Flour, Water, Salt & Yeast

This is turning out to be a good week in my adventures in bread making (it doesn't take much).

First discovery...it's now possible to get locally sourced flour in DC via a small Loudoun County farm. It may not seem like a big deal but from a slow food perspective this is huge. Then yesterday, a copy of The Bread Baker's Apprentice, a must have for bread bakers, landed on my doorstep (even huger!) along with another book filled with hundreds of great ice cream recipes (my next adventure).

Bread is one of those things that is clearly more than the sum of its flour, water, salt and yeast parts. It's captivating how four simple ingredients can come together in various ways to form a multitude of different types of bread.

Over the last couple days I've been thinking off and on about why I bake bread when it would be a lot easier, definitely less time consuming, and likely less expensive to go to the store and get whatever bread I want. My answer is that it's not really about the bread, it's about the creativity, the science, the challenge, and the connection to legions of people throughout time who have mixed with their hands four simple ingredients to produce complex flavors in gorgeous loaves of bread.

From the Bread Baker's Apprentice, the level I strive for...

[T]here are many layers of flavor hidden within the four ingredients of flour, water, salt, and yeast that are the sole components of true French bread. They have taken up the timeless baker's challenge of evoking from the wheat its fullest potential, finding ways of unraveling the tasteless starchmolecules that comprise the bulk of a loaf by attempting to spring free the simple sugars that are woven within the complex but unassailable carbohydrates.

When they successfully accomplish this, using bakers' tricks that are both ancient and modern, layers of flavor emerge. Flavors slowly come into focus as the palate, with its five flavor zones, aided by the chewing process and the release of salivic enzymes, encounters it first in the sweet zone, eliciting an "ahhh, this is nice," reaction. Then the salty zone kicks in, an "oohhh," followed by another level of either sweetness or sourness (depending on the bread), along the sides of the tongue, calling forth a "hmnnn, whoaa...." Finally, just at the swallowing point, the mouth floods in the umami, or rich zone in the back central region, with a nutlike flavor that perfumes its way into the sinuses, where it lingers for as long as fifteen to thirty minutes, re-creating with every inhalation the inimitable finish of a proper, world-class bread, the inevitable "yessss!" (accompanied by appropriate arm pumping, in rare instances).

This flavor joy is in addition to the various auditory pleasures of the sound of crust, crackling and crumbling under the pressure of the chew, and the visual satisfaction caused by both the rich, dusty, reddish gold caramelization of crust and the blooming of the loaf along the slash marks. The blooming produces what the French call the grigne, an ear of crisp crust that neatly separates from the loaf like a proudly curled lip. Bread this good must also be beautiful; after all, in our culinary schools it is taught that we eat first with our eyes.