Our Daily Bread

"Our Daily Bread . . . " The phrase is so familiar that we hardly think about it. All things having to do with bread are tangled up in the deepest symbols and myths of our culture: the wheat, the harvest, milling the grain, mixing, kneading, leavening, baking, breaking, cutting, sharing, eating . . . all have profound significance reflected in all religious traditions, mysticism and art.

Soft, white, pre-sliced plastic-wrapped supermarket bread delivered daily to the supermarket might not be particularly evocative. But fragrant, crusty brown loaves hot from the kitchen oven? That's guaranteed to evoke salivation if nothing else. So let's talk about that.

My recipe here for Daily Bread combines whole grain spelt with white flour. Gasp! White flour? Isn't that anathema?

Well, yes, to a point. And the point is to produce a light, tender crumb, i.e., the inner texture of the loaf. Tender and light simply do not happen with 100% whole grains. (If you have recipes to disprove that statement, I'm willing to experiment.) But honestly, have you seen the worn-down nubs of teeth in the skulls of iron-age Europeans? That shows what can happen when taking the whole grain thing too far.  Choosing between baking whole grain bread that could cause a concussion in a food fight and compromising with a bit of white flour, at long last I have  chosen to compromise.  But only a little.

The Daily Bread also requires kneading. From the enthusiastic responses to recently published no-knead bread recipes, a lot of people think kneading is a bad thing. I disagree: much of the pleasure of bread making rests in the involvement with the living dough. For those whose schedule or physical strength prevents that much effort, a good stand mixer with a dough hook is a fine robotic kneader, producing excellent results.

Don't give up if your first efforts don't produce perfect results. A wise teacher said that anything worth doing is worth doing wrong. Our early flops teach us how to succeed the next time, and for that reason I'm swallowing my pride and including one of my  failures at the end of the recipe that follows. Baking a good loaf of bread is worth learning to do well. 

Recipe: Our Daily Bread

makes 1 loaf

1 c. warm water

3 Tbs. warm milk

2 1/2 Tbs. sugar

2 tsp. active dry yeast (1 pkt.)

1 large egg

2 c. bread flour

1 1/3 c. spelt flour

1 1/2 tsp. salt

2 1/2 Tbs. olive oil (or butter or schmaltz)
optional poppy or sesame seeds for top crust

Combine water, milk and sugar. Stir to dissolve and heat if necessary to about 100 to 110 degrees.

Stir in dry yeast and let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes.

In large mixer bowl combine flours, salt and oil. Mix by hand until oil is blended with flours and mixture is crumbly. Put dough hook on mixer. Add dissolved yeast mixture to flours all at once, and blend with dough hook.  Break egg into the same cup used for yeast mix, beat with whisk just to emulsify, then add to flour mixture. Beat with dough hook for about 3 minutes.

Scrape bowl. Add olive oil (or butter or schmaltz. See Notes below.)  Beat at medium speed with dough hook another 3 minutes, then scrape bowl. The dough should be very soft but not sticky. Turn the dough out onto an  un-floured surface. Knead with oiled hands until the dough comes together, about 10-15 minutes, using a flat spatula or dough scraper to lift the dough for the first few minutes. Or beat another 5-8 minutes at medium high speed until dough comes together and slaps against the sides of the bowl. If dough does not come together and seems too wet after 5 minutes, add 1 or 2 Tbs. additional flour. If dough seems too stiff, add oil by scant teaspoonfuls. It is difficult to beat the dough too much, as the process works up the gluten that forms the crumb of the bread loaf.

Place dough in oiled bowl, cover and set in warm place to rise until doubled. This might be as long as 2 hours or, in Arizona, about 20 minutes! (see below.)

Lift the dough with oiled hands to deflate it, then turn into an oiled 9 x 5 loaf pan. Cover loosely with oiled foil or plastic, set in warm place to rise about 1" about the edge of the pan.

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Uncover raised loaf and sprinkle liberally with seeds if desired. Be very gentle with the risen dough at this point. Bake about 30 - 40 minutes until interior of bread reaches 200 degrees. Cool on rack.



Notes:
Give spelt flour a try. For more years than I like to admit I've tried to find the right balance between nutrition, taste and texture when baking bread. I have plenty of recipes for whole wheat, whole oat, and multi-grain breads that I think taste just fine. But my family and friends politely smile and quietly feed their portions to the dog, who doesn't need more fiber in her diet. When I began using spelt, or more specifically, combining spelt flour with unbleached white or bread flour, the family started eating it, and the dog lost the extra weight.

There's plenty of information available on the virtues of spelt, so all I'll say here is that it is an ancient grain indigenous to Europe that may have been a precursor to our modern wheat. It is high in protein, fiber and vitamins so it provides a good serving of nutrition without the slight bitterness of whole wheat. It does contain gluten, so it is not safe for anyone with Celiac disease. Otherwise, it's a tasty addition to Daily Bread.

Which fat? In one sense, fat is fat, whether olive oil, schmaltz or butter. They have pretty much the same caloric value and the verdict is still out on whether animal fat contributes to arterial cholesterol. (Don't even think about canned white or butter-flavored shortening, which is partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and therefore not real food for our purposes.) On the other hand, olive oil and canola oil to a lesser degree are undeniably health and nutritious. Schmaltz and butter are solid at room temperatures (except here in the Arizona desert, but never mind that now) so they contribute their own unique characteristics to bread and other pastries. This Daily Bread recipe can take on some of the luscious qualities of Brioche when made with solid fats then rolled and folded with even more butter or fat. That's fine for holidays, but for our everyday loaf I recommend the healthier olive oil.    

Now, I promised full exposure of my failures.

Mistake #1: The first loaf of Daily Bread made for this article came together quite nicely right up to the second rising. But I did not oil the foil when covering the loaf pan. The dough was already shiny with oil from the bowl where it rose the first time, which seemed to be sufficient. It may have been fine had the day been cooler. But when I set the dough outside on the patio, I did not realize it was already 89 degrees outside. (On the 14th of October.)

Mistake #2: One cannot monitor the rising dough through aluminum foil as one can through plastic wrap. So when I brought the loaf indoors an hour later, it had not only risen a good three inches above the pan but was clinging to the foil for dear life. There was no way to get the foil free without completely deflating the dough.

Mistake #3: I set it to rise again, but alas, the yeast had given up the ghost (or the gas, which is pretty much the same thing.) I give the bread credit for struggling up as high as it could during baking, but the resulting crust slumped sadly over the edge of the pan.

Happily, no guests were scheduled for dinner and my husband was working late. So I did the whole thing again, with beautiful results. Maybe I won't bake bread every single day, the way our foremothers  did. But with this method and recipe, I wouldn't mind making our Daily Bread every week.

copyright Starr Luteri 2009