In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey by Samuel Fromartz Page B

Place them on parchment paper on the cutting board.) Use a dough scraper to gently adjust the loaves and straighten them out.
    Make four or five cuts on the top of the loaf with a razor blade, 1 / 4 inch deep, running lengthwise with just a slight bias over the midline of the dough. A swift slash at a sharp 20-degree angle works best.
    Lift the cutting board and slide the parchment paper with the baguettes onto the hot baking stone. Shut the oven door. Open the door, and carefully pour the water onto the baking sheet. Be very cautious if using boiling water. Shut the door. Do not open the oven again while baking.
    Check the baguettes after 20 minutes. They should be dark brown and crusty. If pale, continue baking for another 1 to 2 minutes. Remove the loaves and let them cool on a rack for 20 minutes before eating. They are best eaten within 4 hours. If eating dinner at seven P . M ., I aim to have the baguettes come out of the oven between five and six P . M ., as long as it doesn’t interfere with cooking dinner.
    While the baguettes are baking, form the remaining dough into loaves or leave the dough in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours and make fresh loaves the following day. They will be slightly more sour and chewy. If you are not going to eat the baguettes on the day you make them, wrap them in a plastic bag and freeze them. Let them defrost at room temperature, then crisp up the loaves in a 400˚F (205˚C) oven for about 5 minutes. Eat immediately.

C HAPTER 2
Culturing Wild Leaven in My Kitchen

    I n a fluorescent-lit kitchen, a baker takes a small, golf-ball-size piece of dough from a plastic container. Maybe he calls it “mother,” “starter,” “sourdough,” or “
levain
.” He plops it into another larger container sitting on a scale, dumps in white or whole wheat or rye flour, pours in tepid water, and mixes it vigorously with his hands. Then he covers the container and puts this mixture on a shelf. When he returns several hours later, the substance is bubbling, and has risen to two to three times its original size. When he removes the cover, a pungent alcoholic smell hits his nostrils. This lively mixture, made with the flour, water, and the invisible organisms residing in the small doughy inoculator, is a wild leaven, more commonly known as sourdough starter. When this now bubbly ferment is added to dough, it causes the loaf to rise, but it’s also responsible for the tang of a bread, its milky soft taste, the chewiness of the crumb, even the caramel-like richness of the crust. Wild yeast and bacteria—the organisms fermenting in sourdough—make this possible.
    When I started baking, sourdough caught my fascination almost immediately. I wanted to grab these organisms that seemed to be present in the very air I breathed and conjure up a loaf of bread. But “grabbing” these organisms in the air turned out to be one of the many myths associated with the substance. Sourdough is a bit like magic, because you keep this living substance active with regular feedings of flour and water, yet because the microscopic-level work can’t be seen by the eye, it’s also subject to a lot of rumor and tall kitchen tales. The simplicity of the substance, brought alive on a kitchen counter by a plethora of wild organisms, feels so unlike packages of commercial baker’s yeast, which contain just one strain of industrially manufactured fungi. When I began baking many years ago, sourdough felt raw and elemental, and actually it still does, many years later.
    Once you start down this path of baking with natural leaven, a fascination takes hold. But it was a challenge to get it right in the early stages. I was attempting among the oldest of grain fermentation methods, one that dated back at least to Egyptian antiquity, if not the Babylonians before them. Because commercial baker’s yeast was not invented until the mid-nineteenth century, sourdough, along with beer and wine yeasts, was the main fermentation agent in