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Next time you're in Minneapolis, why not don a parka and take a course from Didier Rosada? Call the National Baking Center at (612) 374-3303 for course information, or visit its site at www.nationalbakingcenter.com. |
You assemble the ingredients--flour, water, yeast and salt--in about 60 seconds. Then, following a pattern nearly 10,000 years old, you mix, ignore and bake them until brown. Bread. Anyone can make it, right? Now consider the Pearl Bakery or Grand Central, where "artisan" breads are spun from the same elemental ingredients. Promising to do for bread what Starbucks did for a plain cup of joe, the two are among a plethora of bakeries producing loaves of every shape, flavor and style--baguettes and batards, pistolet or pugliese, herbed, olived, sweet or sour. Before their advent, I might plausibly have argued that I could turn out bread as fine as anything I'd find in a shop. Not any more. Despite their pedigree of artlessness, these humble loaves require staggeringly expensive, garage-sized ovens, precise procedures and strict controls. And yet bread is peasant fare. The metaphorical associations conjured up by bread have been our companions so long they are virtually programmed into our DNA. Hearth and home, comfort and warmth, and bread and its enveloping perfume are proof of uncomplicated values and good, honest upbringing. They're the essence of the distinction between ourselves and what lies beyond our shutters out there in the dark. Can baking top-notch bread really be dependent on complex procedures and right technology, or is it simply that no one has the time to bake bread at home anymore? A lecture offered last month subtitled "The Simple Path to Great Bread" answered yes to both questions. Led by 29-year-old Didier Rosada, a French baker of high repute who teaches at the National Baking Center in Minnesota, the two-hour presentation at the Western Culinary Institute put its share of bends in the simple path, but I left packed with new information about the perfect loaf, ready to try it at home. The well-organized presentation centered around the principles of mixing (kneading) time and fermentation (rising) time, which are interdependent. The shorter the mix, the longer the ferment, and vice versa, but the former is infinitely preferable to the latter. A shorter mix keeps the molecular composition of the dough from becoming too fine and the bread from being stiff and rubbery after baking, but to compensate, a longer fermentation is necessary. Extended fermentation is recommended because long risings allow the development of more flavor, better structure and amazing bread. Rosada repeatedly emphasized precision in baking, and were it not for his baker's hat and floury hands, it would have been easy to mistake his lecture for a science course. "It is important to be precise," he said. "A few cups of flour here, a pinch of salt there, pfff, that's no good." At home, I followed his formula to the ounce, which is based on how much flour you use: 100 parts flour (11Ž2 pounds in my case), 67 parts water (1 pound), two parts salt and one part yeast. At his insistence, I started with cold dough and let the friction of the mixing bring up the temperature, which within only a few minutes shot past the 75° he recommended to begin fermentation. Three increasingly lively 45-minute risings later, I molded the dough into batards (the basic bread shape) and let them rise a final time. Meanwhile, I began preheating a pizza stone and--another hint--a tray of rocks: A little water on them at baking time, and my bread would have its own personal sauna and a crisper crust. Rosada advocated baking by time and not temperature, so it took me a few tries to hit the recommended 40-minute mark. But when I did, my loaves came out golden brown, with a satisfyingly firm, crispy crust and a wonderful yeasty aroma. Grand Central Baking it wasn't, but at about 75¢ a loaf, I'll have enough left over for a funny baker's hat. This approach to baking reflects the thoroughly rational idea that bread is a quantifiable chemical reaction; understand and control the variables, and the results are foregone. For years, my understanding of baking had revolved around a shaky core of judgment calls--warm but not hot water, handfuls of flour until the dough felt right--with predictably variable results. For this amateur baker, Rosada's rules, ratios and explanations were quite liberating, all but guaranteeing the acclaim of my guests. Not everybody buys all this science stuff, however, and to be fair, Rosada isn't ready to surrender his art to the chemist, either. "On the one hand, baking bread is very scientific, but on the other, it is in the hands of the baker," he said. Many people to whom I mentioned the lecture balked at the rigidity at its core, the idea that the best bread must be created, almost engineered, under certain specific conditions. This dredges up the age-old grudge against technology exemplified by the rivalry between Kasparov and Deep Blue, or McCoy and Spock--approximating the human with that which is not. Whether it's advisable or not, winging it is part of the ineffably human act of baking bread. Just not perfect bread, apparently.
originally published September 9, 1998
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