Think about a hot loaf of bread fresh out of the oven. On one level, it s a literal food that s created through chemical processes. But there s something about bread, the so-called staff of life that s different from other foods and resonates on a deeper level. There s a reason bread has been a rich symbol throughout times and cultures and figures prominently in religious scriptures. Today, on the show, Peter Reinhart will take us on an exploration of the many facets of bread, from the spiritual to the scientific.
00:00:26.380There's something about bread, the so-called staff of life, that's different from other foods and resonates on a deeper level.
00:00:33.420There's a reason bread has been a rich symbol throughout times and cultures and figures prominently in religious scriptures.
00:00:38.720Today on the show, Peter Reinhart will take us on an exploration of the many facets of bread, from the spiritual to the scientific.
00:00:45.360Peter's a baker, educator, and the author of numerous books, including The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread.
00:00:52.760In 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.
00:01:00.500We 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.
00:01:08.320After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash bread.
00:01:11.460All right, Peter Reinhart, welcome to the show.
00:01:27.520Thank you very much. Great to be here.
00:01:29.340So 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.
00:01:35.960You'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?
00:01:44.760Yeah, I kind of slid into baking, I'll say, through the back door.
00:01:49.320It was an outgrowth of a hobby, which a lot of people with small little, you know, kind of craft bakeries started that way.
00:01:56.260Same thing with pizza guys. You know, you do it for fun, and you love to make it.
00:01:59.860And 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.
00:02:07.900And 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,
00:02:17.940in 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.
00:02:30.500I live with 30 people in this wonderful retreat center in California to look for ways to create some businesses that could help support us.
00:02:38.500And 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.
00:02:54.000And 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.
00:03:02.200And it was really a ministry cafe. It was designed to create job opportunities for local high school kids and things like that.
00:03:09.600And we could kind of try out some of our ideas around food through that cafe, not just bread, but other things.
00:03:18.220But 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.
00:03:29.580And 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.
00:03:39.480And 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.
00:03:51.420And 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.
00:04:02.760And 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.
00:04:09.640And so I wrote a book called Brother Juniper's Bread Book, Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor.
00:04:17.020Brother Juniper's was the name of our cafe and bakery, and that's kind of when it took off.
00:04:21.720This was 1991. We're talking about a long time ago.
00:04:25.260And again, I threw my hat into the ring, and suddenly I realized people are coming to me and asking me questions about bread baking.
00:04:32.320I better learn more about the craft and the science.
00:04:35.620And before I knew it, I was all the way down the rabbit hole.
00:04:38.180That was really interesting about your career, this experience you had in the community, this religious community.
00:04:56.740It was independent of any other churches.
00:04:58.780But during that time, we began our own sort of intense study into the history of Christianity and where we fit into it.
00:05:08.180And trying to find, you know, our place and based on the life experiences that we'd had.
00:05:13.960And it led us towards Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
00:05:18.260And 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.
00:06:03.880But anyway, that's sort of how we ended up into that.
00:06:06.720And 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.
00:06:17.640We decided at that point to split into two branches, the householder branch, so to speak, and the monastic branch.
00:06:26.000And a certain percentage, maybe 10% to 15% of our members who felt that calling, entered formal monasteries or even started some monasteries.
00:06:34.800And 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.
00:06:45.880Yeah, I think it's interesting that your bread-making journey got started in this intentional religious community.
00:06:52.100I remember, because a lot of monasteries, that's what they do to support the monastery.
00:06:56.480They make bread not only for themselves, but they'll sell it to the public.
00:06:59.660There's a Benedictine monastery here near Tulsa, and some friends and I spent the weekend there.
00:07:05.960And it was great because you get the hospitality of the Benedictine monks.
00:07:09.840And I remember that first evening we had soup and then just this loaf of hearty, delicious bread.
00:07:16.340It was some of the best bread I ever had.
00:07:18.820Yeah, it's interesting that that's a tradition that cuts across.
00:07:23.380In 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.
00:07:35.180They were based on herbs and fermenting local spices and herbs.
00:07:40.840And the Benedictine is one of my favorite liqueurs, I have to say.
00:07:43.820I mean, my introduction to the Benedictine branch of the Catholic Church was through the Benedictine liqueur, not through going to a Benedictine monastery.
00:07:52.160So what's interesting, you get very scientific with your bread making.
00:07:56.200We're going to dig into the science here later on.
00:07:58.020But with your spiritual background, you also explore the spirituality of bread.
00:08:02.380And 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.
00:08:16.020Well, that is really the big question.
00:08:17.740And 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.
00:08:26.060And people would say, well, what is it about bread that makes it so special?
00:08:28.600And I really had to take a deep look into answering that question.
00:08:32.480And 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.
00:08:41.400But really, why – what is it about bread that makes it so special?
00:08:46.220Why does it have such deep meaning to people, even people who are not religious per se?
00:08:50.960There's something about bread that sets it apart from all other food groups and food categories.
00:08:56.720And 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.
00:09:10.140They've been brought to life through the fermentation process.
00:09:13.360So there's all sorts of things that I began to notice about all this.
00:09:19.360And 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.
00:09:56.360And so I just kept asking myself, why?
00:09:58.780You know, it's not enough to just say it does mean something, but why does it mean something?
00:10:03.080And 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,
00:10:25.800And that's what I write about after my first book, which was really about bread as a symbol and a metaphor.
00:10:32.260The subtitle is Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor.
00:10:35.280And 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,
00:10:45.060which 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.
00:10:56.940Why was her bread so good compared to just the fast recipes that we get out of everyday cookbooks?
00:11:03.320And it had to do with the long, slow fermentation process.
00:11:08.120And so my first sort of premise or hypothesis of bread making was that slow-rising bread is always better tasting than fast-rising bread.
00:11:18.360So, yeah, let's dig into some of the symbolism of bread.
00:11:20.480So bread's been around, I mean, it goes back to ancient Egypt, right?
00:11:24.040Well, as far, at least to ancient Egypt, possibly before, but we tend to look at Egypt as sort of the birthplace of leavened bread.
00:11:31.380Right. 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.
00:11:37.060Sure, sure. The word leavened itself, the root of the word itself means enlivened, leavened, enlivened.
00:11:43.680In other words, it's bread that is made from dough that was raised through biological processes that we call leavening.
00:11:52.820Now, you can leaven bread with chemicals, too.
00:11:55.860You can make biscuits, for instance, with baking powder and baking soda.
00:11:59.280That's a type of leavening, and we call that chemical leavening.
00:12:03.300But natural, biological leavening comes from mostly yeast.
00:12:08.300Yeast is the active agent that raises bread by creating carbon dioxide through a chemical process.
00:12:14.640And essentially, that's the differentiator.
00:12:17.420And 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.
00:12:27.380Because, 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.
00:12:42.360The 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.
00:12:51.460And he said things could be understood on four levels.
00:12:53.740The literal level, the thing itself, the poetic level, which I would kind of call the metaphorical level, maybe also the symbolic level.
00:13:02.900The third level down would be the philosophical level.
00:13:06.160Sometimes he used the word ethical, meaning ethics was the category of philosophy that he was referring to.
00:13:12.240And then the deepest level of all was what he called the mystical level, or the anagogical was the term they used.
00:13:18.740So these are four levels of understanding things.
00:13:20.920But 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.
00:13:28.880So I went back to the literal level of how you make bread, and I broke that down into its components.
00:13:36.660And suddenly these other levels of meaning and understanding began to open up to me.
00:13:41.740And, 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.
00:13:54.220Because 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.
00:14:06.200And that's what he would call a universal principle that could be applied to any category, not just bread making.
00:14:11.560But the thing about bread is, is that it's so transparent.
00:14:18.060You know, it can be called the staff of life.
00:14:19.900You know, it has these references in historical and traditional writings and teachings.
00:14:24.840And 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.
00:14:35.040So we're going to get into the nitty gritty of the literal level of bread making, because I think it's really interesting.
00:14:39.820Even as like, I'm not a baker, but I just found it fascinating.
00:14:42.820But 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.
00:14:50.720Well, I think that everything sort of has, there's symbolic renderings of everything can be a symbol of something else.
00:14:56.800So 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.
00:15:02.520And 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.
00:15:40.720So bread can sometimes symbolize money because that actually is a means of commerce or was certainly for many generations, a means of commerce.
00:15:48.460So 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.
00:16:01.440Let'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.
00:16:16.240And 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.
00:16:26.860And so it became an ethical, philosophical, and commerce, you know, issue.
00:16:34.320So 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,
00:16:45.960but 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.
00:16:58.300It's hard enough to talk about any of these levels because, again, you only can really access it by going through the literal.
00:17:03.580But 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.
00:17:15.180Well, 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.
00:17:24.460And what he was meaning is mystical union with God, with your creator, through this piece of bread.
00:17:34.740It's a step that people on the spiritual quest can spend a lifetime in pursuit of.
00:17:39.680And when they take communion, you know, at church, regardless of their denomination, they're taking it on trust.
00:17:46.460They'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.
00:18:03.460And that's why it's so hard to talk about, because the more you talk about it, the more abstract it becomes.
00:18:10.140Well, 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.
00:18:25.600I 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.
00:18:35.100So 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.
00:18:54.380So I call it the journey from wheat to eat.
00:18:56.520And I've broken that journey down into 12 steps.
00:18:58.640The first step of that journey, and this is a culinary term, we call it mise en place.
00:19:04.300Mise en place means getting everything in its place.
00:19:07.080It's the first step of all cooking, is organizing your work area, measuring out your ingredients, and getting organized.
00:19:14.520And so essentially, that is the first step of all cooking.
00:19:18.500And maybe you could say the first step of all activities as a guideline is get organized.
00:19:22.880In this wheat drama, we can take it back to the wheat actually growing in the field.
00:19:29.600Wheat is a living grass that grows in the field and puts out seeds.
00:19:33.460And 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.
00:19:48.940So wheat is the highest generator of gluten of any grain.
00:19:53.220There's only two other grains that really have any substantial gluten.
00:19:56.060One 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.
00:20:12.020And 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.
00:20:27.400It's enough to kill them if they have that kind of level of sensitivity.
00:20:31.500But other grains like corn and oats, unless they've been cross-pollinated with wheat, don't have gluten.
00:20:37.660So anyway, wheat is growing in the field.
00:20:39.400So we're going to go back to mise en place.
00:20:41.300In terms of getting organized, you've got to gather the seeds from the wheat.
00:20:45.220Now, in order to gather those seeds, you have to harvest the wheat.
00:20:48.720You cut down the grass and you collect the seeds.
00:20:51.800In collecting the seeds, essentially, those seeds are still theoretically alive where they have the potential to create more life.
00:20:59.600You can plant those seeds and it will grow more wheat.
00:21:01.900But what a miller does is collects the seeds from the farmer and mills them into flour.
00:21:08.620In 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.
00:21:19.260So 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.
00:21:30.220So a transformation takes place in that wheat.
00:21:33.780It goes from alive or the potential for life to being dead and destroyed, and we call that flour.
00:21:40.840First step would be then alive to dead or seeds of wheat to flour.
00:21:44.900The 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.
00:21:56.200Whether it's commercial yeast or sourdough leavening, we're leavening it.
00:22:14.560We activate the yeast or the leaven that's in there.
00:22:17.460We distribute all the ingredients evenly to make it a flavorful product.
00:22:21.640But the most important thing that happens is that this dead piece of clay comes back to life through the fermentation process.
00:22:31.580And 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.
00:22:41.100So 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.
00:22:50.160And so here's where you can see this sort of parallel and, again, symbolic or metaphorical journey of bread as the resurrection story.
00:22:57.880Also, maybe you could say the Genesis story.
00:23:00.320You know, it's a creation from the clay of the earth into a living being, a human being.
00:23:06.060Adam actually means clay, and bread dough is a type of clay when you look at it.
00:23:37.960It's creating carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
00:23:40.880Essentially, 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.
00:23:52.800But if it was from potatoes, it would be potato alcohol.
00:23:55.640If it was from other kinds of sugars, it would be the alcohol from those things.
00:23:59.740But 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.
00:24:13.900So all these things are going on as this dough comes to life.
00:24:20.080And that alcohol imbues the dough with flavor.
00:24:23.860The 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.
00:24:36.040All this is going on and starts in stage three and then continues all the way through the process until stage 10.
00:24:43.200And all this time, this dough is alive.
00:24:47.220And so we're still in the living stage of dough, but it is not yet bread.
00:24:52.300In order for it to become bread, it has to pass through some distinct stages.
00:24:55.940We have to divide the big piece of dough into smaller pieces.
00:24:59.180We have to give it a preliminary shape to start the process of turning it into bread.
00:25:03.640We 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.
00:25:29.380And 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.
00:25:39.120And we know that this dough is alive because we see it grow in front of us.
00:25:43.420All 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.
00:25:53.580I've kind of run through the intermediate stages.
00:25:55.860Fermentation 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.
00:26:03.660And this is where the final transformation takes place.
00:26:06.260We're taking living dough and we're putting it into an oven to bake it.
00:26:10.980And 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,
00:26:17.180is 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.
00:26:28.120Baking is just all about driving off moisture and thus turning the ingredients into something else.
00:26:34.180So if the definition of transformation is a radical change from one thing into something else, the first transformation was alive to dead.
00:26:48.080The third transformation is when the dough goes into the oven and the temperature of that dough races above 140 degrees, all biological life ceases.
00:26:57.560So the third transformation is alive to dead.
00:27:01.900But it goes in as dough and it comes out as bread.
00:27:05.580So what went into the oven is not what comes out of the oven.
00:27:08.440And so that's the final transformation.
00:27:10.080I'll call it, you know, it goes in as a caterpillar and comes out as a butterfly.
00:27:15.740Literally, dough goes in and bread comes out.
00:27:19.140Metaphorically, something that was living and alive goes in and it comes out as this new product that we call bread that can nourish us.
00:27:26.980Now that's just stage 12 and I said we had 12 stages.
00:27:30.280The 11th stage is what we call resting or cooling.
00:27:35.340And because when the bread comes out of the oven, it's really still too hot to eat.
00:27:38.960The internal temperature of that dough has gone not just above 140, it's gone up to about 200 degrees.
00:27:45.220And during that temperature rise, three very specific literal transformations are taking place in the dough.
00:27:52.880And this goes specifically to the very first level, the literal level.
00:27:56.980The proteins in that dough, which are mainly gluten proteins, do something that we call denature or coagulate.
00:28:04.900And 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.
00:28:15.500The 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.
00:28:51.060The 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.
00:29:02.360It's about 75% starch, and starch is just complex sugar that is so complex that you can't taste the sweetness.
00:29:10.780But 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.
00:29:49.600Now, proteins also turn brown when they go into the oven and get above a certain temperature.
00:29:53.540And there's a term for that called the Maillard reaction.
00:29:56.240It's a type of caramelization for proteins.
00:29:58.140But the main caramelization we see in bread, in the crust of the bread, is caramelization.
00:30:03.660And that happens when the temperature goes above 325 degrees.
00:30:08.260Well, 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.
00:30:16.300The crust then protects the internal part of the dough, which has a lot of water and never gets above the boiling point.
00:31:25.140They line up and they create a structure.
00:31:27.860We sometimes call it the crumb or the webbing of the dough or just essentially the gluten network of that dough.
00:31:35.440We see all of that happens and it only happens as a result of baking, which was to drive off moisture.
00:31:40.820So we've driven off some of the moisture in there, but we've caused these three transformations to occur.
00:31:45.560Until those transformations occur, we still have dough.
00:31:48.820It doesn't become bread until those three things happen.
00:31:51.560And that's the big change from dough to bread.
00:31:55.340As I said, alive to dead, but dough to bread.
00:31:58.180And 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.
00:32:10.460And the proteins begin to firm up and set up as they cool down.
00:32:14.620If 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.
00:32:26.520And 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.
00:32:34.240You can't package it until it cools down.
00:32:35.940But in our classes, I always say that stage 12 is eating.
00:32:40.300And the goal is to get from wheat to eat, you know, in the time allotted during the class.
00:32:45.320And 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.
00:32:55.800So that's, I've just given you the Reader's Digest version of the 12 stages of bread, this journey from wheat to eat.
00:33:02.040And 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.
00:33:09.840But that's why I referred to it as either a resurrectional or even a sort of a recreation of the Genesis story.
00:33:17.760As you were going through that process, you know, obviously I thought of, you know, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
00:33:22.540But 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.
00:33:29.540And then after you die, you come out as a new person.
00:33:34.620Once you understand the literal level of something, you can make all these other leaps with it.
00:33:40.480And 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.
00:33:48.080And those stages very much parallel the 12 stages of bread making that we just described.
00:33:53.720We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:34:00.540So let's get into more about the nitty gritty of bread.
00:34:03.600I'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.
00:34:12.360So 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.
00:34:19.140But what's interesting, you know, bread is basically flour, yeast, salt, water.
00:34:23.520But you can have these different types of bread.
00:34:26.480What differentiates the different classifications of bread out there?
00:34:54.060But 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.
00:35:05.420The function of fat is to tenderize products because it does two things.
00:35:09.120One, it coats the ingredients with the fat and kind of traps moisture in and it softens everything inside.
00:35:16.160So there's a whole other category of bread that we call enriched.
00:35:20.080Enriched breads are enriched with two things, either fat or sugars.
00:35:25.520Sugars also can serve as an enrichment.
00:35:27.460As 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.
00:35:38.240So you have to ask, where did that sweetness come from?
00:35:40.380It came from the sugar that was already in the wheat.
00:35:43.220But 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.
00:35:53.760So sugars and fats and eggs to an extent because eggs have, especially the egg yolks have fat, are considered enrichments to the bread.
00:36:04.440And most of the bread that most people eat are enriched breads, sandwich breads, wonder bread, you know, loaf breads.
00:36:10.460Those are all enriched because they've been softened with the addition of fats and or sugars.
00:36:16.260And those are two categories that we can sort of differentiate, those two categories.
00:36:19.980Then we can also use a category that we call firm doughs or standard doughs and rustic or wet doughs.
00:36:28.340And a standard dough would be most of the bread that we eat.
00:36:31.120The amount of hydration or water that you add to the dough helps to define what kind of bread you're going to have.
00:36:37.080If you only add, let's say, for every 100% flour, because we always do ratios based on the flour amount.
00:36:44.340So 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.
00:37:01.980We might add something else like malt syrup, which gives it the distinctive bagel flavor and a slight amount of sweetness.
00:37:08.320But it's simply a very, very lean, firm dough.
00:37:12.840Most 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.
00:37:24.260And that would be everything from French breads, Italian breads, sandwich breads, almost everything that, you know, that pizza doughs are generally in that range.
00:37:33.620And 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.
00:37:48.720They're almost closer to a batter than a bread, but they make great bread when you know how to handle them.
00:37:53.780And 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.
00:38:18.880It's creating a more roasted flavor and adds a complexity of flavor to the bread.
00:38:23.120So 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.
00:38:32.660And 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.
00:38:44.900What separates that from other breads?
00:38:47.160The main thing that separates sourdough from other breads is the type of leavening.
00:38:51.400Sourdough 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.
00:39:13.240Commercial yeast is very concentrated.
00:39:16.940By quickly, I mean, you know, anywhere from two to 24 hours, you can make bread with just commercial yeast.
00:39:22.280But 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.
00:39:32.960Think of the wild yeast as being like, you know, they're living out there in the wild.
00:39:35.780They're like the little bandits out there and they know how to survive.
00:39:49.120Every 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.
00:39:57.840So 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.
00:40:21.360And 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.
00:40:30.960And we know, you know, once you go down that bread rabbit hole, you just want to know everything that the artists and bakers know.
00:40:36.920And so everybody was making, you know, sourdough bread to varying degrees of success.
00:40:41.740Some of those people became so successful that they did open up bakeries.
00:40:45.660I have friends who live a mile from here who opened up what we call a cottage bakery.
00:40:49.640They 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.
00:40:59.120And there's many stories of that happening because as what happened to me, a hobby can become a vocation.
00:41:06.480Before our conversation, you were mentioning about how, you know, sourdough is sort of the final frontier of bread and it's becoming very popular.
00:41:12.440One, because I think it's just the flavor.
00:41:14.220I love the taste of a good sourdough bread.
00:41:15.940But you also mentioned that there's something about the wild yeast and sourdough that can actually make it easier to digest than regular bread.
00:41:27.960The 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.
00:41:37.400And 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.
00:41:54.520And the most complex part, I would say, the most complex molecule within bread dough is the gluten.
00:42:01.940The proteins are much harder to break down than starches in our body.
00:42:05.140And gluten, there are certain enzymes that can actually help to break down or pre-digest the gluten protein.
00:42:12.400And a gluten protein is made up of two other proteins called gliadin and glutinin.
00:42:16.580So these two partial proteins come together and make a complex protein called gluten.
00:42:22.360And then our body has to break that gluten down if we want to get any energy from it.
00:42:26.220And not everybody's body and gut systems is resilient and healthy enough to be able to handle that.
00:42:32.100What happens in fermentation, and this is true with not only dough fermentation, but cheese fermentation,
00:42:37.720is 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.
00:42:57.800And thus, when we eat them, they're easier for our body to break down.
00:43:01.020So there are some anecdotal instance of people saying that they can't eat bread normally.
00:43:07.520They can't eat normal bread leavened by commercial yeast, but for some reason they can eat sourdough bread.
00:43:13.000And then some of them say, you know, that I have gluten sensitivity.