Community Pizza

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When I first began dreaming of the School of Cooking and Sharing, I knew that our first offering would be a community pizza night. Pizza is the perfect way to begin baking. It is a relatively easy yeasted dough, has a very flexible timeline, and is incredibly forgiving. After all, at the end of the day there is melted cheese on hot bread so you can’t go wrong. Better yet, it is a bread meant for sharing. Anytime there is pizza, there is a party. It is food for gathering around the table, eating with your hands, telling stories and laughing. Teaching people to make pizza at home isn’t just about building a dough – it’s about building a community. I’ve seen this over and over again when I have taught private “pizza for happy hour” classes in the homes of donors, led after-school healthy pizza baking programs for hungry kids, hosted pizza baking parties at the local drop-in center for homeless teens, or grilled pizza in my own backyard with friends and family. One of my favorite things that happens after I’ve taught a class on pizza baking is when my phone lights up the next weekend with pictures of people baking pizza at home for the first time – they are never alone! That’s why over time I have come to think of this recipe as a recipe not just for pizza, but for “community pizza.” I’ve had requests for step by step directions with photos to show what the dough “should” look like at each stage. This past weekend I had some very special pizza chef hand models in town and I can assure you that their results were as delicious as they are beautiful! Each step is important, but as you will see below the timeline is incredibly flexible. You can make crust this afternoon to bake this evening, or you can make crust this evening to bake next week. It’s up to you and your schedule. Just don’t forget that community pizza is as much about the people eating your pizza as it is the pizza itself!

STEP ONE: GATHER

Ingredients for pizza dough are simple so quality matters. I use King Arthur Flour in all my classes because the quality of the flour is consistent and because I know that the company and the people that work there are committed to using their resources to help end childhood hunger. Many of our kid’s baking programs here in St. Louis are possible because of King Arthur’s generous donations of flour, recipe books, and resources. For this recipe you will want their White Whole Wheat Flour (a great way to incorporate more healthy whole grains into all your baked goods) and their higher protein Bread Flour. You will also want yeast (my favorite is SAF), salt and a little bit of olive oil. That’s it! Infused oils like garlic, basil or rosemary can make your dough even more delicious. Play around with the flavor and develop your own “signature” recipe!

While you are gathering your ingredients, don’t forget to gather your friends as well. Call your community and let them know there is a pizza party in the works. One of my favorite things to do is make a few batches of dough in advance and then top and bake the pizzas with friends on a Friday night, but you can make your own pizza community any time of the week.

STEP TWO: BLOOM

Because yeast is alive we want to make sure that it is warm, well-fed, and happy so that it can do what it’s meant to do. Isn’t that what we want for everything that’s alive? When we buy dry yeast it is in a dormant state and we need to wake it up gently. Start by putting 1 3/4 cups of warm water into a bowl. People always ask, how warm? Remember that yeast is alive, so make it a comfortable temperature, like a warm bath. Too cold and it won’t grow, too hot and you can kill it.

Next add 2 1/4 teaspoons of yeast (that’s a packet if you are using packets) and 2 1/4 teaspoons of brown sugar. Whisk them together and let the yeast get warm and eat the sugar to come to life….

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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.

 

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.

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.

Baking Classes for Hungry Kids

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All of the money raised by Little Flour bake sales and classes supports baking classes for food insecure kids in St. Louis.  Originally, most of these classes took place on Friday afternoons at the Drop In Center funded by Epworth Children and Family Services. Today that program has expanded well beyond my original baking program, and you might find me baking and teaching in any number of schools around St. Louis as a baking instructor for Operation Food Search’s nutrition education program. Whole grain baking classes are my favorite, with King Arthur Flour’s Kid’s Learn Bake & Share Blueberry Muffin recipe and my own pizza recipe competing in popularity!

But the Drop-In Center always holds a special place in my heart. The Center is located in the Normandy School District where thirty percent of kids are functionally homeless and many are “food insecure,” which means they live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis and as a result they struggle with hunger. In this environment it is critical to feed kids, and to feed them well. “Hot Food Friday,” as the program has been lovingly nicknamed by the kids, makes sure that everyone who walks in the door gets a hot, nutritious meal. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, protein.  Its all there, and that meal matters, especially on a Friday afternoon when some kids will have even more limited access to food over the weekend. But the program is not just about feeding kids, its about empowering kids to feed themselves and their community-and to do it well. We don’t just feed kids, we teach them about nutrition and cooking and making good decisions about how to nourish themselves as they grow into self sustaining adults. Kids in our cooking classes make the meals for the larger community at the Drop In Center and get to share in the joy of cooking for someone else who is hungry.

One young chef at the Drop In Center told me that the part of the class he loves the most is watching the looks on the faces of the other kids when they see what we made for lunch that day. I’ve heard kids say the same thing over and over again in every environment. There is joy in eating but also in feeding, in being a part of a community and sharing what you’ve made with your own hands.  That’s why I think sharing is the final and most important step of baking, no matter where I am teaching!