Not All Great Bread Is Sourdough, and This Loaf Proves It
Those who have been paying attention to pandemic bread-baking patterns know that it typically goes in two stages. Stage one is the full-throated cannonball into the deep end: You buy the bread books, nurture a sourdough starter, give it a name (Janet, after your grandmother), bake three loaves of bread a week, and consider opening a microbakery.
Stage two, which comes three to nine months later, starts with feeling bloated. You become irrationally irritated with Janet and start sleeping through the second and third and fourth turns of your loaves. You bake less and less bread and eventually Janet—and your bread-baking habit—dies.
There’s a third stage of pandemic bread-baking, but many home bakers never get there. If they wanted to, they’d have to accept that sourdough is not the only way to make bread, and they’d need to embrace straight doughs—something that many bakers, both pro and amateur, just aren’t willing to do.
“Straight dough” is mostly a professional baker’s term, but there’s a little irony there, because these are actually the most friendly doughs for amateurs. The following lines, from Daniel Leader’s book Living Bread, are as good a definition as any: Straight doughs “are raised with commercial yeast, so there is no pre-ferment or sourdough culture to make before mixing. Sourdough enthusiasts may consider straight doughs to have less flavor, character, and aroma than breads made with a natural starter or pre-ferment. But as some of the best bakers in Europe prove, well-made straight doughs can be as satisfying as more complex doughs.”
You know who really gets judgy? The people who just started baking at home.
The raised eyebrows that straight doughs receive are an important part of the definition. In the past decade, bread-bakers have started to see all loaves other than naturally fermented ones as lesser. “There’s a sort of prejudice against things that don’t require a natural fermentation process,” says Roxana Jullapat, the co-owner of Friends and Family in Los Angeles and author of the forthcoming cookbook Mother Grains. She agrees with Leader that this prejudice exists among professional bakers. “But you know who really gets judgy?” she says. “The people who just started baking at home.”
Sourdough’s supposed superiority is a relatively recent development. “In 1980, when I [opened the bakery Bread Alone], nobody had a clue about sourdough, and neither did I,” says Leader. Thirty years later, though, Chad Robertson published Tartine Bread, and the bread world changed. A few years ago, while on research trips for Living Bread in Europe, Leader saw just how significantly Robertson’s book (and bread) had influenced the culture. “I can’t tell you how many times I saw Chad’s book in bakeries all around France,” he recalls.
The book seemed to hit at the exact right moment, a period when homebrewing beer was also gaining traction. Fermentation became a popular hobby, and even an identity. “Fermentation across the board can become such a cult,” Jullapat notes.
As cults go, it’s a pretty harmless one—nothing wrong with people making their own beer and bread and kimchi. But the intense focus on sourdough, and specifically Tartine’s sourdough, has made bread-baking look more and more like a monoculture. (It has been noted that the baking scene itself has also trended toward homogeneity.) Over the past ten years, Leader has seen a consensus about what “good bread” is build on Instragram. It’s sourdough, of course, and it has an erratic, freeform structure (in other words, it has a lot of holes). “If the bread doesn’t have this wild cell structure, it isn’t ‘good bread,’” he says.
Beer Bread - INSET
Sourdough snobbery runs in both amateur and professional baking circles, but Jullapat and Leader don’t see the need to align themselves with one school or the other. Leader points to baguettes as a classic example of a great bread made with straight dough. And Jullapat notes that when it comes to focaccia and brioche, she uses a hybrid method, using yeast and starter. (She’d tried making a fully sourdough brioche, but “it was so crazy-tart it was off-putting.”)
“I bake both ways,” says Jullapat. “I think of the array of techniques and breadth of ingredients as tools. I can choose the right tool for the job and the circumstances.”
Right now—as we approach a year of isolating, and possibly a disillusionment with big cooking and baking projects—the circumstances call for yeast. So Jullapat developed a bread recipe for Epicurious that has all the characteristics of a so-called artisan loaf—the burnished, crackly crust; the deep, sweet-and-tangy flavor—but that is a straight dough, not a sourdough.
How does she make straight dough bread taste like sourdough bread? It comes down to three things: flour, time, and salt.
It is not a surprise that Jullapat advocates for the flavor and health benefits of freshly-milled, whole grain flours (her forthcoming book is a treatise on the subject). “I will die on this hill,” she says. “The quality of the flour is more important than how you leavened.” In this loaf, a combination of white bread flour and rye flour is the base of the bread’s flavor. Using a combination of stout (or porter) and water to hydrate the dough was another choice made with flavor in mind. “Beer and bread are related. They’re both grain-based, both fermented products.” So it’s not a stretch to pair the two.
I will die on this hill: The quality of the flour is more important than how you leavened.
Time comes into the loaf in two ways. The first is in the long, slow, overnight rise, a trick that Jullapat (and millions of other bakers) picked up from the bread that went viral before Robertson’s: Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread. (Jullapat is upfront about the fact that her loaf is a riff on Lahey’s famous recipe.) That long rise is what allows the bread to take on a tangy, almost aged, flavor. Time comes into play again during the bake, when you leave the bread in the oven until the crust is a deep, dark brown and fully caramelized. “I love really dark bread, almost on the verge of burnt,” Jullapat says.
She also really likes salt, and uses it generously in her recipes (usually 2.5 percent of the total volume of flour). The added bonus of that salt is that it helps keep the yeast in check during that long, slow fermentation. “Salt inhibits fermentation. You need it, you absolutely need it, otherwise the fermentation would run amok.”
The resulting bread is not overly salty. It’s tangy and yeast and malty and a little sweet, with an airy—but, compared to Tartine bread, tight—crumb. It has all the rustic qualities of a modern-day sourdough boule, but absolutely none of the hassle, and none of the planning. That lack of planning is perhaps its greatest quality, or at least the one that makes it great for early 2021. “It’s convenient,” Jullapat says. “You just go with yeast and boom, let’s go.”
Yeasted Beer Bread
Originally Appeared on Epicurious
