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Edited 2 April 2016
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-kneading -
"This is labour mind....but what is exercise other than labour? Let a woman bake a bushel [of wheat]
once a week, and she will do very well without phials and gallipots."
(William
Cobbett, "Making Bread", Cottage
Economy,
1823,p 103, Google facsimile)
"Who would ever think of trying to fatten a
pig on white flour?" (H.S. Joyce, I
Was Born in the Country, 1946; cited in
Elizabeth David, English
Bread and Yeast Cookery, 80)
"Industrialization
of milling and baking was nearly the death of bread in England, as it
was here [USA] and threatens to be in France, where it is called
Americanization.", Karen Hess, "Introduction and Notes
for the American Cook", in Elizabeth David, English Bread..., 1980, vii.
''The
whiter the bread, the sooner you will be dead'', Michael
Pollan, Food Rules
(2009)
''...if you
strip out just one letter from a banker, you get a baker.''
Jonathan Kent, theguardian.com, 21 May 2012
Celebrity
baker -
oxymoron?
Facebook
doesn't make bread
'Jake the baker'
The long-time cartoon (anti) hero in Bakers Journal. He is regularly portrayed as a super- sized, servile simpleton.
Artisan bread
flim flam designation of neoliberal marketing
Last four items contributed by the North Head Baker, April 2014
Mill stone ( the top, rotating one, judging by key ways) behind the
bushes of the front wall of the GM Museum; photo 3 April 2010 by the
baker.
<<Le
pain français ne supporte pas la médiocrité>>
Raymond Calvel, 'Fidèles au bon pain ', 1987, p 4.
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BOULANGERIE
NORTH HEAD BAKERY
Hearth
Bread, Craft and Community, since 1988
L=Poilâne dough fermenting; Middle=Manual kneading in pétrin; R=Miller over stones.
Illustrations from Jérome Assire, The Book of Bread (1996).
Bakery
Benchmarks:
- Bread
Nomenclature in Canada is a puzzling subject. There is neither
remembered tradition, system of 2nd ed p.classification,
baking schools of stature, body of relevant literature, nor a
pan-Canadian association representing the interests of bakers (as
distinct from the major bread corporations).* Anyone can
denominate
breads, with the caveat of commercial patenting, e.g. "Wonderbread".
Bread
in the general economic sense in Canada is industrial, and it would
appears to have been so 'time out of mind', generally meaning the last
quarter of the19th century. By the turn of the 20th century, the
elements of industrial bread production were well launched, based on
western and central Canadian wheat, railway transport, capital
intensive roller flour mills in the East, development of factory
production of yeast replacing sourdough leavening, and early bread
factories featuring mechanized kneading and ferris-wheel ovens.
- Traditional
French bread, as laid down in the French decree of 1993,
comprises unadulterated flour (farine
de tradition française), water, salt and leaven (yeast is
permitted in pain au levain
up to 0.2% by weight of flour; yeast levels were not specified in pain courant).
By and large, the decree simply laid down legal definition to best
practice, in France. In Canada it is significant that basic bread is
widely assumed to contain significant amounts of sugar and fat, which
in the longer historical view makes our bread more cake than bread.
Fat makes bread soft, by producing a regular
cell structure in the crumb (the Wonderbread test of the squeeze). In factories, fat makes dough machinable.
The other major additive, sweetener, is fine for cake-like breads, but
has a negative impact on what we consider as basic bread
because it propels
fermentation forward on sweeteners, rather than on wheat
sugars. Fermentation, when properly conducted, on wheat, or rye, gives
flavour, aroma, texture and durability. Good for body and soul.
- Mass
production and mass marketing bread have fundamentally broken links
between agriculture, milling, baking, consumption - by region,
province, nation, and, especially, by community. These segments are
themselves organized for profit and low price of goods and or
services [not real cost, since ecological and social costs are not
accounted for]. There are of course signicant cultural and
ideological dimensions in the dominant discourses, players and
theories, that only occasionally break through everyday activity, such
as in the marketing labels of bakery products, 'artisan breads',
'artisan flour' and
'authentic baguettes'. The terms simultaneously appeal to an
indistinct, roseate handicraft past, and hurl a competitive harpoon at
current artisanal bakeries. To crown phoniness of the labels, such
breads being factory produced are a long way from anything that might
be called artisanal.
-
From the baking and nutritional points of view, the two biggest
differences in flour are
between roller-milled and stoneground, and between wheat and
rye. Roller-milled flour, sometimes called steel milled or cut, is
the fundamental definer of modern, industrial flour. By virtue of the
large scale of 2nd ed p.production,
provenance of the flour, by farmer,
region and harvest year is extinguished. Furthemore,
the zillions of wheat berries are broken or cut down into various
streams, according to particle size and heft. Essentially,
germ and bran are removed. The remaining elements are blended in
proprietory formulas, as patented flours, sold according mainly
to protein levels, as strong (ie high
protein,
for bread lines), bread flours (medium protein, 12-13%), all-purpose
(11-12%), pastry (9-11) and cake (5-9%). Bleaching of flour is
generally done in North American flours, not mainly as whitener,
but as maturing agent, so that flour can enter manufacturing
processes immediately. The essential thing to know about whole wheat
flour is
that it is not whole wheat flour, unless in a minority of instances it
is defined some such as whole grain whole wheat, suggesting mental foot
and mouth disease. Whole wheat is another
reconstituted
flour, a proprietory mixture of white flour, some bran, and no
germ.
Then there is the question
of additives. White roller-milled flour in
Canada is required by law to contain a small list of mineral and
vitamin additives (industrial derivatives). This
regulation came into force, so we might surmise, as a preventive
sop in case any serious popular opposition should ever arise to the
bread manufactures and millers (often same class of people) for having
denatured flour in the removal of bran and germ, let alone the general
practice of bleaching flour with chlorine and or sodium benzoate.
As a Québécoise might say, <<Ça prend pas la tête à Papineau >>
to know how blondes are made, or how deadly chlorine was in World War
I. There
are dozens of other, permitted additives, a veritable chemical thicket,
in which
the non chemist is hard put to detect the thorny from the benign. Some
are there as aids in bread making such as amalyses (enzymes) and
adziocarbonimide
(conditioner and replacement for the notorious potassium bromate), but
most are there for extending shelf life. The roles of
flour mills and bakeries in their corporate entities are serious matters in national nutrition, but rarely if ever objects of academic and or public inquiry.
- Stonegrinding
of flour is a far different and simpler operation, that
historically,
in Canada, in the forms of windmills and water-driven grist mills, can
be understood as artisanal operations. The miller was likely
either owner in
freehold
parts of the country, or lessee in seigneurial
areas. Flour coming through the process was unadulterated (save
for bits of stone, dirt, insects and residues of little sleeket
creatures), and such treatment as given was a matter of sifting out by
progressive particle size, from large down to tiny, or cracked grain,
meal down to dark and then light flour. Stoneground floured
doughs
-containing wheat berries and bran- mix, knead and
ferment
very differently than roller-milled doughs, due partly to variation in
particle sizes and the presence of bran, which is initially
abrasive and moisture resistant, and, subsequently, becomes progressively highly moisture
absorbant. Such doughs expand less, and
over-all fermentation is robustly variable. A
prominent and clearly positive characteristic of stoneground flour is
its affinity with
natural leavens, in part because the particles of flour are often
damaged (allowing early penetration of moisture and leavening) and in
other part due to the comparatively rich nutrients for the ferments
found in the wheat germ and bits of aleuron (outer) layers of wheat
berries. Lastly, stoneground wheat and rye bread
making are much more closely allied, then their industrial-flour
counterparts, marrying well together in many traditional breads.
-
Perhaps
the hardest part to learn in the making of bread is kneading, in which
process there are two stages: the initial mixing
together of flour and water (frassage), and the
later
kneading(petrissage),
the development of the gluten which subsequently retains the gases of
fermentation and baking. Broadly speaking there are four methods of
dough kneading: intensive, improved, long fermentation, and slow mixing
and long fermentation. In general,
industrial bread production is fast, and artisanal baking slow. Furthermore, stoneground
flours perform very differently in kneading than do roller-milled
flour, as they do in their differing responses to yeast and to natural
leavens. Taken together, these
considerations call for much experience and keen judgement on
the part of the baker if s/he is to routinely bring several
doughs along together to succesful outcomes.
- The
experience of the North Head Bakery has mimicked, as it were, the
return of good bread in France,** as well as a certain flowering of
small, sometimes French bakeries in Canada and the US, a sort of
anciliary to the 'Slow Food' phenomenom. Our conversion to slow mixing, slack
doughs, low rates of
leavening, and long primary
fermentations took a decade and more, and was partly sparked by
a
meeting in Montreal with Raymond Calvel and reading his books,
especially on his innovative rest between mix and kneading (autolyse), for that insight
signaled the way to gentler kneading and wetter doughs,*** in this bakery and beyond.
* Baker's Journal, "The voice of the Canadian baking industry" [April 2016] ** Steven Kaplan, Le retour du bon
pain (2002).
*** Raymond Calvel, Le gout du pain(1990), p. 62, note 2. A summary of Calvel's autolyse is given by Hamelman, Bread: A baker's book of techniques and recipes, 2 ed. p 10.
© 2016 North Head
Bakery, 199 Route 776, Grand Manan, NB, E5G 1A4 506-662-8862
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