Bread Matters (36 page)

The cake mix

100g Butter

100g Raw cane sugar

100g Egg (2 eggs)

100g Ground almonds

100g Dark chocolate

500g Total

The ganache

100g Dark chocolate

60g Whipping cream

160g Total

Toasted blanched almonds, to decorate

Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy and light. Separate the eggs. Add the yolks to the butter and sugar mixture and beat well. Stir in the ground almonds.

Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie or a bowl set over a pan of hot water. Fold it into the almond mixture. Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks and then, with a clean large metal spoon, fold them carefully into the chocolate mixture, trying to retain as much air as possible.

Turn the mixture into a greased and floured (or baking-parchment-lined) 20cm cake tin or 2 small cake tins or paper cases. Bake in a moderate oven (170°C) for 30-40 minutes. Don’t expect this cake to rise very much; it is moist and close textured. Turn it carefully out of the tin(s) and cool on a wire rack.

To make the ganache, melt the chocolate in a bain-marie or in a bowl set over a pan of hot water. Scald the cream in a saucepan – i.e. bring it just up to boiling point and then remove it from the heat. Pour it immediately into the melted chocolate. Beat the mixture vigorously with a whisk until it is thoroughly mixed and glossy. Using a palette knife, spread it quickly over the top of the cooled cake (and the sides, if desired); it should still be sufficiently liquid to settle into a shiny, smooth coating with no knife marks, but it won’t affect the flavour if this doesn’t happen. When the ganache has set, decorate with toasted almonds.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY

‘When you die, all the bread you ever wasted is weighed. If it is heavier than you, hell is your destination.’

RUSSIAN PROVERB

Few things compare with freshly baked bread. Like freshly picked vegetables or fruit, it has a vitality that is all the more compelling for being transitory. Like fresh air, we recognise and savour it, but we cannot bottle it. If we could, it would be instantly recognisable as not the real thing.

For supermarkets, freshness is a double-edged sword. They waft the word around their stores like a purifying censer: freshly baked, fresh today, freshly squeezed, oven fresh, sealed-in freshness, farm fresh, fresh tasting…it seems that no product or process, however banal or deceptive (‘farm fresh’ eggs, for example, are laid by hens kept in battery cages), can fail to benefit from an association with freshness. But in reality freshness is a big problem for supermarkets and their suppliers. Global sourcing, centralised distribution and nationwide reach make it all but impossible to have anything on the shelves in less than 24 hours from when it was picked, baked or cooked. Compare this to the neighbourhood artisan baker who sells all his bread within a few hours of it leaving the oven.

Our culture has been corrupted by freshness, by the delusion that things are only any good if they are fresh and by the lie that they actually
are
fresh, when very often they are merely in a state of chemically suspended animation. So, after some words about the way bread ages, I suggest that we should reject the contemporary cult of permanent youthfulness, rediscover the creativity of thrift and relish bread’s dignified decline towards the dust whither we too are bound.

How bread goes stale (or doesn’t)

Starch crystallisation

When bread cools down after baking, the starch begins to ‘retrograde’, or to move from a gel to a crystalline state. The speed at which this happens is dependent on the temperature and humidity at which the bread is stored. Although our palates experience old bread as being ‘dry’, it is not so much the loss of moisture from the crumb, which is relatively insignificant, as the feeling of denseness in the particles that makes it harder to chew the bread and causes us to describe it as ‘stale’. Bread stales most rapidly at +5°C, so it should never be stored in the refrigerator. At -5°C, staling stops, so freezing is a good way of suspending the ageing of bread. However, to freeze and thaw bread, it must be passed twice through its temperature of maximum staling and this is estimated to add the equivalent of a day’s worth of staling at room temperature.

Enzymes to keep bread ‘fresh’

Enzymes are proteins, found widely in nature, which speed up metabolic reactions, i.e. the conversion of chemical compounds in biological organisms. Enzymes extracted from animal, plant, fungal or bacterial sources are used in the chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries for the production of everything from washing powder to beer and cheese. Many are produced by genetic engineering.

Such enzymes are extensively used in the bakery industry to make dough more pliable or stretchy (to make more puffed-up loaves, croissants etc) and to keep bread soft after baking, thereby extending its ‘shelf life’. These ‘anti- staling’ enzymes appear to work by interfering with and slowing down the process of starch retrogradation. This is good for the retailers, who have more time to sell their loaves, and nice for the consumer if he or she likes bread that stays squishy for days on end. But there may be downsides.

Very fresh, and therefore less ‘crystalline’, bread is generally recognised to be less digestible than older bread. The effect of crumb-softening enzymes is to keep bread artificially ‘young’ and more gel-like – in other words in a condition that is known to be less digestible. No wonder many people have a gut feeling that modern bread makes them bloated.

Most of the enzymes used in baking are derived from sources that are not normally consumed as food, so modern industrial bread really does represent a mass experiment on whole populations. It would be good if this experiment were being monitored with a fraction of the energy that the food industry devotes to manipulating the national diet.

Natural freshness

There are some natural ways to reduce the rate of bread staling, or the perception of it.

• A very dense texture, even if quite moist, will be perceived as harder to chew and therefore less fresh than a bread with a more open structure, despite the fact that the latter will dry out more quickly.
  
• The more moisture that is retained in the baked product, the softer it will appear. This explains the good shelf life of 100 per cent rye breads, with their moisture-holding properties. It is also an argument for working as much liquid as possible into the dough at the mixing stage, as well as for baking at a high temperature or in an oven (especially a retained-heat brick oven) that allows the quickest possible transfer of heat throughout the loaf with minimum moisture loss. However, moisture retention does not prevent the hardening of starch, which is the main symptom of staling.
  
• Fat helps a little, not so much because it is soft as because it improves the retention of fermentation gases in the crumb structure, thereby increasing the perception of softness.
  
• Some sources suggest that the organic acids (lactic, acetic, butyric etc) generated in a sourdough fermentation have an inhibiting effect on starch retrogradation. This can be seen by making the ciabatta recipe (page 231) either with or without the rye sourdough component. In my experience it keeps significantly longer when made with the sourdough.
  
• Enzyme-active (diastatic) malt has some effect on starch crystallisation and was widely used before the deployment of novel food enzymes.
  

Storing bread

It follows from the above that there is not a great deal that can be done to limit the rate of bread staling. Far better, as I shall show, to put the changing character of ageing bread to culinary advantage. But certain strategies are worth considering:

• To limit the rate of starch crystallisation, store bread at 16°C or above and never in the refrigerator.
  
• To conserve overall moisture, wrap bread in a polythene bag or similar airtight film. Any moisture escaping from the outside of the loaf will condense inside the bag and a rough equilibrium will develop.
  
• To conserve a crunchy crust is not possible for more than a few hours under normal circumstances because the greater moisture in the middle of the loaf will inevitably migrate to the edge and soften the crust. If a loaf is left unwrapped and exposed to the air (at normal humidity), moisture will evaporate from the surface, giving the impression that the original crust is remaining crunchy. However, although it may remain hard, it will, within a day of baking, have lost the particular character of a freshly baked crust.
  
• If the aim is to retain as much of the freshly baked character of the bread as possible, the best method of storage beyond a day or two is by freezing. Although this adds about a day of staling, it does limit the process more
  

effectively than any other method. It is advisable to slice a loaf before freezing

it so that it is then possible to remove individual slices on demand: not only does this speed up defrosting, but it avoids the need to consume a defrosted loaf in its entirety at a time when its rate of staling has already been advanced by freezing.

Reviving old bread

To restore some crunch to a crust that has gone leathery, all that is required is to reheat the surface of the loaf to a depth of a few millimetres. This can be done in a hot oven (200-220°C) in five minutes or so. This is not long enough, however, to soften the starches inside the loaf and so should be considered only as a way of perking up a recently baked loaf that has lost a bit of sparkle, such as a limp baguette or a bloomer that has sweated inside your shopping bag.

To revive the softness of the crumb inside the loaf, it is necessary to ensure that heat penetrates to the middle and thereby changes the starches from the crystalline to the gel state. This takes some time, so the oven must not be so hot that it scorches the crust before the centre of the loaf is warm. For a small (400g) loaf, 12 to 15 minutes at 170°C is about right.

If the loaf that you are trying to refresh seems exceptionally dry, you may need to provide an external source of moisture. Brushing the entire crust with water will create a little steam in the oven as it vaporises. To keep more of this moisture inside the loaf, wrap it in foil after wetting the crust all over. The heat will take a little longer to penetrate to the core. For a crunchy crust, remove the foil for the last few minutes of heating.

Remember that reheating bread will accelerate its subsequent rate of staling. This is why the part-baked ‘bake-off’ offerings masquerading as ‘fresh’ bread in supermarkets and forecourts the length and breadth of the land turn pretty much to dust within a day.

Uses for old bread

Among the more perplexing reasons given by one villager for not eating the bread from my bakery was that ‘it doesn’t fit in the toaster’. Although I interpreted this as a kindly attempt not to give offence, it did indicate the considerable influence that toasting has had on commercial bread production and marketing. In a very real sense, industrial bread is made with domestic toasters in mind. It is therefore rather ironic that so much effort goes into preserving a soft, moist and gummy crumb when exactly the opposite is the
raison d‘être
of toast. Toasting a dry slice of bread does two things: it softens the starches in the centre of the slice and it caramelises and partially burns the outer surface. The effect is to boost the caramel flavour, create a contrast between exterior and interior, and to soak up toppings that melt in the residual heat. Toasting a slice of bread whose crumb is already (artificially) soft can cause the collapse of the internal structure into a thin, dense and leathery core with little absorbency. Strong teeth are needed to tear mouthfuls from such stuff.

Be that as it may, toast is the first and most obvious way of using old bread. Then there are favourites such as summer pudding and bread and butter pudding. These are well enough known not to need recipes from me, but I would add a couple of comments. Summer pudding uses the absorbency of bread to soak up the rich juices of berries and currants. If the bread used is white and soft, the result can be a slimy mess. Much better to use something dry and with a bit of body, like French Country Bread (see page 182). Bread and butter pudding is a wonderful vehicle for using up rich and flavoured breads such as brioche (page 236), bun loaves (page 258) or even stollen (page 265). We made a version for the Village Bakery restaurant that used a mixture of Borodinsky Bread with raisins in it and French Country Bread. It was quite a hit.

The recipes in this chapter illustrate some of the many ways of using bread as it undergoes the natural process of ageing. If nothing else, they show the extent of our culinary loss if we fall for the notion that the only good bread is fresh bread.

Incidentally, the best collection of recipes using bread that I know of is in Silvija Davidson’s excellent book,
Loaf, Crust and Crumb
(published by Michael Joseph in 1995 but now sadly out of print).

Aubergine and Red Pepper Bruschetta

Bruschetta originates from central Italy and is now widely known. It is really no more than toasted bread decorated with typical Italian foods – tomatoes, peppers, herbs, cheeses, anchovies, Parma ham, tuna, etc. The toast is often rubbed with garlic and always doused in a fair bit of olive oil. Outside Italy an unfortunate practice has arisen of frying the bread in olive oil, which, apart from heating the oil unnecessarily, makes the whole thing too greasy. It is precisely the balance between dry toast and patches of oil that gives the base of a bruschetta its character.

Italians do not often melt the cheese on a bruschetta, but I must admit to shoving mine under the grill for a few moments just before serving. If you are not going to eat your bruschetta immediately, do not melt the cheese.