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Perks of the Job: No. 4

Along with all the gardening, going to the beach, getting rained on, and other summer activities which have been going on around here instead of blogging, we've been taking photos of our bread for our new website.

We've been taking 'whole loaf' and 'in use' pictures for the regular and the special loaves.  'In use' pictures required all kinds of props, including some smoked salmon, which goes so well with our Caraway Meteil. 

And of course once you've taken the photo, you can't just let that smoked salmon go to waste now, can you?

You can see the new site here.

Tea Party

A few weeks ago we passed our final regulatory hurdle for the oven with the granting of our building warrant. With that out of the way we wanted to give a tea party to say thank you to our patient Bread Club customers who had hung on for us whilst we built the new oven.  We also wanted to thank people who had been involved in the build, and to our neighbours.

So we gave the oven a special Saturday firing and made buns - chocolate and currant - and pizza.  With onions, chard and courgettes from the Pillars of Hercules and cheese from the St Andrews Farmhouse Cheese company, we even managed local pizza toppings.

Pizza bases rising during the afternoon, overseen by Matthew as I bustled about with cups and saucers and tablecloths.

I was so busy pouring cups of tea, that I managed to not take a single picture during the party.  The sign of a good afternoon, I think.

Baguettes

In many ways, well-made baguettes are the epitome of white bread. The contrast of the crispy, crackly crust and the mellow, soft crumb, combined with a hint of chewiness and a gentle, mildly sweet and lingering flavour, the whole brought out with some cool unsalted butter, is, I think, one of the really great eating experiences.

Perfection comes at a price, though. Baguettes have perhaps the poorest keeping quality of any bread; after only a few short hours the crust is leathery, and the crumb stiff, and like all white breads, they have only modest nutritional benefits and all the undesirable health consequences that come with a high glycemic index. For these reasons, I generally eat them only as an occaisional treat. Since my baking ambition is to make great everyday breads I haven't been much fussed about making them either.

Some bakers, however, are very fussed about making them, and these include many for whom I have enormous respect, and to whom I have to acknowledge a debt of gratitude for knowledge shared. Jeffery Hamelman is perhaps foremost amongst these; in addition to his superlative book bread (covering everything from baguettes to Vollkorn Rye), he has a series of videos about baguette making viewable online and is a world champion baker. So although I don't have much interest in turning out 300 bags every week, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a decent baguette should be part of a serious baker's repertoire.

Every so often, then, I have a go at improving my baguettes. Below is my current recipe. It yeilds a crispy crust:

and a soft, open crumb:

and it makes me feel like a real baker. I'm so shallow!

Mini Baguettes:
(makes 8 200g baguettes)

Starter:
50g strong white flour
50g water
20g wholemeal rye chef

Ferment 4 hours at 28C.

Leaven
155g Strong white flour
85g Water
100g starter (from above)


Ferment 12 - 16 hours at 16C


Dough
850g Strong white
620g water
340g leaven (from above)
15g salt
25g olive oil


Mix flour and water, and leave to rest for 30 minutes. Add leaven, salt and oil and knead to a medium level of development. Ferment 4 hours at 24C, with folds at 50 and 100 minutes. Divide into 200g pieces, round and rest for 20 minutes. Shape, and prove for 2 hours. Bake 30 minutes at 240C with steam.

Notes:
Fermentation temperatures indicate the desired temperature of the dough, not the surrounding air. I have written about how to adjust the water temperature to achieve this here.

This is very much a bare-bones recipe because a lot of detail is not easily conveyed in writing. I strongly recommend watching Jeffery Hamelman's baguette videos, linked above.

Inspiration

Now that the oven is all finished we're busy developing new breads for the Bakery.  Matthew is working on perfecting our wholemeal wheat loaf - while we were baking for ourselves in our kitchen during the oven build we tried different ways of doing the wholemeal.  Some things were so successful that Matthew is trying to incorporate them into our regular loaf.

I'm working on developing new specials.  The Sweet Lemony Fennelly was the first product of this process.  The inspiration for the loaf was Laurel Robertson's Bread Book.

The two books which inspired our move to all sourdough, Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters and Dan Lepard's Handmade Loaf, concentrate mainly on white or mainly white breads.  Whilst they are both inspiring books, we are so convinced of the taste and health benefits of wholemeal bread that we needed to look further afield for inspiration, and came to the American wholefoods guru Laurel Robertson.

Although Laurel Robertson's bread is not all sourdough, it is a fairly easy matter to convert the recipes to sourdough.  This is how I began with the Sweet Lemony Fennelly.  I love the combination of lemon and fennel, so I was delighted to come across the mix in one of Laurel's recipes.  Hers is a savoury bread.  My first step was to convert her recipe to sourdough.  The bread came out really well, however, it needed some changes.  We wanted another sweet bread for the bakery so we added light muscovado sugar.  We also felt that the use of lemon zest would be too fiddly a process to replicate efficiently in the bakery, so we continued the sweet theme and brought in the lemon flavour with candied lemon.  We ended up with a delicious loaf, excellent spread with butter the first few days, and toasted with almond butter for up to a week afterwards.

I wish I had a better picture, but I confess I was more interested in eating it than photographing!

New Shoes

A baker spends the vast majority of his working day on his feet, so comfortable footware is of prime importance.  Matthew had been wearing his everyday shoes for baking, but they were getting pretty wrecked with flour and oil splatters, so whilst the bakery refit was going on we decided that when the time came it would be new bakery, new shoes.

For us, a sustainable bakery means, not simply organic flour or wood-fired, but trying to look with concern at all aspects of supply.  We decided that for the bakery, as we do for ourselves, we should buy our shoes from Green Shoes in Devon.  Their shoes are not cheap, but they are made in Britain with concern for the environmental impact of their raw materials.  I have two pairs of their shoes - one for winter, one for summer - which I wear almost every day (sadly in Fife the winter ones get considerably more wear than the summer ones!).  They are extremely comfortable and I think they look great.  The other wonderful thing about Green Shoes shoes is that when they get a bit worn, you send them back down to Devon - they get a full service and come back looking and feeling like new.

Here are the new bakery shoes in all their glory when they arrived a few weeks ago -

They are considerably more floury now than in this picture, but with a little care and attention should last for years.

Human Planners

When we started out, we were baking in our own kitchen. One of the more straightforward regulatory hoops we jumped through was to check whether there were any planning issues we needed to worry about. It turned out there weren't, so long as we didn't take on employees or do retail from the house.

Later, when we started thinking about the wood-fired oven, I asked a Development Services officer whether planning permission was required for such a structure. "Not a planning matter", I was told.

So the letter we got shortly after the oven chimney went up was a pretty nasty shock. We had carried out unauthorized development, it said. We had 28 days to apply for retrospective permission, or remove the offending chimney. Also, we would need to seek permission if we wished to bake bread for sale. The following weeks were stressful. In rare moments of optimism, I thought that we might manage to find alternative premises during lengthy rounds of applications and appeals.

The first thing I did, though, was to write back and ask for clarification. I explained that I had checked whether we needed permission. I used a lot of phrases like "sustainable development". And a few weeks later, I got a reply. No permission was required. The case was now closed. They wished us success with our business.

There are many stories about the kafka-esque beaurocracy of planning authorities, and there do not seem to be very many people reporting happy experiences, particularly amongst people wanting to do anything unusual. Sometimes aquiring such a story feels like earning one's spurs but I think I'm much happier reporting that the planners I dealt with were as straightforward and thoughtful as one might hope for.