Sharing Bread

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For everyone missing the breaking of bread in community this month, I’ve simplified my sharing bread recipe to make two small loaves you can bake at home. Even if we can’t be together physically, we can be together in the breaking of bread…

Step One: Gather

The first step is to gather your intentions and your ingredients. This sharing bread recipe makes two loaves, one for you and one to share (even if that sharing is virtual this week). You will need water, yeast, sugar or honey, about three cups of flour, salt and, (if you prefer raisin bread) a cup of raisins soaked in warm water. No yeast in the house? Try the no yeast pizza crust or biscuit recipes at the bottom of this page!

Step Two: Bloom

Yeast is a critical element in bread baking, so be sure your yeast is alive and ready to make bread. Pour a cup and a half of warm (bath temperature) water into a bowl and add 1.5 teaspoons of yeast and a teaspoon of honey or sugar. If you are using raisins, use the soaking water (plus enough extra to equal 1.5 cups) to add extra flavor and omit the sugar. Whisk the yeast and water together and wait a few minutes. While you wait, think about the people that will eat your bread. Say a prayer for them. Remember that baking is never just about bread, it is always about community. When the yeast bubbles and becomes foamy, it has “bloomed” and is ready for baking.

Step Three: Mix

Add the flour to the yeast mixture a bit at a time and stir with a wooden spoon or a dough whisk until a shaggy dough forms. This may take more or less flour depending on the type of flour you are using and the humidity in your kitchen. What kind of flour should you use? In an ideal world I like to use King Arthur Organic Bread Flour if I’m shopping at a grocery store or the fresh milled flours from Janie’s Mill (these amazing women are still filling online orders!), but you can use any flour you have on hand. This is a simple recipe and anything will work! The dough does not need to be smooth at this point, you just want to make sure there are no dry bits of flour.

Here is what a shaggy dough looks like with the salt sprinkled on top!

Before adding the salt, you want to give your dough a bit of a break – just ten or fifteen minutes. This break is called the autolyse, and it gives the flour time to absorb the water before the salt is added. Absorb something good yourself during the break, a book of poetry (Mary Oliver’s Devotions is my favorite) or your favorite passage of scripture are great choices. Then sprinkle two teaspoons of kosher salt (cut to 1.5 teaspoons if you are using table salt) on top of your dough and get ready to knead!

Step Four: Knead

Sprinkle a bit of flour on your clean counter then dump the dough out and begin to knead. Use the palm of your lightly floured hand to push the dough away from you, then fold it back toward yourself and do it again. Sprinkle with a bit more flour if the dough is too sticky. If you are adding raisins, this is the time to knead them into the dough. Knead until the salt is completely absorbed and the dough begins to feel smooth. You want it to be just a bit sticky to the touch, like a post-it note.

Step Five: Rest

Put the dough back in the bowl and cover with plastic wrap and a clean towel. Let it rest for about three hours, folding it over itself every thirty minutes or so for the first hour and a half (three folds total) to strengthen the dough.

This is what it looks like to fold the dough, just scoop it up from the bottom and fold it over itself from each side of the bowl.

This does not need to be done on a perfect schedule. Walk the dog. Read a book. Take a nap. The yeast is doing most of the work for you at this point, and with each period of resting and folding you will see the dough rise and transform. After a few hours, the dough should be puffy and smooth and about double its original size. This will happen faster on a warm day and slower on a cool one. Enjoy a bit of sabbath time for yourself while the dough rests.

Step Six: Deflate

Put the dough back on your floured counter and gently deflate it. Tuck in any stray raisins that fell out. Dough does not need to be “punched down” any more than people do. Bread baking is a peaceful practice! Use a gentle touch to push out some of the air, but don’t completely flatten the dough. This reorganizes the yeast in the dough so that it can access the sugars in the dough and rise again. It makes the taste and texture of the final loaf more complex.

Step Seven: Divide

Divide the dough in half and shape each half into a loose ball. This is how we prepare to share our bread, by dividing the dough in half right now. Normally I say that one loaf is to keep and one is to give away. In this time of social distancing, you might freeze this second loaf and instead consider making a donation to Haven Street as a way of sharing your bread. Let the dough rest for about five minutes and take that time to say a prayer for the person who will receive your gift.

Step Eight: Shape

Shape each piece of dough into a tight ball. The easiest way to do this is to gather the dough with both (lightly floured) hands and rotate it on the counter while squeezing it together on the bottom. The goal is to create a nice smooth surface with some tension. Pinch together the seams on the bottom to seal the ball, then place each one seam side up in a floured bowl or bread basket (a banneton in baker’s lingo – but a plain bowl works just great!). Cover with oiled plastic wrap and the clean towel again.

Step Nine: Proof

This is when the loaves proof. They literally prove that they are alive by rising, but this requires one of the most essential ingredients in bread baking: time! Give the dough about an hour to get puffy again, but don’t wait for it to double in size. While the dough is proofing, you need to create the right environment for it to bake. A hot oven is what makes the dough “spring” and rise. Pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees and get ready to bake. If you have a pizza stone or a dutch oven (with the lid), you can put it in the oven to preheat, as either of these will hold heat and help the dough rise, but if you don’t have one of these a plain cookie sheet will work almost as well.

Step Ten: Bake

Just before baking, dust the top of each loaf with a bit of flour and slash it with scissors or a sharp knife to make three or four cuts about a quarter of an inch deep. These cuts give some direction to the dough as it springs in the oven. Over time, the way you choose to design these slashes will become your own baker’s signature, but as a starting point three straight lines work just fine. Carefully slide the dough onto your pizza stone or into your dutch oven if you have preheated those, or place it in the oven on a cookie sheet. Drop your oven temperature down to 400. If you are using a dutch oven, leave the lid on for the first 20 minutes of baking to help brown the loaf and make the crust crispy. Total baking time varies by oven – no oven holds heat the same way – so start checking your loaf after about 25 minutes. It should be dark brown and sound hollow when you tap it on the bottom.

Step Eleven: Cool

When the bread has baked, remove it carefully from the hot oven and put it on a wire rack to cool. Some patience is required at this point. Hot bread smells like heaven when you take it from the oven, but if you cut into it too soon it will be gummy on the inside. Let it rest on the cooling rack at least an hour until it is warm, but not too hot to hold comfortably in your hands.

Step Twelve: Share

This is the best part. Take. Thank. Break. Share. If you are breaking your bread as part of a Love Feast during Holy Week, this order for eating bread will sound very familiar to you. Take the bread as the blessing that it is. Give thanks to the creator of all good things; for the wheat, the farmer, the miller, the delivery person who brought your groceries, the people at your table. Break the bread with your hands. Then share it. Gather your family, say a prayer of gratitude, break that beautiful loaf (and if it isn’t so beautiful, don’t worry, no one will notice once it’s broken!), and share it with your companions on the journey. It is all of these steps together that make the baking and breaking of bread a spiritual practice in so many traditions of faith. I cherish my own tradition’s way of defining community as people that break bread together from house to house, eating their food with glad and generous hearts.

Whatever your tradition, and wherever you are this week, may you bake, break and share your bread with glad and generous hearts…

No Yeast Pizza for Young Chefs

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This is an incredibly easy recipe to make when you either don’t have yeast on hand or don’t have time for a yeasted dough. It is one of my favorites for after school baking classes because of the speed and ease. It is a can’t fail kid pleasing afternoon activity!

Magical Pizza Crust
 
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Super easy pizza crust for young chefs that requires no rising time!
Author:
Recipe type: Kids Whole Grains
Cuisine: Casual
Serves: 2 personal pizzas
Ingredients
  • 1.5 cups King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour or Bob's Red Mill Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
  • 1.5 tsp baking powder
  • ¾ tsp salt
  • 1 cup whole fat Greek yogurt
  • pizza toppings
Instructions
  1. Create a whole grain crust mix by blending the flour, baking powder, and salt. This can be stored in the refrigerator for several weeks.
  2. Preheat oven to 450 with a pizza stone if available.
  3. Mix 1.5 cups of the flour mixture with 1 cup of full fat Greek yogurt and stir just to blend.
  4. Dump the dough out onto a clean counter and knead a few times to make a cohesive dough ball.
  5. Divide the dough ball in half.
  6. Press each half onto a sheet of parchment paper into the pizza shape of your choice.
  7. Top lightly with olive oil, pesto, tomato sauce, fresh veggies (kale, peppers, broccolini, squash), meat, cheese, etc.
  8. Slide the parchment paper onto the hot stone and bake about ten minutes until crust is brown and crispy at the edges and toppings are melted.

 

No Yeast Cheesy Biscuits with Fresh Herbs

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We are so excited to be working on some kid’s baking recipes along with our friends from Operation Food Search here in St. Louis.  This week we had a bounty of fresh herbs donated from a local community garden and the kids loved these fantastic biscuits that are loosely based on a recipe from King Arthur’s Flourish blog.  Talk about easy, with only three real ingredients in the original recipe: flour, cheese and milk! In keeping with our passion for whole grains we did swap in some great sprouted whole wheat flour, and of course some of the fresh herbs from the garden, but feel free to use 2 cups of any self-rising flour you have on hand or make your own by mixing 2 cups less 2 tablespoons regular or white whole wheat flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt. I hope you enjoy them as much as we did…

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The Power of Small Changes

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I work a lot with hungry and homeless kids, so there is naturally a desire to see big changes in their lives quickly. This weekend, though, I was reminded that there is a lot of power in small changes, too. Thanks to the Bread Baker’s Guild of America, I had an incredible opportunity to study the Science of Sourdough with Karen Bornarth (from the amazing Hot Bread Kitchen) and Debra Wink (a microbiologist and baker whose writings I have admired on The Fresh Loaf) at Companion Baking Company’s Teaching Kitchen here in St. Louis. We learned about metabolic pathways, which map the step by step transformations that allow an organism to turn one thing into another through chemical changes over time. I will admit that I did not completely master the chemistry of heterolactic fermentation and five carbon (or was it six carbon?) sugars, but I did get this: the changes are incremental and small things make a big difference. Karen and Debra pointed out again and again that adding a bit more water, a pinch of salt, a degree of temperature or an hour of time changes the nature of our treasured sourdough starters.

Where the sourdough starter is from does not matter nearly as much as how that starter is treated. The sourdough starter in my bakery originated in the bakery at King Arthur Flour, but now, ten years later, it’s chemistry is more about how it has been treated in my kitchen than how it began in theirs. My starter lives in the refrigerator during the week, and comes back to life through a series of feedings at room temperature on the weekends. Even though I bake with whole grains, I feed my starter with bread flour. I keep it liquid, at about 125% hydration, and never add salt, though I now understand why that would change things a bit too. A couple years ago, the quality of my starter was radically improved when James MacGuire kindly insisted that I never “put it to bed hungry” after a weekend of baking, but instead feed it right before I put it back into the refrigerator for the week. Adding 50 grams of flour to the 600 grams of starter I “put to bed” each Sunday night helps it wake up ready to go to work again on Friday mornings.

The Science of Sourdough helped me to understand why. Every starter has a lag phase as it begins to wake up after a feeding, a growth phase when the population increases, and a stationary phase when it rests again. As long as we feed our starters regularly they should never enter the dreaded “death phase.” Debra pointed out that starters go into the resting phase to conserve their energy, and the longer the starter rests -the longer it has to shut down in between feedings – the longer it takes to wake up and get back to the business of growing. This is where small changes can make a big difference. Feeding my starter one more time after baking for the weekend helps it to wake up stronger. Warming it up on Friday afternoons helps it come back to life faster. The bread flour feeding favors the yeast production that helps my bread lift, while the higher hydration favors the lactic acid production that adds the distinctive sourdough taste. Everything is a balance. There are a myriad of known and unknown factors that influence the taste and performance of each baker’s starter, and each one of them matters. That’s why every starter is unique, regardless of it’s point of origin.

I think kids are the same. There are a myriad of known and unknown factors that influence them and make them unique. How we feed them matters. It changes them. Food. Time. A warm place to rest and grow. These are not small things. They have the power to change people just as powerfully as they change bread. I think that’s what I love about baking and sharing – small changes can be transformative. As we learned this weekend, “the living element is very dynamic, and you have far more power to influence it than you may realize.” Many thanks to Debra and Karen for helping me to understand why.

 

Flexible Fruit Crisp

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I’m so excited to be a guest culinary instructor at Operation Food Search‘s Dining On A Dime event this week. I was invited to make a whole grain dessert that highlights a dish the kids in our Cooking Matters classes enjoy that is healthy, budget friendly and uses only simple tools and methods. This flexible fruit crip is perfect! It showcases whatever fruit is in season (or available frozen) which means it tastes great and the cost stays reasonable. It uses white whole wheat flour only so it is healthy without a long list of expensive grains or flours that aren’t likely to be used in other recipes. And it can be mixed up in one bowl and baked in a toaster oven! Best of all, the girls in my after school baking classes have loved it.

Flexible Fruit Crisp
 
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This kid friendly fruit crisp is made from whole grains and is delicious with any fruit you have available!
Author:
Recipe type: Dessert
Serves: 10 servings
Ingredients
  • Filling:
  • 8 cups sliced apples (or peaches, plums, nectarines, blueberries, blackberries, etc. A mixture of fruits works great, as does frozen fruit)
  • ½ cup brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons white whole wheat flour
  • 1 tablespoon cinnamon (or baking spice, apple pie spice, etc.)
  • Topping:
  • ¾ cup brown sugar
  • ¾ cup white whole wheat flour (or any whole grain flour such as oat or barley flour)
  • ½ cup rolled oats
  • ½ cup chopped nuts (pecans or walnuts, etc. or just substitute with rolled oats!)
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 1½ teaspoon cinnamon (or baking spice, apple pie spice, etc.)
  • ½ cup (1 stick) softened butter
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven or toaster oven to 350.
  2. Mix the fruit, ½ cup brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour and 1 tablespoon of spice together in a bowl.
  3. Pour the fruit into a deep dish pie plate, or similar sized baking dish of any sort.
  4. In the same bowl, mix together all the topping ingredients except the butter.
  5. Cut the butter into small pieces and drop it into the bowl.
  6. Using your clean fingers (this is the fun part!) work the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture is crumbly with no large chunks of butter remaining.
  7. Pour the topping over the fruit and spread it around. It doesn't need to be perfect.
  8. Bake about forty minutes until the fruit bubbles and the top is golden brown.

 

Sprouted Whole Wheat Pumpkin Ravioli

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I always cherish this last month of Farmer’s Markets here in St. Louis, especially when fall has been warm and there are still plenty of herbs growing in my own garden to enjoy alongside the apples and pumpkins from local farmers. The smell of apples and pumpkins roasting in the oven signals the beginning of a cozy time of year in the kitchen. I find myself preserving the bounty of the season by stockpiling apple butter and roasted pumpkin to bake with later in the winter when the market has closed for the year. The earlier it gets dark, the earlier we find ourselves gathered together in the evenings – and I find myself more willing to take some extra time with everyday meals for friends and family. Last week, I roasted half a dozen sugar pie pumpkins from the market to use for pumpkin pies and my favorite sprouted pumpkin oat bread, but I also tried a new strategy and roasted a few of them with cloves of garlic, fresh sage and rosemary in the cavity for a more savory flavor. The results have been fantastic in soups, savory pumpkin sourdough loaves for the bakery, and as a filling for whole grain pastas. I’ve sometimes struggled to get the perfect texture for whole grain pasta but this fall King Arthur Flour released a recipe using their new sprouted whole wheat flour. I’ve been a fan of sprouted whole wheat flour for some time, but had never tried it in pasta. The results are fantastic, and pair wonderfully with savory pumpkin and local goat cheese for ravioli or lasagna. …

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Transformation

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RKXP8526Bread is a constant lesson on transformation, and this month I’ve learned a lot. I had an opportunity to study the classic French breads (miche, pain au levain, and baguette) with expert bakers and teachers Jeffrey Hamelman and James MacGuire last week. These are breads that require some time and practice, but have very few ingredients. As a result, how you treat the ingredients makes a huge difference. The levain (or sourdough starter) needs to be fed regularly and kept at a comfortable temperature to keep the yeast and the acid in balance. The flour and water need to be mixed gently to preserve the color and flavor the grain.  The dough needs to rest long enough to develop flavor and structure. It needs to be shaped with intention and baked under the watchful eye of someone who recognizes how it should smell, sound and feel when it comes out of the oven. Ultimately, when you take care of your dough those simple ingredients become something new. Each of the baguettes in the pictures above contained the same basic ingredients, but how they were mixed, folded, rested and baked made them each different. Flour, water, salt and yeast alone are not foods we can live on, but combine them and care for them and they can become an endless variety of bread. To study the history of bread is to study the history of human community, because bread requires community just as much as a community requires bread. …

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Fougasse: Bread from the Heart

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IMG_9870I’ve been experimenting this week with fougasse for Valentine’s day in hopes of sharing some loaves with supporters this week. It’s a beautiful bread. A mix of sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts in the dough, and a very slow rise in my frigid mid-western kitchen created a bread that was just barely pink and tasted heavenly with a soft cheese and champagne. It’s a perfect Valentine’s treat. Sadly, it just doesn’t seem to do well after it leaves the kitchen, and I gave up on the idea of a fougasse bake sale this year. Fougasse is meant to be eaten fresh from the oven.Stretched thin to make the Valentine’s heart shape, this bread is almost all crust. It’s cracker like where the dough is most thin, but dense and chewy inside the thicker parts. Right out of the oven it is unbeatable, but it doesn’t travel well. The same crust to crumb ratio that makes it so delicious also makes it short lived. Fougasse is, after all, a hearth bread. Once made to test the heat of the hearth (an experienced baker would know how hot the fire was by how quickly the thin loaf baked), it’s still best when eaten close to the hearth where it was baked. In honor of that heritage, it’s traditionally shaped to resemble a flame. But since the hearth has always been regarded as the heart of the home, I think the less traditional heart shape makes sense too. And I guess it also makes sense that my favorite Valentine’s bread is meant to be eaten at home. It’s truly a bread of the heart, meant be shared close to home with people we love, and if we are lucky (and I am) that is often where our biggest supporters can be found anyway.

 

Baking & Breaking Bread

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It’s a snow day here in Missouri, and I’m making a huge batch of breakfast toasting bread to celebrate. Like most of our bakery breads it’s made very slowly, folding the dough every thirty minutes or so throughout the morning. The best thing about this particular bread, and the thing that makes it a universal favorite, is the way the dates gradually melt into the dough with each fold. As I developed the recipe last year, I kept adding more and more dates with each variation until my mom took a bite and declared it perfect. I wrote down the amount of dates (and raisins and nuts and berries) and declared it the perfect breakfast toast formula to anchor the Little Flour weekend menu. Then I promptly made the recipe again and added more dates. After all, if 100 grams of dates are perfect, wouldn’t 125 grams be even more perfect? The answer is no. At some point, too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing.

I am reminded of that this morning as I knead the dates into the dough (the trick is to do this after a nice autolyse allows the two types of flour to absorb all the water making the dough easier to work with) and then tuck it back into a warm bowl to rest. This seems to be the time of year when we all think about what to change, how to grow, or who to be in the new year. Too often, for me, this had led to a temptation to add “more” of whatever is good in my life. More dates to the bread dough. More breads on the menu. More ovens in the kitchen. More classes on the calendar. All good stuff, but adding too much can be, well, too much.

I got to spend a week at King Arthur’s Baking School in Vermont last summer with a dozen great bakers from all around the world who were considering ways to start new bakeries or expand small bakeries into larger ones. The class was taught by Jeffrey Hamelman, who is the Director of King Arthur’s gorgeous bakery. What I remember most, and what I am pondering again this morning as I work with my breakfast bread dough, is that he did not start the class with a list of ways to grow a bakery. Instead, he started with a list of questions about why we wanted to do that. What is the thing you most want to do, he asked. And if you are doing it well as a small bakery, what makes you think that doing it bigger is a good idea? What are your motives? What are your resources? Who do you really want to feed? What makes you unique? After answering these questions, he stressed, the key to success might have nothing to do with getting bigger. I learned a lot about how to run a bigger bakery, and my respect for those that do it grew every day. I continue to be fascinated by big, beautiful bakeries. But my honest answers reavealed that I like my small bakery. A few breads a few days a week. Enough time left over to focus on the community that eats the bread after it comes out of the oven. Because for me, baking is about community. And the bakery is as much about the good breaking of bread as it is about the baking of good bread.

So it will be another small year here at Little Flour. Some baking. Some teaching. Some speaking and advocating about ways to end hunger here in our community. And some time to enjoy breakfast toast with just the right amount of dates, not too many and not too few, as the snow falls outside my kitchen windows.

Holding it all together

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IMG_8986My gingerbread house post yesterday failed to give an icing recipe to hold those houses together. Gingerbread houses aren’t the only thing that can be hard to hold together this time of year, and you need to know what works for you. I’ve found that a little bit of quiet time each week helps me hold it together, and most weeks I start my Monday morning alone in a coffee shop with a frothy coffee (St. Louis has a lot of great independent coffee shops and bakeries where you can still get coffee in a real mug and beautiful pastry made by hand) and some time to reflect and make decisions about how I want to spend my time that week. Often the thing that appears to be the most urgent at first glance is really not the most important thing upon reflection. The retail world may think shopping is urgent right now, but this week I decided to make gingerbread houses for the kids in my life. It’s an important tradition for us, and one that holds us together as a family from year to year. My daughter gave me the best gift of the season when she came home and decorated one for my kitchen, and I’ve loved creating the Little Flour gingerbread house kits so that other kids can share in the fun. When it comes to gingerbread houses, as my friend Emily pointed out yesterday, you really do need a good icing to hold it all together. Here is the recipe I have found does the job the best…

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