Breadmaking update: Brick ovens, kabocha, and very unscientific levain!

It might be the fact that I have absolutely no breadmaking agenda these days, but for whatever reason I have been baking pretty much nonstop. So much that I forgot to write down whatever I did to produce the rather awesome experimental espresso-spelt bread, though hopefully I'll be able to more or less reproduce it. Yesterday I actually had a reason to bake though - we were firing up the brick oven again, and wanted to have some loaves to show for it.

I stirred together a regular spelt poolish the night before, and planned to put the leftover roasted squash from that morning's waffles to use in it in some way. It was only Sunday morning that I remember the little lump of dough languishing in the fridge hoping to become my first attempt at the levain method someday. So I decided to go for two separate doughs, figuring that the levain might be a total failure, but even if it succeeded, the 14 people attending that night's dinner would probably be able to keep up with the eating.

Of course, I only thought about the levain when I got home from yoga at about 12:30. After a quick perusal of our cookbooks and some online sources, it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to be able even to approach orthodox levain methods since at the very latest I should have started to reactivate it the night before. Instead, I just decided to take what I vaguely remembered having read about levain some years before, and just run with it. What could happen?

It wouldn't have been your purist's levain in the best of timings. Levain is a wild-yeast method akin to sourdough. The classic French countryside technique, it involves keeping back some of the preceding week's batch of dough to start the next. Originally it would of course have been kept at room temperature, there not being any other temperature. All that fermentation gives you plenty to work with, keeps the wild yeasts alive in your kitchen. What appeals to me about levain over sourdough is that you don't have to keep refreshing the starter in a way that has always seemed rather wasteful to me (I should state upfront that I have never made proper sourdough yet, though I will get around to it eventually). Instead, you just take your preserved lump of dough, now incredibly stringy with gluten and very wet from all the reactions that have gone on during its resting time, and combine it fully into the new dough. Then before baking, you keep back a new piece, child of the current batch, for use next week.

That much I remember from my prior reading. Anyhow, now I was faced with a cold, stringy little lump of dough, which itself had been started with yeast, albeit slow-started with only a 1/4 teaspoon and left to itself to develop into a fully-raised dough. Nothing purist here, but in for a penny. I decided to help myself out a little, and make this dough in the same bowl I'd had the poolish for the squash dough in, so that the levain could get a little boost from the recent yeast activity still clinging to the sides of the unwashed bowl. I poured in a little water, and started to break up the levain in it with my fingers.

I had to start giggling for a bit, as it seemed like rather than levain, I was ending up with something else I had read about but never made - seitan (wheat gluten, the stuff Asian fake meat is often made of). You make it by developing strands of gluten and gradually washing the starch out of it till you're just left with pure strands of gluten. And that's what I had - stretchy strings of gluten that wouldn't dissolve but kept recoalescing in the water under my fingers. At least they were resilient!

After awhile it seemed I'd done all I could do, so I started stirring all purpose flour into the bowl, and made a little sponge that I left to activate for a bit, just to see whether anything was really going to happen at all in the midst of all this unorthodoxy.

While it was resting I made the dough for the squash bread. I mashed roasted kabocha squash into some yogourt, then stirred in the poolish and a bit more water, then some rye flour. All things considered, I would have liked to have given that sponge a few hours to get acquainted with itself, but instead I just gave it a few minutes and then stirred in all purpose flour until it was ready to be kneaded. After being dubious at first, I have become a total convert to Richard Bertinet's kneading method, described in detail in his book DOUGH: Simple Contemporary Bread. It's got great recipes and the design is lovely, but the best part is this method totally unlike any other I've seen described. The crucial parts are, don't flour the work surface, and rather than pressing and folding the dough over itself, you pull it away and toss it forward, so that you are always stretching the dough and encouraging its growth. There are moments where the dough seems impossibly sticky, but it has always come together for me in the end. I am sure I have been saved from many otherwise unforgivable bread mistakes by the way this knead builds cohesion and resilience in the dough.

Back to the levain, and to Bertinet's kneading again. The bubbles in the sponge showed that SOMETHING was working, and the kneading transformed my little brown blob into something that was clearly leavened bread dough. The gluten strands were short with a tendency to break at first, and the dough was definitely a bit stiffer than what I usually produce, but by the end of the kneading it was a creditable effort. Just a couple of hours to rise, and my lunchbreak.

By this time the fire was roaring, and the dough was ready for shaping. My squash dough became three loaves and 8 pizzette, the levain one loaf, 7 pizzette, and one little lump of dough back in the fridge to wait for next week's levain experiment. A la le Fromentier, beloved Montreal bakery, the squash dough was adorned with black sesame seeds, and one of the loaves got studded with pumpkin seeds. The levain stayed plain, and all the loaves were hidden under double layers of kitchen towel to rise.

Maman had requested pizzette to go along with the olives and other antipasti when everyone arrived, and overall I prefer pizza bianca so that's what we had. I plucked a handful of nearly everything in the herb garden (rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon, oregano - I left out the lavender; and some basil), chopped them and stirred them into olive oil, then rubbed the tops of the rolled out rounds of flatbread that had already risen for 30 minutes. I had intended to serve them with feta, but it had gone off, so it was just veggies. Some I made with cherry tomato halves, others with the rest of the roasted kabocha, and some with both.

We've lit the brick oven a few times, and I have made dough for it before but not actually presided over the baking. It was slightly stressful but also really fun, spinning the disks of dough about right next to the burning logs so as to brown them evenly, learning the best in-the-absence-of-a-peel technique, and leaping madly on the errant tomato halves that tried to bake solo. A few more sessions and I think I'll have it down.

I was a bit less successful with the loaves - I only managed to bake one in there around the roast pork, huge trays of roasted vegetables, whole kabocha squashes (for an amazing goat cheese, arugula and mint warm salad) and the tray of baked pears for dessert (served with the now-legendary homemade honey-thyme ice cream). That one loaf ended up with a carbonised exterior that I had to peel off. The bread inside was quite delicious though - moist, airy, well-structured, a lovely tan colour shot through with bright orange from the squash. We passed it around picking off pieces and the whole thing vanished before supper was properly begun. I baked the other three in the conventional oven, by which time they were a little overrisen and not at their best. The crust is more hard than crisp, but the dough structure in the levain is fantastic - well aerated and spongy. The taste is subtle but good - I'll have to see if later experiments can yield a more sourdoughy flavour. The squash bread is softer and a little sweeter and cries out to be made into a grilled sandwich.

All in all a good day's breadmaking - and with 14 of our extended family sitting down together outside in the obliging evening sunshine, with the wild gymnastic displays by my boy-cousins, my nieces' kindness in sharing their dinner with my recycled My Little Ponies and the poor, pork-smeared stuffed emu; with reading some books in the glider before dessert, and fighting my toddler niece for control of our shared dessert spoon (and saving the emu from chocolatey smears to match the pork ones) - a perfect Sunday evening.