durum,” the flour is milled to the consistency of regular bread flour. This is the grind used in pasta and also used in the 100 percent durum bread called pugliese (page 222). This version of pane siciliano consists of 40 percent semolina flour and 60 percent high-gluten or bread flour. The finished loaf has a beautiful blistered crust, not too crackly, and a crumb with large, irregular holes, open to the same degree as good French or Italian bread. The sweetness and nutty quality of the semolina, and the complementary flavor of the sesame-seed garnish make this one of my absolute favorite breads.

This is the perfect dough for creative shaping, and the one used throughout France for many types of breads sold under various local names. The dough is similar to regular French baguette dough, but it includes a small percentage of whole grain, either whole wheat, pumpernickel-grind or white rye, or cornmeal. This additional grain gives the bread more character and grain flavor, and contributes to the brownish-gold, country-style crust that distinguishes it from white flour French bread. Most important, this is the dough, as I learned it from Professor Raymond Calvel, that opened my thinking to the use of large percentages of pre-ferment. On pages 72–79 you will see a number of shapes you can make from this dough. The most famous are the fendu, épi, couronne, and auvergnat. There are many others that you may also have seen. As always, though, the first emphasis must be on the quality of the dough. There is nothing more disappointing to a bread lover than to see a lot of work go into a shaping technique for a dough that does not deliver world-class flavor and texture. This particular dough never disappoints.

The technique by which this bread is made has tremendous implications for the baking industry and for both professional and home bakers. The unique delayed-fermentation method, which depends on ice-cold water, releases flavors trapped in flour in a way different from the more traditional twelve-stage method. The final product has a natural sweetness and nutlike character that is distinct from breads made with exactly the same ingredients but fermented by the standard method, even with large percentages of pre-ferment. Also, because the dough is as wet as rustic ciabatta-style dough, it can be used in many ways, from baguettes, as Philippe Gosselin does in Paris, to ciabatta, pugliese, stirato, pain rustique, and even pizza and focaccia. This bread shows us another way to manipulate time, and thus outcomes, by manipulating temperature. The cold mixing and fermentation cycles delay the activation of the yeast until after the amylase enzymes have begun their work of breaking out sugar from the starch. When the dough is brought to room temperature and the yeast wakes up and begins feasting, it feeds on sugars that weren’t there the day before. Because the yeast has converted less of the released sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide, a reserve of sugar remains in the fermented dough to flavor it and caramelize the crust during the baking cycle. While this delayed-fermentation method doesn’t work for every dough (especially those that are enriched with sugar and other flavor-infusing ingredients), used appropriately, it evokes the fullness of flavor from the wheat beyond any other fermentation method I’ve encountered. As a bonus, and despite all the intimidating science, this is actually one of the easiest doughs in this book to make. Without question this is the dough that has gotten the most recent attention from my students at Johnson & Wales, The California Culinary Academy, and around the country in my daylong workshops for home bakers. It is not just the flavor of the bread that excites them, although without it the concept would be interesting but moot. It is the idea of pressing into new frontiers of bread making, of realizing that there are still areas of exploration not charted by even the professional community. We are learning that as we deconstruct the bread-baking process, we are still in the early discovery stage of what is possible. As in any facet of life, this is an exciting place to find oneself, like standing at the end of the world, facing the words, as so often showed up on ancient maps, “Unknown Kingdoms Be Here.”

I am always exploring the multigrain genre in a never-ending quest for better and better ways to deliver nutritious bread in a delicious package. Adapting some of the advanced concepts we’ve discussed, such as the soaker technique, to activate enzymes and break out natural sugars seems a natural progression. This is a variation of perhaps my best-known bread, struan, whose flavor in the original version I thought impossible to top. This version preserves that flavor and opens up possibilities for grain variations not possible with the direct-dough technique of the original struan, as described in Brother Juniper’s Bread Book and Bread Upon the Waters. Substituting, for instance, millet, quinoa, amaranth, or buckwheat for the corn or oats (or simply adding them to the blend) can be accomplished with the soaker method without pre-cooking those grains. I say this with the confidence born of hundreds of customer testimonials: this bread and its variations make the best toast in the world. Because it is sweetened with both honey and brown sugar, it caramelizes quickly, both while baking and especially when toasting. The many grains hold moisture so that, while the slices crisp up when toasted, they also retain a moist sweetness. The flavors marry extremely well with mayonnaise-based sandwich fillings, such as egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and BLTs. I nearly always top the loaves with poppy seeds because they add a complementary appearance and taste and look more attractive than, say, sesame seeds. The dough can be formed into rolls and freestanding loaves for specific applications, but I believe that the most perfect use of this bread is either for sandwiches or toast (or even better, toasted sandwiches).

Here, whole-wheat flour accounts for 33 percent of the total flour, which is the most popular formula for making light wheat bread. The result is a loaf similar to the soft wheat breads purchased off the shelves. Of course, this is a poor compromise for whole-grain purists, which is why I am also including a bread formula with 100 percent whole wheat (page 270).. But there are times when you just want a tasty, soft, but not altogether white sandwich bread, and this versatile loaf fits the bill.

Either of these two formulas will make a delicious rye bread, light or dark. But combined, you can weave them together to make the fabled marbled rye of childhood memories and Seinfeld fame. These are made by the direct-dough method, as opposed to the sourdough method preferred for onion rye and deli rye. But the ease of making these breads, their soft texture, and their flexibility for braiding and blending make them a favorite of my students.

Here’s a simple formula for making snappy Armenian-style crackers, perfect for breadbaskets, company, and kids. Lavash, though usually called Armenian flatbread, also has Iranian roots and is now eaten throughout the Middle East and around the world. It is similar to the many other Middle Eastern and North African flatbreads known by different names, such as mankoush or mannaeesh (Lebanese), barbari (Iranian), khoubiz or khobz (Arabian), aiysh (Egyptian), kesret and mella (Tunisian), pide or pita (Turkish), and pideh (Armenian). The main difference between these breads is either how thick or thin the dough is rolled out, or the type of oven in which they are baked (or on which they are baked, as many of these breads are cooked on stones or red-hot pans with a convex surface). Some of the breads form a pocket like a pita bread, and some, like the injera of Ethiopia and Eritrea, are thicker and serve as sponges to soak up spicy sauces. The key to crisp lavash, which is becoming one of the most popular of these flatbread variations, is to roll out the dough paper-thin. The sheet can be cut into crackers in advance or snapped into shards after baking. The shards make a nice presentation when arranged in baskets.

In America, the term Italian bread has come to mean a loaf very similar to French bread, only usually a little softer. This has very little to do with reality, however, since scores of authentic Italian breads exist. What made the old-time Italian bakeries that were once a part of many American towns and cities special was that the bread was baked fresh daily and bought right at the shop. Today, even with the current bread revolution, much of the bread produced does not stand up to the those old Italian loaves, despite the love, care, and wonderful wood- or coal-fired ovens that we may associate with many contemporary bakeries. This is because many bakeries, smitten with innovative modern ingredients that accelerate fermentation in order to save time and increase profits, have reverted to fast-rising methods that leave much of the potential flavor and color trapped in the starches. The Italian biga pre-ferment method is a step in the direction of improving these breads, much as pâte fermentée and poolish does for French bread. The following formula pushes the biga method to its limits, and the result is an Italian bread as good as or better than any I’ve had in recent years. The use of a large amount of biga insures maximum sugar breakout from starches, evoking a sweetness that is far beyond the small amount of sugar in the formula. The finished bread will be slightly softer than French bread and less crusty.