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.

 

Dear Elizabeth…

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I am so thrilled to be featured in Blurb’s “Behind the Book” feature today! How did it all begin? Long before I fed big groups of kids, I fed Elizabeth. She was the first in my family of recipe testers, and like all first babies she taught her mama as much as her mama taught her.

She taught me that I love to feed people. So much that when she went away to college and her baby brother had the nerve to show signs of growing up also, I knew I had to find more kids to feed – thus the Little Flour concept was born. But four years later, as her graduation neared, I found myself distracted again by a desire to feed Elizabeth. This summer my only daughter graduated from college and started cooking in her own kitchen. I had so many things I wanted to tell her as she began this new chapter of life. At first I just wanted to make sure she knew how to bake her own favorite cake. But soon there was more. I wanted her to know how to feed herself well, and I wanted her to know the joys of feeding others. I wanted her to know how to make the cakes and breads and pies that make her happy, but I also wanted her to know that happiness is about more than good food – that the people around her table are always more important than the food that’s on her table. I had recipes I wanted to share, for meals of course, but also for life.  I wanted her to start each new endeavor in the kitchen with good flour, but also with gratitude. So I’ve been cooking for her, testing recipes and remembering old favorites. And I’ve been writing for her too, reflecting not just on what to cook but why.

Dear Elizabeth is a love letter with recipes from one generation to the next. The book is equal parts cooking school, coffee date, and care package from home. Lessons cover the basics such as how to boil pasta or scramble an egg alongside reflections on the larger questions of cooking like why to make your own pie crust, where to find the best veggies, when to braise short ribs, what makes homemade bread so special, and who gets the last cookie. The more I wrote, the more I realized that I want all of our daughters (and sons too actually, though that’s the next book) to know these things. And that even those of us who’ve been cooking for decades need to be reminded why we do it every so often.  So with Elizabeth’s encouragement and assistance with final edits, the book is now available for everyone, right here for the softcover kitchen edition, or here for the hardcover gift edition. For graduates and mothers of graduates and everyone in between that wants to feed herself and others with joy. And yes, chapters on baking include gorgeous step by step photography (thanks mom!) that will guide readers through the bread, pie and scone recipes that are the heart of Little Flour Microbakery. I hope this is just another way to encourage you to bake and share with those you love!

 

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.

Gratitude

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This might be the best tasting bread that ever came out of our kitchen. If Peter Reinhart calls it “my all time favorite bread” you know it must be good.  Check out the swirls of cinnamon in that beautiful raisin bread dough. The recipe includes quite a list of grains: polenta, oats, wheat germ, wheat flour, brown rice. And if you read the story of the bread, you know that it was meant to be made for today, September 29, Michaelmas. It is a harvest bread, celebrating the many grains of the harvest. But it celebrates more than that.  The original blessing of the bread starts with this wonderful language “each meal beneath my roof, they will all be mixed together…” That language struck me as I mixed together all of those grains this morning.  Every grain, every meal, every person with whom we break bread-they all get mixed together into the fabric of our loaves and the fabric of our lives.  As I kneaded the dough I was grateful for all of them. As I rolled it out I realized that each grain had its own shape and texture, but they were all necessary to get the perfect dough. It made me think about all the things that make us each unique, and the ways that we are so much better when we come together. So I am grateful tonight. For the smell of cinnamon lingering in my kitchen. For warm bread and butter with my son after school. For the family and friends I break bread with almost every day. For the kids I bake with on Friday afternoons. For the supporters who buy our breads and donate funds to keep our programs running.  They are all part of the Little Flour mix, just like all the grains that go into the Struan. So while the Struan recipe is perfect exactly as written, I think part of what made it taste so good today was the gratitude that went into it. Its another one of those intangible ingredients that make all the difference in baking. Try it yourself and see what you think.

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Why Bread?

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Bread is not fast. Invariably someone will point this out when I talk about baking classes for hungry kids. The ingredients are simple and readily available on almost any budget: flour and water, salt and yeast.  Even the yeast is optional when bread is naturally leavened like the sourdough baguettes we love on weekend nights around here. But bread requires time. And in today’s world time often seems like the costliest ingredient.  You have to mix those few ingredients and then let them rest. This is the critical “autolyse” during which the flour absorbs the water. Then a bit of salt gets added and more time is required for kneading.  Since both hands are required the baker can’t do anything but knead and think about the the dough transforming in her hands. It’s a time to think about the the people that will eat the bread, too, and about the ways they might be nourished and transformed by the meal.  Then the dough rests again. The dough is much better if the baker lets it rest for a while and then folds it gently to develop the gluten. And it’s made better still if she does this several times over the course of the afternoon. That means staying close to the bowl of dough, watching its temperature and feeling the texture change. Rest. Rise. Shape. Wait. More time. More attention. Bread is more than the sum of its simple ingredients, it is a gift of time. A gift of self. There are faster ways to get people fed, but few send the same message.  A loaf of bread made by hand says something powerful. To break that bread and hand it to someone to eat is to hand them a bit of yourself.  It means you cared enough to spend a day thinking about them, that you were willing to spend some time on them, that you want them to be well fed on the journey. And when you bake bread with someone, and break bread with someone, you build a relationship that can only come with time. Those relationships are as nourishing as the bread itself. So yes, we could teach kids to make a faster meal, and in fact we often do, but the weeks when we bake bread together are the weeks that feel special. Time may be a costly ingredient these days, but it’s also the one that changes things.

Oven Spring

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IMG_6939Bakers talk about something called “oven spring.” It happens not long after the dough goes into the oven, when the internal temperature of the loaves reaches around one hundred degrees.  Jeffrey Hamelman in his book called Bread explains that there is a “rapid increase in yeast fermentation and an increase in enzymatic activity” at this temperature.  Basically the starch is swelling and gasses are being produced and all of these things cause the bread to puff up, or “spring.” If no one has ever explained the chemistry of it all, it can appear pretty magical. This week I got to explain the process to a group of kids at our local drop in center for homeless and food insecure youth. While I was teaching them about the bread breaking process, I learned something myself. The kids and the bread dough are a lot alike. They are in a process of transformation. And during times of transformation some patience is required. The hardest part of teaching bread baking classes to kids, compared to teaching kids to make cookies or pancakes or pasta, is the waiting. We had a lot of fun measuring and mixing and kneading.  No one had seen a dough whisk before. We learned the right way to measure flour. Kids lined the countertops kneading their bowls of dough. There was laughter and chatter and story sharing. One wants to be a baker. One had a grandma that made cinnamon rolls this way. One asks for an apron to keep the flour off his pants for a job interview. The bowls of dough were lined up and covered and admired by the staff, but then came the hard part. The waiting. Oven spring doesn’t just require a warm oven, it requires dough that has been able to rest and to rise. Kids are like that too. These kids don’t like it when you call them homeless. For them, homelessness is a situation but not an identity. It is something they are going through, but it is not who they are. We teach them to bake because someday they will have homes and kitchens and kids of their own to feed. It just takes a little time. A safe place to rest overnight and the right environment to help them spring. I’m glad to be baking in place where the bread isn’t the only thing rising.

Birthday Cake

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Cakes are special. Every birthday, every celebration ends with something sweet, a cake, and people remember. It’s all about the memories. -Buddy Valestro

Around here our birthday cakes tend to be a little less fussy than what you can find in a “real” bakery. I’d rather tackle wild yeast than buttercream any day. The cake in the oven today is the fantastically simple strawberry summer cake from Smitten Kitchen.  Loaded with fresh strawberries and barley flour, it smells like a strawberry patch in the oven, just as the recipe promises. But it smells like more than that to me. To me, a cake in the oven is the smell of birthdays. And of children’s wishes being made real. When you ask for strawberry cake, you get strawberry cake. There is no greater joy than being the one who gets to bake the cakes of childhood. My mom made one with peaches for my sister and me growing up.  My son prefers chocolate cream “birthday pie” instead of cake, with a double thick graham cracker crust and homemade whipped cream. For my daughter it’s an apple cake loaded with cinnamon, although I once sent a carrot cake through airport security when that was what she craved her first year at college. At the drop in center we bake for, there is a monthly party where kids get to pick their own decorations. But it’s not really about the decorations that go on top, or even so much about what flavors the batter on the inside. The essential ingredient for a good birthday cake is love. Thats what makes the memories sweet.

What is a microbakery?

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Little Flour is a quirky midwestern microbakery. That means we aren’t trying to bake a lot of bread for a lot of people. We’re just doing our own small thing with a lot of love. Breakfast toast. Cookies that don’t come from a box. Sourdough baguettes fresh from the oven on Friday night. Breads and sweets that make people healthy and happy. We offer “Flour Baskets” filled with a week’s worth of toasting bread and baguettes and treats to our subscribers on Friday afternoons.  We bake for drop in centers and shelters where people are hungry not just for good homemade bread, but also for the hope and joy that bread can bring when shared around a table. We bake occassionally as a “pop-up” fundraiser for those organizations working to end hunger in our little corner of the world.  We teach bread baking and basic cooking skills to a lot of the folks we meet along the way, and wherever possible adovocate on behalf of the hungry and those who seek to feed them well. This site is a place for our supporters to find out what we are baking for our pop-up bake sales and Flour Baskets. And it is a response to requests that we share some of our recipes so they can be recreated at home and shared by others. Along the way we might talk about what inspires us. It’s a love of cooking to be sure. And eating. But it’s mostly about feeding. Feeding the people gathered around our own tables and around tables throughout our community. If you stumbled upon us from another neighborhoood, welcome. We hope something you find here might inspire you to bake a little extra this week and share it with someone near you.

Update 9/8/15: The subscription list for the 2015-2016 season is now full, but please stay in touch for information on pop-up bake sales!  Thanks to our loyal subscribers for funding a full school year of baking classes for hungry kids!

Extra Baguette

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IMG_7992This week the Flour Boxes were custom ordered for a very special birthday celebration and included half size baguettes which were adorable.  When we looked around the kitchen this morning we found one that had been left behind on accident.  What to do? We sliced it, toasted it, and topped it with treasures from our local farmer’s market that is now open for the summer: fresh tomato, eggs, zephyr squash and basil mixed with fresh dill, chives and lemon thyme from our own kitchen garden.  The perfect way to relax after a busy weekend in the bakery.  We are so inspired that subscribers may find baby tomato and herb plants in their deliveries next week!