Polytropy

This is about the bread that I baked on Sunday, March 17, 2024. It’s in the photo below. You can see that the rising was a bit uneven; otherwise, I don’t know how the bread can be any better than I am able to make it now. That is why I am writing things up.

When I was in high school, in the early 1980s, for some reason I got the idea to follow the recipe for French bread in my mother’s old copy of The Joy of Cooking. Bread was not something my mother made, but I had learned about French bread from a friend who had grown up in Côte d’Ivoire. I was able to produce edible loaves, but I couldn’t figure out how to deal with the stickiness of the dough. Whole-wheat flour would have helped, but I didn’t know this. I first made 100% whole-wheat bread in 1989, and I made it regularly until moving to Ankara in 2000. Suitable flour then became harder to find, but somehow I made such bread as in the photo below.

Ayşe and I moved to Istanbul in 2011. I did some baking, but not much, since it was easy to pick up loaves at the bakery called Komşufırın (“neighboroven”). Like many people, I took up baking again in 2020, during the restrictions of the Covid-19 Pandemic. It was October 26, 2021, when I started combining the two key features:

1. Whole einkorn wheat flour, called siyez in Turkish.
2. Sourdough starter made for this flour.

This combination has been a revelation.

I was still trying to work out the best technique until September of last year (2023). At least, that is when I stopped bothering to keep a written record of my baking. There is surely more I can learn, and anybody who knows it should feel free to tell me.

I first baked sourdough bread in the 1990s. I was in graduate school, and a new roommate brought his starter to our group-house in Washington, DC. However, until the Pandemic, I had not learned that sourdough bread did not require a lot of gluten, if indeed it needed any at all. Perhaps there was no need to learn this in the United States, with its amber waves of grain.

In DC, we were a six-person vegetarian cooperative house, in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, once a streetcar suburb. I said something about us in “Community” in 2017.

Before the new comrade brought his starter, which he had obtained from King Arthur Flour, I was already baking bread for the house, using dry yeast and the whole-wheat flour that we ordered in large sacks through our neighborhood food cooperative. What I knew how to do, I had learned mainly from The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking.

They should have included “yeast-risen” in that long title. Although the book turns out to say something about sourdough, I don’t think the authors understand how it works; otherwise, I would not have struggled for years in Turkey to make bread with low-gluten flour, because I would have learned to use sourdough. In any case, the book’s “Whole Wheat Sourdough” recipe also uses dry yeast, and according to the text,

Sourdough bread, a specialty of Northern California, Eastern Europe, and several points in between, is flavored with a starter – a small amount of dough that’s allowed to ferment until it’s sour. Since they vary a lot, sourdough starters with especially good flavor are valued highly, and often passed from friend to friend like great treasures. It is in this spirit that we pass Manuel’s starter on to you.

I’m not using sourdough for flavor; I’m using it because it works for making good bread from low-gluten flour. According to a later recipe in The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book,

Some people feel strongly that bread is much better – both more healthful and more flavorful – when it is made without adding yeast but by letting the dough mature and ripen slowly by itself over a longer period of time. Organisms similar to those that would make a desem starter do begin to thrive in such doughs, and even though there is no added yeast, there is considerable biological activity in the dough during the long fermentation due to so-called wild yeasts and dough enzymes; their by-products produce a loaf that is almost always exceptionally flavorful. The bread will not rise very much, though it may spring a little in the oven from the expansion of steam.

The part about not rising very much would have sounded right to me, when I started out with sourdough einkorn bread. Now I am in awe of how much it rises, both on the counter and in the oven.

I say that as a wholegrain baker. I recently started making pizza in my cast-iron pan, and although the first time I used my einkorn sourdough for this, next time I used “pizza flour”: high-gluten white flour. The way it formed a dough instantly and rose like a cloud was ridiculous.

For my einkorn sourdough bread, perhaps I had to develop the right technique. In that case, the technique is this:

• Don’t make the dough too dry. Near the end of the kneading, use water on your hands, not flour.
• Roll up the dough for each loaf into a cylinder, and drop this gently into the pan; don’t press it in.

I don’t know whether such things can somehow be inferred from The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book.

From that book, I have mainly remembered the recipe for “Scottish Sponge Bread,” on which there is a comment,

In addition to turning out a relatively easy five loaves, this sponge makes it possible to use lower-gluten flours to good advantage. One practical example: a friend bought a bag of pastry flour by mistake, and with this recipe used it to produce marvelously tasty, light bread.

I understood the technique to be little yeast, long rise. This wasn’t enough for the “village flour” (köy unu) that I found when I moved to Ankara. It was supposedly whole wheat, but perhaps intended for things like noodles.

At the organic vegetable farm in West Virginia where I worked after college in 1988, I became a devotee of Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition. We six workers took turns cooking dinner, and our most-used reference was that book. It was the best place to find ideas for the vegetable that you had the most of.

We also baked bread on the farm, for sale at our weekly stands in Washington; but we just followed the boss’s recipe, which was sixteen parts white flour for every five parts of whole wheat, along with molasses to make the bread look browner than it was. There was no kneading, just mixing everything up in a bowl. If the boss saw us using a spoon for this, he would say, “Use your hand!” Then he would demonstrate by sticking in his own unwashed hand.

After I left the farm, before I went off to graduate school, I lived at home, where I decided to learn how to make proper whole-wheat bread. I perused library books, and ultimately I obtained my own copy of The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. This taught me that I had to do a lot of kneading, but that this kneading would be enough, even if my flour was low in gluten. Again, that wasn’t necessarily true for the flour I found in Ankara.

I went years without baking bread. We moved to Istanbul in 2011, as I said. Then the Pandemic came, and I figured I ought to pick up baking again.

I remember buying various flours from the organic bazaar. It was held on Saturdays behind our university building, not a place we really felt like going on the weekend; but now we weren’t going there during the week.

I understood that some people were treating their doughs with the “folding” technique. I tried letting my own doughs rise for hours, folding them every hour or so.

In the summer of 2021, we hired a car and driver to take us to the beach. I was ready to bake my loaves on day when the power went out. I just went on folding and refolding the dough until the power came back. The loaves collapsed in the oven. I guess the dough had been overworked.

One of the flours that I used, along with “regular” whole wheat and spelt, was siyez (einkorn) flour. The company that made it turned out to sell a sourdough starter for it. I ordered this, tried following the sketchy instructions provided, and eventually I figured out that, when your dough is sour, you need not knead it much at all.