NEAR EPHESUS IN SOUTHERN TURKEY, an old woman makes saç bread, thin oniony layers baked on a griddle that looks like an upside-down wok perched over an open fire. In Marrakesh in Morocco, a well-to-do lady rises at dawn to set the dough for the semolina bread she herself makes each day for an extended family that includes half a dozen servants. In the crowded alleys of the medieval souk in Fez, children balance on their heads wooden trays piled with pale, dimpled loaves of dough, on their way to the neighborhood baker. In Egypt, village women bake paper-thin flatbread, as they have for at least 5,000 years, by pressing it against the hot and gritty inside wall of a hand-built mud oven. In Southern Italy and in Greece, when the flames have died in the household oven and the walls are white with heat, housewives thrust in great round grainy loaves made weekly from wheat raised on terraces below the farmhouse and ground at the local mill. And in Naples and Nice and Marseilles, the pizzaiuoli work at a feverish pace, flipping flat round disks into domed ovens so hot they could fire pottery, so hot the pizza is done in two minutes flat.
You could spend a lifetime researching, cooking, and writing about all the different breads of the Mediterranean, and in the end you might feel you had only begun. In this part of the world, where the value and power of yeasted grain was probably first encountered and where bread has been such a vital element in the diet since the beginning of history, possibly even earlier, the variety of breads and yeasted products is amazing.
Ceres, in the old religion the goddess of grain and the harvest, retains her power as a symbol of sustenance and life. Bread was one of the holiest offerings solicited for the dead god-kings of Egypt (“thousands of bread and thousands of beer,” the ancient formulas intone), just as today it is raised to a sacrament in the Christian Mass. For the same reason, all over the Mediterranean the sacred loaves are baked and blessed each Friday at the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, and bread, or cake, broken and shared between bride and groom, is the symbol of a new beginning, a new family.
The reason is simple: bread is, for the people of the Mediterranean and their cultural descendants throughout the Western world, the fundamental food. In blessing it and sharing it we recognize, if only tangentially, our connection with each other, with our past as a community, and with the earth that offers us the grain from which we grind the flour to bake our daily bread.
There is a subtler reason at work as well. For in the action of yeast we perceive in a dramatic and immediate form the very beginnings of life itself. Yeast is nothing on its own, a lump of clayey matter or, for most of us today, dry granulated dust that lies inert in the palm of the hand. But mix it with warm water, stir it with ground grain—whether wheat, rye, or barley—knead it and coax it and set it to rest in a hospitable environment, and it begins to stir and grow and come alive. Then pop it into the hot womb of the oven, and it becomes something quite phenomenal, not only symbolic of life but life-giving matter, in and of itself. Food.
The King Arthur Flour Company in Norwich, Vermont, produces a variety of different flours, including all-purpose flour, bread flour, and artisanal bread flour, all of very high quality. These flours are widely available in stores throughout the Northeast of the United States as well as on the Internet (see www.kingarthurflour.com, an unusually informative and educational web site). Mostly I use King Arthur’s unbleached, unbromated all-purpose flour ground from hard red wheat from the western prairies; it is also available as a certified organic flour. The web site lists this flour as between 11.3 and 11.7 percent protein, which is excellent for bread making. Another of King Arthur’s flours that gives equally fine results is their “European-Style Artisan Bread Flour,” at 11.7 percent protein, made from a mixture of spring and winter wheats to mimic the flours used in traditional European hearth-style breads. Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is added to enhance yeast growth, but there’s also what the company calls “a hint of white whole wheat” in the mixture.
In the recipes that follow, I have given instructions for using active dry yeast, the granulated form that comes in little envelopes or is sold loose at health food stores.
But the most traditional and, in my opinion, the best leavening for bread dough is a piece of dough from an earlier baking that has been held back and kept in a cool place for at least 24 hours. You may be more familiar with the name sourdough for this process, although when properly maintained the dough should not really be sour at all but rather have the well-developed tang that all fermented foods, from wine to sauerkraut, derive from lactic fermentation. Sourdough is not unique to San Francisco or to Forty-Niners. Since baking began, it has been the most common way to preserve the leaven, in home kitchens as well as commercial bakeries, but since commercial yeasts became widely available, the traditional method has lapsed.
It is so very easy, however, that I urge it on anyone who intends to bake bread at least once every 10 days or so. Well do I remember, from what my children call those hippy-dippy days of yore, bakers who would proudly open a refrigerator to show you a jar of sourdough that they’d kept going for six years or more, a base of nearly solid library paste covered by a thin and yellowish liquid. Like much of what we did in those days, there was something more than a little murky and unseemly about it. There is no reason to go to such lengths, and it may help to get over that if you simply think of each baking as raising a sponge of flour, yeast, and water, then removing a cup of it and setting it aside in a covered glass jar for the next baking.
Some baking instructions will tell you to “feed” your sourdough starter, if you’re not able to use it every 10 days or so, with additional flour and water. The irresistible image that springs to mind is of some earnest yuppie on an extended business trip, clutching his jar of sourdough starter so he can feed it regularly while he’s away from home. Believe me, this is just too complicated. If you have to go away for a couple of weeks, for heaven’s sake, leave behind the sourdough starter or reserved dough or whatever you want to call it. If it isn’t any good when you get back, throw it out and start afresh. Life is too short to worry about things like that.
If you want to use the traditional method, start the following recipe. After the first rising, you will have what’s called the sponge. Before you add the barley, rye, or whole-wheat flour, remove a cup of the sponge, transfer it to a glass container (a mason jar is perfect), cover it, and store it in the refrigerator. (The country bread recipe, having had a cup of starter removed, will make a little less than usual, but that’s okay just this once.) The one important thing to remember about starter or reserved dough is that it will work best if it contains nothing but yeast, water, and unbleached all-purpose wheat flour. No eggs, butter, fats, milk, or anything of that ilk should be added to the sponge before the cup of reserved dough has been removed. The starter will keep for ten days. (If you want to keep it longer, you should feed it with equal quantities of unbleached all-purpose flour and tepid water, ½ cup of each. Let the starter come to room temperature, stir in the flour and water, then let it sit at room temperature for an hour or so before returning it to the refrigerator.)
When you want to use starter to make bread, take a cup of reserved dough out of the refrigerator and, using a spatula, scrape it into a bowl. (In cold weather, rinse the bowl with hot water before you add the dough. This will make a warmer, more comfortable environment for the starter.) Simply substitute the cup of starter for the yeast. (I know, this increases the overall quantity of the recipe, but believe me, it will all work out in the end.) Starter works best for true bread recipes rather than quick-rising flatbreads like Arab pita and Neapolitan pizza. But in the very best pizzerie of Naples, the traditional leavening to this day is a piece of dough held back from the day before.
You should feel free to experiment with the starter and with other aspects of bread making. Bread is about the most forgiving thing in the entire kitchen repertoire—even when something doesn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected, the smells that emanate from baking bread will convince anyone in sniffing range that wonderful things are happening.
Do keep in mind that with any bread or yeast dough, the balance between flour and liquid depends on a number of unpredictable variables, among them most particularly the humidity of the room in which you are working and the age and humidity of the flour. Don’t be bound by the quantities in the recipes that follow. If the dough seems very damp and squishy, add more flour; if, on the contrary, it seems dry, add more water. (One easy way to do this is simply to dip your hands in water as you knead—the slight amount of water added to the dough may be sufficient. Or you could spread a thin film of water on the bread board and knead that into the dough.)
If you work with a baking stone, which produces the best texture in breads and pizzas, note that you must put the cold stone in the cold oven, to avoid cracking the stone. Turn the oven on to the desired temperature and preheat for at least 30 minutes, even though the oven light goes off. The oven will have reached the desired temperature after 5 minutes or so, but it takes a lot longer to heat the stone thoroughly.