The Art of Manliness - The Art and Spirituality of Bread

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.540 Think about a hot loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.

00:00:14.840 There's a lot going on with that loaf.

00:00:16.700 On one level, it's a literal food that's been created through chemical processes.

00:00:20.700 A delicious, your mouth might be watering right now, form of sustenance.

00:00:24.960 There's also more to it than that.

00:00:26.380 There's something about bread, the so-called staff of life, that's different from other foods and resonates on a deeper level.

00:00:33.420 There's a reason bread has been a rich symbol throughout times and cultures and figures prominently in religious scriptures.

00:00:38.720 Today on the show, Peter Reinhart will take us on an exploration of the many facets of bread, from the spiritual to the scientific.

00:00:45.360 Peter's a baker, educator, and the author of numerous books, including The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread.

00:00:52.760 In the first half of our conversation, Peter impacts the deeper, mystical meanings of bread by walking us through the 12 steps of how it's made.

00:01:00.500 We then get into why sourdough is the future and final frontier of bread, and the technical secrets to mixing, fermenting, and baking a killer loaf.

00:01:08.320 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash bread.

00:01:11.460 All right, Peter Reinhart, welcome to the show.

00:01:27.520 Thank you very much. Great to be here.

00:01:29.340 So you are a pizza aficionado. You run a site called Pizza Quest, but you're also a baker. You're first and foremost a baker.

00:01:35.960 You've written several books on baking, including The Bread Baker's Apprentice. You teach other bakers how to bake. How did you get into baking?

00:01:44.760 Yeah, I kind of slid into baking, I'll say, through the back door.

00:01:49.320 It was an outgrowth of a hobby, which a lot of people with small little, you know, kind of craft bakeries started that way.

00:01:56.260 Same thing with pizza guys. You know, you do it for fun, and you love to make it.

00:01:59.860 And then before you know it, people are saying, hey, you should, you know, open a place, or you should enter into the state fair, or try to win some awards.

00:02:07.900 And that's what happened with me. I was baking bread as part of living in a, I was living in a Christian community, and, you know, kind of a structured religious community,

00:02:17.940 in which we supported ourselves through our work, our jobs. And one of the things that I was interested in was creating a sort of a source of livelihood for the people.

00:02:30.500 I live with 30 people in this wonderful retreat center in California to look for ways to create some businesses that could help support us.

00:02:38.500 And we all loved to cook, and my wife and I were both good cooks. I was sort of getting into bread baking as a hobby, and the bread started to actually win awards at county fairs and state fairs, and we got some notoriety.

00:02:54.000 And one thing led to another, and before we knew it, we had opened a small little restaurant and cafe in the town of Forestville, California, along the Russian River.

00:03:02.200 And it was really a ministry cafe. It was designed to create job opportunities for local high school kids and things like that.

00:03:09.600 And we could kind of try out some of our ideas around food through that cafe, not just bread, but other things.

00:03:18.220 But bread was one of the things that I had kind of gotten really deep into, and so we thought we'd make sure that all the breads that we served there were homemade breads, and that became part of our signature.

00:03:29.580 And again, it just sort of took a life of its own. Before we knew it, we were getting written up in newspapers, including the New York Times, about the bread.

00:03:39.480 And I just kept getting deeper and deeper into bread, and I realized if I'm going to go deep and maybe even open a full-time bakery, I better learn more about the art and craft and science of bread baking.

00:03:51.420 And it just took off from there. A couple years into it, I wrote a book about the experience, because, again, our background really was ministry and teaching.

00:04:02.760 And so here I was having a little cafe, and I finally had something to write about, which was what we were doing at the cafe.

00:04:09.640 And so I wrote a book called Brother Juniper's Bread Book, Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor.

00:04:17.020 Brother Juniper's was the name of our cafe and bakery, and that's kind of when it took off.

00:04:21.720 This was 1991. We're talking about a long time ago.

00:04:25.260 And again, I threw my hat into the ring, and suddenly I realized people are coming to me and asking me questions about bread baking.

00:04:32.320 I better learn more about the craft and the science.

00:04:35.620 And before I knew it, I was all the way down the rabbit hole.

00:04:38.180 That was really interesting about your career, this experience you had in the community, this religious community.

00:04:43.720 Was this a monastery?

00:04:45.500 We called it semi-monastic.

00:04:48.060 At the time that we started it, I was living in what we call a non-denominational Christian community.

00:04:54.600 It had started 20 years earlier.

00:04:56.740 It was independent of any other churches.

00:04:58.780 But during that time, we began our own sort of intense study into the history of Christianity and where we fit into it.

00:05:08.180 And trying to find, you know, our place and based on the life experiences that we'd had.

00:05:13.960 And it led us towards Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

00:05:18.260 And in around 1986, 1987, right around the same year that we opened my cafe, we decided as a community to enter fully into the Eastern Orthodox Church.

00:05:28.380 We petitioned.

00:05:28.960 We were essentially re-chrismated.

00:05:32.160 We'd already been baptized.

00:05:33.280 So we were chrismated into Eastern Orthodoxy.

00:05:36.280 And suddenly we were connected to the longest and oldest branch of the Christian tradition.

00:05:42.520 And ever since then, we've identified really as Eastern Orthodox.

00:05:46.600 I go to a Greek Orthodox Church, for instance.

00:05:49.480 And people who live in other parts of the country who were part of our community may go to a Russian Orthodox or an Antiochian Orthodox.

00:05:56.440 All the Orthodox theologies are the same. 0.96

00:05:59.420 They just have different what we call jurisdictions.

00:06:01.620 They're under different patriarchs.

00:06:03.880 But anyway, that's sort of how we ended up into that.

00:06:06.720 And what happened was we went from living in intentional communities in which we had families, we had married members, we had children, and we also had some people who felt called to monasticism.

00:06:17.640 We decided at that point to split into two branches, the householder branch, so to speak, and the monastic branch.

00:06:26.000 And a certain percentage, maybe 10% to 15% of our members who felt that calling, entered formal monasteries or even started some monasteries.

00:06:34.800 And the rest of us who were already married or who had families and had an independent life went off in that, I'll call it a more laicized direction.

00:06:45.880 Yeah, I think it's interesting that your bread-making journey got started in this intentional religious community.

00:06:52.100 I remember, because a lot of monasteries, that's what they do to support the monastery.

00:06:56.480 They make bread not only for themselves, but they'll sell it to the public.

00:06:59.660 There's a Benedictine monastery here near Tulsa, and some friends and I spent the weekend there.

00:07:05.960 And it was great because you get the hospitality of the Benedictine monks.

00:07:09.840 And I remember that first evening we had soup and then just this loaf of hearty, delicious bread.

00:07:16.340 It was some of the best bread I ever had.

00:07:18.820 Yeah, it's interesting that that's a tradition that cuts across.

00:07:21.400 Well, it is.

00:07:22.020 It's certainly an ancient tradition.

00:07:23.380 In fact, the Benedictines are known for the Benedictine liqueur that they would create, which back in the original days of liqueurs were really much more health tonics and medicinal.

00:07:35.180 They were based on herbs and fermenting local spices and herbs.

00:07:40.840 And the Benedictine is one of my favorite liqueurs, I have to say.

00:07:43.820 I mean, my introduction to the Benedictine branch of the Catholic Church was through the Benedictine liqueur, not through going to a Benedictine monastery.

00:07:52.160 So what's interesting, you get very scientific with your bread making.

00:07:56.200 We're going to dig into the science here later on.

00:07:58.020 But with your spiritual background, you also explore the spirituality of bread.

00:08:02.380 And you talk about in your book and in some of your talks how we see bread as – you see it as a spiritual symbol across times and cultures.

00:08:12.500 Why do you think that is?

00:08:13.360 Why is bread such a potent symbol?

00:08:16.020 Well, that is really the big question.

00:08:17.740 And it was a question that I started getting asked a lot when my first book and then my second book came out because I was writing about it.

00:08:26.060 And people would say, well, what is it about bread that makes it so special?

00:08:28.600 And I really had to take a deep look into answering that question.

00:08:32.480 And so I started thinking about it, you know, not just to try to give glib answers about the obvious, you know, bread's in the Bible and et cetera.

00:08:41.400 But really, why – what is it about bread that makes it so special?

00:08:46.220 Why does it have such deep meaning to people, even people who are not religious per se?

00:08:50.960 There's something about bread that sets it apart from all other food groups and food categories.

00:08:56.720 And there are a few other foods that maybe come close to mirroring that, such as wine, such as cheese, things that are essentially all under the category of fermented foods, meaning that they are really living foods.

00:09:10.140 They've been brought to life through the fermentation process.

00:09:13.360 So there's all sorts of things that I began to notice about all this.

00:09:17.620 But then, again, why bread?

00:09:19.360 And the thing that alerted me to this importance and the special meaning of bread for people is how emotionally connected so many people were to bread itself.

00:09:32.400 Many people can give up meat.

00:09:34.520 You know, they can eat restricted diets and let go of a lot of foods.

00:09:38.340 But the one thing that's the hardest for people to let go of is bread.

00:09:41.300 And then we see that especially with people who have restrictions, such as celiac disease, where they can't eat gluten.

00:09:47.320 That's a much bigger sacrifice to make in your dietary system than giving up meat, even, for many people.

00:09:54.380 It means something, folks.

00:09:56.360 And so I just kept asking myself, why?

00:09:58.780 You know, it's not enough to just say it does mean something, but why does it mean something?

00:10:03.080 And so I started to kind of deconstruct the process and go back into how bread comes into existence and maybe see if I can make some connections as to why it has this deep connection to us,

00:10:16.020 our, I'll call it our inner lives.

00:10:18.780 Maybe, you know, in my background, I would say, why is it so connected to our sense of soulfulness?

00:10:24.420 And so I come up with some theories.

00:10:25.800 And that's what I write about after my first book, which was really about bread as a symbol and a metaphor.

00:10:32.260 The subtitle is Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor.

00:10:35.280 And that whole first book, which is full of bread recipes from my bakery, is really based on the opening chapter of the book, which was an insight I had,

00:10:45.060 which was one day I realized that the best tasting bread, and I learned this by making Julia Child's French bread recipe and learning about the most simple of all breads, French bread or plain lean bread.

00:10:56.940 Why was her bread so good compared to just the fast recipes that we get out of everyday cookbooks?

00:11:03.320 And it had to do with the long, slow fermentation process.

00:11:08.120 And so my first sort of premise or hypothesis of bread making was that slow-rising bread is always better tasting than fast-rising bread.

00:11:18.360 So, yeah, let's dig into some of the symbolism of bread.

00:11:20.480 So bread's been around, I mean, it goes back to ancient Egypt, right?

00:11:24.040 Well, as far, at least to ancient Egypt, possibly before, but we tend to look at Egypt as sort of the birthplace of leavened bread.

00:11:31.380 Right. So, yeah, leavened, what does leavened mean for those who might not be, they've heard the word, maybe they don't know what it means exactly.

00:11:37.060 Sure, sure. The word leavened itself, the root of the word itself means enlivened, leavened, enlivened.

00:11:43.680 In other words, it's bread that is made from dough that was raised through biological processes that we call leavening.

00:11:52.820 Now, you can leaven bread with chemicals, too.

00:11:55.860 You can make biscuits, for instance, with baking powder and baking soda.

00:11:59.280 That's a type of leavening, and we call that chemical leavening.

00:12:03.300 But natural, biological leavening comes from mostly yeast.

00:12:08.300 Yeast is the active agent that raises bread by creating carbon dioxide through a chemical process.

00:12:14.640 And essentially, that's the differentiator.

00:12:17.420 And that is, in a sense, maybe the key to what it is about bread that I think makes it work on so many levels, you know, of understanding and meaning.

00:12:27.380 Because, you know, I've talked about in some of my presentations that things could be understood, and this goes back to sort of ancient teachings, and not only the Christian tradition, but in all sort of world wisdom traditions, that things could be understood on many levels.

00:12:42.360 The reference I use is from Dante, who is quoting the time, he was living in the time of Thomas Aquinas and some of the great thinkers of the Christian tradition.

00:12:51.460 And he said things could be understood on four levels.

00:12:53.740 The literal level, the thing itself, the poetic level, which I would kind of call the metaphorical level, maybe also the symbolic level.

00:13:02.900 The third level down would be the philosophical level.

00:13:06.160 Sometimes he used the word ethical, meaning ethics was the category of philosophy that he was referring to.

00:13:12.240 And then the deepest level of all was what he called the mystical level, or the anagogical was the term they used.

00:13:18.740 So these are four levels of understanding things.

00:13:20.920 But he said the key to all this is that you can't really understand these deeper levels of meaning unless you first understand the literal level.

00:13:28.880 So I went back to the literal level of how you make bread, and I broke that down into its components.

00:13:36.660 And suddenly these other levels of meaning and understanding began to open up to me.

00:13:41.740 And, you know, again, a hypothesis is that people can sort of experience and access or intuit these other levels, whether they believe in them or not, whether they have a religious background, whether they care about any of these other levels.

00:13:54.220 Because something happens that kind of makes those levels transparent to us, if we can enter it through the literal meaning, by either eating or making bread, you know, we can access those.

00:14:06.200 And that's what he would call a universal principle that could be applied to any category, not just bread making.

00:14:11.560 But the thing about bread is, is that it's so transparent.

00:14:15.420 It's there.

00:14:16.340 It's in our lives every day.

00:14:18.060 You know, it can be called the staff of life.

00:14:19.900 You know, it has these references in historical and traditional writings and teachings.

00:14:24.840 And there's something about the process itself that seems to open up a sense of wonder and interest in those who enter through those portals.

00:14:35.040 So we're going to get into the nitty gritty of the literal level of bread making, because I think it's really interesting.

00:14:39.820 Even as like, I'm not a baker, but I just found it fascinating.

00:14:42.820 But before we do, just kind of give readers a taste of what you're talking about with these other three levels that Dante talked about, the metaphoric, the ethical, the mystical.

00:14:50.720 Well, I think that everything sort of has, there's symbolic renderings of everything can be a symbol of something else.

00:14:56.800 So if we talk about bread at the literal level, we're talking about bread that we eat, you know, made from flour, water, salt, and yeast.

00:15:02.520 And then at the next level down of the metaphorical, you know, we can talk about it as somehow it sometimes appears in scripture and in various, not just Jewish and Christian scripture, but in all religious scriptures, bread is a symbol.

00:15:18.320 It's a symbol of a lot of things.

00:15:20.140 It can symbolize the act of transformation.

00:15:22.620 It can symbolize the presence of God in this world or the body of Christ in the Christian tradition.

00:15:28.280 You know, it has the symbolic meaning and it can also symbolize things like when you say, okay, I'm going to pay for something with bread.

00:15:38.180 You know, I'm going to, where's, where's your bread?

00:15:39.820 You're referring to money.

00:15:40.720 So bread can sometimes symbolize money because that actually is a means of commerce or was certainly for many generations, a means of commerce.

00:15:48.460 So it can work as sort of meaning something else at the ethical or philosophical level where, again, we can talk about things like the use of bread.

00:15:58.280 Bread as a means of exchange.

00:16:01.440 Let's say, think about the era of the French Revolution, and many people already know this who have studied history, that one of the triggers for the French Revolution was the inequality between the haves and the have-nots.

00:16:16.240 And it was a bread revolution that took place where part of the act that triggered the overturning of the monarchy was fair access to flour and bread.

00:16:26.860 And so it became an ethical, philosophical, and commerce, you know, issue.

00:16:34.320 So that's maybe not the most, quote, philosophical way of describing it, but that's just to give an example of how bread can work at that level where bread, again, was working both as a symbol of inequality,

00:16:45.960 but it actually was the actual, you know, differentiator between those who fought against the monarchy and those who defended the monarchy, the fourth level, which is the one that's really the hardest to talk about.

00:16:58.300 It's hard enough to talk about any of these levels because, again, you only can really access it by going through the literal.

00:17:03.580 But the deepest is what we call the mystical level, and this is where you get into things like Jesus saying, you know, you are eating my body when you eat bread, or when you eat this piece of bread, you are eating my body.

00:17:15.180 Well, we know that that was a literal piece of bread that they were eating at the Last Supper, but he was kind of leaping it over to something to mean something much, much deeper.

00:17:24.460 And what he was meaning is mystical union with God, with your creator, through this piece of bread.

00:17:31.840 That's a very big reach.

00:17:33.460 It's a very big step.

00:17:34.740 It's a step that people on the spiritual quest can spend a lifetime in pursuit of.

00:17:39.680 And when they take communion, you know, at church, regardless of their denomination, they're taking it on trust.

00:17:46.460 They're not necessarily having a, quote, mystical experience every time they have communion, but they're taking it on the trust and hope that by partaking of this mystically transformed piece of bread, that they can actually experience the body and blood of God.

00:18:03.460 And that's why it's so hard to talk about, because the more you talk about it, the more abstract it becomes.

00:18:09.520 Yeah.

00:18:10.140 Well, continuing on this line of bread as a religious symbol, particularly in Christianity, I remember in a talk you said that bread can be seen as a resurrection drama.

00:18:20.560 Yeah.

00:18:21.240 Can you tell us a little bit about that?

00:18:22.800 Because I thought it was interesting.

00:18:23.980 Sure.

00:18:24.280 Well, this goes back.

00:18:25.600 I think the best way to talk about it would be let's talk about the literal process of making bread and then see if we can draw some of the connections.

00:18:33.400 Great.

00:18:33.640 Let's do it.

00:18:34.120 Because that's where it happens.

00:18:35.100 So I broke them down, and it wasn't just me, in textbooks when it teaches people how to make bread, they divide it into 12 distinct steps or stages that bread goes through in its journey from, I'll just say, wheat growing in the ground to eating the bread at the end.

00:18:54.380 So I call it the journey from wheat to eat.

00:18:56.520 And I've broken that journey down into 12 steps.

00:18:58.640 The first step of that journey, and this is a culinary term, we call it mise en place.

00:19:04.300 Mise en place means getting everything in its place.

00:19:07.080 It's the first step of all cooking, is organizing your work area, measuring out your ingredients, and getting organized.

00:19:14.520 And so essentially, that is the first step of all cooking.

00:19:18.500 And maybe you could say the first step of all activities as a guideline is get organized.

00:19:22.880 In this wheat drama, we can take it back to the wheat actually growing in the field.

00:19:28.720 It's a grass.

00:19:29.600 Wheat is a living grass that grows in the field and puts out seeds.

00:19:33.460 And it just so happens that the seeds that wheat puts out are bigger than the seeds of other grains, and they have properties that other grains don't necessarily have, including a certain high volume of protein that ultimately, when it's mixed with water, turns into gluten.

00:19:48.940 So wheat is the highest generator of gluten of any grain.

00:19:53.220 There's only two other grains that really have any substantial gluten.

00:19:56.060 One is rye, which has about half the amount of gluten as wheat, which is why rye, as popular as it is and important as it is as a grain, is less important than wheat in terms of creating the world's supply of bread because wheat has the most gluten.

00:20:10.380 Barley has a little bit of gluten.

00:20:12.020 And this is only important to know because barley is delicious, but it doesn't make great bread by itself, but it does have enough gluten to make somebody who is sensitive to gluten or intolerant of gluten, say somebody with celiac disease, it's enough to make them sick.

00:20:27.400 It's enough to kill them if they have that kind of level of sensitivity.

00:20:31.500 But other grains like corn and oats, unless they've been cross-pollinated with wheat, don't have gluten.

00:20:37.660 So anyway, wheat is growing in the field.

00:20:39.400 So we're going to go back to mise en place.

00:20:41.300 In terms of getting organized, you've got to gather the seeds from the wheat.

00:20:45.220 Now, in order to gather those seeds, you have to harvest the wheat.

00:20:48.720 You cut down the grass and you collect the seeds.

00:20:51.800 In collecting the seeds, essentially, those seeds are still theoretically alive where they have the potential to create more life.

00:20:59.600 You can plant those seeds and it will grow more wheat.

00:21:01.900 But what a miller does is collects the seeds from the farmer and mills them into flour.

00:21:08.620 In other words, crushes those seeds of wheat into powder, into a powder that we call flour, and in so doing, destroys the life-giving properties of that wheat.

00:21:19.260 So the first step of this journey of wheat becoming bread is that it has to be essentially destroyed and killed and turned into something else.

00:21:30.220 So a transformation takes place in that wheat.

00:21:33.780 It goes from alive or the potential for life to being dead and destroyed, and we call that flour.

00:21:40.840 First step would be then alive to dead or seeds of wheat to flour.

00:21:44.900 The next transformation takes place in the second stage of bread making, which is when we mix the ingredients together, essentially flour, water, salt, and leavening.

00:21:56.200 Whether it's commercial yeast or sourdough leavening, we're leavening it.

00:21:59.840 We're bringing this back to life.

00:22:01.920 So the second transformation that takes place in the wheat is that it goes from flour to dough.

00:22:09.460 When we mix it, a few things happen in the mixing process.

00:22:12.480 We develop the gluten.

00:22:14.560 We activate the yeast or the leaven that's in there.

00:22:17.460 We distribute all the ingredients evenly to make it a flavorful product.

00:22:21.640 But the most important thing that happens is that this dead piece of clay comes back to life through the fermentation process.

00:22:31.580 And I think this, again, speaks to why fermentation is such a popular category of discussion for people these days because it's about something coming back to life, bringing something to life.

00:22:41.100 So the second stage is, and the second act of transformation is, first it goes from alive to dead, then it goes from dead to brought back to life.

00:22:50.160 And so here's where you can see this sort of parallel and, again, symbolic or metaphorical journey of bread as the resurrection story.

00:22:57.880 Also, maybe you could say the Genesis story.

00:23:00.320 You know, it's a creation from the clay of the earth into a living being, a human being.

00:23:06.060 Adam actually means clay, and bread dough is a type of clay when you look at it.

00:23:10.340 So clay brought back to life.

00:23:12.260 Then there are these other steps that happen in this journey during the third stage, which we call fermentation.

00:23:18.440 This dough comes to life and develops character and personality.

00:23:22.840 And by personality, I mean flavor and other characteristics that were not there in the piece of clay before it was brought to life.

00:23:31.780 Things are happening.

00:23:32.640 Biological processes are happening.

00:23:34.720 The yeast is eating sugar.

00:23:36.720 It's digesting it.

00:23:37.960 It's creating carbon dioxide as a byproduct.

00:23:40.880 Essentially, the yeast is burping carbon dioxide, and it's also sweating out alcohol, ethyl alcohol, or we call it grain alcohol because it's made from grain.

00:23:52.800 But if it was from potatoes, it would be potato alcohol.

00:23:55.640 If it was from other kinds of sugars, it would be the alcohol from those things.

00:23:59.740 But essentially, the byproduct of this fermentation, and then we're specifically talking about yeast fermentation because there's also bacterial fermentation that's going on in the dough, which is creating another compound, which we call acid.

00:24:13.900 So all these things are going on as this dough comes to life.

00:24:17.500 This is the biological process.

00:24:20.080 And that alcohol imbues the dough with flavor.

00:24:23.860 The carbon dioxide causes the dough to rise and expand and trap the carbon dioxide in the dough, which creates little air pockets, which later we see when we bake the bread as the structure or the crumb of the bread.

00:24:36.040 All this is going on and starts in stage three and then continues all the way through the process until stage 10.

00:24:43.200 And all this time, this dough is alive.

00:24:45.920 It's a living thing.

00:24:47.220 And so we're still in the living stage of dough, but it is not yet bread.

00:24:52.300 In order for it to become bread, it has to pass through some distinct stages.

00:24:55.940 We have to divide the big piece of dough into smaller pieces.

00:24:59.180 We have to give it a preliminary shape to start the process of turning it into bread.

00:25:03.640 We have to give it some time to rest so that the gluten, which is very kind of a tight protein, can relax enough for us to be able to stretch the bread out into the shape of the dough or the loaf that we're trying to make.

00:25:16.040 We have to let it rise some more.

00:25:17.560 We have to put it in some kind of a form, a pan or a loaf pan or a flat pan for it to, you know, we call that panning the dough.

00:25:25.240 Let it rest and rise.

00:25:27.180 And the final rise we call proofing.

00:25:29.380 And the word proofing, which is another way of saying continued fermentation, is the term proofing is used because it means to prove that the dough is alive.

00:25:39.120 And we know that this dough is alive because we see it grow in front of us.

00:25:43.420 All this time, it's developing more flavor, more characteristics that later on will turn into, you know, the flavor profile of that particular type of bread.

00:25:52.320 Now we're up to stage nine.

00:25:53.580 I've kind of run through the intermediate stages.

00:25:55.860 Fermentation is going on through all of these stages and we take it all the way through stage nine where we've risen the dough to the point where it's ready to go into the oven.

00:26:03.660 And this is where the final transformation takes place.

00:26:06.260 We're taking living dough and we're putting it into an oven to bake it.

00:26:10.980 And the definition of baking, and this is something I teach in my baking classes at Johnson & Wales where, you know, I'm teaching the students how to bake bread,

00:26:17.180 is the definition of baking is the application of heat to a product in an enclosed environment, meaning the oven, for the purpose of driving off moisture.

00:26:28.120 Baking is just all about driving off moisture and thus turning the ingredients into something else.

00:26:34.180 So if the definition of transformation is a radical change from one thing into something else, the first transformation was alive to dead.

00:26:43.080 That's pretty radical.

00:26:44.280 The second transformation is dead brought back to life.

00:26:46.980 Pretty radical.

00:26:48.080 The third transformation is when the dough goes into the oven and the temperature of that dough races above 140 degrees, all biological life ceases.

00:26:57.560 So the third transformation is alive to dead.

00:27:01.900 But it goes in as dough and it comes out as bread.

00:27:05.580 So what went into the oven is not what comes out of the oven.

00:27:08.440 And so that's the final transformation.

00:27:10.080 I'll call it, you know, it goes in as a caterpillar and comes out as a butterfly.

00:27:13.540 That's the final transformation.

00:27:15.740 Literally, dough goes in and bread comes out.

00:27:19.140 Metaphorically, something that was living and alive goes in and it comes out as this new product that we call bread that can nourish us.

00:27:26.980 Now that's just stage 12 and I said we had 12 stages.

00:27:30.280 The 11th stage is what we call resting or cooling.

00:27:35.340 And because when the bread comes out of the oven, it's really still too hot to eat.

00:27:38.960 The internal temperature of that dough has gone not just above 140, it's gone up to about 200 degrees.

00:27:45.220 And during that temperature rise, three very specific literal transformations are taking place in the dough.

00:27:52.880 And this goes specifically to the very first level, the literal level.

00:27:56.980 The proteins in that dough, which are mainly gluten proteins, do something that we call denature or coagulate.

00:28:04.900 And denaturing means that the protein goes from a very tight coil, like a muscle, and it relaxes and opens up and kind of lines up against other proteins into kind of a pattern.

00:28:15.500 The best analogy of this would be if you fry an egg, and when you put that egg in a pan, the egg white, which is where all the protein is, is very clear and the light is shining through it.

00:28:27.980 It's translucent.

00:28:29.160 But as the egg fries, the egg becomes white.

00:28:32.000 The white becomes white and opaque.

00:28:34.160 And that is a result of coagulation of proteins.

00:28:37.700 As those protein molecules line up like little soldiers side by side, it blocks the flow of light.

00:28:43.520 That's just sort of a way to get your head around what coagulation is about.

00:28:46.780 That's going on in bread as well.

00:28:48.720 So the proteins are coagulating.

00:28:51.060 The sugars that are in the bread, even if you didn't add sugar to the dough, there's lots of sugar in the dough as a result of the wheat itself is loaded with sugar because it's loaded with starch.

00:29:02.360 It's about 75% starch, and starch is just complex sugar that is so complex that you can't taste the sweetness.

00:29:10.780 But what happens during fermentation is that the yeast is beginning to go into, and in the yeast there are enzymes that go into the starch molecules and break them apart and release some of the little threads of sugar that are in there, the glucose sugars and the sucrose sugars that we can taste on our palate.

00:29:28.420 That's all happening.

00:29:29.300 As it does so, it makes the sugar available to the yeast for more food. 0.72

00:29:35.120 So the yeast is eating it and making more carbon dioxide.

00:29:37.600 So it continues to kind of feed until it runs out of food.

00:29:41.060 But finally, the sugars, when you put them in the oven, do something that we call caramelize or caramelize.

00:29:47.860 And that means they turn brown.

00:29:49.600 Now, proteins also turn brown when they go into the oven and get above a certain temperature.

00:29:53.540 And there's a term for that called the Maillard reaction.

00:29:56.240 It's a type of caramelization for proteins.

00:29:58.140 But the main caramelization we see in bread, in the crust of the bread, is caramelization.

00:30:03.660 And that happens when the temperature goes above 325 degrees.

00:30:08.260 Well, the only place that it can get that hot on a loaf of bread is on the surface, which is why we only see the caramelization on the surface in the crust.

00:30:16.300 The crust then protects the internal part of the dough, which has a lot of water and never gets above the boiling point.

00:30:23.420 So it doesn't caramelize.

00:30:24.960 But what it does do, the third transformation that takes place, is that the starches do something called gelatinize.

00:30:31.920 So gelatinization is when starches, as they heat up, they absorb all the moisture around them, they swell, and eventually they burst.

00:30:40.440 When they can't hold any more moisture, and they burst and they kind of spread themselves out and they thicken the product.

00:30:46.280 Again, an analogy, making gravy.

00:30:48.900 You're stirring gravy.

00:30:49.840 You put some cornstarch or flour into the gravy and you stir this liquid broth.

00:30:54.480 And as it gets close to the boiling point, what happens to the gravy?

00:30:57.880 It thickens.

00:30:58.600 It turns into a thicker mass.

00:31:00.620 All these same things are parallel happening in the loaf of bread itself.

00:31:04.460 And I call them transformations because the sugars caramelize.

00:31:08.000 That's a change from one thing to something else.

00:31:10.040 The starches gelatinize.

00:31:12.000 They burst.

00:31:12.800 They're no longer starches, as we think of them, as sort of a tasteless, starchy product.

00:31:17.820 But now they have a sweetness to them because their sugars have been exposed and we can taste that sweetness.

00:31:22.660 And the proteins coagulate.

00:31:25.140 They line up and they create a structure.

00:31:27.860 We sometimes call it the crumb or the webbing of the dough or just essentially the gluten network of that dough.

00:31:35.440 We see all of that happens and it only happens as a result of baking, which was to drive off moisture.

00:31:40.820 So we've driven off some of the moisture in there, but we've caused these three transformations to occur.

00:31:45.560 Until those transformations occur, we still have dough.

00:31:48.820 It doesn't become bread until those three things happen.

00:31:51.560 And that's the big change from dough to bread.

00:31:55.340 As I said, alive to dead, but dough to bread.

00:31:58.180 And that happens during stage 10 and it completes itself during stage 11 because now the dough is continuing to evaporate moisture, which again kind of concentrates the flavors.

00:32:10.460 And the proteins begin to firm up and set up as they cool down.

00:32:14.620 If we eat it right out of the oven, it's still going to taste a little doughy, even if it has gone through these transformations because they haven't had time to kind of firm up and create the structure.

00:32:24.800 So stage 11 is cooling.

00:32:26.520 And stage 12 in the textbooks, they will say is packaging because if you're doing this for high production and to sell the bread, you have to package it.

00:32:34.240 You can't package it until it cools down.

00:32:35.940 But in our classes, I always say that stage 12 is eating.

00:32:40.300 And the goal is to get from wheat to eat, you know, in the time allotted during the class.

00:32:45.320 And so that is, for me, stage 12 is eating the bread and essentially partaking of this transformed piece of dough that has been turned into bread.

00:32:55.800 So that's, I've just given you the Reader's Digest version of the 12 stages of bread, this journey from wheat to eat.

00:33:02.040 And I think that I don't need to spell out the parallels and the, you know, the metaphorical aspects because they kind of speak for themselves.

00:33:09.840 But that's why I referred to it as either a resurrectional or even a sort of a recreation of the Genesis story.

00:33:17.440 No, yeah.

00:33:17.760 As you were going through that process, you know, obviously I thought of, you know, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

00:33:22.540 But then I also thought of, I was thinking of the hero's journey from Joseph Campbell, where there's this transformation where you basically have to die.

00:33:29.540 And then after you die, you come out as a new person.

00:33:32.920 So, yeah, I think Dante was right.

00:33:34.620 Once you understand the literal level of something, you can make all these other leaps with it.

00:33:40.480 And it's true, by the way, in Campbell, one of these renderings of the Joseph Campbell model of the hero's journey is that it's a 12-stage journey as well.

00:33:48.080 And those stages very much parallel the 12 stages of bread making that we just described.

00:33:53.720 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:33:58.800 And now back to the show.

00:34:00.540 So let's get into more about the nitty gritty of bread.

00:34:03.600 I'm hoping that after this, our readers can get an appreciation, not only of the spiritual symbolism of bread, but also just enjoying bread for what it is.

00:34:12.360 So the first question is, I'm sure people, when they go to like Whole Foods or to a bakery, they see all these different types of bread out there.

00:34:19.140 But what's interesting, you know, bread is basically flour, yeast, salt, water.

00:34:23.520 But you can have these different types of bread.

00:34:26.480 What differentiates the different classifications of bread out there?

00:34:29.960 It's like, I mean, what?

00:34:30.640 Sure.

00:34:31.160 Can you walk us through that?

00:34:31.900 Yeah, we can.

00:34:33.520 Well, there are categories of bread.

00:34:35.440 I described earlier, you know, what we call lean bread or the most basic flour, water, salt, yeast.

00:34:41.340 There's no other.

00:34:42.600 You can make bread with just those ingredients.

00:34:44.380 And you can leave out the leaven.

00:34:45.840 You can even leave out the salt.

00:34:47.140 It's flour and water.

00:34:48.360 And you could use other liquids besides water.

00:34:50.360 But it's basically flour and water.

00:34:52.180 There's no fat in those breads.

00:34:54.060 But there are many breads that are made with the addition of fat because the function of fat, whether it's butter, shortening, oil, you know, any kind of fat that you add to a bread dough tenderizes it.

00:35:05.420 The function of fat is to tenderize products because it does two things.

00:35:09.120 One, it coats the ingredients with the fat and kind of traps moisture in and it softens everything inside.

00:35:16.160 So there's a whole other category of bread that we call enriched.

00:35:20.080 Enriched breads are enriched with two things, either fat or sugars.

00:35:25.520 Sugars also can serve as an enrichment. 0.97

00:35:27.460 As I said, flour itself has its own sugars and we know that they're there because if you eat lean bread, we'll say a French baguette, for instance, it has a natural sweetness to it.

00:35:38.240 So you have to ask, where did that sweetness come from?

00:35:40.380 It came from the sugar that was already in the wheat.

00:35:43.220 But when we add additional sugar to the wheat, such as when winemakers add sugar to the grape sugar that's already in the grapes, you know, they change the nature of that wine.

00:35:53.760 So sugars and fats and eggs to an extent because eggs have, especially the egg yolks have fat, are considered enrichments to the bread.

00:36:03.020 So that's a whole category of bread.

00:36:04.440 And most of the bread that most people eat are enriched breads, sandwich breads, wonder bread, you know, loaf breads.

00:36:10.460 Those are all enriched because they've been softened with the addition of fats and or sugars.

00:36:16.260 And those are two categories that we can sort of differentiate, those two categories.

00:36:19.980 Then we can also use a category that we call firm doughs or standard doughs and rustic or wet doughs.

00:36:28.340 And a standard dough would be most of the bread that we eat.

00:36:31.120 The amount of hydration or water that you add to the dough helps to define what kind of bread you're going to have.

00:36:37.080 If you only add, let's say, for every 100% flour, because we always do ratios based on the flour amount.

00:36:44.340 So if we had, we'll just use as an example, 100 pounds of flour in the mixer and we wanted to make bagel dough, we would add about 50 to 55 pounds or 50 to 55% water to flour and make a very firm, stiff dough.

00:37:01.980 We might add something else like malt syrup, which gives it the distinctive bagel flavor and a slight amount of sweetness.

00:37:08.320 But it's simply a very, very lean, firm dough.

00:37:12.840 Most bread doughs are more in the 60 to 62%, 65% hydration level, meaning for every 100 pounds of flour, there's 60 to 65 pounds of water.

00:37:24.260 And that would be everything from French breads, Italian breads, sandwich breads, almost everything that, you know, that pizza doughs are generally in that range.

00:37:33.620 And then there's another level beyond that, the highly hydrated doughs that some of the breads fall into that would be like ciabatta bread, certain kinds of pizza doughs, focaccia doughs, wet doughs that are too sticky to touch.

00:37:48.720 They're almost closer to a batter than a bread, but they make great bread when you know how to handle them.

00:37:53.780 And that style of bread making has become very popular in the last 20 or 30 years in our country because that extra moisture that's in the bread allows the bread to expand more in the oven, opening up the cell structure or the crumb of the bread to create these large, irregular holes that allow the heat to penetrate to the center of the bread and thus roast those proteins as they're coagulating.

00:38:18.880 It's creating a more roasted flavor and adds a complexity of flavor to the bread.

00:38:23.120 So that's a style and a category of bread that, you know, is popular, but not everybody is comfortable making that bread because it requires being comfortable working with wet and sticky dough.

00:38:32.660 And those are all things that are learnable, but that's why if it comes down to it, most bread falls into that standard category of somewhere between 60 and 65 percent hydration.

00:38:43.780 What about sourdough?

00:38:44.900 What separates that from other breads?

00:38:47.160 The main thing that separates sourdough from other breads is the type of leavening.

00:38:51.400 Sourdough is just another way of saying naturally leavened bread, meaning leaven that has been made from a piece of dough that has been inoculated with and has become the home for wild yeast and wild strains of bacteria that can coexist and create a different flavor profile than commercial yeast.

00:39:13.240 Commercial yeast is very concentrated.

00:39:14.940 It works very quickly.

00:39:16.940 By quickly, I mean, you know, anywhere from two to 24 hours, you can make bread with just commercial yeast.

00:39:22.280 But it's created in a laboratory and it's sensitive to acids and certain temperatures so that it doesn't have the resiliency of wild yeast.

00:39:32.960 Think of the wild yeast as being like, you know, they're living out there in the wild.

00:39:35.780 They're like the little bandits out there and they know how to survive.

00:39:38.820 They're very resilient.

00:39:39.640 And they live on the skins of grapes and they live on the skins of fruits and they live on the skins of wheat.

00:39:47.440 And so they exist out there.

00:39:49.120 Every breath that we take, we're breathing in one of maybe 250 strains of yeast that are out there, some of which are really good at creating carbon dioxide.

00:39:57.840 So sourdough starter is essentially a piece of dough that has been grown, you know, under guidance to maximize the production of these wild yeast and wild bacterias that when added instead of the commercial yeast or in combination with the commercial yeast will raise the dough in the same way, but also give it flavors that you can't get with commercial yeast.

00:40:21.360 And that's why it's kind of like the final frontier of bread making and why during the pandemic, it became so popular because everyone was stuck at home wanting to make bread.

00:40:30.960 And we know, you know, once you go down that bread rabbit hole, you just want to know everything that the artists and bakers know.

00:40:36.920 And so everybody was making, you know, sourdough bread to varying degrees of success.

00:40:41.740 Some of those people became so successful that they did open up bakeries.

00:40:45.660 I have friends who live a mile from here who opened up what we call a cottage bakery.

00:40:49.640 They turned their garage into a small bakery and every week they sell about 200 loaves of bread to a small mailing list of people and at the local farmer's market.

00:40:59.120 And there's many stories of that happening because as what happened to me, a hobby can become a vocation.

00:41:06.480 Before our conversation, you were mentioning about how, you know, sourdough is sort of the final frontier of bread and it's becoming very popular.

00:41:12.440 One, because I think it's just the flavor.

00:41:14.220 I love the taste of a good sourdough bread.

00:41:15.940 But you also mentioned that there's something about the wild yeast and sourdough that can actually make it easier to digest than regular bread.

00:41:25.120 It's not because of the wild.

00:41:27.960 The wild yeast isn't what does it, but the wild yeast, because it can endure longer during this biological process, allows other things to happen in the dough.

00:41:37.400 And one of those things I referred earlier to, the fact that enzymes exist in the dough and what the purpose of an enzyme is, is to break apart complex molecules and simplify them into smaller components that can be digested and turned into energy.

00:41:54.520 And the most complex part, I would say, the most complex molecule within bread dough is the gluten.

00:42:01.940 The proteins are much harder to break down than starches in our body.

00:42:05.140 And gluten, there are certain enzymes that can actually help to break down or pre-digest the gluten protein.

00:42:12.400 And a gluten protein is made up of two other proteins called gliadin and glutinin.

00:42:16.580 So these two partial proteins come together and make a complex protein called gluten.

00:42:22.360 And then our body has to break that gluten down if we want to get any energy from it.

00:42:26.220 And not everybody's body and gut systems is resilient and healthy enough to be able to handle that.

00:42:32.100 What happens in fermentation, and this is true with not only dough fermentation, but cheese fermentation,

00:42:37.720 is that the length of time that the dough is enduring this fermentation, the enzyme activity is further breaking down and creating not only enzyme activity, but now acids that can also help to pre-digest those molecules.

00:42:57.800 And thus, when we eat them, they're easier for our body to break down.

00:43:01.020 So there are some anecdotal instance of people saying that they can't eat bread normally.

00:43:07.520 They can't eat normal bread leavened by commercial yeast, but for some reason they can eat sourdough bread.

00:43:13.000 And then some of them say, you know, that I have gluten sensitivity.

00:43:15.660 They may or may not.

00:43:16.400 We don't know how sensitive they are, but some people with mild gluten sensitivities feel that they can digest sourdough bread,

00:43:23.540 which has undergone a much longer fermentation process than commercial bread, commercially leavened bread,

00:43:30.120 because the yeast, the concentration of yeast and bacteria in that sourdough starter is much smaller than it is in a teaspoon of yeast,

00:43:39.000 in which there are literally hundreds of thousands of living yeast cells.

00:43:43.320 The slowness is one of the reasons.

00:43:45.260 It goes back to slow rise as a method and metaphor, that slow rise makes better bread.

00:43:50.100 The flavors are more complex, but also the dough is theoretically, to some extent, easier to digest for the body.

00:43:57.580 And I think that's really both of those things working together.

00:44:00.760 In the end, flavor always is the most important thing to people.

00:44:03.780 We want to eat for health, but we really eat for flavor.

00:44:06.540 And so if something tastes better, we'll eat it even if it isn't good for us.

00:44:09.740 But if it also can be better for us and tastes better, then you've kind of, you know, hit the mother load there.

00:44:15.380 And I think that's why sourdough bread is having a renaissance.

00:44:18.580 Because remember, at one time, before commercial yeast was invented, which was only about 150 years ago,

00:44:24.460 all bread was made through natural fermentation, through natural leavening.

00:44:28.120 The Egyptians, going way back there, it's all naturally leavened.

00:44:31.380 And we have a saying in the bread community.

00:44:33.660 I put on, was putting on for a number of years, a bread symposium.

00:44:36.980 And the catchphrase at the symposium and the theme of the symposium was, what is the future of bread?

00:44:42.060 And the catchphrase was, the future of bread can be found in its past.

00:44:46.740 And I think that's what's happening is, is the past is now becoming the future.

00:44:50.740 And we're seeing, and we'll see, I think, an ever-growing amount of sourdough out there, including in the pizza world.

00:44:57.820 Because remember, pizza is just dough with something on it.

00:45:00.640 And so even pizzerias now are moving into the sourdough sector because, in the end, it's not because of health.

00:45:08.080 It's because it tastes better.

00:45:10.420 And ultimately, flavor is the one, I'll say, if there's any rules of baking,

00:45:15.880 the one rule that governs all cooking is the flavor rule, which is that flavor rules.

00:45:22.740 And this is a perfect example of it.

00:45:24.640 You just can't get any better tasting bread than naturally leavened bread.

00:45:28.560 Even if you don't like it sour, you can do natural leavening without making the bread sour once you learn how.

00:45:34.080 And it's just more complex, more of the natural flavor that's inherent within the wheat itself is evoked.

00:45:42.140 I teach my students that their mission as a baker is to evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain

00:45:50.060 by using the tools of the baker's craft, which is primarily understanding fermentation.

00:45:55.680 And that's the goal, is to evoke flavor.

00:45:58.300 And when you've tasted two different breads that are fermented in different ways,

00:46:02.340 you can tell which one has evoked the full potential of flavor that was in that grain to begin with.

00:46:08.060 And it's usually the longer fermentated bread.

00:46:11.200 Okay, I want to dig more into the details, the technique of baking in these 12 steps you laid out earlier.

00:46:16.760 And let's just kind of use just like a basic lean dough.

00:46:19.360 So this is just flour, yeast, salt, and water.

00:46:24.320 And you've got a great recipe here.

00:46:26.000 This is kind of like all purpose.

00:46:27.860 You can make, you know, two loaves with this, one very large loaf of bread.

00:46:30.780 It's basically, we'll put the recipe in the show notes, but it's, you know,

00:46:35.060 five and one third cups of unbleached bread flour, three one fourth teaspoons of salt or, you know, coarse salt,

00:46:42.820 two teaspoons of instant yeast, and then two and one fourth cups of lukewarm water.

00:46:48.240 Let's say we get this stuff, the mixing process.

00:46:50.700 Do you need a hand mixed bread to make really good bread or can you use an electric mixer?

00:46:54.540 Either way, because mixing is mixing.

00:46:58.180 If you mix more gently, you can maybe have, you know, some people feel that it makes a better, more tender loaf of bread.

00:47:04.300 But our hands were the original mixers before electric mixers came along.

00:47:08.240 Electric mixers, like a KitchenAid or something like that, just replicates what we were doing by hand in a mechanical fashion.

00:47:14.300 The goal of mixing is, again, to combine the ingredients that you put in there and distribute them evenly,

00:47:20.940 and then to hydrate the dough and activate the gluten and to activate the yeast that you put in there.

00:47:28.820 All that is happening in the mixing process.

00:47:31.440 Typically, like the recipe that we're talking about is in that middle range of hydration.

00:47:37.240 It's about 65% water to flour, and the goal of that mixing process is to accomplish those three things,

00:47:45.760 those three purposes of mixing, and take it from a sort of a coarse, shaggy dough

00:47:51.920 that looks very much like a piece of carpet, of rough carpet,

00:47:55.340 and mix it long enough so that the gluten can develop, meaning the gliadin and the glutenin find each other and bond,

00:48:03.200 wrap themselves around all the other ingredients, and create a smooth piece of dough.

00:48:07.780 It can take anywhere from five to ten minutes, depending on how you mix, but that's the idea.

00:48:13.000 So you're putting all that together to create the piece.

00:48:16.460 You've transformed now the flour into dough, and now the dough is coming to life

00:48:21.000 as we exit stage two and move into stage three, which is fermentation.

00:48:26.340 And so techniques or tips on this.

00:48:28.920 So growing up, I remember my mom, when she'd make bread,

00:48:31.980 she would put the dough ball in a bowl and then put a cloth over it,

00:48:36.480 and then she'd find a warm place in the house.

00:48:40.000 Do you need to do that for the fermentation process?

00:48:42.480 Well, yeast is sensitive to temperature.

00:48:44.600 It will act more quickly or slowly, depending on how cool it is.

00:48:48.560 So, for example, every 17 degrees Fahrenheit will double the rate of fermentation.

00:48:55.500 So typically, if we take that ball of dough, put it in a bowl, cover the bowl,

00:48:59.440 and I usually suggest covering it with plastic wrap rather than a cloth,

00:49:02.960 because you want to kind of trap any moisture in there.

00:49:05.360 Don't put the plastic on the dough, but on the bowl itself to create a little chamber.

00:49:09.580 And then at 72 degrees, we'll say if that's the temperature of your house,

00:49:13.320 that dough will typically take about two hours to double in size.

00:49:16.800 The fermentation happens in about two hours.

00:49:19.580 But if you were to put it in a chamber that was 17 degrees warmer or 89 degrees,

00:49:25.440 it would double in one hour.

00:49:28.040 On the other hand, if you went into a cool spot, like let's say it's winter

00:49:32.160 and you put it in your garage and it's cold out there in the garage,

00:49:34.680 but it's about 50, what we say, 72 minus 17 would be what, 50, 55 degrees or something like that.

00:49:42.020 It would take four hours for it to double.

00:49:44.860 Now, you don't always have to use 17 degree increments,

00:49:47.040 but I'm just using that as an example that how the temperature can affect the rate of fermentation.

00:49:53.540 So in some instances, and certainly in sort of the more popular methods of today,

00:49:59.340 where we purposely use cold overnight fermentation to slow things down,

00:50:05.200 we can actually get better flavor by allowing all those enzymes to go to work

00:50:10.020 and create more of the flavorful acids and alcohols that are generated.

00:50:15.760 So all that can be controlled by temperature.

00:50:18.620 Bakeries have boxes of expensive equipment that can establish the exact temperature that they want to use. 0.97

00:50:26.300 The same way that anyone who makes beer knows that every degree of temperature

00:50:30.240 as they're fermenting their grain to make beer is critical in the final flavor.

00:50:35.060 A couple of degrees can make all the difference in the kind of flavors that are produced.

00:50:38.920 I want to talk more about this overnight fermentation process,

00:50:40.920 because this is something that you've been advocating and you're kind of, you're famous for.

00:50:43.840 So by extending the fermentation process, you get more flavors.

00:50:47.240 So what does this involve?

00:50:47.900 It just involves taking your dough and then you stick it in the fridge?

00:50:50.140 Is that what you're doing?

00:50:50.620 Right, exactly.

00:50:51.580 Because as the dough is cooling down, it's going to continue to ferment.

00:50:54.560 But once it gets below 40 degrees, and most refrigerators will be at least under 40 degrees,

00:51:01.760 usually 35 to 39 degrees, the yeast will go to sleep.

00:51:07.300 It doesn't go 100% to sleep, but it goes pretty much dormant.

00:51:11.040 And at that point, the only activity that's going on in the dough then would be the enzyme activity,

00:51:16.280 which is, again, breaking apart some of those starches and proteins to make them more digestible.

00:51:20.340 So by slowing this down, we're creating the release of some of those flavors.

00:51:25.440 Then the next day, and you can even wait two or three days once the dough gets cool enough,

00:51:30.480 and the enzymes kind of complete their mission. 0.92

00:51:32.980 They have sort of a threshold of how much they can do.

00:51:35.960 But then you pull that dough out and bring it back to room temperature.

00:51:40.460 And slowly, as it's waking up and coming to room temperature,

00:51:43.840 the yeast is waking up and it's beginning to ferment again.

00:51:46.700 And then you can complete the process of shaping the dough, raising the dough, baking the dough,

00:51:51.860 you know, a day or two later.

00:51:53.400 And you're going to have a totally different flavor profile than if you baked that loaf on the same day.

00:51:58.640 Now, and I go back to that Julia Child recipe.

00:52:02.380 She didn't use cold fermentation because the bakers of France didn't have refrigerators. 1.00

00:52:07.640 They didn't exist either in the old days.

00:52:09.760 And there's no room in a French bakery for big refrigerators. 0.74

00:52:12.880 So they had to slow things down by punching the dough.

00:52:17.320 You know, as the dough rises, they would punch the dough down and de-gas it.

00:52:20.900 They would knock out the carbon dioxide from the first rise,

00:52:24.320 and they would let it rise again a second time.

00:52:27.180 And then after they shaped it, it would rise again a third time.

00:52:30.140 A lot of the cookbooks, you know, the cookbooks that were popular in the 1950s, 60s, 70s,

00:52:35.400 they just said, let the dough rise once, shape it, let it rise again, and bake it.

00:52:39.760 And you get bread, and you do get bread.

00:52:42.060 You just don't get the best bread.

00:52:43.980 So in Julia Child's method, the first takeaway for me,

00:52:46.860 and what started this entire chain reaction that's taking me to today and 13 books later,

00:52:52.360 was that she did an extra punch down of her dough. 0.97

00:52:55.700 She used a little bit less yeast. 0.99

00:52:57.540 She let the dough rise for about two, three hours.

00:52:59.800 She punched it down, meaning she folded it and reshaped it into a dough ball

00:53:03.640 and let the dough ball rise a second time.

00:53:05.880 And when I read that, and we're talking about, you know, 55 years ago,

00:53:11.380 and I read that, kind of a light went off on it.

00:53:13.740 That's got to be something that's making a difference.

00:53:15.680 Why did she give it another rise? 0.94

00:53:17.240 And sure enough, the baguettes that we made from that recipe,

00:53:20.400 as simple as that recipe was, it was lean, no fats, just flour, water, salt, and yeast.

00:53:25.660 Those baguettes were better than some of the ones we could buy in the store,

00:53:29.380 and certainly better than the ones I had been making using the single rise technique.

00:53:33.280 So that's where, you know, sort of then tracing this process

00:53:37.960 and figuring out why this works, why is this happening, you know,

00:53:42.020 it all started from that recipe.

00:53:44.020 I give Julia Child a lot of credit because she brought that technique 0.98

00:53:47.000 to the American awareness among the many contributions

00:53:50.280 that she made to our culinary growth in this country.

00:53:53.560 You know, she was critical in my becoming a baker.

00:53:57.320 So with this overnight fermentation process,

00:53:59.960 do you have to do the degassing, the punching down?

00:54:02.140 Is that part of it?

00:54:03.700 Well, you don't necessarily have to.

00:54:05.500 What I do is I usually will let the dough rise for about 20 minutes

00:54:08.920 and give it a head start.

00:54:10.120 Let it start to wake up and let it start to ferment.

00:54:12.640 And then I put it in the refrigerator because I know it's going to take

00:54:15.340 at least two hours, maybe longer, for it to completely cool down.

00:54:19.160 So overnight, it's slowly, slowly going to sleep.

00:54:22.260 But while it's going to sleep, it's also still creating carbon dioxide and rising.

00:54:26.000 So the next day, it should be pretty much risen once,

00:54:29.420 but then kind of in a holding pattern.

00:54:31.860 And that's when I take it out.

00:54:33.280 And if it hasn't risen at all, if for some reason I chilled it down too much,

00:54:37.260 the reason we call for lukewarm water is that it gets the fermentation going at the beginning.

00:54:41.840 You don't need to give it a long time then to double in size.

00:54:45.120 So we put it in the fridge, let it finish its rise.

00:54:48.020 If it hasn't risen at all overnight, then you have to pull it out and give it,

00:54:51.420 you know, three or four hours to warm up and wake up and start to rise.

00:54:55.180 But it will eventually if you've done everything right.

00:54:57.700 But normally, you don't have to.

00:54:59.140 So then you've had your first rise overnight,

00:55:01.580 but you've also had all the enzyme activity that you need to create great flavor.

00:55:06.160 Then you can go ahead and shape the bread the next day

00:55:09.200 and then give it its final rise, the proofing rise,

00:55:13.240 and bake it because the flavor development has essentially,

00:55:16.820 95% of the flavor development took place in that bulk, cold, overnight fermentation.

00:55:22.020 On that second rise, after you've taken it out of the fridge,

00:55:25.680 shaped it to like the loaf you want, how long does that second rise last?

00:55:30.100 Well, typically, it depends on how cold the dough got.

00:55:33.020 You know, I like to take it out and shape it while it's still on the cool side,

00:55:36.300 but then you have to wait for it to start to wake up and warm up.

00:55:39.520 So I would give it somewhere between, depending on if you're making a loaf,

00:55:43.340 like a sandwich loaf, it'll take two to three hours for it to wake up.

00:55:46.660 Or if you're making a baguette, which warms up a lot faster

00:55:49.540 because it's a smaller piece of dough, about an hour and a half,

00:55:52.860 maybe two hours, depending on how warm your room is,

00:55:55.740 to wake up and basically increase in size about one and a half times

00:56:00.220 the original size before you take it to the oven.

00:56:02.880 It will spring in the oven.

00:56:04.400 You'll get another 10% to 20% oven spring

00:56:06.880 because when you put that dough in the oven,

00:56:09.940 the first thing that's going to happen is it's going to warm up

00:56:11.880 and the yeast is still alive,

00:56:13.440 so it's going to have kind of a final feeding frenzy

00:56:16.620 while it's digesting sugars and burping carbon dioxide

00:56:19.440 until it hits that threshold,

00:56:22.320 what we call the thermal death point of about 100,

00:56:25.520 well, we'll say 136 to 138 degrees,

00:56:29.220 but to make it easy, 140 degrees.

00:56:31.880 And at that point, it gives up its life.

00:56:33.960 It sacrifices its life for the sake of the dough.

00:56:37.600 And basically, if the mission of the yeast

00:56:39.660 was to raise dough so that it could become bread,

00:56:42.580 in order for that dough to become bread,

00:56:44.400 the yeast has to give up its life

00:56:46.320 for that final transformation to take place,

00:56:50.060 which again, opens up the metaphorical

00:56:51.880 and deeper levels of understanding

00:56:53.500 when you play that game with me.

00:56:55.600 So when you put it in the oven,

00:56:57.060 any tricks there for how to bake

00:57:00.080 so you get like a really delicious bread

00:57:02.160 that has a good mouthfeel? 1.00

00:57:03.540 If you're baking hearth bread, crispy bread,

00:57:07.140 like a baguette style French bread,

00:57:08.820 where you want to crackly crush,

00:57:10.920 then you bake hot, like 450 to 475 in your oven

00:57:14.560 and you create steam

00:57:16.120 because the steam also allows for more oven spring

00:57:20.020 and it puts a little shine on the loaf.

00:57:22.540 And the way I do that is,

00:57:24.000 the best way I know,

00:57:25.200 is to put like a cast iron frying pan

00:57:27.160 in the bottom of the oven

00:57:28.120 and after you put the bread in the oven to bake it

00:57:31.540 and you follow the instructions,

00:57:33.120 whether you're cutting score marks

00:57:35.060 and things like that,

00:57:36.020 put it in the oven

00:57:36.560 and then either put some ice cubes in that hot pan

00:57:39.420 or very carefully pour about a half a cup of water

00:57:43.380 into that hot pan

00:57:44.360 and it will instantly turn into steam.

00:57:46.700 Then shut the door and let that steam 0.99

00:57:48.580 give you about five minutes of steam in the oven

00:57:50.920 to enhance the oven spring.

00:57:53.340 You want it to eventually evaporate.

00:57:54.900 If you don't put too much water in, it will.

00:57:57.080 And so that's a trick for that.

00:57:58.600 Now, if you're making a sandwich loaf

00:58:00.000 where you're baking it in a loaf pan

00:58:01.600 and you want it to be a tall sandwich style loaf,

00:58:03.980 you don't need steam.

00:58:05.520 You could brush the top with some egg white

00:58:08.480 or brush it with,

00:58:10.160 some people like to brush it at the top

00:58:11.440 with a little vinegar,

00:58:12.280 something to kind of moisten the top,

00:58:14.120 but you don't even have to do that.

00:58:15.740 If you like a shiny loaf when it comes out,

00:58:18.280 after it comes out of the oven,

00:58:19.700 the top will be caramelized,

00:58:21.060 but it'll be kind of dull.

00:58:22.440 So you can brush the top

00:58:24.060 with some vegetable oil or melted butter

00:58:27.900 and it will give the top a little bit of a shine.

00:58:30.620 But if you're doing a sandwich loaf,

00:58:32.520 you bake at a lower temperature

00:58:33.900 because you do not want those chemical

00:58:36.980 or what we call chemical transformations

00:58:40.080 to take place in the oven.

00:58:41.540 We don't want caramelization too soon

00:58:44.080 because if the outside gets caramelized

00:58:45.960 before the inside gelatinizes,

00:58:48.120 you've got a doughy bread.

00:58:49.580 The internal temperature of the loaf

00:58:51.000 should be about 190 degrees.

00:58:53.360 For a baguette,

00:58:54.480 you want the internal temperature to be 200 degrees.

00:58:57.200 It could be up to 205 if you can get it there.

00:59:00.060 But essentially, you're looking for the top,

00:59:02.440 the outside, and the inside

00:59:03.700 to get done at the same time.

00:59:05.540 So thin, crispy loaves can be baked hot.

00:59:08.500 Sandwich-style loaves, enriched breads,

00:59:10.800 soft breads, typically baked about 350 degrees

00:59:14.100 so that the outside and the inside

00:59:16.040 all happen at the same time.

00:59:18.480 Should you bake by time

00:59:20.200 or internal temperature for the bread?

00:59:23.460 In the end, the dough tells you what it needs.

00:59:26.080 You can follow the recipe perfectly

00:59:27.600 and something might not go right for your loaf.

00:59:30.360 So in the end, you want the loaf to tell you

00:59:34.260 is it done or not.

00:59:35.580 And the two things you're going to be looking for

00:59:37.280 is the outside caramelized,

00:59:39.340 not just the top,

00:59:40.540 but also the side walls

00:59:42.100 and the bottom of the loaf.

00:59:43.620 Are they all golden brown?

00:59:45.460 The only way you can tell that

00:59:46.420 is to get the loaf out of the pan.

00:59:48.520 So if you're following the instructions

00:59:49.840 and the top of your loaf's not burning,

00:59:51.660 but it feels like it's been in there long enough,

00:59:53.560 you can tap the loaf out of the pan

00:59:55.540 and check it.

00:59:56.840 Then to be sure,

00:59:58.360 and the absolute best way to know

01:00:00.020 if the internal temperatures have been reached

01:00:01.660 is to use a food thermometer,

01:00:04.040 a probe thermometer

01:00:05.020 that you stick into the center of the loaf.

01:00:07.260 You can either go in through the bottom

01:00:08.560 to the halfway point,

01:00:10.280 or you can go in through the top.

01:00:11.600 I usually go through the bottom

01:00:12.560 so that I don't put a hole in the top of my loaf.

01:00:14.420 And I look for a temperature reading

01:00:16.260 to be somewhere for a sandwich loaf,

01:00:18.260 at least 190 degrees.

01:00:19.680 If I'm getting a good firm structure

01:00:21.620 on the outside, caramelization,

01:00:23.160 and I'm seeing 190 degrees,

01:00:24.520 I know now that that loaf is fully baked.

01:00:27.360 If I'm doing a baguette,

01:00:28.760 you know, I should be able

01:00:29.600 to get higher temperature than that.

01:00:31.060 And the loaf should have a nice, solid,

01:00:33.480 you know, when you thump the bottom of that loaf,

01:00:35.320 it should sound hollow.

01:00:37.140 So you have all these tests.

01:00:38.500 Some are empirical,

01:00:39.720 but the most scientific test

01:00:40.900 is the temperature test.

01:00:42.040 And then you should let it cool

01:00:42.800 before you eat it, right?

01:00:44.060 Well, yeah, then go into stage 11. 0.96

01:00:46.200 Again, a baguette, thinner loaf,

01:00:48.160 smaller loaves will cool down

01:00:49.680 in 45 minutes or so.

01:00:51.860 A sandwich loaf,

01:00:53.240 ideally give it minimum 90 minutes,

01:00:55.960 but really ideally two hours

01:00:57.500 to cool down so that

01:00:58.900 that it's evaporated off

01:01:00.500 the maximum moisture

01:01:01.660 that was left in there.

01:01:02.760 And you can actually taste the flavor.

01:01:04.840 If you taste the bread when it's hot,

01:01:07.240 the warmth of the heat

01:01:08.840 masks a lot of that subtle,

01:01:11.620 wonderful, complex flavor

01:01:13.240 that you've spent so long

01:01:14.340 trying to generate.

01:01:15.560 So if you let it cool down,

01:01:16.640 you can actually taste those flavors.

01:01:18.740 And if you're making sourdough,

01:01:20.340 you especially won't taste the sour

01:01:22.500 if you eat it while it's hot.

01:01:24.060 So if you like sourdough bread

01:01:25.760 the way I like sourdough bread,

01:01:27.140 I like the little tangy flavor,

01:01:28.800 then wait till it cools down

01:01:30.160 because you won't taste the tang

01:01:31.500 until it cools down.

01:01:33.940 Well, Peter,

01:01:34.240 this has been a great conversation.

01:01:35.800 We're going to put that recipe

01:01:36.760 we mentioned in our conversation

01:01:38.180 in our show notes,

01:01:39.000 so we'll make sure people go there.

01:01:40.420 But where can people go

01:01:41.160 to learn more about your books

01:01:42.360 and your work?

01:01:43.480 Well, of course,

01:01:44.660 that particular recipe

01:01:45.620 that we're putting up

01:01:46.280 came from a bread book

01:01:47.500 that I wrote called

01:01:48.900 Artisan Breads,

01:01:50.680 what do we call it?

01:01:51.560 Artisan Breads Every Day

01:01:53.220 where we introduce

01:01:54.420 all the breads

01:01:55.240 are using this overnight

01:01:56.140 cold fermentation technique.

01:01:57.900 My most well-known book

01:01:58.920 is called

01:01:59.300 The Bread Baker's Apprentice,

01:02:00.740 which is basically

01:02:01.460 this 12-stage journey,

01:02:03.060 you know,

01:02:03.480 spread out into

01:02:04.520 many, many, many types of breads.

01:02:07.140 And then my pizza work,

01:02:08.820 you can find me

01:02:09.940 and my pizza work

01:02:11.000 on my website.

01:02:12.740 It's www.pizzaquest.com

01:02:16.940 or just go pizzaquest.com.

01:02:19.560 And if you would like

01:02:20.740 to get a sort of

01:02:22.260 a condensed version

01:02:23.120 of this 12-stage journey

01:02:24.880 from wheat to eat,

01:02:26.120 just look up

01:02:26.740 Peter Reinhart at TED

01:02:27.860 and watch my TED Talk.

01:02:29.360 It's 15 minutes

01:02:30.060 that kind of consolidates

01:02:31.740 a lot of the things

01:02:32.440 we just talked about here

01:02:33.540 into a little crash course.

01:02:35.340 Even today,

01:02:35.960 we just took

01:02:36.580 a month-long bread course

01:02:38.500 and condensed it

01:02:39.220 into a one-hour conversation,

01:02:40.880 which I love doing with you.

01:02:42.000 And we covered

01:02:42.620 an awful lot of ground,

01:02:44.100 but there's a lot of ways

01:02:45.620 to get to this information.

01:02:47.260 Fantastic.

01:02:47.540 Well, Peter Reinhart,

01:02:48.160 thanks for your time.

01:02:48.560 It's been a pleasure.

01:02:49.680 Well, Brad,

01:02:50.260 it's been great talking with you.

01:02:51.360 Thanks for having me on

01:02:52.340 and stay in touch.

01:02:54.580 Anybody has any questions,

01:02:55.620 just write to me

01:02:56.220 at peter at pizzaquest.com.

01:02:59.560 My guest is Peter Reinhart.

01:03:01.020 He's the author of the book

01:03:01.900 The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

01:03:03.120 It's available on Amazon.com

01:03:04.300 and bookstores everywhere.

01:03:05.440 You can find more information

01:03:06.200 about his work

01:03:06.620 at his website, Pizza Quest.

01:03:08.200 Also, check out our show notes

01:03:09.140 at aom.is slash bread

01:03:10.640 where you can find links

01:03:11.300 to resources

01:03:11.820 where you delve deeper

01:03:12.520 into this topic.

01:03:20.820 Well, that wraps up

01:03:21.860 another edition

01:03:22.560 of the AOM Podcast.

01:03:23.700 Make sure to check out

01:03:24.320 our website

01:03:24.680 at artofmanlings.com

01:03:25.780 where you'll find

01:03:26.040 our podcast archives

01:03:27.020 as well as thousands

01:03:28.060 of articles

01:03:28.440 that we've written

01:03:28.900 over the years

01:03:29.320 about pretty much

01:03:29.940 anything you think of.

01:03:31.260 And if you haven't done this already,

01:03:32.280 I'd appreciate it

01:03:32.920 if you take one minute

01:03:33.540 to just read on the podcast

01:03:34.500 or Spotify.

01:03:35.160 It helps out a lot.

01:03:35.980 And if you've done that already,

01:03:36.880 thank you.

01:03:37.680 Please consider sharing the show

01:03:38.840 with a friend

01:03:39.200 or family member

01:03:39.720 who would think

01:03:40.160 there's something out of it.

01:03:41.300 As always,

01:03:42.000 thank you for the continued support

01:03:42.900 and until next time

01:03:43.440 it's Brett McKay.

01:03:44.480 Remind you to listen

01:03:45.120 to AOM Podcast

01:03:45.840 but put what you've heard

01:03:47.120 into action.

01:03:47.740 We'll see you next time.

The Art of Manliness - November 13, 2024

The Art and Spirituality of Bread

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