Butter, eggs, cream and wine were Julia Child’s staples until the health scare hit American diets in the 1980s, banishing her staple ingredients with fears of heart disease, obesity and strokes. She fought back — feebly — with a few attempts to come up with lighter recipes, but she never gave up the fat and the alcohol and died a few days short of 92.
She’s been largely vindicated, and we can confidently cook her recipes again from “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” without dropping dead face down into a bowl of freshly whipped cream.
Next, however, with the popularity of such high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets as Atkins and South Beach, rice, potatoes and especially bread were banned in the cause of losing weight quickly.
Now the villain is wheat and its key component, gluten. Their damages are legion, from celiac disease to a cranky disposition. “Gluten-free” is the watchword of the day as markets hustle to bring their customers products without the now-discredited ingredient.
Gluten, however, is what makes bread the wonderful food that it has been for centuries. A form of protein found largely in wheat, it provides the elastic strands that help bread rise and give it its chewy texture.
Bakers nurture it, encourage it and rely on it but their faithful ally is under attack. While there’s no chance that Americans will stop eating their bagels and baguettes, some bread-industry professionals are sweating today, even when the ovens are turned off.
The chief worry wart is Peter Reinhart, who teaches baking at a professional culinary school and has written eight books on bread, his best-known being “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice,” published in 2001. It was an ambitious effort to provide home bakers with a wide variety of breads and techniques from naturally leavened ryes to sweet holiday loaves, a bread book for all seasons.
But, the life of the loaf goes on and Reinhart soon found his conventional and often ordinary breads getting stale as hipper bakers such as Chad Robertson, Daniel Leader and Jim Lahey were leaving him in the flour dust with their unconventional approaches.
Manhattan-based Lahey gained a promoter in the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, who endorsed his “no-knead, bake in a pot” loaf to Manhattanites. Although their kitchens barely had room for a toaster and bottle of dish detergent, they could bake a respectable loaf at home, even though New York is full of great bakeries.
Then came the sucker punch of the gluten-free movement. Bakers started scrambling for substitutes for wheat — for which there isn’t any — to concoct breads, pastas and cookies. Reinhart climbed aboard with his latest book, “Bread Revolution” (10 Speed Press, $30) to keep his hand in the game.
“What on earth is going on?” ponders the bread maker. “Is it possible, after 6,000 years that bread is really dead?”
His response to that rhetorical question — it seems alive and well — is this book that tries to encompass a variety of strategies to deal with the gluten-free crowd, without abandoning wheat and traditional breads.
The book, though, raises more problems than it addresses by promoting ingredients and methods that are expensive, time-consuming and often leading to disappointing results. I’m well-acquainted with Reinhart’s recipes and have used his cranberry walnut bread as a popular holiday loaf for years. It’s tasty, but I had to tinker with his measurements so I could bake full-sized loaves.
I encountered the same difficulties with his recipes in this book, but the real problem with “Bread Revolution” is that its author roams from one subject to another, without covering each in detail.
He first focuses on sprouted grain — wheat, spelt, rye, corn and emmer — as the frontline troops in his “revolution.” We’re all familiar with bean sprouts sprinkled on salads, but the practice of encouraging seeds of all kinds to send out their shoots or germinate is an ancient one.
The author also tells us that using sprouted grains “promotes shorter rise times and faster flavor development” due to “active enzymes” for bread. Certainly my attempts at his recipes made a flavorful bread, but I could see little difference in the rising times compared to conventional flour.
While he assures us that sprouted-grain flour is available through mail order, he glosses over the fact that with shipping and handling charges added to a pricey product, the cost of these flours is much higher than conventional ones.
Leader’s 2007 “Local Breads” (Norton) also illuminates the art of natural leavening using a variety of flours.
Supplied with sprouted-grain flours including my homemade rye and a sourdough starter, I worked my way through Reinhart’s recipes. The results were disappointing. The dough didn’t behave the way he told us it would, particularly with loaf breads such as his Sprouted Sandwich Rye, which never reached the volume he — and an attractive photo — indicated.
I made his Sprouted Wheat Croissants, a recipe that seems counter-intuitive. A croissant is an airy, flaky buttery treat made from highly refined white flour that only the French can eat regularly. Even without the butter and jam, a croissant is bad for you.
The sprouted-wheat version was dense, more rubbery than chewy, but with a spicy flavor. I’ll use Julia Child’s recipe if I ever make croissants again.
I suspect that Reinhart’s recipes didn’t work as planned because the sprouted wheat and spelt flours might be lower in gluten that their conventional cousins. The packages did not indicate the protein percentages, something a professional baker must know.
If you’re interested in baking with these “revolutionary” flours, I suggest you replace a quarter to a half of your conventional flour amounts with them, or use the quick bread and muffin recipes from Reinhart’s book.
He also covers the use of such interesting gluten-free flours as grape skin, offers recipes using fruit- and cheese-based leaveners for bread, making bread from sprouted-grain pulp (consider Sprouted Kamut Pulp Bagels) and a discussion and recipes for “whole-milled” flours.
It seems a baker told him that so-called whole-grain flours are “fractionated,” meaning the bran and germ were sifted out after milling, then a percentage added back in before packaging. This process by unnamed milling companies compromises the quality of the bread.
The premise is an excuse for the author to offer a group of bread recipes using “whole-milled” grains and heritage wheats such as Red Fife, a 19th-century grain. I get mine by mail-order from Anson Mills in South Carolina (ansonmills.com). It provides a lovely wheaty aroma and flavor.
When I checked with Washington County’s Weatherbury Farms, where organic grain is milled into flour, about fractionating, miller Nigel Tudor said that his flour is whole-milled with only debris sifted out after grinding. He also sifts his whole-wheat bread flour to retain 85 percent of the whole grain, a level known as “high-extraction” flour.
Katie Walker, a Pittsburgh native who works for King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont, reports that “our whole-wheat flour is ground from the entire hard red wheat berry, with all the goodness of both bran and germ. We do not fractionate our berry …”
“We mill our whole-grain flours from the entire grain. We do not fractionate it,” confirms Cassidy Stockton, spokeswoman for Bob’s Red Mill flours. “We like to say ‘1 pound in, 1 pound out’ here — meaning, we put in a pound of wheat berries and get a pound of flour from the mill.”
Reinhart’s worries then, from the “death of bread” to nutrition-deficient whole grain flours, seem misplaced if not exaggerated. “Bread Revolution” contains a treasury of bread-baking advice and methods, both traditional and non-traditional. It’s not for the novice baker, however, and perhaps not even for the experienced one in today’s baking-book world, where there’s enough non-revolutionary breads to satisfy everybody.
SPROUTED WHEAT QUICK BREAD OR MUFFINS (PG tested)
Here’s a straightforward recipe from Peter Reinhart using sprouted flour in a quick bread or muffins. Please note that this recipe, with its sugar, oil and sodium, produces a calorie-dense bread or muffins that are also rich in gluten.
3¾ cups or 1 pound of sprouted wheat or sprouted wheat pastry flour or sprouted spelt flour
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon (0.75 ounce) baking powder
1¼ teaspoon (0.25 ounce) baking soda
¾ teaspoon (0.19 ounce) salt
1 cup (9 ounces) brown sugar or honey or agave nectar
2 cups (16 ounces) buttermilk
3 eggs (5.25 ounces) eggs
¾ cup (6 ounces) vegetable oil
2 teaspoons (0.28 ounce) vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees with rack in the middle. For a loaf, use a well-greased 4½-by-8-inch loaf pan with either vegetable oil spray or brushed with melted butter. Flour the pan with sprouted wheat flour.
For muffins, use 12-muffin pan with paper liners sprayed with vegetable oil.
In the bowl of a stand mixer with paddle attachment or in a large bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir in sugar or if using honey or agave nectar, add to buttermilk in next step.
In a separate bowl, whisk buttermilk, honey or agave nectar, oil and vanilla extract. Pour into flour mixture and beat or stir until well combined. The result should be a thick batter that continues to thicken as it sits.
For a loaf, pour into prepared pan within ¾ inch of the top. For muffins, fill cups to just below the rim.
Bake 30 minutes for the loaf or 20 minutes for muffins, then rotate and bake 25 to 35 minutes longer for the loaf or 15 to 20 minutes longer for muffins, until tops are golden brown and springy to the touch and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.
Cool on a rack 15 minutes for muffins or 30 minutes for the loaf.
Makes 1 loaf or 12 muffins.
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